My daughter received a “Horseland” movie for her 5th birthday and the theme of the first story is “Doing your personal best”. The whole concept is “compete against yourself only”. Every design I create, every trade show I do, even every web page I create, I’m constantly trying to remind myself to do just “do my thing”.

Walking in to set up for our first trade show was very overwhelming. All these BIG companies having BIG booths built up by professional builders and there we are, hand-carrying a couple boxes of samples to our booth – but it didn’t matter. We weren’t competing against them, we were there to show our stuff, to do our thing. We had boatloads of confidence and we got orders!

My daughter’s movie served as a nice reminder for me and got us talking about practice and doing the work it takes to be ready when it’s time for the “big show”. I think this is a crucial thing to remember when starting a business because it’s easy to look at the competition and start comparing yours to theirs. But you can’t do this too much. Sure, you have to study the market, know what’s out there and what prices the industry are holding, but you have to do your own thing. It’s how you’ll set yourself apart as a startup.

For our next trade show, competing against myself means how much better can I make our booth this time? How much can I improve our product offering, our display, our presentation? I can only measure our improvement based on how far we’ve come and whether or not I feel I did my personal best.