Beating Your Competitors and Transforming Your Business

Copyright (c) 2011 Willie Horton

Having worked with many business leaders over the last thirty years, I could easily become depressed (as distinct from impressed) by the number of people who expect something different to happen if they keep repeating the same thing! Sound mad? But you shouldn’t be surprised. Seventy years research in psychology concludes that the normal mind controls the normal person. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Is that not a definition of madness? Well, you don’t need psychology to tell you that normal people are crazy. As a result, the average business will always be that - average compared to a load of other normal average businesses. In this article I want to focus on one of the normal rituals that all businesses put themselves through each year - in the faint hope that next year will be different - the annual targeting and budgeting process. The average business takes a look at what’s happening this year and adds a bit for next year. No business is ever going to achieve the effortless and spectacular success with that attitude.

If people like Sir Richard Branson, Warren Buffet or Bill Gates took the normal approach to business planning, budgeting and targeting, we would simply have never heard to them - Bill Gates' little business would be a bigger business - selling other people's software from a big shed somewhere in Seattle - and, if they were having a good year, they'd be outselling their competitors! I've a client who transformed a small subsidiary of a small subsidiary of an international business (I haven't repeated my words, this little company was a tiny pimple on the rear-end of a bigger business!) into the most profitable and successful division of the multi-national - within an eighteen month period.

What was his secret? Well, it's actually just common sense which, unfortunately, is not that common at all. In order to beat the competition, you have to be different. And, if you really want to outrun everybody in sight, you've got to be completely different. As my friend said "Who wants to do the same old things that everyone else is doing? Why really wants more of the same? If you want more of the same, how are you going to get a different result?" Uncommon sense!

Many businesses, of course, talk about "thinking outside the box" - but it's only talk, they never do anything outside the box. In fact, they don't realize that, in reality, there is no box! Sadly, we only operate in a box because our crazy little normal minds created the box for us. And here's another bit of wonderful over-used business jargon. How about we develop a 'culture of innovation'. Read the phrase carefully, because it doesn't make any sense at all! "Culture" means "this is the way we do things here". Innovation means doing completely different things.

Throw away the out-dated, out-moded, broken nonsense that was taught to you at business school. It's a sad truth but go to business school and you'll come out like everyone else - just another member of the normal crazy herd. Did Bill Gates go to business school? Did Sir Richard Branson? All the high achievers have one thing in common - they do not accept what passes for common sense or conventional wisdom. Neither should you! In saying this, I'm assuming that you're not like the idiot that I spoke to a couple of years ago. When I suggested that he might do my two day leadership development workshop, he explained to me that he had already achieved enough success. His business no longer exists.

So, although we're only half way through the current year, you need to start getting your head around how your business could be completely different next year. You need to forget about how you're doing what you're doing now. Forget about the competition - unless, of course, you're in the rare but unfortunate position that you have an abnormally successful competitor! That would be rare indeed.

You need to start thinking about how you'd like your business to perform - without any reference to how it's performing now. You need to think about what level of sales your business could achieve - without any reference to the half-hearted normal adults that you employ as sales people right now. If you raise your sights, if you transform your expectations, the best of those people will rise and follow you - the others who don't - they'll get out of your hair sooner rather than later! You need to set sales targets that have no connection whatsoever with the sales that you're currently achieving. You need to set expenditure targets based on what your business should be costing to run - not based on what you've historically been spending. In fact, if you actually look at what you're spending, you'll find that the word wasting would describe some of it better.

In other words, you've got to take an off-the-wall look at the very nature of your business. You need to remember why you're in business. I assume that, if you sit down for a few minutes to think about this, you'll actually recollect why you started in business in the first place. And, as business and the economy becomes more difficult, chances are that your business and life are probably not living up to your original expectations right now.

The bottom line - if you'll forgive the pun - is that to be more successful next year, you can't keep following in last year's footsteps. Don't you understand that, if you keep doing the same thing, nothing different is going to happen. And if you want your business to be effortlessly successful - yes, I said "effortlessly" - then you need to start exciting your mind to the possibilities that are outside that non-existent box. Now, if you do succeed in exciting your mind, your excitement will be subconsciously transmitted - others will effortlessly follow.


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Willie Horton launched his now acclaimed Personal Development Seminars in 1996. His clients include Pfizer, Deloitte, Nestle, KPMG, G4S & Allergan. An Irishman, he lives in the French Alps and travels the world as a much sought after speaker and mentor. In 2008 he launched Gurdy.Net home to his Online Personal Development Seminars, Change Your Life & No More Stress