I recently learned a valuable lesson on a turn around project I was working on: sometimes your competitors can actually help you, as a leader, better your business or organization (and not in the traditional ways you’re thinking of right now).
Everyone knows that competitors can “help” organizations through the obvious paths: poorly thought out strategy, inept execution, or even badly serving a customer… That’s the easy stuff to take advantage of. What I recently learned though was very interesting and required letting go completely of conventional thinking and old paradigms.
Here’s what happened:
A company I was working with was entering a new area of their market and attempting to capture a new major customer. The catch, a competitor in this market space already had the customer…
No fret to us though, because we had some very valuable intel on said competitor, that help us greatly. We discovered that they were known for being “OK” in their delivery, which I deciphered was clearly due to a lack of focus on their strategy, and a lack of sufficient staff.
My strategy then was to build up the expertise from non-traditional sources (University Graduates without the seasoned experience that is required), and build a solid strategy that would better serve the customer.
The problem now for us though, was that we lacked the seasoned experience to fully complete the training of the new recruits. So, what is a leader to do?
The answer was about as non-conventional as it comes. Contract the new recruits to the competitor for a few months!
By sending the new recruits to the competitor, they were able to train these bright young talents with their sage and experienced old hands, giving them the experience they needed. As well as help the competitor pick up on some of their backlog that was causing them problems with the customer. The customer also knew that we helped out the competitor with badly needed resources, which showed that we had the customer’s best interest in mind.
Our catch – we made sure to create a tight agreement with the competitor that they could not hire the recruits.
In a few months, we got the new recruits back onto our team with the much needed final training and experience they needed. We then move into focused execution of winning part of the new account.
Sound crazy!? Well sometimes in leadership and in business, you need to open your mind to unconventional opportunities and possibilities in order to see the ‘long-view’ strategy. It requires you to look at things from a different lens. And, sometimes, the answer to solving challenges lies in partnering with the competitor. I call it Coopetition.
