Why You Need Competitors

When it comes to your business, do you worry about competitors? If you do, what’s behind the worry? There are more than enough people in the world to serve so running out of clients or customers shouldn’t be something to spend your time worrying about.

Rather than viewing competitors as trying to take away business from you, view them as resources to learn from—check them out!

Take the time to do a competitive analysis. It doesn’t have to be a complicated or detailed project. The analysis is for your use and your eyes only. Meaning, you can make it as simple or as complicated as you want.

You can learn a great deal by analyzing how your competitors are showing up in the marketplace, what kind of messaging is coming across to potential clients, how they’re marketing their products and services, and much more.

A competitive analysis gives you an opportunity to study what other businesses are doing in their business. What products and services beyond career coaching sessions and resume writing projects do you find showing up more (or less) than others in the career service industry?

Competitive research can also position you to become creative by finding gaps in products and services not yet being offered. Gaps that you can fill that other coaches or writers haven’t tapped into yet!

The objective behind analyzing your competitors is to gather as much info as you can or want in any given area. Use your findings as a resource when reassessing your own business and tweaking what you deem needs tweaking to make you stand out from other career services offering similar products and services.

You’re not meant to serve every single client in the world and there’s no way that you could, which is why there is no need to worry about competitors stealing business from you.

Again, there are more than enough customers to serve in the world. The ones who you can’t serve or who are not your ideal clients can be direct to a competitor who you think can help them.

It’s a win-win situation because the people who you can’t help will appreciate your honesty and will remember you for it. Meaning, if they know someone in need of career services, it’s very likely they’ll send them your way first because they know you’ll point them in the right direction if you can’t help them.

Analyze Your Competitors

Visit their website and look at what they’re marketing, how they’re marketing, and what messages they’re communicating.

Look for gaps—what do you notice they don’t provide as a service or product that you can offer?

Identify their strengths and weaknesses.

What do they do well or better than your company?

What makes your services and products unique compared to them?

Doing a competitive analysis provides you with info that you can use when reevaluating your own business, determining your strengths and weaknesses and where you can tweak or add to your products and services to give you a competitive edge.

Let’s take TCE for example. In 2000, TCE (formerly CertifiedCareerCoaches.com and CertifiedResumeWriters.com at that time), we were the first of its kind to market, promote, and support diverse credentialed career professionals. And, the first to connect provide job seekers with an easy way to connect with career professionals via a database listing and our idea caught on, over the years.

However, we remain to be different in many ways as you'll quickly see after visiting our website and why TCE stands out from all the other career professional databases resource sites out there.

Bottom line, we go way beyond just being a listing of career coaches and resume writers!