E-THOUGHT FOR THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

Good day fellow vending enthusiast,

If you subscribe to the idea that there is plenty of whatever it is you do out there for everyone, you stop worrying about competition. When I am out and about at events and businesses, I hear a lot of manufacturers and vending professionals talk about their competition, and typically in a negative way. There are two main reasons why this is not a good idea. Number one is if you subscribe to the idea of the law of attraction, which I do, you understand that energy flows where attention goes and you focusing on your competition only creates more competition for you! A great example is elections. The media talks about how bad someone is and they end up winning!

The second main reason is when you talk about your competition, you are reducing the amount of time you can think and talk about your own business. I don’t care who you are, your business can always be improved! Spend your time and energy thinking of how to make your own business better and that is time well spent!

I work with a lot of vending companies and I see a lot of management spend their time focusing on their competition. I remember one time when I used to send the E-Thought out as an attachment to my e-mail, I emailed it out to my database and the next day a salesman from another distributor received it and replied to all introducing himself and asking all of my data base to give him a call so that he could make them some great deals on items that I might not be able to sell to them myself, The great thing was that I also send the E-Thought out to allot of personal friends and family members so I learned of the incident very quickly and was able to counter act the damage before it was caused. The next two days we had more than a 15% increase to calls into the office than normal and I have to think that the competitions salesman had a lot to do with it!

Now, not all competition stories are that clear cut when focusing on the competition was a dumb decision but just know that each minute you spend focusing on things you cannot control, you lose control of the things you do!

Regards

Curt Wokal