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A very important business lesson about confrontation and goals

Want to share an important business lesson with you. Years ago I got into a legal dispute with a competitor which was growing rapidly. The issue was over the name of one of my products that he took issue with and said it sounded like the name of his company. I didn’t think he had a case and he thought he did, so off we went getting our “balls” and “chequebooks” out all the way to court. I was never going to back down and looked like he wasn’t going to either.

Then, all of a sudden, he backed down, totally! As for me, I didn’t like that!!! Why did he do that? 🤔 He had an OK case; it wasn’t like he was 100% going to lose, it was 50-50. Do you know why he backed down? Because he was smart!!! He didn’t want to be bogged down with a legal case, spending tens of thousands over something that in the scheme of things was not causing him much harm. His company was really growing and he decided to concentrate on the positive and not the negative. Looking back, I was the more experienced businessman and had the bigger company at the time but I wasn’t as smart as him in many ways. I was all too ready to put my growth and bigger aspirations on hold or slow them down to “fight” and teach him a lesson. .

If you are this way inclined, NEVER do this! You must never put the bigger mission of your business behind petty fights and “ego”- driven confrontational decisions. He went on to sell his company at the right time and at the time of writing is said to be worth some £250m. He was smart enough to abandon something, IF it meant he would prosper financially in the long run. . . It was a good lesson to learn and an unexpected one for me. It taught me that smart people are those that set a goal and go about achieving it without getting distracted and if they can remove distractions, they must do it at the cost of their ego, pride or how they appear to others.

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