One of our biggest fears is the bite of the brown recluse spider. People are terrified of spdiers in general, but I think the brown recluse tops the charts. It’s understandable, some of the scars they leave are just nasty and they like to “hide” in stuff. It just doesn’t get any creepier than that. There are organizations that claim that they can rid your house of spiders, and they can, for a while. They may be able to alleviate the problem for a month or two, but pretty soon they will be back. The truth is, you are always going to have spiders in your house. Always. You might as well just accept that. The same goes for competitors. Every business will have competitors no matter what actions are taken to defeat them.
Since you can’t get rid of competitors or spiders permanently you have to make some choices. If you try to exterminate spiders, it can actually do more harm than good. When the existing spider population in a house is exterminated, the house will often become dominated by one species of spider. This is often how many houses become infested with brown recluse spiders.
Choosing Your Favorite Spiders
The key is to find the right spider. There are many species of spider that are neither poisonous or aggressive. These are the spiders you want to have in your house. When a house is dominated by these types of spiders it makes it much more difficult for a spider like the brown recluse to proliferate. I don’t have a species to recommend, but you get the idea.
Choosing Your Favorite Competitors
The same logic can be applied to your competition. The key is knowing what a good or bad competitor is. The choice of a favorite is much easier with spiders. In business, bad competitors are ones that degrade the structure of your industry. Competitors that don’t understand what their generic strategy is, competitors that decrease the barriers to entry in an industry when equally profiatable barrier enforcing alternatives exist. Another form of bad competitor is the one that is overly price focused and causes needless rivalry. The Porter Five Forces model is a good model to use to identify good and bad competitors. Just look at each “force” and decide which competitors are making them better for your market and which ones are making them worse.
Identify the good competitors and consider their market position when making strategic decisions. If you make a decision that hurts a good competitor and helps a bad one, your “house” could get overrun by your industy’s brown recluse. If you are presented with a decision that would either harm a bad competitor or a good one, and either decision produces the same result, harm the bad competitor. This philosphy will create more long run profit potential in your industry.
Conclusion
Whether your trying to keep from being bitten by a brown recluse or being dethroned by the competition, you will always have both spiders and competitors. You just need to identify the good ones from the bad ones and make strategic moves that fill your house with friendly spiders and your industry with good competitors.
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