What is hard for your competition to copy?

What is hard for your competition to copy?

By Rajesh Setty on Mon 28 May 2007, 6:34 PM – 7 Comments

Here are few things that is hard for your competition to copy (individually and collectively)

1. Your History
Your history is yours alone. Nobody can repeat it.

2. Your Identity
Identities are built over a lifetime. Whatever you have built as your identity so far, others can’t copy it.

3. Your Relationships
Who you know, how you know who you know, who knows you – these are all impossible to copy.

4. Your Configuration
How you have structured your business, who owns how much, the vendors you chose and your relationship to them etc. are hard to copy.

5. Your Values, Beliefs, Determination
These are all so personal. If they are powerful, you have a huge competitive advantage.

6. Your Intellectual Property
When protected right, it can be a source of competitive advantage.

7. Your Timing
If you time the market right and your competition does not, you have a huge lead.

The above list is incomplete and I am sure each one of us can come up with more items to add to the list.

Her are my points:

1. List all the items (with their combinations) that are hard to copy and see if you are taking full advantage of that “strength” to establish a better position in the marketplace.

2. Most often, it is not that we don’t have enough resources that makes us fail. It is how we configure “everything we have” to gain superior strength.

 

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7 Comments so far, Add Yours

Anonymous  on May 29th, 2007

Dear Rajesh,

I found this entry ver, very profoundly true in its essence and therefore I have translated it and post it in Czech language with proper crediting. I hope it is alright.

Anonymous  on May 29th, 2007

Dear Viktor,

Thank you for your help. I don’t know Czech but that is one country that is in my list to visit. Don’t know when :( Have a great week ahead.

Best,

Raj

Anonymous  on May 29th, 2007

Your Customers:

We often resort to vanilla-strategies of cold-calls, emails (and spam) to hit customers but forget that our customers are unique to us (or our business). Each customer has a special relationship with us if we care to spend enough time to nurture them.

A reason why the services industry in IT is so screwed up: if we cared to build unique relationships hard to copy (and yes, hard to develop), customers will not put us on competitive bids with other vendors.

Anonymous  on May 29th, 2007

Couldn’t agree with you more Karthik. Thank you.

Best,

Raj

Anonymous  on May 29th, 2007

I agree very much. The thing is though that for many owners/managers it is too abstract and expensive to build “long-term” relationship with quality customers that get the rumor going. For some reason it’s too abstract – opposed to spamming.

Anonymous  on May 30th, 2007

Hi Rajesh,

I do agree with what you say here. But it is the URL of your website that actually caught my attention. It reflects my own opinion about life in general. I share some thoughts with a few people on the net, once in a while. So if you find the time, do share your opinion on my blog sometime.

Anonymous  on May 30th, 2007

Thanks for stopping by Anand. I will check out your blog.

Best,

Raj

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