What are your competitors doing?
How can you find out?
Who can tell you?
Meanwhile, what are YOU doing?
At times, we fall in to the trap of becoming distracted with our competitors.
There are two reasons I encourage you to re-direct your attention.
Firstly, I don’t buy in to the concept of ‘competitors’, and ‘us and them’. It wasn’t that long ago that dental practices worked happily alongside one another, helping when they could. There are still pockets of this, however I am seeing a growing trend of dental practices thinking they will only be successful if others are not.
This is a scarcity mindset: the thought that there is only a small group of dental patients out there and “there’s not enough to go around”. This way of thinking has, at its core, fear.
But, there IS enough to go around. Your competitors can thrive, and you can too! There is an abundance of patients, an abundance of great staff and an abundance of success to be achieved.
Rather than labelling other practices as competitors, treat them as colleagues. Be there to support one another. At the very least, have good intention and root for their success.
Secondly, worrying about what your colleagues are doing is wasting your precious time and energy on the wrong thing. You have no control over another business. You will have quite different visions for your practices, and certainly have different staff, patients and environments. Therefore, any thoughts and deductions become quite irrelevant.
Instead think of how YOU can improve. What can YOUR practice do to build on its strengths, and either minimise or transform its weaknesses? What do YOUR patients want and need from you?
Focus on your success instead of what everyone else is doing.
What you focus on grows, so make sure you are focusing on the right thing!
