Competition is always seen as a negative element in the business environment. After all, they steal your profits, market share, and even customers. Almost all businesses and organizations desire to beat the competition and emerge on top. Sure, staying ahead of competition and ensuring an edge over them is important for success. But, at the same time, one cannot ignore the benefits of having competition that can help you get a jump in business.

Following are some of the ways through which you can use your competitor to further your business.

· Engage in price wars

Competition, in essence, is a battle among businesses. Price war is just one of the many ways that businesses, facing intense competition, engage in, in order to capture a greater proportion of the market share. Even though these price wars cause a sudden fall in prices, it doesn’t really have much of a detrimental effect on the business’s revenue as more and more customers start to buy your product, thereby compensating the loss of revenue. Furthermore, if the price wars continue for a long period of time, it can even push your competitor out of business if they are not able to withstand these aggressive price cuts.

· Learn from their mistakes and successes

Your competitors provide you with a one of a kind real life case study from which you can learn. Studying your competition by analyzing their strategies and practices can be really beneficial for your business. You can see for yourself what strategies implemented by the competitor worked and which failed. This is likely to minimize your potential losses, while making sure that future profits are seized. This is also very useful in case of online businesses as you can see which keywords they target and how they market their product, etc.

· Merge or takeover your competitors

This is perhaps one of the easiest ways to get a jump in business. Merging with a competitor or buying a competitor business which is up for sale is a very simple way to gain a larger market share. This is done by acquiring their customers. Moreover, as you join forces with the competitors, you are less likely to lose sleep over possible loss of market share and revenue at the hands of the competitors.

Having competition is not entirely a bad thing for your business. If tackled properly, you can use it to grab a greater market share and in turn get a jump in business.