<p>I work in a field that's relatively new, residential energy auditing and conservation.&nbsp; I've been seeing my competition grow exponentially over the last 18 months, and initially, I was terrified that I would be out-classed, out-gunned, out-marketed, and even out-kicked from the field altogether.&nbsp; The competition was becoming fierce and I'm not a very good fighter.&nbsp; I regrettably ended up posting a skeptical tirade about a supposed competitor on a public forum a few months back, and upon reflection, it was a tipping point for me and my business.&nbsp; Something snapped and I could not go back from that moment.<br /><br />What I realized was that I had let the culture of competition get the better of me.&nbsp; I had allowed my own petty fears become a tool for destruction, when my own view of myself was so much more constructive.&nbsp;What was missing?&nbsp; What could I do if I found out what was wrong? Could competition itself be competing against my own success?<br /><br />What was happening to me was also happening across my industry of energy conservation, but likely was also happening in almost every economic sector.&nbsp; The economic downturn had triggered a false sense of panic, a sensation that we all had to shut our doors and hunker down.&nbsp; We had to stop working together and adopt the classic defensive stance that says "kill the enemy that is trying to take food off your table".&nbsp; I could see it unfolding in a very ugly and unnecessary way; we'd all eventually move into our own silos, barricade the economic doors and hope we survived.<br /><br />There had to be a better way.<br /><br />Turns out, there was, and there still is.&nbsp; It turns out that within our industries and fields, there is no such thing as actual competition, only manufactured acrimony built up by a culture that was mistakenly founded on a kill-or-be-killed corporate mentality.&nbsp; We've been allowing this competition model of the marketplace to alter our business, from the ground up.&nbsp; And we've been ground-up in the process.&nbsp; The answer to this must be the opposite of competition, right?&nbsp; I don't think that's quite right.&nbsp; What I have discovered is that we need a collaborative mode of market forces that allow us to compete in a particular way while being collaborative in most others.<br /><br />In particular, I realized that although most of my supposed competition was also well-trained and often skilled in the methods for doing good energy audits, my own specific passions led me to focus on some of the more human components of energy conservation and efficiency.&nbsp; I was not as excited about the nitty gritty numbers of cubic feet per minute of air leakage as much as I was about the way that people behave after they have had an energy audit, or even if they never had one.&nbsp; That human-centric passion of mine made me a much different energy auditor than most of my peers. &nbsp;<br /><br />Not surprisingly, I also found that people and business needed both the human and technical side of an energy assessment.&nbsp; What that means, of course, is that the people who considered competition were actually valuable co-workers for me.&nbsp; They offer something I don't offer and vice-versa.&nbsp; Not something that most Biznik folks will find a shock, but for me it was a revelation.&nbsp; Our own DNA makes it nearly impossible for there to be people who will ever be exactly our peers or competition because at some level we will always do something slightly better than our peers as well as slightly worse.<br /><br />In the end, I stepped most of the way back from calling myself an energy auditor and have adopted the role of "Conservation Evangelist".&nbsp; This is the ultimate form of collaboration to beat competition: to promote the industry and its practitioners as a whole instead of trying to tell people how much better I am at the job than someone else.&nbsp; All that target audience and key competitor due diligence I did at the beginning can now pay off massively for me and everyone in my field.&nbsp; Now I know all the best players, the people with particular energy fetishes, the educators, and the even the obscure support services in the field.&nbsp; Instead of spending valuable marketing money on describing my supposed competitors as charlatans and fools, I can actually tell my own clients to look them up and see if they might be a better fit when I can see my services don't really help them directly.<br /><br />While I am advocating collaboration, I am not saying there aren't better or worse people out there to do a job.&nbsp; What's changed is that now there are new markets and different needs in a contracting economy and those that fair better will be those who find a way to work together.&nbsp; They will have found a way to become more efficient and effective by making friends in the fields of our choice rather than enemies.&nbsp; In the long run, since people are much more likely to move jobs than they ever thought, it's likely also that they will end up working alongside people who they had thought were their mortal enemies and perhaps even go into business together.<br /><br />I doubt this will somehow create any kind of local monopolies as much as it will create a truly integrated populace of workers and citizens.&nbsp; We'll be able to focus on our own skill-sets and passions while working with people who can help us work more effectively.&nbsp; I know it's been a great transition for me, and I think we'll see much more collaboration within and across our chosen livelihoods as the idea that "we're all in this together" begins to permanently set in.&nbsp; I personally hope that everyone who reads this article can see at least a few places where competition might be replaced with collaboration, and look forward to hearing about instances where collaboration has trumped competition for you or your business.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> 2009-06-17T03:06:20Z -6.53587 368 5050 true 4 22974 collaboration-beats-the-competition 8 2009-06-17T06:32:37Z 2009-06-17T05:33:58Z

Done your due diligence and discovered people already doing work in your business area? Take them out to lunch! In the new economy, collaboration is more important to long term business success than any other "competitive edge."

1 2009-06-17T05:33:58Z