Wedding Business Solutions

We are not competing!

• Alan Berg, CSP, FPSA, Global Speaking Fellow

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Do you ever worry that someone else’s success is taking away from yours? What if focusing on how your competitors are doing actually keeps you from reaching your own goals? In this episode, I ask: Could you be more successful by putting your energy into your own unique results rather than measuring against the competition? What might you accomplish if you stopped defining success by someone else’s achievements? I’ll be sharing why your market is bigger than you think, why every client doesn’t need to be your client, and why your definition of success should be yours alone.

Listen to this new 9-minute episode for a fresh perspective on competition and how investing in your own growth can bring more opportunities than you think.

If you have any questions about anything in this, or any of my podcasts, or have a suggestion for a topic or guest, please reach out directly to me at Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com or visit my website Podcast.AlanBerg.com 

Please be sure to subscribe to this podcast and leave a review (thanks, it really does make a difference). If you want to get notifications of new episodes and upcoming workshops and webinars, you can sign up at www.ConnectWithAlanBerg.com  

View the full transcript on Alan’s site: https://alanberg.com/blog/


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I'm Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you'd like to suggest other topics for "The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast" please let me know. My email is Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.

Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:

©2025 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com

We are not competing. Listen to this episode. See what I'm talking about? Hey, it's Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions Podcast. I've been listening to a book, uh, by Mel Robbins called The Let Them Theory, which I will talk more about in, in future episodes. But something just came up about this, one of the early chapters about competition. And, and we are not competing, you and I. Your success does not affect my success at all.

As a matter of fact, my goal is your success because I believe your success will lead to more success for me because I'm focusing on you, not on me. But you have other people in your market. You might call 'em competitors, you might not. That's okay. Their success doesn't take away from you, right? Unless you have a monopoly, which none of us do. There is very little you can do to stop somebody else from succeeding legally. And I want you to only act legally, right? What you can do is you can be a better you. You can invest more in your marketing, your advertising, things like that.

But remember, their success doesn't take away from you because there's enough to go around. I was just talking about this with a client of mine, and I said, because we're doing a little competitive analysis, and it bothers them every time they lose a sale to someone else. And I first of all reminded them something I've spoken about before. Matter of fact, I think I spoke spoke about it on the last episode, you know, if everyone who inquired booked, you couldn't handle the work, right? Plus, you don't want some of that work. Some of those are not profitable jobs, right? They're not profitable events. You can't charge enough to make sense for that. It's like, I talk to venues sometimes and I say, you know, you can decide to keep the lights off, you know, Monday to Friday, or Monday to Thursday, or Tuesday to Thursday, or whatever, and not take a, a, a, a small event then, because you'd have to bring in staff and things, and maybe it doesn't pay, maybe it's not profitable, right? Or maybe you do, that's up to you. If you have people there all the time, then sure, it makes sense.

But you don't necessarily want every job that comes your way. I know for me, there are some that's just not a good fit, whether it's they can't afford it or they don't want to invest that money for right now, or whether I don't feel I can give them the results that they want. But as far as competition goes, you know, their success should be an incentive to you because it shows that there's more success that's available, right? Why does somebody start in business? Because they see there's an opportunity. Very often, once we're in business, we stop seeing some of those opportunities. Blinders come on us and we stop seeing some of those things. And what you're poking through a little hole in that blinder and you see somebody else doing something like, oh, Man, now that doesn't hurt you. Good for them. Good for them that they saw something.

First of all, you don't always know if that's working. This is really important. Just because somebody else is doing something doesn't mean it works for them and gets them a kind of result, or maybe would get you the kind of result that you would want, because maybe their idea for a result and yours are different. Everybody's definition of success is different. You know, when I do social posts, I'm not looking for direct business from them. It's staying top of mind and showing some things that maybe people didn't know that I can do, or that I talk about or whatever. But it's not for direct business. The same here with the podcast, right? I don't have any ads on the podcast.

If you hear me promoting anything, it's only my things, right? Or things that I'm involved with. I've had people that come and want to advertise. I say no, no, I don't do that. Right? I want this to be value for you. Now, sure, I still have a business. But when people ask me, who do I compete with? I say nobody. And I don't mean that in a bragging way. It's just that I have such limited bandwidth to do what I do that I don't care if somebody else is in that space, is doing sales training or website reviews or writing books or things like that.

Good for them. Good for them. Because there's tens of thousands of you and I can't handle more than handfuls of you every year. So there's got to be more people out there doing that. Now, if someone is considering me versus someone else, what they are looking at is the results that I could provide versus the results someone else could provide. And I've said this before as well, but if you haven't heard it, this is the first time, and if you have, I'll repeat it for you. My results are different. I can't say that they're better because we'll never know.

If you hire me for sales training, that means you didn't hire somebody else to come that day or to do that Zoom with your— you and your team, or just you, whatever it is, right? So you'll never know if that particular training, you would have better results from someone else than from me. What you're perceiving is you want the results I can provide as opposed to someone else, because there's always somebody else, always. And there are people that are cheaper and there are people that are more expensive. There are always other options. But the reason someone chooses you As opposed to someone else who's in your market, in your category, is because they want your results and they perceive they will be better. But we'll never know. We'll actually never know. And that's why, again, I'm not competing.

Yes, I'm trying to get the attention. I'm competing for attention, right? So if somebody is thinking, oh, I want to do whatever, right? I just had somebody found me through an AI search, right? That's the first time I've heard that. I don't know if it's the first time it's true, but I know it's the first time someone's told me that. And what that tells me is I my website, my marketing, my presence in the world is out there so that when someone is searching for someone, like whatever they put in for their search results, in this case they knew of in another industry someone that did something like this and they said, who is there in the wedding and event industry that does that here in the States? And I came up first. Great. So that means things that I'm doing are working. Now, how many times might that happen where I never know I didn't come up? 'cause I didn't get the inquiry. You'll never know when you didn't get considered because they didn't see you on that website.

They didn't see your site in a search. They didn't see you on your ad or at a wedding expo or a trade show. We'll never know that, right? You never know when you didn't get considered. We can't know that. You do know when they tell you, I'm looking at you versus these others, right? And the answer when somebody says, well, you know, tell me how you're better, I'm gonna say, I can't. I can't. I can tell you how I'm, how I'm different, right? I've done that when we do our masterminds and I do sales training. We use AI to come up with the wording to show how we're different.

I can tell you the kind of results that I provide in the words of the people that have actually had me do sales training or used Ask Alan Anything or had me do a website review or read a book. But I can't tell you that I'm better because we'll never know. But I can tell you why people choose me. I can tell you the kind of results. But again, I don't think it's competition. That's up to you to decide as the customer. When you're a customer, you get to decide which of the choices you want to choose, right? But as a business, we can only choose to try to get the attention of those same people, right? The 4 steps to getting more sales are get their attention, get an inquiry, have a conversation, make a sale, right? Those are the 4 steps to more sales in just about anything in, in the world, right? Get someone's attention. If they don't know it exists, how can they ask for it, right? Or reach out? They can't make an inquiry if they didn't even get their attention.

So now getting their inquiry is putting out the, the best content and the best why they should choose you, not just what, right? Having a better conversation digitally first, and then either on the phone, Zoom, or in person, right? And then making the sale and then follow up between those points there, right? It's not a perfect system. Right? You're gonna get ghosted. I get— I wrote two books here called Why Are They Ghosting Me? And I still get ghosted sometimes. So nothing is perfect. The goal is to get it to work better. So again, stop thinking about the competition. Any time you spend worrying about competition is time you're not investing in your personal success and the success of your business, right? Because your time is finite. When you use time for something, it means you didn't use it for something else.

So we're not competing. If I'm successful, that's, that's me. That's my definition of that. If you're successful, good for you, right? I, I crossed that line a long time ago where I'm no longer jealous of somebody's success. It doesn't take away from me. If I see somebody who just, you know, bought a fancy car or a bigger house or opened a new office or whatever, good for you. Good for you because that was important to you and you achieved that. Good for you.

I get to achieve what's important for me. There's no competition for that. Thanks for listening.


I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com or you can  text, use the short form on this page, or call +1.732.422.6362, international 001 732 422 6362. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.

Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:

©2026 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com


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Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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