SERIES: How are you doing?

By Becca Anderson

Evaluating your own company’s strengths doesn’t begin and end at your property line. To fully grasp how you are succeeding, you need to know how your competitors are doing, as well. With a structured, practical way to evaluate your competitors, you can turn new insights into improvement.

Who are they?

Do you know who your competitors are? Maybe you have settled into a comfortable routine, and don’t really pay attention unless someone new comes into your market with great fanfare. If that’s the case, your first task is to make a list of them. Their success has an impact on your piece of the market, so it’s vital you keep an eye on them.

A true market evaluation will include getting an objective review of many aspects of each competitor. You need to know about the following:

• Customer experience – what does the average person experience in dealing with that company? Are they friendly? Fast? Are communications clear? Do they appear confident in their service?
• Store appearance – is it clean, modern, cluttered, dated, difficult to get in and out, full of outdated signage?
• Pricing – this includes both what their rates are, and how clear it is what will be charged. If they have signage, is it straight-forward? Does a customer know what the bill will be beforehand?
• Upselling or lack of it – upselling extra services is key to the success of any dry cleaning or laundry business. Do they recommend things like stain treatments, repairs, de-salting, wet cleaning, leather and other specialty cleaning?

Obviously, you can’t march into your competitors for this information. You need to send someone who will observe and gather information. They need to take an actual order with them. Their role is not to judge other companies, but to map out the competitive landscape. And they have to have permission to tell it like it is.

Put some thought into the order that is taken to each competitor. The orders should be equal in complexity and size, with the same variety of items and challenges. Don’t just toss some stuff in a bag and send out your shopper. The object here is to get a real read on your competitors abilities.

One more thing: this secret shopper should shop your store, too, without your staff being aware. So an outsider is essential.

Getting the scoop online

Part of the evaluation process that you can handle yourself is to spend time analyzing each competitor’s digital footprint. You can also have someone else do it, and include your digital presence, as well. Again, objectivity is essential. Look at:

• Website – is it modern or outdated? Does it look amateurish? Is it mobile-friendly? Can you get all the information you need from it, or would it require phone or email contact?
• Google Reviews – including the number of reviews, average rating, and patterns in comments. For instance, they may have had great reviews two years ago, but today they are largely negative. That’s a trend to watch.
• Social media – Are they on Facebook and other Social Media with an active presence? (Are you?) Is their input online helpful, professional, interesting, or non-existent?
• Online ordering or pickup/delivery – do they offer it and is it easy to access and follow? Can a customer download an app or have real-time tracking of their orders?
• Interaction – when someone posts a negative review, does the company come back with excuses or with solutions, or with nothing at all?

You and your competitors can only control online reputation to a certain extent. Your website is yours. Your Facebook posts are yours. But your customers opinions are theirs, and they give you a read on how things are really going.

Operational strengths

You can observe your competitors and make inferences about their strengths. For instance, do you see their vans everywhere every time you drive around town? They must be doing a good volume of business. And they’re doing a good job keeping their services top-of-mind for potential customers.

Often the equipment can be observed from the customer area of the store, so have your secret shopper check it out. Is it new? Are they still running 20-year-old machines? Is their front desk POS system up to the job?

What do they say about themselves? Do they tout specialty services like wedding gowns, leather, repairs, household goods cleaning? Do they post signage about “green cleaning” or say they are perc-free? Do they have certifications on display?

The staff stability is also important. Are there familiar faces in the store or does it seem they are always hiring new people?

These observations help you determine where each company is investing—and where they aren’t. Don’t forget to include your company in the review.

The Scorecard

All this data is useless until you put it into a form that allows you to study it easily. The best way is a simple scorecard, ranking each shop (including yours) 1-5 on a variety of aspects. These can include:

1. Customer Service
2. Store Appearance
3. Service Options
4. Pricing Strategy
5. Turnaround Speed
6. Quality of Work
7. Stain Removal Expertise
8. Brand Reputation / Reviews
9. Convenience
10. Technology / Modernization (POS, texting, app, etc.)

If your data is gathered in a dispassionate manner, you will have the basis for making solid decisions in your future direction. We’ve put together a scorecard for you that you can download and use. The first file lets you put all the information on one competitor on one piece of paper. The second file is for you to transfer the scores to so you have side-by-side comparisons of your company and all your competitors.

• Competitor Scorecard – click to download PDF

• Competitor Comparison Spreadsheet – click to download PDF

What’s next?

It will take you some time to assemble this information. It’s not an hour-long exercise by any means, so put in the necessary effort. In Part II of this article (coming next week) we’ll take all that data and begin to assess the strengths and weaknesses of everyone in your market. Solid marketing and operational decisions and plans can be drawn at that point.

The validity of those plans rests on the thoroughness with which you complete your review of your company and your competitors. It isn’t an easy process, but neither is being a successful entrepreneur.

And don’t miss Francis Flair’s column this month on looking at your own company objectively. Read it here.

---