Do you love your competition or hate them?

I recently took a high-performance training session from 2 former Olympians named Jason Dorland and Robyn Meagher.  This session was designed to help give you a high-performance mindset and make you aware of how to take your business to the next level by removing roadblocks from your own mindset and making you more aware of the mindset of your employees.  The most interesting part of this training was a section they called the Love Score.  The Love Score measures how much you love your Self, Endeavour, Team, and Competition.  Jason and Robyn believe that if you love those 4 elements of your life more, then you remove blocks that can lead to higher performance. You can read more about Jason and Robyn’s theories here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/love-competitive-strategy-jason-dorland/

The theories behind the love score at first were a little bit combative to how my mind works, although I did have a higher score than most, I wanted to dig in and learn more.  After much analysis, I realized that the reason my love score for competition was higher than most was because, in large part, the PromoKitchen mentorship program!  I have spent the last 4 years working both on and inside this program with my competitors (or industry colleagues as I like to call them).  My competition is amongst my peers with my fellow PromoKitchen Chefs as well as all of the people I have been mentored by and mentored over the years.  That doesn’t mean I go out for lunch with my competitors daily or that I love all of them, but there is true value in my life and career to having a great working relationship with people in our industry and even in my own town. I do have a unique perspective because of my place in the industry, but when I look across at other industries, many top players have relationships with their competitors, not just ours.

I have built great working relationships with a couple of competitors that are in my own backyard.  We help each other with finding hard-to-get products, and talking about trends in the marketplace, heck, we have even bought from each other on occasion (Shout out to Lindsay and Darrell!). These kinds of relationships with people who would be considered competition by many have helped get me through some of the darkest times of my career and leveled me out during the highlights.  I prefer not to measure my success in business based on its relation to how my competitors are doing.  Business is not a race to the finish line after all, so why treat it like one when dealing with competition? I believe that we can use each other to make us all and therefore our industry better as we move towards whatever the world is going to look like in the future.

The next time you are raging about losing a quote to a competitor, see if you can find the love and turn it around.  See if you can get your hands on their quote to do a competitive analysis on why they were better in that instance.  You may be able to find efficiencies in how you operate, you may be able to find savings that were not evident to you before you lost.  The whole idea here is that by analyzing how they won, you can make yourself better.  Don’t look at your competition as someone you hate, look at them as an opportunity to make yourself better.  If you want to find out more, come hang out with your competition in the Promokitchen Mentorship program here: https://www.promokitchen.org/mentorship-1