Hi again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm and today I will be talking about my competitors
and I hate to dwell on the negative honestly there are really good competitors in my space both here
in retail selling plants and on YouTube and there are bad competitors as well and obviously I have
to be aware of them I can't be ignorant of it but my approach towards each varies quite a lot and I
I think this is something that even though I'm talking about selling plants or succeeding on
YouTube there are areas in your life where you have competition and the way that you approach
both your Healthy competition and your unhealthy competition can make a big difference into how
successful you are and also how happy you are as a person so let's talk about it I don't want
to be indelicate here but I am going to use real names of real competitors in this video because I
think it will help to illustrate my point and the first topic I want to talk about really
is the concept of scarcity I think that idea this mentality of scarcity can make people do
the wrong thing towards competition and the first example I'll use of that is at the Farmers Market
now I was a farmers market vendor for many years with my plants and I don't do that anymore I
usually I'm here at the farm but at the farmer's market you would anticipate some friction between
vendors I don't know why that's particularly the case but it was the honey vendors and the soap
vendors who were the worst just spilling some tea there but even between me and other plant
vendors there would be a little bit of eyeing up to see what your competition was for the day and
the idea sort of was that if customers came to the farmers market and it was a finite number of
customers and they come with a finite number of dollars in there in their pockets that if they
spent it at that booth on some plants that they might not spend it at my booth for some plants
which there's some flaws in that mentality there as well but I think in general people are wired
towards reacting to scarcity and all you'd have to do to confirm this is have a look at some of
those videos of Black Friday videos or think about at the beginning of the pandemic when there was an
idea that toilet paper was uh was short and that people were uh fighting each other for rules of
toilet paper in the stores there's I think humans nothing gets the blood pumping and the competitive
juices flowing so much as thinking that there are scarce resources and that you've got to compete
for them so people are a little bit wired that way and I think you got to get past that or at
least think bigger than that and so you know let's look at the farmer's market example and
say you know your biggest problem at the farmer's market is that finite number of customers and if
you have a poor selection of vendors and if you have a poor ecosystem in that market let's say
there's only one plant vendor well of course as one plant vendor I'll get all the plant
sales but it does limit the number of customers who are going to show up and the bigger problem
in same mission that was my home Market was that there was a market of potentially over a hundred
thousand people and you're only seeing 400 people and on any given saturday that's rough you know
so the idea that if you had more vendors there and they had a better assortment and they were better
competitors I'm talking you know good competition that the customers would have more to find at the
farmer's market than over a number of weeks you would all benefit from that idea that you have
a healthy competitive market in at the farmers market so you know I saw one of my competitors
that I met at the farmer's market this guy named Mark Stephens I've made a video on him before I've
toured his place and he's really into the Edibles and there was some overlap between our plants but
frankly he focused a lot more on the Edibles and I focused a lot more on the ornamentals or
at least that's the way it turned out and uh you know it turned out to be a great partnership at
that market you know if if I didn't have what the customer needed I knew that Mark probably did or
even if I didn't know the answer to their question you know he's a knowledgeable guy it's rare that
I run into people who have my level of plant knowledge and you know he's right up there so it
was it was good to have another guy like like that there the farmers market it really sent customers
away with his idea that they were well taken care of uh you know doing really well if you think
about it in that market and again thinking about this limited resource The Limited pocket of these
customers far more dollars were being spent at the hardware store at the Walmart at the grocery store
on Plants than we're ever making their way down to the farmers market so if I want to talk about good
and bad competition Mark was on my side he was good competition he was right there bringing it
and bringing knowledge and bringing good plants and if you go to the Walmart or the Home Depot
or the hardware stores what you often find is a rack of neglected plants in the corner that are
you know frankly dead but they're trying to sell them for half price you know it like the idea that
they're what they're going to do to customers over a length of time is actually going to make
gardeners less successful make new gardeners not succeed in the in the industry and then that
means that I have less customers in the future so good competition Mark bad competition the
you know hardware stores and the mass Merchants that are basically getting into the business for
you know two months of the year and then right back out of the business and leaving customers
without answers that they need let's switch gears now and talk about YouTube because there's a
similar Dynamic going on here and you could go in with the rather flawed idea that there's a limited
number of views and viewers to be spread amongst a number of channels and that you just got to beat
the other guy to it and this is so wrong think about it people and I'm not talking about just
gardeners but people who potentially could watch gardening videos can range from not interested
at all to very very interested in how far they go along that scale really depends on us and so
if you turn them off with bad information really quickly you may not make a gardener out of that
person but if you can keep them now on YouTube you can keep them on YouTube interested excited being
educated they're just going to jump between from one channel to the other most of the referring
videos I have analytics on this and most of my referring videos on let's say propagating roses
come from Mike Kincaid's Channel and many of my information on just general rose stuff comes from
the rose Geeks Channel I mean they bounce back and forth and if they're getting good information
and they're enjoying the information they are then then these competitors say are actually
allies they're keeping those viewers on platform watching gardening videos me and extending their
journey into gardening and their knowledge of gardening which helps us all and if I want to
say who's bad competition in this case I mean I'm going to name some names in five minute crafts or
bright side or some of these clickbaity gardening channels that show magic powders
that you could use or or magic Solutions I mean these are these are terrible ideas on their face
and what they're going to do is they're going to create a custom Commerce in this case viewers who
are not succeeding and frustrated and annoyed and because it's kind of Click bait that leaves
a bad taste in your mouth anyway so those are just bad competitors and as far as YouTube goes
anybody off platform is also kind of a not say a bad competitor but certainly not helping me
so I would certainly much rather say that Mike Kincaid is my ally and the rose geek is my ally
as opposed to that person going and reading a book which is not a bad thing either because it
helps their gardening Journey but it isn't on platform and so as far as best competition for
me best competition are those YouTubers are that are right in plain view of me finally now that
I've moved on to selling retail rather than going to the farmers market I'm looking at a completely
different set of competitors and it's the same process I'm just looking at different people so
probably my most direct competitor here in the retail space is a guy named Brad Gilbert who's
actually well known to Rose people because he's a breeder of roses and that gives him him what
I would call an insurmountable Advantage you know but that's not a bad thing he's a great seller of
roses he does a great job of pre-selling his roses into the local market has great relationships with
the local clubs and Rose societies uh you know and he presents his products extremely well and
this brings me to my next point which is that ultimately when you look at your competition you
look at good competitions strong competition people who are better than you right now you
can look at them and say they've solved or are solving the same problems that I'm working on
today and their Solutions can look a lot like my Solutions it doesn't mean you go and clone
or copy what they're doing but there are ways you can you can cooperate with this and you
know without Mark Stephens I talked about in the first section who I who I competed against at
the farmers market and we share tips on where to get our pots where to get our soil he has to solve
a lot of the same problems about attracting and retaining customers that I do and when I look at
Brad Jalbert who we're on not on unfriendly terms we're we've been quite quite uh Cooperative in the
past and I can look at the way he's presenting his plants and look at what he's doing in the business
and say that's a model of how I can go forward you know who's bad competition once again I go
back to those pop-up markets or pop-up shops of of plants that just get into the business quickly
for a couple months of the year hardware stores grocery stores you know those competitors just
don't do anything for the business and if they're not giving out good information and they're not
developing the customers then they make people less successful in the hobby I can go forward
knowing that people like Brad jalbert or Clearview who I did a video of earlier in the season and
again much much larger than where I am right now but I know that when people go there they're going
to go away satisfied with the value satisfied with the quality satisfied with the information they're
not turning people who are novice gardeners into ex-gardeners they're turning them into gardeners
who can bounce back and forth between all of our different stores and build the market together so
that's my view on competition I hope I didn't come down too hard on anyone really honestly
I spoke a lot of Praise towards my competitors and the bad competition well what I would say
about them is you don't have to beat them you can just disregard them once you know about them once
you've analyzed their approach to the business you don't have anything to learn from them so just set
them aside work with your good competition and eventually you'll sideline those guys all right
that's all I have for you today I hope that was interesting or useful and if you have any
questions or comments about it please drop that Below in the comments of the video thanks so much