Originally published in Inc, March 16, 2026
As a founder or executive, you have worked hard to build your business and your unique offering. When a larger company enters your space, it can be unnerving. They have more marketing resources and a larger staff to court and service clients. But instead of thinking about the threat, consider your advantages.
These 23 Inc. Leadership Forum members have faced competition from firms much larger than their own, and lived to tell the tale. Most would probably say they benefitted from this competition. It forces a company to focus on what they do well, the advantages they offer over a larger company, and how they want to show up to their clients. Take pages from their books and see how you can improve your own strategy, even before any new competition arrives.
1. Market your competitive advantage strategically
This is the story of our business; we live and work amongst the giants! Stand confident in your own success and experience. Do a SWOT analysis on the competitor and use it to market your competitive advantage more strategically. Sharpen your edge and just compete. The win tells the story! — Jennifer Schielke, Summit Group Solutions, LLC
2. Collaborate, don’t compete
I don’t look at people as competitors because we all have something unique to offer. I usually work together with “competitors” by hosting webinars and collaborating on posts. There is no need to try and go against each other. — Stephanie Long, Mrs. SEO
3. Stay close to your customers
When a larger competitor entered our space with similar offerings, I didn’t panic or try to outspend them. Instead of chasing them, we sharpened our differentiation and stayed close to the people we serve. Big competitors can scale faster, but they can’t easily match trust, impact, our core values, and client community. — Gina Anderson, PhD, Luma Brighter Learning
4. Study the signal
When a larger competitor enters my space, I ignore the noise and study the signal. If something gets my attention, I screenshot it and revisit it six months later to see if it actually mattered. Most of the time, it doesn’t. Competitors can copy offerings, but they can’t copy discipline, identity, or the long‑term consistency that builds a real lane. — Ari McGrew, PhD, Tactful Disruption
5. Share proven capabilities
My firm operates from a position of unwavering confidence, grounded in faith, which guides my business and its results. When a prospective client informs us of the competition, my approach is simply to present the concrete facts of our proven capabilities—a level of delivery most other firms cannot match. I also love to challenge all prospective clients by asking them to Google me or my recent work and let the results speak for themselves. Confidence is the key to any success. — Misty Schwartz, Schwartz Entertainment Media Group
6. Double down on differentiated value
Historically, we have responded to increased Big 4 and large-competitor entries by doubling down on our differentiated value, which is deep specialization in organization design and transformation, a more consultative and bespoke client experience, and rapid innovation of frameworks and tools that larger players are slower to adopt. Rather than trying to match their scale, we lean into thought leadership, agility, and long-standing trusted advisor relationships to win work where complexity and tailored solutions matter most. — Rebecca Ellis, AlignOrg Solutions
7. Be the best in a sharp lane
When a larger competitor waddles into our space, we don’t panic and sprint after them. We remember we’re the speedboat, they’re the cruise ship. They’re huge, shiny, and slow to turn; we’re small, precise, and ridiculously quick. Our move is to narrow our focus even more, refine the product our specific audience actually loves, and ship improvements and refinements fast while they schedule nine meetings to discuss a tooltip. We keep a pulse on the market zeitgeist so we’re not blind, but we refuse to drift into being a knockoff. We’d rather be the best in a sharp lane than a bland version of their everything-for-everyone platform. — Susanne Norwitz, Maya Chia
8. Sharpen positioning
We don’t chase scale, we double down on what’s hard to copy: speed without chaos, senior attention without layers, and work built with taste and a flexible process. If the market feels crowded, we get narrower, sharpen positioning, show our point of view, and make standards visible in the details and systems behind the work. Innovation is our baseline. We refine our method and keep delivering, staying ahead of where clients are going next. — Goran Paun, ArtVersion
9. Bespoke services and customized solutions
The market typically supports multiple models. Mid-sized firms can differentiate through more bespoke services, hands-on management, and customized solutions, while larger organizations tend to focus on scale and a more standardized, mass-market approach. This distinction allows each to serve different client needs effectively. — Jessica Hawthorne-Castro, Hawthorne Advertising
10. Use size as an advantage
We’re in the software development consulting business, where the largest firms have over 400,000 employees globally. The most important approach is to use our size to our advantage. We’re nimble and we’ve built talent acquisition as one of our primary capabilities, so we can fill a role faster without carrying the overhead cost of “bench talent” (where someone is on payroll with no work to do). Because we are smaller, we are also able to invest more deeply in culture and relationship with and between our team members and increase our talent advantage. — Rob Kischuk, Bellwood
11. Experience and record of success
We have focused our conversations with clients on our long-standing track record within the niche. While those competitors may bring greater resources or larger marketing budgets to new initiatives, there is no substitute for experience and a proven record of success. — Aaron C. Giles, Agile Consulting Group, Inc.
12. Invest in the best available talent
The No. 1 thing we have done is focus on the quality of our work. We have accomplished this by really investing in the best available talent in the marketplace. Secondly, as part of building our ecosystem strategy of integrated services, we are able to arbitrage pricing to gain a foothold in certain verticals and/or services as needed to win a client. — JD Hayes, Traverse Group
13. A human-led and personalized team
I’m in a highly saturated industry, and large corporate competitors have been an issue since day one. Through trial and error, I realized our real advantage is our people. We are a human-led team dedicated to serving small business owners and entrepreneurs. From one business owner to another, we go the extra mile with personalized, attentive customer service, ensuring every step of our process is seamless. This approach creates confidence and ease for our customers and partners, who know they’ll never face outsourced call centers or impersonal automation—and it’s made all the difference. — Nellie Akalp, CorpNet.com
14. Relationships and flexibility
We lean hard into relationships and flexibility (two things large competitors usually can’t scale). Big firms tend to operate by rigid service-level agreements and playbooks; we operate like humans. More than once, we’ve simply waited them out and been called back in later to clean up the mess when “one-size-fits-all” didn’t actually fit. — Lisa Larson-Kelley, Quantious
15. Bigger is not always better
We generally welcome larger competitors into our space, as it means they are trying to move downward from enterprise and midmarket into the SMB market. We leverage their entry by focusing on three things. Our solutions are designed for SMBs, not modified enterprise solutions that never quite fit. Our offerings are bespoke to SMBs, not commoditized packages. They are not one-size-fits-all. Our clients are not little fish lost in a big lake. Our clients are seen, heard, and valued. Rather than promote ourselves as the largest market leader, we would modify our marketing messages to reflect how we are the more intimate and client-focused vendor of choice. Bigger is not always better. — Allen Falcon, Cumulus Global
16. Define the competition
We define what we can do that they can’t. — Bill Austin, Bill Austin & Associates, Inc.
17. Don’t track competitors too closely
We’ve had multiple larger competitors enter our space over the years, some with similar offerings and others with offerings that looked similar on paper. The first step is to assess how credible the threat may be. As a product-led tech organization, we understand our competitors are primarily sales-led organizations where product release announcements come months or years before a line of code is created. As information becomes available, we gather intel to understand how well we predict their product will solve the market problem. We usually move on after that since tracking competitors too closely creates a losing strategy. — Cecilia Corral, CareMessage
18. Be flexible, be fair
We operate in a highly saturated market, and we are neither the largest nor the first. We play in the same space where Google makes its own money. Our approach has been the same from day one: be faster. Be flexible. Be fair. — Yuriy Gorokhov, Adtelligent
19. Improve core product experience
Larger competitors entering the space confirmed our direction, so we sharpened our positioning. We improved the experience around our core product rather than expanding for expansion’s sake. That helped us stay differentiated. It also helped that we already had strong brand recognition and customer trust in our niche. — Liviu Tanase, ZeroBounce
20. Use larger companies to educate the market
I actually love it when larger competitors try to match our offerings. As a smaller services business, it is expensive to educate the market on new offers. Larger companies have bigger marketing budgets to educate the market, which we find helpful. Differentiating between what we offer and what a larger competitor offers is then pretty straightforward in terms of more bespoke solutions, greater client care and attention, and higher levels of trust. — Chris Younger, Class VI Partners
21. Exceptional customer service and relationships
I began to use the metaphor that our competitors are huge universities where students are a number versus a name, whereas we are a small institution where each student is known, nurtured, and given the opportunity for a personalized educational experience. We shifted to a model of “white glove service” throughout the entire lifecycle of our student experience, to truly differentiate in a crowded space with competitors who can outspend us on the front end. As a small shop, we can provide exceptional customer service and build real relationships with our students that facilitate transformational learning. — Noelle Cordeaux, Lumia Coaching
22. Narrow your focus
We didn’t chase them on price or volume. Instead, we narrowed our focus, increased specialization, and made our process harder to replicate. Large players sell scale; we sell judgment, speed, and discretion, which is where incumbents struggle to compete. — Kevin Leyes, LeyesX
23. Consistency, clarity, and execution
There is a standard we anchor in and when our space was entered, we clarified our signal. We understood precision creates trust and double down on our brand as a credibility system and not marketing function, that could potentially create noise. We sharpened our narrative on how we thought, executed, and reduced risk for customers. We let consistency, clarity, and execution differentiate us. — Paul L. Gunn Jr., KUOG Corporation
