What is hard for your competition to copy?

Here are few things that is hard for your competition to copy (individually and collectively)

1. Your History
Your history is yours alone. Nobody can repeat it.

2. Your Identity
Identities are built over a lifetime. Whatever you have built as your identity so far, others can’t copy it.

3. Your Relationships
Who you know, how you know who you know, who knows you – these are all impossible to copy.

4. Your Configuration
How you have structured your business, who owns how much, the vendors you chose and your relationship to them etc. are hard to copy.

5. Your Values, Beliefs, Determination
These are all so personal. If they are powerful, you have a huge competitive advantage.

6. Your Intellectual Property
When protected right, it can be a source of competitive advantage.

7. Your Timing
If you time the market right and your competition does not, you have a huge lead.

The above list is incomplete and I am sure each one of us can come up with more items to add to the list.

Her are my points:

1. List all the items (with their combinations) that are hard to copy and see if you are taking full advantage of that “strength” to establish a better position in the marketplace.

2. Most often, it is not that we don’t have enough resources that makes us fail. It is how we configure “everything we have” to gain superior strength.