Collaboration Gets You Further than Competition

 I had a competitive mentality for many years as a sales executive. I was concerned about my title (shouldn't I be a SENIOR Account Exec by now?) and I was concerned about my competition knowing things about me or the company I represented.  Many of my peers bad-mouthed our industry counterparts.

In the late '90s I met a man named Thomas Leonard, known as the Father of Coaching. Thomas was amazing and revolutionized the way I and many others thought about many things, including the fact that the world is your oyster - and there is enough for everyone in it. I learned to be collaborative. I thank Thomas for that lesson and it has changed just about everything about how I do business and who I choose to work with.

That's why I'm so excited about Bizjam - a first-ever conference for independant business owners put on by Biznik. Biznik is all about:

radical self promotion and business networking that doesn't suck.

Who couldn't embrace that?  What Bizjam is doing that I love is bringing together all sorts of solopreneurs and entrepreneurs to learn and collaborate with each other. It is what small business owners and entrepreneurs need to succeed - knowledge from those who can help them most.

If you are a small biz owner and haven't joined Biznik, be sure to do so, and see if you can get a Bizjam going in your city. I don't know their plans to do this everywhere, but knowing their enterepreneurial spirit, they will offer you ideas to succeed in growing your local fellow entrepreneur group.

If you are not an entrepreneur but like this idea, see how you can mold it to fit what you do. Can you do something with those in your industry for everyone's mutual gain? Example: Tully's coffee, a local Seattle institution, opened many stores near Starbucks locations - it may have been an all-out competitive reason to be next to the big guys, but the way it plays out now is that if you want coffee, you go to that corner on Queen Anne Avenue where there are now three great coffee places - Tully's, Starbucks, and a third one, Caffe' Ladro. People know that on that corner, you'll get a great cup of coffee, and if one is cafe' is full, or slow, you can walk to the other.  The message is that that corner equals coffee, so everyone who tends to like coffee goes there, rather than going to a location by brand preference first or even exclusively.

What is your Bizjam?