Why your best friend can be your competition
Are you like most small businesses? Do you see your competition as the enemy, the biggest threat to your business? Someone to be resisted and held at bay at all times.
Has lack of capacity ever meant you could not take advantage of an opportunity. You may have all the required skills but can't meet the volumes required.
Or maybe an opportunity may call for a range of skills, products, or services beyond the capability of your business. You may be able to meet some of the requirement, but not all.
Both these situations can put you in a quandary. You have the choice of forfeiting the opportunity or acquiring additional capabilities or capacity. Formally or informally partnering or collaborating with other businesses is one solution.
The quandary arises you are most likely to find the required capacity or additional capability with your competitors. And most small businesses are extremely distrustful of their competitors.
One way to take advantage of an opportunity presently out of reach of individual businesses operating in their own right is to collaborate or partner. Advantages include:
Sharing the knowledge learnt from each other
Building closer working relationships with suppliers
Undertaking joint research, marketing and development
Creating more opportunities to meet customer requirements for products/services
Improve procurement and negotiating
Open the door to new knowledge and experience
Co-opetition is the name I give to partnering or collaborating with your competition.
So what is the basis of co-opetition?
Co-opetition may be built in a variety of ways. It can be in the form of:
for a particular project or opportunity creating a formal joint venture;
looking for a variety of opportunities in an on-going formal relationship where a new business is formed to provide the means for the co-operation;
looking for a variety of opportunities in an on-going formal relationship where one business agrees to be the lead vehicle for co-operation;
a continuing informal relationship seeking various opportunities;
Where three or more businesses become involved the partnership can be regarded as a business network.
Successful co-opetition has five characteristics which must be met:
Each business needs to stand to benefit, and so to have the motivation to join the partnership or network;
The partnership members need to build a commitment to an already good relationship and to the business project;
Every member must have something to offer;
Participants should have 'domain overlap' between them.
The business climate should be suitable.
And how to ward off the problems?
It can take a long time to build the frankness and trust co-opetition depends on, and a very short time to destroy. Trust is destroyed when:
Partnership members moving into competition with one another when there is a partnership opportunity;
The partnership moves away from its core business;
A motivated, self[starting champion is not in the group
Business opportunities are not shared by partnership members
Absence of dedication to a group effort
One business behaves entrepreneurially at the expense of the others.
So to succeed partners need to do the reverse of these factors.
Give it a try. Committed co-opetition with your competitors can reap rich returns.
What do you think?
Are you like most small businesses? Do you see your competition as the enemy, the biggest threat to your business? Someone to be resisted and held at bay at all times.
Has lack of capacity ever meant you could not take advantage of an opportunity. You may have all the required skills but can't meet the volumes required.
Or maybe an opportunity may call for a range of skills, products, or services beyond the capability of your business. You may be able to meet some of the requirement, but not all.
Both these situations can put you in a quandary. You have the choice of forfeiting the opportunity or acquiring additional capabilities or capacity. Formally or informally partnering or collaborating with other businesses is one solution.
The quandary arises you are most likely to find the required capacity or additional capability with your competitors. And most small businesses are extremely distrustful of their competitors.
One way to take advantage of an opportunity presently out of reach of individual businesses operating in their own right is to collaborate or partner. Advantages include:
Sharing the knowledge learnt from each other
Building closer working relationships with suppliers
Undertaking joint research, marketing and development
Creating more opportunities to meet customer requirements for products/services
Improve procurement and negotiating
Open the door to new knowledge and experience
Co-opetition is the name I give to partnering or collaborating with your competition.
So what is the basis of co-opetition?
Co-opetition may be built in a variety of ways. It can be in the form of:
for a particular project or opportunity creating a formal joint venture;
looking for a variety of opportunities in an on-going formal relationship where a new business is formed to provide the means for the co-operation;
looking for a variety of opportunities in an on-going formal relationship where one business agrees to be the lead vehicle for co-operation;
a continuing informal relationship seeking various opportunities;
Where three or more businesses become involved the partnership can be regarded as a business network.
Successful co-opetition has five characteristics which must be met:
Each business needs to stand to benefit, and so to have the motivation to join the partnership or network;
The partnership members need to build a commitment to an already good relationship and to the business project;
Every member must have something to offer;
Participants should have 'domain overlap' between them.
The business climate should be suitable.
And how to ward off the problems?
It can take a long time to build the frankness and trust co-opetition depends on, and a very short time to destroy. Trust is destroyed when:
Partnership members moving into competition with one another when there is a partnership opportunity;
The partnership moves away from its core business;
A motivated, self[starting champion is not in the group
Business opportunities are not shared by partnership members
Absence of dedication to a group effort
One business behaves entrepreneurially at the expense of the others.
So to succeed partners need to do the reverse of these factors.
Give it a try. Committed co-opetition with your competitors can reap rich returns.
What do you think?
About the Author:
Adam Gordon is known as an expert mentor to small business owners, assisting them improve their profitability and creating more free time, by identifying and plugging leaking profits in their business. Visit the Profit Leak Detective now and grab your free copy of 7 Clues to a Profit Leak.
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