Should You Care About Competition?

Founder's Journal

Morning Brew

Entrepreneurship, Careers, Business

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 13 September 2021

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How much time should you spend worrying about "the other guy?" In this episode, I’m talking about competition and how much you should focus on it as a founder or an employee. Check out episode transcripts at https://foundersjournal.morningbrew.com to learn more, and if you have any ideas for our show, email me at alex@morningbrew.com or my DMs are open @businessbarista Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	What's up, everyone? This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew.
0:05.3	Welcome back to Founder's journal, My Personal Audio Diary, where I give you the business builder,
0:11.2	the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business,
0:16.5	a team, or a new product. Today, I am talking about competition and how much you should focus on
0:23.7	your competition as a founder or an employee. Let's hop into it.
0:30.0	Every single business has competition. And if you don't think you're business as competition,
0:37.6	you're probably lying to yourself. But the real question is, how much do you actually think
0:43.1	about competition and about the things outside of your control? That's what I want to dive into
0:47.5	today. And I want to start with what is seemingly an unrelated story, but I promise there's relevance.
0:54.8	So on the side, outside of Founder's journal and Morning Brew, I've been looking to embark on a
1:01.4	very strange project. And that project is to buy mini golf courses around the US.
1:10.3	Why? You might be wondering? Well, I thought it'd be a fun operational project.
1:16.4	I also love mini golf. I played it a lot growing up. And I see this opportunity
1:22.3	to upgrade mini golf courses to be like top golf, which is the tech-enabled driving range
1:29.0	business, which sold to Callaway, the golf maker, for $2.6 billion. So what I've been doing as I
1:36.5	try to dig into the space, understand the economics of mini golf courses, see how much opportunity
1:41.7	there is to buy up courses is I've been reaching out to owners. It's a super fragmented market.
1:47.8	So I've literally been going on LinkedIn and messaging anyone who has the title CEO,
1:53.2	president, or founder, and has the words mini golf in the title of their company. And I've been
1:59.5	reaching out to them and seeing if they would be interested in discussing selling their business.
2:04.5	I would say 80% of my messages, as most cold messages are, were met with radio silence.
2:10.5	Then there were a handful of people who responded basically in a nice way saying no, not interested.
	...

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