The bottom-rung loser in one town can move to another town and often become the king of his category. All it takes is weak competitors. I've seen it happen a dozen times.

Whether you dominate your marketplace won't be determined solely by the strength of your advertising. It will be determined partly by the strength of your competitors.

How good are you at what you do? How good are they?

There are 4 factors that determine business success. The most important of these, competitive environment, is the factor most often ignored. The reason, I suppose, is that business owners feel they can do nothing about it. So they ignore their competitors.

But their customers don't.

The ability to measure your strength objectively and compare it to the strength of your competitors is essential to strategic planning.

This is why Wizard Academy is developing a six-sigma Customer Experience Index, a patented instrument that will allow you to know – precisely and objectively– how you compare to each of your competitors locally. The same instrument will also compare your scores to national averages for your category in a number of critical customer touch-points. Sound interesting? Stay tuned. A Beta version of the instrument will be released in Summer '06.

Today we'll take a brief look at the four factors that govern business success. (In weeks to come we'll zoom in for a closer examination of each.) In order of importance they are:

1. Competitive Environment (strength of competitors)

2. Business Model (strategy. creation of customer expectations.)

3. Operational Execution (delivery of what was promised to the customer.)

4. Message Development (total business communication, including ad writing, décor, media planning, etc.)

When released, the Customer Experience Index will objectively measure what had previously been unmeasurable.

And you're the first to know.

Roy H. Williams