Keep Your Enemies Close

Know your enemy and know yourself and you will always be victorious. – Sun Tzu

  • Your enemy is not the competition
  • Your enemy is certainly not the customer
  • Your enemy is you

“What are you talking about Chris?”, you might be asking yourself.

Fight The Natural Tendency To Protect Yourself

Today I received a call from a friend of mine, my direct competitor in my business.  He informed me that one of my customers had asked him for a service quote and the customer accepted it.  My friend realized a short time later that it was my customer and withdrew the bid.  How can this be possible in the cutthroat business world we live in?  It’s called strong business ethics.

The ‘enemy’ I speak of was the belief I had when I started my companies (and sometimes still have to fight) in caring at all for my competition.  It was the belief that business should be conducted independent of any consideration of your competition with the exception of knowing their pricing and practices.  Over time, I realized some things:

  • Your competition is owned by a person – just likes you
  • Your competition is trying to support themselves, their families, and achieve their own dreams
  • There can be value in establishing a friendship with your competition
  • The pie is always much larger than you think

Prioritize Your Customer, Sometimes At Your Own Expense

The easiest way to achieve good relationships with your competition is to always think of the customer first!

One of the first customer service practices I established was to provide a referral to a competitor when we were too booked to perform the service ourselves.  This is win-win, all the way around.  The customer sees that you care for their well-being.  They understand you are willing to give business away for their own welfare.  And because of this, you have built trust.  Your competitor sees this is an olive branch.  You are extending your hand for a handshake.  And because of this, you have built trust.

In time, you may actually become friends with your competition, as I have.  I regularly talk to them about many different aspects of our businesses, our markets, and even pricing.  I don’t even have to play games with pretending to be a customer to get pricing!  Now how cool is that?

Even more cool are some unintended consequences:  We’ve established turf.  If our customers go to a friendly competitor and it’s purely a pricing issue, we don’t take our competitor’s customers.  As any good business person knows, nobody wins in a price war, especially small businesses.  If the customer has decided that they had a different customer service issue with their original service (not related to pricing), we take the business but then call our friendly competitor to tell them what happened.

Sounds crazy, right?  It isn’t if you think about it.

What is another consequence?

You can build pseudo-partnerships.  For example, there was a potential customer that required a very large amount of resources required to provide what they needed.  Independently, my friendly competitors and my own company could not solely provide the services required.  So, what did we do?  We teamed up and submitted a joint bid for the service.

You are probably saying, “Well that’s nice, but it wouldn’t work in my market.”  Maybe not.  It’s a little more complicated than that as corporations scale up in size.  For as corporations scale up, the ability to see that there are people in those organizations begins to diminish.  We tend to see large corporations as giant beasts rather than a sum of its employees.  And giant beasts will consume as much of the market it can.

And yet even at those levels this doesn’t change:  The enemy is not the competition.  The enemy is the force that compels corporate leaders and business owners to see their competition as the enemy rather than people.  The pie is almost always huge and there’s usually plenty to go around.  It doesn’t mean we aren’t competitive in our pricing, delivering high product value, and excellent customer service.  It’s just a shift in philosophy in this one area, and one that will return business success back to you tremendously in the long run.

Who Do You Want To Be Your Captain?

A Life Changing Day

I remember that day in September, 2006.  That day changed my life.  And from that day my life has never been the same…

What happened?

I realized that I controlled my destiny.  Me, myself, and I.  Nobody else.  Moreover, it was the day I realized that what went through my head in thoughts will affect everything.

The Story

I was flying back from Europe on a business trip, tired and irritable.  I was sitting in the front bulkhead row in the aisle.  As was customary, I was looking at the passengers coming on board.  I like to do that because there aren’t many places you see so many people people from all walks of life in one place.  And you can tell a lot about someone when they are boarding a plane.  It’s not a terrificly fun experience, you have to be patient, and sometimes tensions are a little high.  You can certainly tell if someone’s having a bad day.  And so I did.

It was a man and woman, a couple it seemed, that looked like they were not at all happy to be there.  It was written all over their faces.  They might have been arguing, perhaps, and I remember thinking to myself, “I really hope they aren’t sitting next to me.”  And…of course they did.

Nice, Chris.  Nice.

I had been reading on the power of thought for a couple of months.  If there is anything you take away from that general learning is that what you think about, you get.  A better thought would’ve been, “That person there looks super happy to be alive.  I hope they sit next to me!”

So back to the couple…They were definitely not happy.  They started with the hushed-tone snappy back and forth snippets between them.  It didn’t matter what they were saying.  You could feel the negative energy between them.  It escalated as the flight progressed.  It got so bad that when the lady attempted to reach for the man’s right hand, he jerked it back, shoving his right elbow into my seat and catching my arm a little bit.  He was completely oblivious that he had done so – that’s how upset he was.

That’s when I tried to do something I’d never tried to do before.  I closed my eyes and began visualizing.  I visualized how I wanted the flight to go between me and the couple.  I imagined the man and woman happy and laughing.  I imagined all of us talking about nothing in particular but just having a good time.  I tried to feel the actual feeling of it, too, not just images in my head.  I was in a much better mood after just a few minutes of it and suddenly I opened my eyes and said something that wasn’t predetermined at all.  I turned slightly to the man and said, “Hey, I know how uncomfortable those middle seats are, would you like to sit in my seat?”  He looked a little embarassed and said, basically, “No thanks.”  Then I said something which could’ve been the weirdest thing I’d ever said to a stranger on the plane, “Hey, those are really cool shoes!  Where’d you get them?”

They were really cool shoes, a pair of Nike athletic shoes that had the newly-fashionable bright neon colors with flames coming out of the back and various geometric shapes all over them.  He couldn’t stop talking about them for 5 minutes.

That topic led to another topic, then another one, and then another.  In 20 minutes, there we were, all enjoying conversation about where we were going, how travel can be difficult (but worthy), and what else, I have no idea.  It was precisely then that I realized a monumental understanding:  All of us have the power to change our future by simply managing our thoughts.

It sounds pretty hoky, huh?  Yes, it does.  There’ve been SNL (Saturday Night Live) skits on just thinking things and getting what you want and all sorts of jokes about it.  They are pretty funny, I admit!  But of course it doesn’t work like that, otherwise, we’d be a character in the next Marvel Comics movie.

What You Think Is More Than Important

Still, realizing this allowed me to take control of my ship!  Most of us probably already know there’s a connection here.  It only takes some self-observation to link up the thoughts going through your head with how you generally feel and most importantly how they tend to snowball.  It basically comes down to this:  If you ever want to be the captain of your life, then you have to be the captain of your thoughts.  If your thoughts generally bring you down, your life will become increasingly out of control as you perceive it, with the rest of the world at the helm.  If your thoughts bring you up, you will be amazed at the positive direction your life is taking, and you’ll feel more and more like the captain of your life.  There is no right or wrong about what you let go through your head.  There is no question, though, that over the long run what you think about, you get.  So, whether what you get is mostly what you want, or what you don’t want, is completely up to you.

 The thought manifests as the word; The word manifests as the deed; The deed develops into habit; And habit hardens into character. So watch the thought and its ways with care, And let it spring from love born out of concern for all beings. – Buddha

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