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Fortify Your Competitive Moat: Because Everyone Wants Your Lunch

Fortify Your Competitive Moat: Because Everyone Wants Your Lunch

Welcome to 2025. Your competitors are lurking, your moat needs dredging, and Porter's Five Forces are out there waiting to ruin your year.

Basil Choudhry
January 06, 2025

In partnership with

Obsessing over your rivals is a sure-fire way to achieve nothing, but as 2025 kicks off it’s time to sharpen your focus and size up the competition.

❝

We’re not competitor obsessed, we’re customer obsessed.

Jeff Bezos

Michael E. Porter didn’t invent his Five Forces to make MBA students cry—though that’s a bonus. Instead, he gifted us a framework to expose the brutal truths about competitive pressures.

Which of these do you need to allocate the most resources to countering in 2025?

Competitive Rivalry – How many existing competitors do you have? How active are they? How well funded/robust/healthy are they? Are you prepared to fight back?
Threat of New Entrants – Genuinely, how hard is it to reproduce what you do?
Bargaining Power of Suppliers – Vendors know you need them more than they need you. Are your margins being squeezed?
Bargaining Power of Buyers – Customers can smell desperation. Keep your value high, or prepare for discount hell?
Threat of Substitutes – Can your client problems now be solved another way? (AI? Outsourcing? Insourcing?)

Your 2025 Action Plan:
Less Guesswork, More Strategy

Step 1:
Conduct a Competitor Analysis (Like You Actually Mean It)

List the Usual Suspects: Identify who’s gunning for your customers—and who might be next. Don’t just look at the same old people you’ve been tracking for years - who are the new players?
Spy Strategically: Keep tabs on their campaigns, reviews, and product launches. What LinkedIn posts are their senior execs reposting/commenting on? Tools like Panoramata, Crayon, Kompyte can help with market intelligence on the online presence of your competitors [Not ads/sponsored] and of course Crunchbase is invaluable for tracking funding.
Call Out Weaknesses: Your competitors have them - but go deeper than the headline features they’re missing - what are the real gaps in their offering?

Step 2:
Build a Moat Big Enough to Drown the Competition

Innovate or Die: If your product hasn’t evolved since 2020, your customers are already eyeing something shinier.
Overdeliver Like Crazy: Blow their minds with service so good they wouldn’t dare leave you.
Be Un-copyable: Whether it’s through patents, proprietary tech, or just being —make it impossible for anyone to replicate what you do.

Step 3:
Fortify Your Defenses

Raise Barriers to Entry: Make sure getting into your market is harder than getting through TSA on a holiday weekend.
Negotiate Like a Shark: Don’t let suppliers push you around - remind them who’s boss. If you have enough clout - push for exclusivity.
Create Switching Costs: Lock customers in with loyalty programs, aggressive discounting for long contracts and sticky integrations.

The Long Reed: Deeper-Dive

Richard Rumelt’s modern-classic Good Strategy Bad Strategy is a no-nonsense guide to building strategies that actually work—cutting through buzzwords and fluff to deliver sharp insights and practical frameworks.

This book is your roadmap to smarter, sharper strategies, covering:

What makes a strategy “good” or “bad”?
Spotting the difference between real plans and empty slogans.
Identifying the critical issues and avoid distractions.
Developing focused plans designed to deliver measurable results.

Fortify Your Competitive Moat: Because Everyone Wants Your Lunch

Welcome to 2025. Your competitors are lurking, your moat needs dredging, and Porter's Five Forces are out there waiting to ruin your year.

Which of these do you need to allocate the most resources to countering in 2025?

Your 2025 Action Plan:
Less Guesswork, More Strategy

Step 1:
Conduct a Competitor Analysis (Like You Actually Mean It)

Step 2:
Build a Moat Big Enough to Drown the Competition

Step 3:
Fortify Your Defenses

The Long Reed: Deeper-Dive

Sponsored content

Ready to level up your work with AI?

Enterprise level marketing analytics at a starter price.

Fortify Your Competitive Moat: Because Everyone Wants Your Lunch

Welcome to 2025. Your competitors are lurking, your moat needs dredging, and Porter's Five Forces are out there waiting to ruin your year.

Which of these do you need to allocate the most resources to countering in 2025?

Your 2025 Action Plan: Less Guesswork, More Strategy

Step 1: Conduct a Competitor Analysis (Like You Actually Mean It)

Step 2: Build a Moat Big Enough to Drown the Competition

Step 3: Fortify Your Defenses

The Long Reed: Deeper-Dive

Sponsored content

Ready to level up your work with AI?

Enterprise level marketing analytics at a starter price.

Your 2025 Action Plan:
Less Guesswork, More Strategy

Step 1:
Conduct a Competitor Analysis (Like You Actually Mean It)

Step 2:
Build a Moat Big Enough to Drown the Competition

Step 3:
Fortify Your Defenses