Sharpening the Sword is a regular column by retailer John Riley of Grasshopper's Comics, a 1300 square foot comic and game store in Williston Park, New York.  This week, Riley gives us the second half of his two part series on inter-store competition.

Last time we discussed the concept of inter-store competition, and how the most effective method of dealing with competitors was to improve your store to the point where all other stores in the area were compared to yours.  But how do we go about doing that?  The answer is to compete like a glacier.

What does that mean?  Well, there are two business entities today that really embody this idea. 

The first is Toyota, which is poised to become the second largest car manufacturer in the US this year, if not the first, beating Ford and possibly GM.  Toyota has emerged from a cheap, economy car company in the US about thirty years ago to becoming the standard for quality and beating industry behemoths a century old.  That's a massive achievement and change in status in a relatively short time, the result of very different corporate cultures regarding change (not national cultures mind you, because both run factories in the US with US workers).

In GM, change comes in radical waves.  Two or three times a year, after much planning, reviews, meetings, projections, presentations, analysis, and more meetings, changes are made to the manufacturing process. Understandably, making a car is an incredibly complicated process, but in GM change comes from the top down.

At Toyota changes are made to the production process on average about fifteen times a week!  Workers are taught to be constantly looking for ways to improve their jobs and minimize the chance for errors.  Although these changes are occasionally dramatic in impact, usually they are very small, simple tweaks to the process.  But the sum of these tweaks is huge. While GM makes two to three major changes a year, Toyota makes roughly eight hundred, each of which builds upon the benefits of those before it.  Just like getting compound interest on money in the bank, each improvement can help to yield yet another improvement.

Our second example is in the world of software.  Although Microsoft has spent a lot of energy dismissing the 'threat' of open-source software, they finally had to respond when the Firefox browser got 200 million downloads and started to make a serious dent in Microsoft's browser monopoly.  Microsoft is fond of doing infrequent, big releases (like Vista showing up years after Windows XP).  But while they were planning their next big thing, the open source community slowly developed a better browser.  By the time Microsoft responded with IE7, all they were really doing was catching up by imitating Firefox.

The most important point of the story? By the time Microsoft caught up with IE7, Firefox had already improved again.  This is the concept of competing like a glacier.  The idea is not to make one or two staggering improvements each year, but to make small constant improvements.  The key to this is making it constant, to be constantly looking at your business to see what you can be doing better.  If you're making a few big changes a year your competitors can easily copy you.  But if you're making constant change, by the time your competitors copy you, you've already evolved past them again.  In this way, not only do you slowly evolve to be the market leader that everyone else is following, but you make it exceedingly difficult for anyone to play catch up with you. 

Obviously, this isn't an easy process. You need to condition yourself to always be asking yourself if you can be doing whatever you're doing better.  But here's a good place to start.  For a week, write down every question you're asked by your customers.  At the end of the week, take a look at them.  Which ones could have been prevented by changing something?

If customers are asking you where a certain product is, why can't they find it?  Do you need better signs?  Better layout?

If customers are asking you what your policy is on something, maybe it should be posted more prominently.

If customers want to know when events are, maybe you need a better way of communicating your schedule.

The easier you make it for your customers to shop in the store the better, so what they need is a great place to start.  Once you get your feet wet you can start asking yourself about your behind the scenes operations. Are you doing something as efficiently as you should?  At the right time?  Should you be doing it at all?

Once you start the process it's addictive and hard to stop.  You'll find yourself constantly wanting to improve.  There are a million adages about the tortoise and the hare, about the journey of a thousand miles starting with a single step.  What's important for us to know is that they're all true, and they're the key to permanently moving past your competitors.