Welcome to Meaningful Work Remarkable Life. I’m your host Brook McCarthy, and I’m a business coach, trainer and speaker living and working on the unceded lands of the Camargo people here in Sydney, Australia. In this podcast, we explore the paradoxes inherent in working for love and money, magnifying your impact and doing work you feel born to do. We explore the intersections of the meanings we bring to work and the meanings we derive from work.
Hello. I love this topic. I hope you love it too. I am talking today about making peace with your competitors. And this is of course, part of our summer of selfish season. A lot of S’s in that. As somebody who used to have a lisp as a child, it is a little scary approaching those phrases too, I have to say.
But making peace with your competitors is in pursuit of being selfish because in pursuit of being selfish, we are taking back our minds. We are ejecting the squatters from our most valuable real estate, our brains. And we are sharing that valuable head space only with those who lift us up, who spread the joy and who wish us well.
And those thoughts that pop into our brains at odd times, we are being ruthless with plucking out the negative self-talk and those ghosts that we have kind of implanted there. And oftentimes I think I know with our competitors, we oftentimes have a whole fantasy evolving them.
And I’ve seen this with business owners, with clients. I’ve seen this with myself. I know people do it where they have a very detailed, oftentimes have a very detailed fantasy and stories going on about what their competitors are thinking about them and saying about them and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, when actually they have absolutely no idea what is actually going on.
This is in pursuit of taking back our precious attention from petty joy sapping things. Things that we have no control or very little control over. Because first and foremost, we are the only people responsible for ourselves and our happiness. And only then can our responsibility and love extend outwards because we are after all, all interconnected.
And when we are constantly trying to control things that are outside of our control, such as our competitors and their opinions of us, we’re also not taking responsibility for things that are inside of our control, which is our thoughts, our feelings, our attitude, our opinions, and of course our actions.
So many years ago, I had a client who was a fairly large client and they were the market leader in their field. They were the first in this particular business category in Australia. I’m not going to name them, but they had at least, I think from memory, about 14 years in business when I started working with them and as well as consulting on their particular specialty, their particular area of expertise to larger businesses. They also ran regular training and certification courses, teaching other people how to do what they, what they did. So these guys were at the top of their game, right? And they should have been enjoying the fruits of their labors, but instead they were constantly being spooked by movements made by others into their category.
And it is absolutely true in my experience. I have asked many, many owners over many, many years. Do you think your business is in a competitive category or a competitive niche? And not a single person has ever answered no to this question.
We all believe as owners that our niche is highly competitive, even when it is in fact, not so competitive. And so what was happening with this particular client is that they were very niched and very specialist, very specialised. And they were pretty much the only players in that particular niche for many, many years, they were the leaders. And then larger companies started to come into that niche. And that’s what happens of course, when your niche becomes a little bit more mainstream. And this is a good thing, right? Because when your niche becomes a bit more well-known, becomes a bit more mainstream, then the market. The volume of potential customers becomes a lot larger as well. But of course, what else happens is you’ve got new competitors that weren’t there before.
And I found this very, very puzzling because from my perspective, where I was standing as the, you know, external marketing consultant, these guys were doing everything right. They were doing everything well. They had a, they were exceptionally good at community building. They were fabulous at building partnerships. They had a lot of people who didn’t work for them, what weren’t paid for by them, but had a sense of ownership over the company. You know, we’re running kind of meetups and drinks and book clubs and all kinds of stuff and, you know, it’s basically as good as it gets, you know, from a user generated content perspective, from a kind of, uh, online business perspective for one of a better phrase.
You know, it’s as good as it gets when, when, when your fans, when your clients feel a sense of ownership with you over your company and they feel like they’re part of your, your business and they’re taking initiative and growing your community for you, I mean, that is as good as it gets. So they should have been, you know, ideally loving themselves and really kind of doubling down on what they were doing and yet constantly the boss was calling meetings saying, Oh, you know, this competitor is now doing this and that competitor is now doing that and what should we do? What should we do? Lots of hand wringing and, you know, introspection and, and causing strife where strife was unwarranted. So their strategy of course, was being constantly undermined by this because our competitors, God loved them, are oftentimes in our brains, they’re oftentimes taking up wasted time and headspace.
And this is why I’m so passionate about it because we cannot afford to let our competitors squat there. So I want to redirect the conversation a little as to what we can do if this is true. So I think firstly is the attitude that we have towards competitiveness. Now, if you’re the kind of person who readily says I’m competitive, then this is not applicable to you. Go on your merry way, well done, you know, fantastic. But in my experience, a lot of business owners have an uneasy relationship with that sense of competitiveness that we feel from time to time. We tend to judge certain attributes as being good or bad, right? We have certain feelings or attributes, and we label them as, you know, positive and good or, you know, negative and distasteful and bad. And competitiveness is one of those.
So firstly, I want to talk about the upside of competitiveness because they’re absolutely definitely is an upside of competitiveness. And the first one is that when we feel a sense of competitiveness, when we are looking at our competitors and we are reviewing what they’re doing and watching them. It stops us from becoming complacent or rather it can be very useful if we don’t allow ourselves to get stuck there. And we use that to motivate us to make changes and improvements in our business. Yeah. Because with the best of intentions, most people become complacent. Even when we love what we do, even when, you know, we’re engaged, it’s normal over time to get a little bit complacent, a bit comfortable. You know, you cut a few corners, you go with the flow without realising that you’re doing it. It’s a natural, normal state of affairs.
Our brains are pretty lazy organs and they’re looking for shortcuts all the time. So our competitors keep us from getting complacent. They keep us hopefully improving and innovating and, and coming up with better and new ways of doing things. And this is not just, of course, with service delivery as well, although, you know, this is what I’m talking about. I’m talking about service delivery. It’s also true of marketing and branding. Yeah. Because when a competitor is similar to us, this is when it becomes even more important to differentiate ourselves. And when our brand is sufficiently differentiated, when we are in a category of one, when we have created our own category, this is what I’m talking about when I say you render your competitors irrelevant, because when you have differentiated yourself, your brand enough, then you can’t be compared and this is what we’re aiming for in branding.
We don’t want to look like everybody else. And the more closely we look like a particular competitor, the more important this becomes that we differentiate the tiny details, the smaller details. So this is a huge part of, you know, the good parts of competitiveness. And it’s really important to kind of look at that square in the face, to try to be as objective as possible, because when you are judging yourself for what you think or feel, this doesn’t actually doesn’t help change anything and it creates, you know, shame and embarrassment and complicated actions. This is when we tend to do weird and wonderful stuff, you know, that doesn’t really make any sense.
So what next? What do we do with this feeling of competitiveness? Because, you know, a lot of us don’t like that feeling of competitiveness because we don’t like that win-lose game. We have been brought up in a society, brought up in a culture, where we’re taught that there is a first, second, third. There is a good, better, best, and that if you’re a winner, somebody else is a loser. And for those of us who are, you know, who have a sense of egalitarian-ness, a sense of kind of responsibility and interconnectedness with other people, a sense of compassion for others, then this is not something that we like. It’s not something that we deem to follow, that we wanna follow. However, this competitiveness endures.
So what do we do with it exactly? Well, the first thing is to change your attitude towards good, better, best, first, second, third, unless you are an athlete, unless you are an Olympian athlete, there is no such thing in business as good, better, best. There is no such thing as the first, the second and the third. Yeah, we’ve got 25,000 business awards. Most of them are worth precisely nothing. It is a fool’s errand to try to figure out how that works and where you sit amongst it, because there is no scoreboard.
How do we redirect this energy? How do we redirect this competitiveness? Well, what I suggest is that you start competing with yourself. And how do we do this exactly? Well, we do this through metrics. We do this through metrics. And in this way, we are divorcing ourselves from the shoulds that crop up on the internet when we’re scrolling social media or we’re scrolling LinkedIn and we’re looking at everybody’s, you know, accolades, oh, I’ve done so well and I’ve done this and I’ve done that and I’m amazing and I’m marvelous and blah, blah, blah, blah. And it’s, it’s easy then to kind of start falling into the shoulds, right? You start falling down the should rabbit warren and without realizing it, you’ve appropriated other people’s goals and other people’s achievements as your own goals when actually they’re not.
So who are you competing against? You’re competing against yourself. And the kinds of things that I’m measuring are my launches. How many people did I enroll last time? How much profit did I make last time? How many emails did I send? What was my open rate was what was my click-through rate? How many eyeballs were on my sales page during my launch period? You know, these are all metrics that I’m trying to beat from last time. When I’m running some kind of content event or some kind of marketing campaign, I’m also trying to beat my personal best. So I’m looking at, okay, last time I ran the life’s a pitch party. How many people signed up for the automation, the emails, how many people participated in the Facebook group, how many people joined our mentoring circle, how many people were involved, how many people gave Google reviews to the business. All of these metrics I’m recording and all of these are metrics that I’m trying to beat.
In the same way that I’m in the gym and I’m deadlifting and I’m attempting to beat my personal best, which if you’re interested is 75 kilograms by six sets. I’m doing the same with my business. I’m doing the same with my sales calls, how many sales calls booked. What’s the sales call conversion rate? Now, of course you don’t have to do what I’m doing. You don’t have to do sales calls if you don’t want to do sales calls. But whatever your sales process is, whatever your major marketing activities are, you, you likely have metrics around these and what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to focus on the most important metrics, you’re trying to keep your eye on these and you’re trying to beat your personal best.
I particularly like doing this in a short sharp thing, such as a launch or a marketing campaign where it’s a uh, you know, three week period or it’s an eight week period. And it’s a sprint that I can, you know, go hard. I can go hard and then I can take a rest. I can take a break and I can review, you know, what worked and what didn’t work so well. So last year, 2024, my year of experiments, uh, I did a debrief after as many of these as possible, as many, and I can’t say everyone because I don’t know if that’s true exactly, but as many as possible, as many marketing campaigns, as many launches as possible. I did a little debrief afterwards so that I could keep tracking these metrics so that I could keep my eye on beating my personal best.
Now, a lot of people at this time of the year, especially at this kind of beginning of the year, end of the year, beginning of the year period, a lot of people are setting goals, a lot of business owners are setting goals. And I hear a lot of business owners say to me, it all seems rather arbitrary, the goals that I’m setting. And you know, that’s true. A lot of it is arbitrary, especially when we’re talking about marketing or business development activities, right? But sometimes, sometimes, all the time us humans are pretty good at over complicating things. So if you’ve got less than 500 Instagram followers, your goal is to get to 500. If you’ve got 500, your goal is to get to 1,000. If you’ve got 1,000, your goal is to get to 2,000. And it doesn’t have to be any more complicated than this.
We’re trying to grow and at the same time, we’re trying to grow the things that actually move the needle, but we can’t know what those things are that move the needle if we’re not tracking anything, right? If we’re just doing random activities and not actually carving out time and space to do the debriefs, to track the metrics, to look at the metrics, then nothing’s going to change. Yeah. We have to, we don’t just start lifting weights, we start lifting a particular heavy weight that’s kind of pushing us, but not pushing us to the edge of exhaustion, not pushing us to the edge of quitting, not pushing us to the edge of injury, but pushing us nonetheless. And then we’re trying to incrementally improve our personal best from there.
So this personal best is a fantastic way to make peace with your competitors because oftentimes making peace with your competitors actually means making peace with yourself. It means making peace with those vexed feelings that you may have towards that competitiveness streak that you are judging yourself for.
And I’m saying this as somebody who told herself for 40 years that I wasn’t competitive for 40 years. My way of dealing with those feelings of competitiveness was to opt out. When I was a child and a teenager and when I was a young adult, if I had this kind of feeling of competitiveness coming up inside me, I would judge it, I would try and suppress it, and I would opt out. So I opted out of so many things when I was younger because I didn’t want to admit actually I’m quite competitive and changing my attitude towards this and turning it into a focus on my personal best has made all the difference.
So please try it on for size, tack it into your brain, set aside time every week or every month to check in with your key metrics. Yeah. And report back. Let me know how you’ve go. I’d love to hear from you. You can send me a message on Instagram. Brook McCarthy, there’s no E Brook, and I’ll see you next time.
Real quick before you go, if this episode has gotten you thinking, gotten you excited, or has you changing the way that you do business or life, would you do me a super quick favour and write me a short review? Your podcast review means so much to me and it helps other values-based business owners just like you to find this show, which is a fantastic gift to me.
