Who are our competitors?

Rita and I were having this discussion recently about who are competitors are. A customer had told us how someone he called a competitor of ours was putting us down. The customer was great and of course the comments only made the guy making the comments look bad to the customer. I appreciated his I told the customer that it really didn't bother us, because he's really not a competitor any more at this point.

I used to say that I was a Telenumeric Consultant, and I guess I still am to some degree. But my role has switched from being a consultant to being a vanity number service. I built my business as a consultant and still have that attitude to some degree. I still have the free consultation button on the page and take phone calls personally as much as possible. But I've only done one or two consulting type jobs in the past six months. I also get more toll free numbers for my clients per month than any of the other "consultants" do all year. It's not eve close.

There are still a couple people that think of me as a consultant and I guess it's natural to try to compare themselves to me or to put me down in order to make themselves look bigger. The more successful you are the more people try to compare themselves to you and the more they try to tear you down. But like I said to the person that thought someone else was a competitor, he's not a competitor for me any more than a domain name squatter is a competitor to GoDaddy.com.

We're really only competing with ourselves. What we do is really different than what the regular phone companies do and from any other vanity number broker/squatter. We're not trying to take business from anyone else, but to fill a need that neither of them are really addressing and to build this niche into a much more widely recognized and understandable market. That's why we have to provide more information and education and why we have to make it so simple that anyone can easily find and activate a good number for their business.