A business leader running a centrifugal separator company stripped his machines down to a spinning bowl that separates gold slurry, winning the world's largest contracts while his competitor stayed fixated on him. The competitor's valuation crashed from $50 million to $10 million in five years. Focus on your product, not your rivals.
You are spending way too much time watching the competition and it's not making you better. In fact, it's actually making you worse. People that are enemy-centered are always watching their competition. Our competition, when I ran my centrifugal separator company in the mining industry, our competition watched us all the time and we just kept on running. We were number 2 in the world. They were number 1. And eventually we changed our machines completely. We took off all the stuff. The machine is a spinning bowl meant to separate gold slurry. That's all it's meant to do. We had all these additional equipment on it. We took all that equipment off. And guess what? By the time our competition woke up, we had already won some of the biggest contracts in the world. A results-focused mindset. This is what happens when you become enemy-centered. When you're enemy-centered, you lose focus on what the prize is. We took away that business. It went from a $50 million valuation business down to $10 million in just 5 short years because they were focused focused on us as a competition, and we were focused on the end prize. I'm gonna ask you to think about this for your business. What are you focused on right now? Are you focused on your competition? I am a big fan of, yes, you need to understand what your competition are doing, but don't make that the be-all end-all. It will cost you your business in the long term, or it'll just keep your business smaller. Run ahead of your competition. Show them that they need to keep up with you, not you keeping up with them.
