There are many hidden competitors to our line of businesses that are hard to spot if we are not careful here. We might be good at identifying competitors who are offering exact products/solutions as our, sure they are not hard to identify and keep an eye on. What about the one we don’t see?

For example, if I run a sushi restaurant serving lunch to office workers. There are plenty of other lunch bars around such as Vietnamese? Thai food or Burger King also ready to compete for the same customers, they are pretty easy to identify as competitors to my business.

Think about this for a moment, there are plenty of busy people, do not have time to come down to my sushi bar, don’t want to spend 5-10 mins walking to my lunch bar and another 5 mins waiting to be served. What would they prefer to do instead ?.

could think of a few other solutions. Perhaps they would rather just go to the snack machine in the office and get something really quick and easy. Or perhaps they could order Uber Eats 10 or 20 mins in advance so they can get their meals on time for their lunch breaks.

Instead of thinking about which product or categories we are competing in, to me, it is much clearer to think who else is competing for this same job. Thinking in this context gives us a much more defined view of who is our competition. Some we can see directly and some inconspicuous threats we can identify using this mindset framework.

In the example above, the question we should be asking is what jobs were they trying to do. And which product/solution (or in this case, food option) they are going to hire to do the job.