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Lesson 9 from ten years in business
There is a strange narrative in business that there is not enough to go around.
I have heard it in almost every industry I have worked in or alongside. The sense that other businesses doing similar work are a threat. That a client who goes to someone else is a client lost. That knowledge shared is advantage surrendered. That the pie is fixed, and every slice someone else takes is a slice you do not get.
I have found the opposite to be true. Consistently, and without exception.
Where the scarcity story comes from
I think it is worth understanding why this narrative exists, because it is not entirely irrational.
Competition is real, budgets are finite and there are genuinely situations where two businesses are going for the same opportunity and only one will get it. That is not fiction.
The trouble starts when we take that narrow, finite reality and inflate it into a universal way of working. When scarcity becomes your default setting, it stops being a observation and starts being a costly mistake.
This stance relies on the belief that we are fighting over a frozen landscape. It assumes the volume of potential work and client needs is set in stone, leaving us only to squabble over the division of the pieces. In ten years of business, I have seen that this premise is simply incorrect.
Markets grow, needs evolve, and new opportunities emerge. And the businesses that are most likely to be part of that growth are the ones who are connected, collaborative, and genuinely embedded in their communities, not the ones who are hoarding knowledge and treating every peer as a potential threat.
What collaboration actually looks like
I want to be specific here, because collaboration gets used loosely and can mean almost anything.
In practice, collaboration in business looks like referring a client to someone better placed to help them, even when you could technically take the work yourself.
It looks like sharing knowledge with a peer without attaching conditions to it.
It looks like partnering on a project that neither of you could do as well alone.
It looks like celebrating someone else's win without mentally calculating what it means for you.
It also looks like the harder version. For example, being honest with a collaborator when something is not working and having the difficult conversation rather than letting a joint project drift. It means holding each other to the standards you both agreed to.
Collaboration is not just the pleasant parts. It is the full commitment to making something work together that works better than either of you would have managed separately.
The practical case for collaboration
Beyond the values argument, which I find compelling on its own, there are a number of practical reasons for choosing collaboration over competition.
- Your work improves.
When you collaborate with people who are genuinely good at what they do, the output is better than what either party would have produced alone. Different skills, different perspectives, different ways of approaching a problem, these things combine in ways that tend to produce stronger results.
- Ideas improve.
The conversations that happen in genuine collaborative relationships are some of the most generative I have experienced in business. Not because everyone agrees, but because there is enough trust to disagree productively and enough shared investment in the outcome to keep pushing until something good emerges.
- Opportunities expand.
This is the one that surprises people most. When you collaborate generously and consistently, you end up with access to opportunities that would never have come to you through competition. Referrals, partnerships, introductions, joint projects. The collaborative network compounds over time in ways that the competitive posture simply cannot match.
The marketing angle
In marketing, collaboration beats competition in a very direct way.
The businesses that are willing to share their knowledge, to create content that genuinely helps people, to refer openly and speak well of others in their industry, those businesses build trust faster and in a more lasting manner than those who guard everything and present themselves as the only viable option.
Generosity in marketing is not naivety, it is strategy.
The business owner who shares useful knowledge consistently becomes the trusted authority in their space. The one who refers openly becomes the person everyone wants to send clients to, because they know the referral will be looked after.
That reputation compounds and it is very hard for competition alone to build.
How to collaborate
- Identify who you could collaborate with rather than compete against.
Look at the businesses in your orbit who serve similar clients but offer different things. Where are the natural overlaps? Where could a genuine partnership create something better for the client than either of you could provide alone? Start there.
- Refer openly and generously.
When a client or contact needs something you cannot provide, or something someone else could provide better, refer them. Without conditions, without expecting reciprocity, without keeping score. Do it because it is the right thing for the person in front of you. The reciprocity tends to follow anyway, but it should not be the reason.
- Share knowledge without attaching conditions.
The instinct to protect what you know is understandable. The reality is that sharing knowledge builds trust and authority far faster than hoarding it. The person who learns from you is also the person most likely to refer to you, hire you, and speak well of you. (Mind you, this is not why I’m sharing these lessons with you. There is no expectation of reciprocity.)
- Choose collaborators carefully.
Collaboration requires trust, and trust requires alignment. Not everyone is the right collaborator, and going into a partnership with someone whose values or standards do not align with yours tends to create more problems than it solves. Be generous with knowledge and referrals broadly. Be selective about who you commit to working with closely.
Your action this week
Think about one business in your orbit that you have been thinking of more as a competitor than a potential collaborator.
What would it look like to approach them differently? Is there a conversation worth having, a referral worth making, a project worth exploring together?
Take one step toward that this week and see what opens up.
Collaboration is at the heart of how I work at Starfish. I am not trying to be everything to every business, I am trying to be exactly the right thing for the right businesses, and to connect the people I work with to the best possible support for everything else they need. If that sounds like the kind of marketing partnership you have been looking for, let's talk. [Get in touch here.]
This is part of a series expanding on the lessons from ten years of running Starfish. Next up: Lesson 10, bigger is not the goal.
Lesson 1: Do what you say you will
Lesson 2: Do not put a lit pipe in your pocket
Lesson 3: Empathy can be learned
Lesson 4: Different is not evil
Lesson 5: Curiosity beats assumption
Lesson 6: You Do Not Have To Agree, But You Do Have To Listen
Lesson 7: Thinking differently is the point
Next up: Lesson 10, Bigger is not always the goal
Frequently Asked Questions about collaboration over competition
Why do so many businesses default to a competitive mindset even when collaboration would serve them better? A lot of it comes down to how business success gets framed and measured. Revenue, market share, client numbers, these are inherently comparative metrics, and they create a mental model where more for someone else means less for you. The scarcity mindset is also self-reinforcing. If you approach other businesses as competition, they tend to respond in kind, which confirms the original assumption. Breaking that cycle requires someone to move first, to extend genuine collaboration before there is any guarantee of reciprocity. The businesses that are willing to do that consistently tend to find that the collaborative model produces better outcomes than the competitive one, but it does require a willingness to go first.
How do you know when to collaborate and when to compete? The most useful question is whether the other business genuinely serves the same clients in the same way, or whether there is enough difference in approach, specialisation, or audience that the relationship could be complementary rather than directly competitive. Even in cases of genuine direct competition, the collaborative instinct, sharing knowledge, referring where appropriate, speaking well of peers, tends to build more trust and reputation than competitive positioning does. The exception is where values are misaligned. Collaboration requires enough shared standards that you would be comfortable with your name being associated with the other party's work.
Can small businesses really afford to refer clients to competitors? This is the question that underlies a lot of resistance to the collaborative model, and it is worth examining the assumption inside it. Referring a client to someone better placed to help them is not losing a client. It is building a reputation as someone who puts the client's interests first, which is one of the most powerful things a small business can do. The client you refer generously is the client most likely to come back when they need something you can provide, and most likely to send others your way. The short term cost of a referral is almost always outweighed by the long term value of the trust it builds.
