I’m betting you are familiar with the idea that your business is like a big pie (pizza or apple, take your pick). And, that there is plenty of pie to go around for everyone, so it is best to focus on your business rather than give your attention to your competition and feel threatened by whatever they are doing. Well I had an eye opening experience vicariously recently.
A talented coach whom I’d spoken to shared that she was being coached (hey even we coaches have coaches), and her coach had told her that she wasn’t allowed to charge more than he did and was to only create programs that didn’t compete with his in any way.
Whoa! What? In our short conversation, I’d encouraged her to raise her rate, she was undervaluing the tremendous transformation that she provides. She tripled her rate in less than two weeks with ease and was rewarded by the difference it made in her business. When she told her coach, he reacted poorly and made threats about the program she wanted to launch. I was shocked.
As a coach to designers, coaches, speakers, consultants and all manner of service based professionals it is my job and my honor to be supportive, encouraging, and allow my clients to choose their own path. This other coach feels highly threatened by their own client and is freaked out that there isn’t enough pie to go around. This is scarcity thinking and a lack mentality.
Ultimately what is going to happen is that as this coach’s clients will outgrow him because he isn’t growing but instead focused on the lack of pie. And rather than leave with a good taste and desire to refer, they will leave with a bad taste, hard to forget threats, and a complete unwillingness to refer. His hogging of the pie is going to cost him his business. Are you hogging the pie in your business?
Are you spending your time focused on your competition? Are you worried constantly about how they are getting more business than you? Are you chronically anxious about what they charge and how they work? Stop! Step back and instead put your focus on your and your business. What you think about expands, what you focus on comes into view.
There is plenty of pie to go around. In a service based business in particular you are more often hired (when you aren’t at the Walmart level) for your personality, your experience, your talent, and your unique success perfection (everyone has a USP, yours is better!) It isn’t about your rate. It is about the transformation your service, product, or ideas creates for your clients.
Let go of the worry, release the anxiety because the more you hang onto it the more that lack will show up. The more you will drive away business by your very fear that there isn’t enough to go around. Reclaim your confidence, hone your skills, practice your talents. Focus on the fact that there is more than enough when you go after it with an abundant mentality.
The greatest threat to your success isn’t your competitor but instead self sabotage. What are you doing today to prevent that threat from stalling you out and robbing you of business?
Please share your business pie experiences here in comments and tell me how you’ve laid your worries about competition to rest by focusing on your unique talents, gifts, experience, and expertise.
