Evan Carmichael tells a lawn-care business owner being copied to ignore imitators and focus on becoming the best in his market. Copycats steal ads and websites word-for-word, but they're usually desperate and disappear fast. Use their imitation as fuel to innovate further.
Chapters
How to deal with copycats. As you get successful with your company, you are going to have people who, who will rip you off, who will copy everything that you do and try to put it word for word on what they're doing to try to copy your success. It's never going to work, and you can either spend your time chasing these guys down and being mired in negativity and and anger and hatred, or you spend your time making something amazing and building yourself up and getting into new things. With my website, I get ripped off all the time, okay? People rip off my quotes, they rip off my videos, they rip off my website, they rip off my content, my copy, and they'll rip it off blatantly and put their name on it. Word for word what I said and put their name on it. They're never gonna have success. It's great to model. You can model what I'm doing and make it your own, put your spin on it and make it personal to you. That can work. But taking what I do and word for word copying it, it's not gonna work. And I don't wanna waste my time on these people, 'cause I have two options. I either spend my time making videos like this, answering your videos on YouTube, on Twitter, answering your questions, building new products, building new resources to help you guys out, to build the momentum and to build the revolution of entrepreneurship. I either do that, spend my time on things that build me up, build entrepreneurs up, and empower me, excite me, get me passionate, or I spend my time chasing these guys down, and I'm pissed off and I'm angry all the time. And what's it doing? These guys will never amount to anything. They're not worthy of my time, and it shouldn't be worthy of yours either. I got a question from a YouTube viewer— love you guys— Gonzo. Gonzo writes in, long email. Basically, he's in the lawn care business, and he has a whole series of Craigslist ads and Backpage ads and on the website, and his competitors are ripping everything off and doing exactly the same thing as him. And he said he spent some time following up with them and trying to chase them down and sometimes ignoring them when he's pissed off. From Houston, Texas, Gonzo from Houston, Texas wanted to know what should he do. Gonzo, man, these guys are not worthy of your time. Let them do their thing. Invest your time into making your business better. Be the best lawn care company Houston Texans has ever seen. And the guys who just try to copy you word for word, they're never gonna make it. These guys are struggling to survive, man. They're struggling, and the last thing they're going to think of, their last ditch effort here, is to rip you off. Your best bet is just to ignore those guys and keep building what you're doing. I've got an investment in a salsa dancing company here in Toronto, okay? The biggest salsa dancing school probably in North America. We teach 5,000-6,000 people a year how to dance salsa. I help the company with their marketing. Okay, one of the things that I brought, and we created great content, and so for example on our homepage we wrote a great article, maybe 700 words, 1,000 words, something like that. A new competitor popped up with almost the exact same name, same domain name, just with like an extra word on it. And they took the copy exactly from our homepage, the exact copy, word for word, exact copy, put it on their homepage. And if you typed in anything that was in that copy, you'd see our page and then you'd see theirs. It's desperate. You know, it's so desperate. You know that these guys are not business people. They're struggling. They can't make ends meet. They have no idea what they're doing, so the best thing they can think of is to copy somebody else word for word. And you know what? A year later, they're gone. I don't even know what happened to them. Their website's gone. These guys who are, who are coming after you, Gonzo Man, they're not gonna be around. They're not real business people running these things. So just keep your head down, focus on providing a great service, ignore the haters. And as you get more successful, you're gonna get more haters. You're gonna get more people copying you word for word, more people ripping you off. As I get more successful with my videos and content and all that, there's more people ripping me off. There's somebody on Facebook who said she was married to me, used my picture and like Photoshopped me in with her, and we have this relationship, and created a fake account for me saying that we were married. It's like, what is happening? I can only imagine it getting worse. Imagine the bigger players. Imagine, look at people in the entertainment industry. Look at Justin Bieber. Okay, how many people use him as their Twitter profile? Or impersonate him, or try to put out tweets as him, try to put out content as him, or rip him off exactly word for word. How many people? It's crazy. As you get bigger, more people will rip you off. Okay, think of it as a form of flattery. Use it as a way to make you work harder, come up with something new, something better, something that's harder to replicate. Use it as fuel to make your business better. And keep believing. You're the leader, man. Everybody wants to be you. Own it. Believe. For those of you watching, like the video, give it a thumbs up below, makes me wanna do more for you. And hey, I wanna hear from you. Leave a comment underneath, let me know your thoughts. You have a question, put it below. Your thoughts and comments create the content for these videos and they make my day every day when I'm eating my breakfast watching the, the, your comments come in. So thank you so much. Leave a comment and I'll see you soon.
