Here is a cautionary tale.

I’m going to be terribly vague here, partly because I like the person involved.

I am not going to give names or even say which of my projects or businesses I am talking about.

You don’t need those details anyway.

I noticed that one of my clients/clients was offering people something that looked a bit familiar. Not long after we worked together, I noticed his new business model.

They offered the same service as me, at the same prices, using the same digital infrastructure…

They even used the same kind of language as me.

What did I do?

Did I call my lawyers?

Tell them to drop it?

Rally against them on social media, complaining to my followers, maybe even trying to remove them?

My God, no, I can’t imagine a greater waste of time and energy.

My strategy was very clever.

I sat and watched.

My offer sold so well that after a little over a month, I had to double the price, twice, and that didn’t even slow down my sales. In fact, if I looked at the (admittedly small) numbers, I’m pretty sure I’d see an increase in the number of people buying.

Meanwhile, my would-be clone halved his prices and sat down, his offer gathering dust.

That was the likely outcome. I built and priced my offer around my brand, my audience, my trial and experience. Their offer was inferior to them in many respects and they didn’t have the same history with the market as I did.

So I was not surprised.

However, what if it was the other way around? What if they did exactly what I did… only they made more money doing it?

Well why would I complain about that?

Think about it: does someone take my business model, my style and my offer… and make more money than me? That’s a useful experiment showing how you could do better.

Now…

If they were to steal my content and sell it as their own…or even steal my copy…that would be a different conversation.

But my business model?

I built it in an afternoon.

They were welcome to try it, but I knew how it worked and why. The only move they knew how to make was to lower the price.

(Personally? I would have raised the quality… )

By all means, look around you and see how other people run their businesses. Let them be inspiration to you. But you need to understand your business, and your market, to see which bits apply. You’ll never see everything under the hood, so all you can copy is surface detail.

Unless you know how your business works, it won’t work for you.