The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius kept a private notebook that was never intended to be made public, but it was. It’s called Meditations, and it consists of several “books,” or chapters, with notes he made to himself. There’s a line in Book 4 that reads like it was written for a staffing leader having a bad week:
“How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbor says, does, or thinks, but only at what he does himself…”
The Emperor wasn’t running a staffing firm. But he certainly understood the price of spending too much time watching everyone else and not enough time on your own affairs.
There’s a common thread that runs through most staffing offices, and it goes something like this…
“We need to keep a closer eye on what our competition is doing.”
Know your market, understand what your key competitors are doing, track who their clients are, and what their growth plans are. It sounds reasonable. Like due diligence. So you spend time on their LinkedIn page, following them on industry forums, and quizzing your sales team about rates and who lost which account. You justify it by calling it staying informed.
But here’s the fork in the road:
You can spend your time watching them.
You can spend your time getting better.
Every minute spent worrying about the competition is a minute not spent on tightening up your own processes, deepening a client relationship, or prepping a candidate to get the offer. Let me be clear – attention is finite. Spend it on them, and you starve your own.
Here’s another truth for you to consider:
Watching the competition feels strategic.
It’s usually just anxiety dressed in business casual.
Obsessing over what the other firms are doing doesn’t decrease their odds or raise yours. Knowing they landed a new account you wanted doesn’t help you win the next one. Most competitor watching produces no benefit at all. It just creates a low hum of comparison that makes you feel better (or worse) but has no real impact. You end the day knowing more about them, but at the same time less about your own operation.
I'm not saying it's wrong to keep an eye on the competition. But your attention (focus) is one of the few things you fully control. Every bit of it that you aim outward at what someone else is doing is attention spent on something you can't control at all.
The competing firm’s markup isn’t your problem to solve. The quality of your last five placements is. The client relationship that has grown cold is. The candidate interview that was rushed through is.
Everyone is watching their competition right now, but not everyone is watching their own operation. Be the firm that invests precious time in improving a process or client relationship. The staffing firm that stops comparing and starts improving pulls away from the competition, not because they learned what everyone else is doing, but because they stopped looking long enough to do their own work well.