When you first set up your IT business, ideally you will have had a plan in place and ideas about how you were going to grow and what you wanted from your business. Your plan might have been to grow the business as much as possible before selling it and retiring, or even handing it over to your children, for example. Maybe your plan was a little vaguer, and you just wanted to be extremely successful in your sector.
No matter what your dream may be, every path you go down is going to require you to make decisions and get ahead of your competition. If you don’t pay attention to what your competitors are doing, you might find they easily overtake you, and you could lose out in a big way. So here are some ways to get ahead in business even if you have a lot of competition – it’s important that you do this for your own future and the future of your business.
Know The Competition
Simply having an idea of who your competition is or, even worse, not knowing who they are at all, or even if they exist, is not a good way to run a business. In fact, this is a good way to be lost in the crowd and potentially even have to close your business. It may not be a comfortable thing to do, but taking the time to know who your competition is and what they do means that you can get ahead of them much more easily.
Study the marketplace in your sector and find out what it is that makes your competitors popular; what do they do that you don’t? Are you able to replicate their success? Can you see mistakes they are making so you can do things differently? You can use your knowledge of your competition to your advantage and use it to help grow your business and your reputation.
Be An Early Adopter
In business, it can certainly pay to be cautious, but sometimes you will need to take a risk – as long as it is a calculated one. In the IT sector, this is hugely important. If you can take a risk and be an early adopter of new technology, you will be able to get ahead of the competition because your customers will be able to see the new products that will help them coming from you.
The fewer risks you take and the more cautious you are, the slower you will grow and if your competition is willing to take those risks that you don’t, they will get ahead of you easily. This doesn’t mean you should take a chance of every new piece of technology that comes out, but the ones that really do seem to make sense and will help your business should be researched and adopted.
Boost Your Knowledge
The more you can show you know about your business, the more people will trust you and see you as an expert in your field. You’ll also be more confident when you are answering questions and dealing with clients because you will know exactly what to say and how to answer them.
Education is key when it comes to gaining this knowledge and expertise. You can learn while you work with an online computer science degree so you don’t have to take time out of your business in order to gain this information, and then use it in your business to grow it even further. You’ll find that the more education and knowledge you have, the more trusted and respected you are, and therefore the more successful you’ll become.
Of course, once you have your degree and additional knowledge, you’ll need to let people know about it. You can do this in a variety of ways:
- Write a blog
- Give talks
- Offer tutorials
- Give advice
- Write an eBook
Be Unpredictable
Being unpredictable in business can mean that your profits are unpredictable as well, but if you play this ‘unpredictability’ in advance, it can actually work wonders for you. The problem comes when you start to get stale and even boring; your customers will have seen everything you have to offer before, and they will start to lose interest. By changing things up every now and then, you can keep your customers’ interest, and since it is far easier to keep selling to old customers than it is to find new ones, this is an ideal way to grow your business and get ahead of the competition at the same time.
Unpredictability could mean setting up a special offer, or giving a live video talk, for example. You might even leak trailers suggesting you have an important announcement to make, and that will capture people’s attention – remember to actually give the announcement, however, or you might come across as untrustworthy or disorganized.
Keep your business exciting and fresh with new ideas and your customers will follow you, buy from you, and tell others about you for years to come.
Get Feedback
Your customers are integral to the success (or otherwise) of your business, so why not take the time to ask them what they think, and what you can do better? Find out what you’re doing well, too, is this is just as important. Do this through your social media or via a newsletter, or even ask them face to face if you interact with them in that way.
Once you have the feedback, make sure you act on it where possible. If you can change things for the better due to customer feedback, you will show that your customers are important to you, and that is something they will remember. It also means you are creating your business to suit them, and again you’ll be able to retain them for longer.
This doesn’t mean that you should act on all the feedback you receive. Some of it just won’t make sense, and some will contradict the next. However, if it makes sense to do so, and will be of benefit to your business, this is a great way to get ahead of the competition.
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