My Biggest Competitor Emailed Me

A thought for your Sunday…

Imagine for a second that you get an email from your biggest competitor… 

Someone in the same market as you, selling to the same people… 

Someone who might even be doing a little bit better than you…

and in this email, they ask you for a favor. 

They’ve seen something you’re doing… and they want to know how they can do the same thing in their business.

What do you do?

Ignore it?

Tell them to **** off? 

Help them?

What would you do?

..

..

Well… here’s what I did when this EXACT thing happened to me (and what I learned from it)…

There's a lesson here and that lesson is that, business is a relationship game. It is absolutely 100% a relationship game. And I believe that the more value you can create for people that it will end up all coming back to you.

So you could say this is just me being selfish on my part that I want more in the long run, or that I've got this ego and my ego is driven by helping people but this all changed for me. I don't know that this was natural but there was one moment where it changed for me. And that was when I was first starting out in that first year I was in business and maybe even the first six months when I was in business, I was publishing a newsletter about the stock market. That was my business but it was a free newsletter. So the only money I made was every now and then I would get a sponsorship. People would pay me to run an ad in my free newsletter and I knew I was building towards having a paid newsletter but I didn't know how to take payments. I didn't know how to structure the offer. I didn't know – there was so much I didn't know – and I was super intimidated about it and at that time there was someone else – his name was Frank Collar. And he had this newsletter – it was a paid newsletter and it was exactly what I wanted. I would go to his website. I would look at what he was doing and I would just – that was what I wanted because that was my path forward in my business that was the path forward in my life. Times were desperate back then and I was just trying to build this business. I didn't know how but I knew a paid newsletter was going to be the path. This was, way back in the '90s. You know, paid newsletters are like a big thing right now but this is in the 90s. And I would look at his website and I would look at his offer and I'd read

about his newsletter and I would – that was just the pinnacle for me and probably every three or four days I would go take a look at his website. And then one day, I actually received an email from Frank. I didn't know that he even knew I existed. In his email to me [he] asked about my website, my little ugly duckling website. I did have one thing on my website that was attracting traffic and bringing visitors in and that was, I had these pretty cool charts, historic charts of the stock market. and that was where all my traffic was coming from and Frank sent me this email just out of the blue he just said “See my charts.” Out of the blue, send me an email. Says, “How do you put those charts up? How do you do those charts? How do you get them on your website? That shows you how long ago this was, just putting simple graphics on your website was like rocket science.

And I got that email from him and I thought well, this is the one thing I have going for me is I've got these cool charts and it's bringing some traffic. And if I tell him about this then he's probably going to go create cool charts and it's going to be, you know, it's going to threaten me and I looked at his email and I thought about it. I thought about it and, by the way, it had taken me a long time to figure out how to put those charts on my website. So I looked at that email. I thought, you know what, I was able to figure it out. He's going to be able to figure it out. I might as well just tell him and save him, you know, the time it took me. And it took me two or three days to figure out how to do it. So I wrote up a tutorial – very detailed tutorial – took an hour or two writing up this email. And sent it back to him and in less than five minutes I got an email response from Frank and he thanked me.

He was so, so happy and thankful that I'd taken that time to write up this tutorial for him and he said “And Jeff if you ever want to, I see you have a free newsletter, I’ve got a paid newsletter.” Which, I was like, “Of course I know that I look at your website like three times a week.” But he said, “I've got a paid newsletter and if you ever want to have, you know, go from having a free newsletter to a paid newsletter just let me know because I've got 30 years of experience in the offline newsletter industry and now I've created this online newsletter. And I know an awful lot about this including the pricing and how you should structure it and what you should put,  just let me know and I'm happy to jump on a call and talk you through exactly how to do this.”

And I was like “Wow, I did one thing for him and he has all this experience he's willing to share with me.” And that's what happened. He did help me launch that not too many months later. It was an amazing lesson in what I call the “abundance juice” that if you help and give and take care of people abundantly that will come back to you. Not always directly. But the more people you help the better off you're going to be.

My friend Joe Polish says “Life gives to the giver and takes from the taker.” And I truly believe that and it has built my entire business, my career has been by giving freely. I suggest you try it.

I'm Jeff Walker, wherever you're watching this scroll down, leave a comment for me, and let's go get him this week.