Strategic Planning Kit For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Pinpointing Your Competitive Advantage

Now that you've asked everyone who's important to your business to define your competitive advantage, you need to summarize the findings and pinpoint your areas of uniqueness. Look at the responses to the questionnaires from your employees and customers as well as your own answers to the questions from the previous three sections.

In your strategy notebook (which I discuss in the Introduction), capture the common themes or ideas from your customers, your employees, and yourself. Use a separate page for each one of these perspectives. Collect these thoughts from each employee and customer questionnaires. In the sections that follow, you use this data to develop your own competitive advantage. I also provide some examples of successful competitive advantages to help you narrow down your focus.

Perusing a few examples

Learning from others can be helpful in identifying your own competitive advantage. Check out the following two examples to see how these organizations define their uniqueness.

Pershing General Hospital is a 125-bed, primary-care facility located in a rural area with no other hospitals within 50 miles. Because the organization operates with almost zero competition, it doesn't need to focus on how to beat out other hospitals. However, it does need to decide what services to offer with its limited governmental funding. By offering services that are based on its competitive advantages, it can maximize the funding it does receive. Here's ...