Sur-Petition means no competition!

Real Estate

Edward de Bono wrote a book that all entrepreneurs should know called Sur -repetition.

Sur -petition is a fantastic concept. It works like this. Normally, when you show up to play a game, you have an opposing team. The same is true in business. You typically have one or more competitors competing with you on service, price, quality, or all three. Imagine if you showed up to play the game and no one else showed up. In other words, you had the entire field to yourself while they were playing on another field.

I have had many examples that I could write here, but I will choose one. My first administrative position was in a shower enclosure business in my 20s. Our competitors were window companies that made add-on shower screens while we were a specialized shower screen manufacturer.

The lead time to supply a screen to a new home was approximately three weeks. My team and I were too young and naive to know any better, so we discussed an idea to reduce lead times from three weeks to three days.

The reason this would be important to the customer was because the shower screen set up the final inspection in the house when the builder could be paid. You couldn’t pass the inspection without electricity, you couldn’t connect the electricity without the shower screen, and you couldn’t measure the height of the screen until the tiling was finished.

Long story short, we did it and a year later we had changed the industry forever. You may ask why our competitors did not copy us. Remember that they were window suppliers and delivered to the house in concrete slab stage. They relied on a phone call from the builder to come back and measure the shower screen. Since we were focused on shower enclosures, we called in the tiling stage and found out where his next job was. So the constructor never had to call us. In addition, the window companies were not as flexible in their manufacturing processes and, although they reduced their lead time to ten days, they never regained their share. The results of this survival strategy were an increase in your profit from 10% to 21% and an increase in ROE from 15% to a staggering 126%.

That was a good example of a sur-petition.

Another good example is when you are a smaller competitor, for example, the number three player in the market. Let’s say your biggest competitor is big and strong, with good long-term people and solid procedures. You, on the other hand, are smaller and more agile. You could make the comparison between a pyramid and grave robbers or a tanker and a speedboat. The point is, if you come up with a strategy based on speed and flexibility, you will be leveraging your strengths and working against the weaknesses of your competitors.

So think of it like this. Basically, the sur-petition is where you understand your strengths and your competitors’ weaknesses. Then you implement a strategy that focuses on an opportunity in the market and is difficult for the competitor to follow.

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