Focus On Your Competitor’s Tail Lights

Having a crisp and clear business objective is a great way to motivate your team.  Making the objective simple so that everyone can understand your revenue, market share, or profitability
goal is extremely transformative for your business if you can master an easy way to communicate your key goal.

In particular, making the goal tangible and personal is another way to tap into your company's competitive instincts.  Identifying a competitor is a way to make your goal real and more tangible. I remember being at Expedia when the company finally beat Travelocity as the market share leader in the online travel space.  The emotion and revelry were tangible.  Since I had not been at the company from inception, I could only draft off of the raw emotion that had been built up over the years as the company singularly focused on being #1.  That singular focus drove many forms of product and business innovation that built key competitive advantages for Expedia. 

Try it.  It is sometimes easier to motivate a company by competing with another entity that it is to explain how you need to grow at a 35% CAGR to beat your competitor with a gross margin structure of 73%.  I'll always remember what Coach Dale (played by Gene Hackman) said from the movie Hoosiers when giving advice to his player on how to guard his opponent, "Think of him as chewing gum. By the end of the game, I want you to know what flavor he is."  You can be a market leader if you focus on beating the current market leader.

So, who's tail lights can you see today…

By focusing on them you can beat them…

…and then quickly identify a larger competitor to beat after that.