The first principle of my blog is Creating Ecosystems of Success, and two key focuses are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. Business in a lot of ways is competition and it’s critical to understand the keys to making your particular operations successful. Knowing what to do at the key junctures can pay big dividends later. The following contributed post is entitled, When Others Want You To Fail – Keep Yourself Focused.
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While it takes immense optimism and positivity to establish a brand and hope to develop a business from an idea – it can be that fervent competition makes certain markets anything but. Despite their size, Coca Cola would likely be quite content if other drinks manufacturers decided to close up shop. By default, as good business sense, it’s natural for other businesses to wish an end to your operation.
This can come from undercutting costs and taking a loss in order to outbid you in the market, corporate espionage, directly suggesting they are better than you in marketing, and a range of other tactics many of us see businesses pull all the time. However, as a small business, it’s unlikely your local area is going to be awash with this kind of trouble.
It’s worth keeping in mind how your strategy will evolve in this direction, though. Thankfully, there are many measures that anyone can put in place to ensure a better and more competent sense of business development – despite the hidden negative wishes of others. It’s all to do with refocusing. Let’s see what that might look like:
Refine Your Game Plan
Sticking to, or refining your game plan can be worthwhile from time to time. This is because in the intense measure of planning and development you’ve likely had to experience, it’s easy to get sidetracked, particularly if having to defend yourself from criticisms, or overcoming a failure of a launch. Going back to the most time-honored elements of your plan can be worthwhile, because then you can separate the wheat from the chaff and begin anew with the ideals that hold some value.
On top of that, becoming refocused and understanding what really matters can help you avoid the deep emotional turbulence you might feel when having to justify your business to others. This way, you’ll only have to justify it to yourself, and the results you focus on. Refocusing can be a great goal for any person’s headspace.
Use Professional Help
It can be that using professional help to get you to the next step can fuse your business acuity with the acumen of a professional service. This is especially worthwhile for those who might not have the deepest of business experience yet still want to gain professional results. For example, commercial buyers agents are often the best bet to utilize when hoping to find an incredible commercial property, one that keeps you focused on the task at hand and enables you to set up in the perfect environment.
Business consultants, lawyers, outsourced health and safety personnel, all of these might further help you isolate the issues that you might have previously experienced and help you refine your goals and set about committing to the straight and narrow. This can seem like an overly ambitious goal, but it’s incredibly worthwhile and deeply human to wish to revive immediately. If you can do that, you’ll be quite stunned as to the positive results you can achieve in this direction.
Set A New Standard
It can be hard to find comfort when being set against by all competition in the marketplace, but there’s no reason why you need to stoop to that level – and you might sometimes actually subvert that into something good. Like a prism taking light and showing multiple strands of color, you may be able to foster business goodwill by acting ethical to a fault.
For example, championing a new means of developing a product could seriously get you noticed, and can help you avoid the bad publicity associated with certain competition. Let’s bring this down to a humble level. It might be that the other cafes in your area are quite happy to use battery-farmed eggs and instant gravy or other forms of low-quality food. While it might eat into your profit margins, ensuring that you use the best of produce, that you take time with each coffee or meal served, and that you champion your branding in that direction can do something similar to killing with kindness – and that’s killing with better standards.
There’s almost no better revenge than ensuring your business is on the straight and narrow path, and focuses on making its output as good as possible. If you can do this, then setting a new standard becomes the exceptional norm.
With these tips, we hope you’re better able to keep your business focused and direct from its heart – no matter the social challenges that come your way.
