In business and golf - forget your opponents and play against par.

Rod Lorenz

As a kid and a young man, I loved sports. I was on the basketball team in high school, and I played competitive softball for 25 years.

golf holeThe competition was what drew me in. It was a thrill to have a game on the line. I loved to win, and I hated to lose—and that’s what drove me to always strive to become better.

As I got older, though, I started looking for a sport that was a little more relaxing. So, like many guys my age, I took up golf. Little did I know that while golf is definitely enjoyable, it’s not exactly “relaxing” for a competitive guy like me!

But it’s a different type of competition.

I’m no longer competing against somebody else. Now I’m playing against myself, always trying to better my score. That’s why golfing can be so frustrating—you can’t just say, “Well, the other team was better.” With recreational golf, you’ve got no one’s performance to consider except your own.

What I’ve discovered is that I like the pressure of competing against myself. It makes me focus on how I’m doing instead of how the other guy is doing. It’s no accident that top coaches will invariably say that it’s critical to keep their players focused on their own actions rather than being preoccupied with what the other team is doing.

It’s the Same in Business

When I took over Ralph’s Hardwood Flooring from my father, I was a pretty young man. I still had that love of “beating” somebody in a sport, and that carried over to how I thought about business. I wanted Ralph’s to “crush” the competition, and I always kept a very close eye on our competitors.  I measured how well we were doing by how well they were doing.

But just as with sports, as I’ve matured my attitude toward business competition has changed. I’ve come to realize that measuring ourselves against the competition isn’t the best measurement.

Rather, we should measure ourselves against how well we’ve done in the past. The idea is to always get better because our “best before” is what we’re competing against now

What this means is continuous improvement. We’re never satisfied. We’re always doing all we possibly can to provide better products and services to our customers. In golf, the score is how many shots it takes to get the ball in the hole. For Ralph’s, the “score” is how satisfied our customers are.

Over the years, we’ve developed a reputation for high quality and have a long list of loyal customers, so constantly improving on what we do is a challenge. But it’s a challenge the competitor in me welcomes.

Photo courtesy of eMaringolo. Available under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.

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