How to gain a competitive advantage over your competitors

How to gain a competitive advantage over your competitors

A competitive advantage is the benefit (good thing) that differentiates your business from its competitors. If you know what your business is good at and that’s different to what your competitors are good at, you will be able to provide excellent service in that niche (specific target and area).

For example, if you are a plumber and you specialise in underground leak detection in certain areas of Johannesburg, you will provide a good service to your clients if you stick to your core competencies (strengths).

When someone has an underground leak, they will come looking for you instead of a normal run-of-the-mill plumber. Can you see that a competitive advantage will reduce the amount of work you have to do to find new clients?

Here are another three ways to gain a competitive advantage over your competitors:

1. Reposition yourself as the market changes: Don’t become a dinosaur, keep reinventing yourself based on what your clients need. For example, there used to be a whole industry built around making negatives for printing photos (remember those?), but today, those companies that didn’t re-invent themselves have gone under because customers use digital cameras now.
2. Don’t re-invent the wheel: If you’re thinking of something, the chances are that someone somewhere along the line has thought about that same thing. Do research and talk to others in the same field, you’ll learn a lot by doing things that worked well for others and avoiding the mistakes they made. But whatever you do, be decisive. Don’t stand on the fence and watch the other companies progress while you become stagnant.
3. Invest in your team: If you help your team develop into great specialists, your company will benefit from it. Worried they’ll leave your company for another? If you look after them, even if you pay less than the next company, you will always have a core team of people you can rely to help you take your business forward.

Your work in the market will be much tougher if you don’t find a competitive edge for your business because you will be competing head-for-head against your competitors and you’ll end up in a price-war… The last place you want to be in business.