Why you should write your competitor’s business plan

Writing a thorough business plan is a necessary if tedious part of starting a business. But it’s not just for the startup phase. It’s also a good practice for existing businesses to review their initial business plans, and make adjustments after evaluating the plan’s accuracy. A crucial part of any business plan is the competitor analysis: taking a deep dive into what motivates your business’s competitors, and how they approach the market, will inform your strategy.

The competitive analysis, argues AT&T’s Jennifer Van Buskirk, should be more than just a cursory chapter in the larger business plan. As Executive Vice President for mid markets at AT&T Business, Van Buskirk conducted the launch of Aio Wireless, from its launch in 2013 through its merger with Cricket Wireless by AT&T in 2014. She recommends writing the full business plan of your competitors when launching a new business. It’s also useful when looking for fresh insights into the competition. Doing so, she says, helps leaders zero in on the “North Star” of their unique market segment.

At any stage, for any size

Van Buskirk writes her competitors’ business plans whenever she starts a new venture for AT&T, but says that any time is the right time to try it out. Early on, she says, “It helps to focus a business on the most important thing and get to profitability as fast as possible without having too many pivots.”

Van Buskirk says that she and her team write up business plans for the competition in each segment of AT&T. Completing the exercise, she says, “guided every decision that we made throughout the startup business” as Aio became Cricket and was folded into the AT&T family.

Whether it’s a single city or a multinational program, she says, the strategy helps define “how you carve out the market position, and how you solve customer problems, resolve pain points and make a difference.”

The approach works for any size business since most businesses, big or small, “are not creating a whole new product category or some unique space.” Instead, addressing unmet needs is the goal. In order to achieve that, it’s important to find out where the competitors are already meeting customer needs. Then, business leaders can either stay away from those areas or hone in on creating better value or providing a higher-quality product.

Ruthless prioritization

“You’ve got to have ruthless prioritization and a bias towards action” to avoid scope creep, says Van Buskirk. “Making sure that you’re really focused on the things that are going to help you realize that market position you laid out” will keep business leaders “laser focused.”

The process isn’t painless—nor should it be, Van Buskirk says. Be prepared for uncomfortable truths. “There are plenty of businesses and even new products that start up without solving a customer problem,” says Van Buskirk, “but some of them turn into hobbies because you can’t make money at it.” Better to realize early on that a new idea for a business or product should remain abstract than to waste money and resources on an unsustainable concept.

The perfect is the enemy of the good

“Perfection is not required,” says Van Buskirk. Once you’ve concluded what your competition prioritizes and differentiated your own approach, it’s time to call it a day and put these understandings into practice. The entire exercise, she says, shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks to perform. As with many business ventures, says Van Buskirk, “timeliness is more important than perfection.”