It’s a slow night. Your competitors are right there, in their underwear, competing for the few punters who are wandering through. Your ‘pick me’ vibe is seeping out your pores. You know your attitude isn’t where it needs to be, and you know it’ll cost you if you don’t lift your mood.
If you’ve ever thought, “there are so many competitors! How can I possibly compete?!” then welcome to the strippers guide to competition.
So as not to sound like a total middle class nit wit, I interviewed a stripper, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, on how they play the psychological game of dealing with their competitors, when they’re almost naked, competing for clients, in the same room.
Own who you are
“People want what they want – they want your look and vibe, or they prefer the girl sitting next to you,” she tells me.
“It’s pointless wishing you were otherwise. You can’t change their tastes and you can’t change yourself.”
When you’ve fallen hard and fast for a new competitor’s brand this is easy to forget.
You’re stalking their socials, lurking on their sales pages, and trying to reverse engineer their funnel.
Stop. There’s only one you-shaped you. Your ideal clients and you form a mutual admiration society – so there’s ideal clients lurking on your sales pages right now, too.
“You’ve got to keep your regulars happy, and not get distracted by new conquests all the time,” she tells me. “Your regulars need to feel seen and appreciated. When you make people feel seen and heard, they’ll stay longer, spend more, and come back, with friends.”
Render your competitors irrelevant
The job of branding is not to look expensive or aspirational. Nor is it to look safe and relatable. The job of branding is to emphasise that unfair advantage that you have, by virtue of being you.
You’re not competing with brands that look drastically different because you’re not attracting the same clients.
It’s when your brand looks and feels the same, with pricing that’s plagiarising and offerings which look almost identical. This is dangerous territory.
The most crowded market is mid-range because the middle feels safe. But when your pricing is more-or-less what most are charging and your deliverables are almost indistinguishable – this is when you have a problem.
You render your competitors irrelevant by having a one-of-a-kind brand that can’t be compared.
And the only thing beyond replication is YOU. So don’t outsource your power to AI. Your creative and critical thinking is one of the most important assets you have. Your branding and messaging needs to be owned by you.
A shitty attitude is expensive
“I often felt not good enough,” she tells me. “On nights when my negative self-talk spiralled, I’d make no money as my attitude would repel clients.”
Spiralling into negativity is understandable. It’s easy (and cheap) to indulge in cynicism or scepticism. A full-blown existential crisis can be provoked when your ‘but who am I, really?!’ branding process has gone too far.
After 17 years in business, I’ve indulged in many a shitty attitude – and I can map my mental health over the years in my profit and loss statements.
The 18 months when I lost my business mojo after the birth of my second baby was one giant shitty attitude that cost me a lot.
Nowadays, I work hard on my attitude – including the foundations of good sleep, exercise, good food, and proper weekends. Nowadays, I cannot afford the luxury of a negative thought, especially when I know how much more fun and profitable being upbeat is.
“Some people will like your look, and some won’t,” she tells me. “You can’t change that. Rejection is part of the gig, but there are always plenty more fish in the sea.”
Collaboration over competition
“The nights I made the most money were nights when I’d team up with another girl,” she tells me. “I was the young, fun blonde, with that crazy attitude that’s really attractive to some men. I’d partner with the brunette in her 30s who’s interested in politics.
“We’d bounce off each other and give a way better vibe. The energy we’d create together would be magnetic, and men would be lining up.”
In 2025, collaboration has been essential in my business, as social media algorithms bring diminishing returns, the ‘trust recession’ means prospective clients need a far higher number of touchpoints, and way more trust signals than ever before.
When we collaborate, we’re not just sharing each other’s audiences, we’re also extending our credibility and trust, which means that the people who come to us through others are already warmed up.
Borrowing other people’s audiences has always been my preferred way of building my audience, growing my email list and finding new clients – rather than through reaching cold audience with ads.
Of course, not all competitors make great collaborators. But business owners who don’t even entertain the idea of collaborating with their competitors are letting their low self-confidence take the lead.
Confidence sells
“Confidence is a big turn on,” she tells me. “The most confident girls in the club didn’t have the best bodies or the most skills on the pole. They were simply confident – and they earned far more money as a result.”
You know this already. You’ve likely seen your competitors who have far less expertise, experience and accolades than you do, scoop up great opportunities because they’re more confident.
But there’s a difference between integrity and confidence – too many people confuse these and bundle them together.
Having high integrity and not wanting to compromise on your values doesn’t need to undermine your confidence. Questioning the status quo doesn’t need to undermine your confidence. Appreciating nuance and complexity doesn’t need to undermine your confidence.
When it comes to selling your offerings, you need to be your own hype girl. If you aren’t hyping up your offerings, who is? The value is not self-evident. “If your work is good, it sells itself” isn’t reliable. And you can’t sell a secret.
The good news is that confidence can be taught and courage is contagious. {LINK}
Overthrowing the scarcity mindset
“Women are taught that there’s only one spot at the top, that there’s not enough to go around,” she tells me. “But when we pit ourselves against each other, it’s a turn-off for clients, as well as our own experience on the job.”
We’ve been sold a myth that resources are scarce, and we need to fiercely fight and compete so we can survive. But there are more than enough resources to feed the world.
When women work together, we don’t just make far more money while having way more fun, but we also unpick the ill effects of white patriarchal capitalism.
When you appreciate there’s enough to go around, and realise that power doesn’t need to be hierarchical, but can be power within and between, too, then you’re undoing thousands of years of socialisation that have kept the worst of our society intact.
Our conditioning – our beliefs, opinions, thoughts, and attitude – is one of the last vestiges of control, and arguably the most effective because our conditioning becomes a cage that polices our own thoughts.
Competition is real, yes. But our attitude towards it doesn’t need to be self-defeating any longer.
Ready to change your attitude towards selling, promoting, and competition as collaborators? Time for Momentum Mastermind.
