How to Deal with Competition – Lessons and Victory

As a construction business owner, you know that competition is fierce. You likely also know that in order to be successful, you need to learn from and defeat your competitors.

Luckily, there are plenty of ways to do both. In this blog post, we’ll discuss some of the best ways to learn from and defeat your competitors.

Keep reading to find out more!

How Do I Learn About My Competitors?

Whether you want to admit it or not, you have competition in the construction industry – and it’s fierce. In order to stay ahead of the curve, you need to find a way to size up the competition.

Here are a few tips to help you do it.

1. Understand Your Market

Your first step in understanding your competitors in the construction industry is to understand your market.

The right competitive research can reveal trends in the marketplace that you might have missed – but if you don’t actually know who you’re trying to sell your business to, that can be a problem.

Are you marketing mostly to the commercial sector? Are you a home builder? Do you offer specialized services like electrical or HVAC? Do you work mostly with families, couples, or business owners?

Having a clear idea of your target market should be your first step in learning more about the other people competing within that market.

2. Identify Main Competitors

Next, it’s time to figure out who your main competitors are. In some cases, this might be obvious. If you provide your contracting services locally and you’ve been in business for a while, you probably can identify at least one or two other major competitors.

However, if you’re new to the business or new to an area, you can check your product category out on the web to see what comes up. Cast a wide net and see what come up.

3. Analyze Online Presence

Not all construction businesses have a strong online presence (and those who don’t really should). Once you have an idea of your main competitors, you can head online to see who’s doing well in the digital space.

Do they have a clear, mobile-optimized website? Is it easy to understand the products and services offered by this business? What do their online reviews look like? This last piece is one of the most important pieces of data to analyze in your comparison of the competition. It will give you some hints about what you could improve on for your own construction business.

4. Gather More Information

To gather more information about your competitors, look at them like you are a customer. Sign up for their email list, if they have one, and look for opportunities to see how they interact with customers. How do they respond to reviews or complaints? Look for gaps or areas that might be getting missed.

5. Record Your Findings

Keep close track of your findings on a spreadsheet. This will help you record what the competition is doing so you can find ways to improve upon it.

As you go about your research, make notes of things like the company name, website, strengths and weaknesses, and unique features.

6. Identify Areas for Improvement

Once the research is done, it’s time to learn what you can take away from all of your findings. Your research should reveal at least one area you can use to improve your own business.

How Do You Beat Business Competitors? 10 Tips

Now that you know who your competition is and what they do well, you can follow these tips to get ahead of the curve – and stay there permanently.

1. Understand Your Own Business Well

It’s easy to become hyper-focused on everything that the competition is doing. While it’s important to pay attention to industry trends and what other construction businesses are doing, you should never lose sight of your own business goals and strengths.

Figure out what you do well – and focus on that. Learn everything there is to know about your specialty. Study. Study your competitors in this specialty, and study competitors in adjacent industries.

Then study some more.

2. Provide Proper Training

Make sure your staff is properly trained in what your business does. Your training should not consist of a one-off seminar but instead, be an ongoing process.

Help your employees get the right certifications. Encourage them to self-study. Whatever it is, make sure your employees are constantly improving and build a culture of constant growth.

3. Strive Toward Constant Improvement

Improvement should be a common thread in everything you do. Make sure you challenge yourself and your staff to do better every single day.

This could be in regards to customer service approach, meeting safety standards, or something else. Set goals each day, week, month, and year so that you never remain stagnant in your business.

Look at other businesses to get an idea of what they’re doing well – and make it a goal to imitate them (in your own unique way) as much as possible.

4. Improve Customer Service

You can never go wrong with outstanding customer service. Put this at the heart of what your business does.

Amazing customer service is more than just a few good reviews. It’s about thanking your customers for their business, ensuring all their needs are met, and finding ways to make sure that they keep coming back again and again.

Remember, 85% of business owners say that word-of-mouth referrals are how they get their business. How do you get word-of-mouth referrals? By offering the friendliest, most responsive, and most effective customer service.

5. Work on Branding

Take a close look at how your competition identifies itself. Is it easy to recognize who they are and what they do just from a quick glance at a website or business card?

Then take a look at your own branding. Is it easy to tell your construction business apart from the competition?

Everything from the colors you use in your logo to your uniforms should have consistent branding. It should set you apart from the competition and make it easy to see what you do.

6. Be Specific

You can’t be everything to everyone! While it’s tempting to look at competitors and think, “they’re offering X, Y, and Z – why can’t I?” you shouldn’t fall into the comparison trap here.

Don’t get distracted by what other businesses are doing and instead, focus on what you’re doing and do it well. If you don’t focus on one clear mission, your business will become blurry. You might not be able to offer everything to everyone – but you can offer the best to the people you do have.

7. Work On Your Sales Pitch

Selling isn’t necessarily pushing your business on other people. That’s a common misconception and it’s why so many construction business owners are so afraid to come up with an effective sales pitch for their businesses.

However, it’s important that you do. Without a good sales pitch, it will be hard to tell what makes your business better than your competitors’.

Take a close look at how your top competitors are getting work. What sorts of messaging are they using in their advertising? How do they handle proposals? How are they bidding on new jobs?

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