Looking out for rivals

Unless you are the Egyptian Pyramids, your business has rivals. While they can make our lives more painful than it is often necessary, they are not always such a bad thing. Opponents are a great tool for motivation and improvement. If your customers have no substitute for your service, why would you bother to improve? Additionally, rivals can become your assets even more literally, that is, when you work with them on the same goals that you otherwise be working to achieve on the opposite sides of the same river. Now, in order to help you get to the place of your dreams, your rivals need a small assessment.

Their best practices
The life's bitter truth is that you will never be able to excel at everything at the same time. There is always someone who can do things better than you. That may go for your classmates' GPA, your neighbors' lawns, and your competitors' companies. When assessing your competition, you need to first think about the aspects of your business at which your rivals are particularly strong. This will let you understand the aspects of your own company where you might want to work a little harder (or get a little extra help.) Keep in mind that life is not a hopeless thing, and if you don't manage to outperform your rivals in a few categories, you should consider cooperating or directing your customers' attention toward the better sides of your business.

Their weaknesses
The life's much sweeter truth is that, just like you, your competitors will not be able to excel in everything at the same time either. Your competitors have weaknesses just like the ones that we taught you to mitigate in our previous article. Just like yours, their weak spots can become the source of your strongest assets under the right treatment.
Realizing this can lead you into three directions. First, you can relax your grip on the areas where your competitors don't compete that well. This strategy is not the most aggressive, but it will definitely allow your company to concentrate on other tasks. Prioritizing is the key to success, and if your priorities lie elsewhere, consider this good news.
On the other hand, you adopt the opposite approach, where you would accentuate the fields of your superiority over your competitors when marketing to customers. While this method is fine in the cases where your firm's fortes coincide with your rivals' flaws, stressing fields that lie outside your own strong suit will likely lead to marketing that does not reach its full potential. Instead, we recommend a third alternative when dealing with your competition's imperfections, and that is:

Cooperation
The zenith of competitor analysis comes when you use the strengths, the weaknesses, and the needs of your competition altogether to bring guaranteed benefit to both of you. Working together with other market participants is a sure way to increase your overall chances of getting to your ultimate goal.

• Examine the conclusions that come out of your past competition analysis (i.e., their best practices and their weaknesses.)
• Note the gaps between the two: those places where your rivals are neither strong nor weak.
• Think of our own company's most powerful assets and places where you might want improvement

If the two businesses that you are looking at are not twins, and they most likely are not, that means that the two have room for cooperation. Your business can fill in the dull spot in their operations with your strengths, and they can do the same for you. The results? Alleviation of certain stress, performance improvement for both of you, and a stronger position in the market against the competitors who don't get a chance to participate in your tour de force.

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