Who Do You Compare Yourself To?

Posted by Deborah Chaddock Brown on December 15, 2009 under General, marketing | Read the First Comment

I can remember sitting around the executive table at Pearle Vision with the competition ads in front of us.  We would scour over their wording and product focus and even their color scheme to see how we could position our message to stand out.

Then one time and gosh I wish I could remember who said this – we threw out the competition material and decided to look with a fresh, clean slate.  “If we only compare ourselves to the competition then we force our thinking into a rigid box.  We need to just compare our performance and company to ourselves and then begin to think outside the box.”

I just joined a gym.  Yes – I’m paying good money for all the pain I am in.  I look around the room at people 20 years older than I am lifting weights, working out on the machines going a mile a minute and it is hard not to be intimidated.  But the trainer that helped me get started gave me some great advice.

“Don’t look at them.  Don’t compare yourself to them.  Don’t look and see what someone else is doing, just focus on your own progress.”

And I am making progress.  I can see it in my clothes and on the scale, I can feel it in my knees and I am enjoying a greater sense of energy than I’ve had in the past, but it is hard not to compare yourself to others.

When we compare ourselves to others we do so without all of the information.  We don’t know their strategy or what they have planned for the future – we can only see the tip of the iceburg and therefore in our comparison can make invalid assumptions.  Whereas, when we only look at our own performance for comparison, we do have all of the information.  We know about the great margin discounts we received from a supplier or we understand the unique needs of our customer or the fact that we just invested money in a customer service training program for our sales staff.  We can see what the results are based on the effort and focus we put forth.

So rather than comparing yourself to the competition – hold the mirror up and ask yourself a few simple questions:

• How am I doing based on the customer’s expectations?
• Has my referral or repeat business increased?
• What percentage of my customers are returning customers?
• Has my average transaction increased?
• Have we improved relationships with our vendors?
• Has the number of complaints dwindled?
• Has the number of compliments increased?
• How is the employee morale versus last year at this time?

Just like Mom always said “keep your eyes on your own plate” when I’d complain that my brother didn’t have to eat as many peas as I did – we need to just focus our attention on improving business based on our own performance rather than that of the competition.

What benchmarks do you have for your business?  How do you compare and measure success?