In today’s fast-paced business world, you need to stay ahead of your competition to succeed. If you have been in business for a long time, you probably understand this. Here are several tips that will help you to take advantage of business opportunities that your business rivals may miss:

Obsess over your competitors

If you want to be able to take advantage of business opportunities, you need to watch your competitors with a keen interest. Most entrepreneurs spend most of their time reacting to their competitors. This drains your energy very fast and keeps you from seeing new business opportunities.

You should spend less time planning what you should do and start analyzing your competition. If you need some motivation, you should assume that your competitors are out to get you and destroy your business. If you do not have enough time to do this yourself, consider hiring a small team to handle the task.

Pay attention to startups 

Ignoring competitors because you think they will not amount to much is a risky move. For instance, Google and Craigslist had a significant impact on print newspapers but were ignored at first. You must pay attention to new competitors and learn fresh ways of using the technologies that you are used to.

In doing so, you might come across business models that could change the marketplace drastically. Your competition will probably ignore the startups, giving you a better chance of survival.

Be unpredictable

Do not forget that as you watch your competitors, they are also watching you. They will be studying you to see if they can take advantage of your habits. For this reason, you should not be too predictable, as this will make you an easy target. You need to come up with a new strategy that hides your moves.

For instance, Google does not usually announce when it makes changes to the search algorithm. Bloggers and journalists are the ones who usually uncover this information. It also hides its algorithm to keep its competitors and SEO companies from gaming it.

Another good example is Apple, which pre-sells in a secretive manner. This enables the company to keep its competitors in the dark about any feeble organizational habits while they get plenty of free publicity.

Study your competitors’ organizational habits

When you change your organizational habits, you should keep your competitors guessing and find out the routine things that they are doing. When you spot a weakness in your competitor’s organizational habits, you need to go after it. You can start bringing in the profit that your competitor is missing.

Destroy what you do

As suicidal as this might sound, you need to disrupt your own business, products, and profit model. This is the best way to get a jump on your competitor. You will come across companies that dedicate entire divisions known as ‘skunk works’ to disruption.

You should make creative destruction an ingredient of your organizational structure. The importance of destruction is that it brings about change. Your company can do several things to destroy itself, including opening up decision-making processes, changing at the scale and pace of the market, and relaxing its conventional notions of control.

Refusing to make such changes will make your business fade into mediocrity. You might also miss out the opportunities that could allow you to grow annually and give your competitor the chance to dominate.

Whether you are looking for business or franchise opportunities, you need to follow the above tips if you want to be more successful. Whatever you do, make sure that you keep a close eye on your competition.