How to Analyze Competition for Entrepreneurial Success

As a seasoned entrepreneur, it is clear that having knowledge of business basics provides a competitive edge.  Regardless of the scope of your vision, if your intention is to use it to obtain financial freedom, having a solid plan is critical to your success.  As a former colleague of mine once opined, a plan is something that you can use to measure your progress. Also, if you are seeking to secure investor funding, you must have a formal business plan to present for their consideration and it must include detailed market research.

Assuming that you believe that the money or time you are investing or plan to invest in your business is valuable, you will find it easy to appreciate the need to analyze your competition but you might be asking yourself how to go about it.  Essentially, competitor analysis involves two basic activities:

1. Obtaining information about important competitors
2. Using that information to predict potential competitor responses

Casual knowledge about your potential competitiors is normally not enough.  Using a systematic approach to gather a wide array of information permits you to make informed decisions about how to best position your new product or service or how well the business you are planning to join is positioned.  The objectives and assumptions of competition are indicators about what they are doing and what they are capable of doing, which defines their strengths and weaknesses.  As you uncover market risks from studying competitiors, remember that one person’s risk can become another person’s advantage.

There are many sources of public information for you to use while gathering your intelligence.  If competition is organized and traded publicly, you can review documentation required for them to sell stocks.  This includes shareholder reports, 10K reports, analyst interviews, management statements and press releases.  Most of this information is available on sites like E*Trade.  Another good resource is to scan press releases from PRweb, a site you might even use in the future.

If you understand the business objectives of your competition, you can more accurately predict their response to various competitive moves.  As an example, a business focused on short-term financial goals will not be willing to invest financial resources in response to an apparent competitive attack.

You can determine what is important to your competition by learning more about their structure.  An organizational overview will reveal a lot.  The functions that report directly to the chief executives are those that will, most likely, be given priority.  If your idea targets functions with lower priorities to your perceived competition, it is your advantage.

If you clearly understand the assumptions of your competition, you can predict their reaction to your interference.  Imagine that the company has previously suffered a product failure which has caused their executives to determine there is no market for that product or service.  This knowledge presents an opportunity to be explored.  Little known companies like Honda have leveraged advantages just like this!

Evaluating your competition’s resources and capabilities provides insights into what competitors are capable of doing in response to a threat.  You can delve further to determine how quickly they will be able to react too.

After gathering information about your competition’s objectives, assumptions, strategies, and capabilities, compile it into a response profile of possible moves they might make against your idea.  Like pieces on a chess board, you can use these profiles to anticipate the possible moves on the board well in advance of the plays and have a plan of action that keeps you in the game.

We all are aware that that there is competition in any market.  Whether your business idea is online or offline, it is critical to evaluate competition, as well as buyer behavior.  In fact, some schools of thought suggest that one ought to evaluate consumer behavior prior to analyzing anything else, which makes sense.

Michael Porter, the man who imagined strategic analysis, was a business thought leader in the early 1980s but … well … his stuff was written in the early 1980s.  As we all are aware, business has changed significantly since then, partially due to major advances in technology.  A couple of theorists named Brandenburger and Nalebuff extended Porter’s work to include evaluation of consumer activity using something called the Six Forces Model in the mid 1990s, and their work involves game theory.

If your product is internet based, there are many tools that measure what people are searching for and some even offer statistics about consumer behavior but, without knowing what data was used to calculate it, the onus falls on you verify assumptions you have made about the market niche you want to reach.  The next post will provide more details about this topic, so stay tuned!

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Strategic Analysis – An Entrepreneur’s Best Friend

When you are disappointed by anything, what are your tactics for overcoming that feeling? Not so long ago, my grandson answered that random question in this way:

“Oh … I just look out the window and take some action.”

My curiosity was satisfied through further inquiry. The action that this astute 6-year old boy takes is to imagine that he has gotten what he wanted to have. Without thinking too hard, he knows how to do something that many people have paid money and invested many hours to learn. My grandson mentally rewrites the story so it ends in a way that he can feel happy. He shifts his mindset!

Whether this is intuition or instinct remains a curiosity but there is no doubt that my grandson’s method works. Envisioning a desired outcome enables you to see, hear, and feel it in such a way that it can become real. It is the basis of the popular Law of Attraction philosophy.

Envisioning what you want to go after is only the beginning, however. After you’ve imagined it, you need to perform some soul-searching that measures your personal readiness to operate in that niche, as well as performing due diligence about the future you have envisioned.

Two models are used for strategic analysis in business; PEST and SWOT.

A PEST analysis should always occur first. It measures a market, including competitors, against four external factors; Political, Economic, Social, and Technological. When conducting this phase of due diligence, it is critical to be crystal clear about the market aspect you are addressing so you can observe the external factors from any of the following standpoints:

• a company looking at its market
• a product looking at its market
• a brand in relation to its market
• a local business unit
• a strategic option, such as entering a new market
• a potential acquisition
• a potential partnership
• an investment opportunity

Within each of the aspects of a PEST analysis, there are several details that need to be evaluated. This analysis may seem more useful and relevant for larger propositions, but very small businesses can use it to locate significant issues that might otherwise be overlooked.

A SWOT Analysis evaluates the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. This tool measures a proposition or idea, including competitors, and assists with understanding and decision-making for many business situations. Here are some examples of what a SWOT analysis can help you assess:

• a company (its market position, commercial viability, etc.)
• a sales distribution method
• a product or brand
• a business idea
• a strategic option, such as entering a new market or launching a new product
• an acquisition
• a potential partnership
• supplier changes
• outsourcing services, activities or resources
• an investment opportunity

Strategic Planning may not seem essential but, even if you are the only one at the party, careful evaluation of any business action prior to making an investment is prudent. In a small way and somewhat unconsciously, we perform these analyses every time we go to the grocery store so it makes perfect sense to do so when considering a business, doesn’t it?

At internet speed, the pressure to act quickly is always a factor when deciding whether or not to pursue something. Whether the decision involves $5 or $5,000, the result is the same if that business doesn’t pan out and there is no one to blame but yourself if you have taken no time to investigate it.

Using PEST and SWOT templates to evaluate your plans will force you to think through all the aspects of whatever you are investigating.  The internet is a remarkable asset in this research but it should not be your only resource. And, if your research reveals that your idea is not all that you had originally envisioned, young children also teach us something else. When they are interested in what they’re doing, a fall rarely causes them to stop playing the game.

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