Why Doing The Opposite Of Your Competition Works

Feeling like you’re drowning in a sea of competitors who all look and sound exactly the same? It’s frustrating when you’re working hard but still feel invisible, especially when every move you make seems to blend right into the noise. That pressure to stand out can hit you right in the gut when you know you’re capable of more but can’t quite break through.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Small business owners, listen up. You started your business, but you can't do it alone. And that means you have to hire people to help. That's where Justworks comes in. Justworks is the payroll, benefits, and global hiring platform to unburden your brain from all the complicated small business stuff. They handle the things you can't afford to get wrong, so you don't have to worry. So you can focus on the parts of running a business that you enjoy, knowing everything else is running smoothly. You don't have to worry when it just works. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first, but didn't live up to the hype? For example, I really wanted to love the show Mad Men. I really tried to watch it and love it, but it just didn't do anything for me. As a marketer and business person, the show was a little bit of a disappointment.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  Marketers know that feeling. They optimize for the numbers that look great, like impressions. But then we don't see revenue. LinkedIn has a word for that: bull spend. Instead, you can get the highest ROAS of major ad networks with LinkedIn ads. Cut the bull spend, advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/MBAShow. Terms apply.

• 1:11Speaker 00

  If you're struggling to get traction right now, if you are stuck at a plateau that you can't grow past, I've got something for you today. I've got something that's going to change things immediately. And here it is. I'm just going to give it to you right now from the top. If everyone in your space is saying, doing, and offering A, the easiest way to stand out and become the industry leader is to say, do, and offer Z, or whatever the opposite of A is. The opposite position is the only unoccupied real estate in your space. You have a very crowded market, so go where it's not crowded. But there's a right way and there's a wrong way to do this.

• 1:51Speaker 00

  Doing the opposite badly will kill your business and really ruin your life in a lot of ways. So it's important to do this right. And I'm going to show you both, the right way and the wrong way to do this. Plus, I'm going to show you a massive opposite opportunity that's in the market right now that you can leverage, that you can take on here in 2026.

• 2:16Speaker 00

  Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, to help you start, grow, and scale your business.

• 2:29Speaker 00

  If this show has helped in any way, it would be amazing if you could drop us a quick review on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast right now. It helps me and my team bring new episodes every week. And more importantly, more entrepreneurs will be able to discover our podcast, so you can help someone else start their journey. Thanks so much.

• 2:50Speaker 00

  So let's start, why the opposite actually works? What's the mechanism behind this? Well, there's three reasons why this isn't a gimmick and is an actual real strategy. The first reason is that you're serving an underserved need. When everyone is doing A, is doing a certain thing in your market, customers who don't want that are not being served. They have nowhere to go. They exist. They are frustrated. They're waiting for someone to serve them. And the best part of this is that you're not stealing customers from your competitors. They are customers that exist, that are not being served, that your competitors are not dealing with. You are rescuing these customers that are being ignored. The second reason is The Blue Ocean Strategy.

• 3:33Speaker 00

  This is a very famous book that we covered here on the show. And it's the idea that competing where everyone competes is a red ocean. It's bloody, right? Price wars and feature wars. And it's really tough to survive in a red ocean. But the opposite position is a blue ocean. It's non-competitive because no one is there. No one is doing anything there. You don't have to outcompete anybody. You don't have to be better than anybody. You just have to be the option for people that are looking for that option. Reason number three, and one of the biggest reasons you should do this, is that you become memorable. The brain ignores saneness, okay? You are probably experiencing this right now as you're scrolling through your feed

• 4:16Speaker 00

  on Instagram, or on YouTube, or whatever it might be, where you're just seeing the same thing over and over again. I personally have seen it. The people in the business education space, like, there's like five or six people, basically they're the same person, okay? And they just say the same things, they're doing the same things, they're preaching the same kind of ideas, and it's exhausting. By doing the opposite, you're standing out from the noise. It's not a marketing tactic. You're actually taking a position. It's important for you to understand that you need to believe in this position. It can't be just something for the sake of doing it, like just for the sake of being contrarian. No, you actually have to believe in it and maybe have a story behind why you believe that. Maybe that's your experience. But reason number three really is powerful because you become a memorable brand.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  You have free word of mouth that compounds over time because you are different. We're all about being practical here on the podcast, so let's get real. Let me give you some real examples of how I have applied this myself in my own businesses. The first one is a podcast that I shared with you in a previous episode called People Who Know Their [BLEEP], which is a podcast that was an interview podcast. And every business podcast at the time was doing interviews, long intros, backstories, "Tell us about your journey." You've heard of this before, right? It was like an hour of fluff with five minutes of insights. What we decided to do is to do the opposite. We're not going to do interviews. And now, we do do extended interviews now on the podcast because there are some insights that I cannot share, perspectives I don't understand, like how to be a female entrepreneur.

• 5:45Speaker 00

  And that's why we bring on guests once in a while. But the vast majority of our episodes are lesson-based, and that's how the podcast started, where we teach a lesson, where we show you what we failed at, we show you what we've won at, what works, what doesn't. And helping people with concise business lessons so that they can build upon their own skills and be a better entrepreneur. So we thought to ourselves, what's the opposite of an hour, two-hour interview? Some of these interview podcasts were three hours long. Well, we're like, we're going to make our podcasts so short, but feel so long. What does that mean? Well, we thought, how do we make our podcasts so valuable in just 20 minutes that people feel like, wow, this was great? I can't believe that was just 20 minutes. I learned so much in just 20 minutes.

• 6:30Speaker 00

  Like, how can we concentrate as much information as possible and deliver incredible value to our audience? At the time, this was a very novel idea, where people were just teaching on the podcast. Now, it's quite common. We started back in 2014. We're a little bit early for our time. But it resulted in incredible amount of momentum because we zigged while other people were zagging. Over 300 million downloads and counting for this podcast. Super proud of that. Of course, I don't do this alone. I have a team around me. But the point is, is that the concept, the idea, was serving an underserved market. People that are maybe not as flexible with their time, or don't have an hour long to listen to a podcast, only have maybe a 15-minute commute, a 20-minute commute. They don't have all the time in the world.

• 7:15Speaker 00

  They want to learn something and they want to move on. We served that blue ocean.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  To the millions of small business owners out there, we appreciate you. We see your early mornings, late nights, and all the hard work in between. And with the US Bank Business Essentials Card, you don't have to go it alone. With unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase, because we know your community's counting you to be here, there, everywhere. So yeah, we don't just appreciate you, we support you. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from VC USA, Inc. Some restrictions may apply.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  The holidays are the season business owners get pulled in six directions. More calls, more requests, more chances for things to slip through the cracks. Hoping you catch it all isn't a plan. That's why today's episode is brought to you by QUO, spelt Q-U-O. The business phone built so you never miss a call or a customer. Ever have a lead call or text at 10:00 PM? QUO's AI agent handles both 24/7. It answers questions, gets to the details, and can text them a link to book an appointment. By morning, you've got the summary and can jump right in. And nobody should have to ask customers to repeat themselves. In QUO, every call, text, and voicemail lives in one thread. So anyone on the team can jump in already knowing the whole story.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  If you have a business where your customers call or text you, this is a no-brainer. You must have QUO. Money is on the line. Always say hello with QUO. Try QUO for free, plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com/mba. That's Q-U-O.com/mba.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  Second example I've used this concept is with our software company, Webinar Ninja. In software, in SaaS, software as a service, they teach you, or you hear in the market, that you should automate everything, right? You should leverage a technology as much as possible, especially when it comes to customer service, you know, help desk bots and self-serve knowledge base and deflect as much as possible when a customer emails you because you want to save money, because you want to put all the money in, you know, R and D, in the product itself, in growing your team, all that kind of stuff. All our competitors were removing humans from their support team. They were going, you know, support bot-based, AI-based at the time. And we decided, we're going to do the opposite.

• 9:38Speaker 00

  We are going to only have real humans, and not only that, we're going to have live chat, and it's going to be available 24/7. 365, no days off, around the world support. On top of that, we're like, the support's going to be amazing. Our response time, our first response time is going to be under 30 seconds. That means if you send a chat message to our team, you're going to get a response, the first response, in under 30 seconds. Sometimes it was like 15 seconds. And in fact, this was so impressive, people actually loved this so much, that I used to show it off when I used to demo the software on sales webinar. So I would be on the live sales webinar, and I would tell the people in the chat, everybody that is live on the webinar, that were potential customers, hey, if you ever have a question, and you're struggling, or you need some help, or you don't know how to put your webinar

• 10:21Speaker 00

  together, or you're live on a webinar, and you need some help from our support team, you can just go to the chat bot on our website and ask somebody, I shouldn't say chat bot, I should chat bubble, because it's a live person, and you can ask a real person for help. And they're like, cool. I said, you want me to prove it? They're like, yes. So I said, go to the website right now, and go ahead. And I knew there was a support person there. We had a whole team of people that were there, and they would send a chat message, like four, five, six, seven, eight, 10 messages happening at the same time. And they all got responses in seconds. And that was enough to sell the software. People were like, wow, this is incredible. If I ever struggle. And remember, webinar software is quite complicated. There's high stakes, right? People are worried that it's going to maybe fail, or maybe they're not going to do well.

• 11:05Speaker 00

  So having somebody to help them along the way and answer their questions is a huge advantage. And in fact, our customer support team even would join our customers' webinars and help them live during the event. So we just went all in on support. We really wanted to differentiate ourselves and say, hey, everybody else in the market is neglecting you when it comes to support. Everyone in the market is automating this. No, we're going to go the opposite and go full human, full support, available at any time. The crazy thing is that some people in my industry, that I knew personally, my competitors, would call me crazy, like, this is crazy. You're spending so much money on support, support is costly. And I would say, it's not a cost, it's an investment. Think about it. When do you reach out to customer support?

• 11:49Speaker 00

  One, when you're not a customer yet, right? When you're asking questions about the product, like, you are a potential buyer, you are on the fence. So if you get an answer quickly, people want answers quickly, they want to decide now if they should buy this thing or not. And if they get it within seconds, you're closing more sales because of your fast support. When do you also contact support? When things are not working, when things are not going as planned. This is a moment that's super critical. They're going to decide to stay or leave. So if you're able to solve their problem as quickly as possible, within seconds, and show them, oh, all you got to do is this, 1, 2, 3, 4, it's fixed. They're like, oh, you just saved me. Fantastic. You just saved a customer, and you've saved yourself having to acquire a new customer to replace them.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  So there is money to be made here, and I realized that in the moment. And when we started to implement this strategy, we cut our churn by 70%. And churn is the percentage of people that leave your customer base, meaning how many people leave every single month. So our customer service became a hallmark feature that people talked about in our business. Customers literally would say, the support alone was worth the monthly subscription. So what's the insight here? What's the lesson for you to take away? Well, when your whole industry is treating something as a cost to minimize, that is an opportunity for you to maximize and make it the thing that is making you special, making you unique. And there's a lot of opportunity for this, I'm going to talk about this in a bit, especially in the age of AI.

• 13:17Speaker 00

  But you have to realize that as long as when you are doing the opposite adds value, that's when it adds value to your customer, but also adds value to your business. Hey, I hope today's episode is making you see things differently about doing things differently. Hit subscribe, because I don't want you to miss an upcoming episode about how to force yourself to start that business already. Okay, this is an episode that I have been working on, because a lot of people are saying to me, I want to start a business Omar, but I just don't know how to bring myself to it. There's always things that come up. I'm going to show you how to make sure it actually happens, if you want it. Subscribe, so you don't miss it. Now, I hinted at this earlier, but I got to tell you, when doing the opposite actually fails, when it doesn't work.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  And this is a very critical distinction that you need to really have cemented in your head. The opposite only works when you deliver more value. If you're just doing the opposite for opposite sake, it's not really going to do much. It's going to make a little bit of noise, might give you some notoriety temporarily, might have like a viral post or something like that. But it's actually not going to deliver you more customers and grow your business, because you're not actually giving more value because of the stance. Let me give you an example. Let's say you're a YouTuber, and you're noticing that people are publishing YouTube videos at the 10-minute mark, like, the length of the video is 10 minutes long. And you decide, I'm going to do the opposite. I'm going to publish videos that are three hours long. Great.

• 14:45Speaker 00

  But if those three hours are not packed with in-depth training, like a full-on course, and it's just a lot of fluff, and the video actually could be shorter, like, the video value could be just 30 minutes, then you're just stretching it to three hours to be different. And you're not actually giving the customer, giving the viewer what they want. They want three hours of value, not three hours, and within those three hours is about 20 minutes of value. The distinction here is that the length isn't the value, right? The depth is the value. And a good example of this is like Caleb Ralston, who's like this big branding expert. He published a six-hour video on YouTube, and it's a six-hour course on branding.

• 15:25Speaker 00

  And it's a real, full-on course that you would buy for thousands of dollars. And this is why his channel really blew up in a short period of time, because people were like, this guy's nuts, he's giving away all this stuff for free. But he zigged while everybody zagged, but he did it with value. The reason why this distinction matters as well is that the competition might be doing some things because those things work, right? They didn't invent those things, they're just adopting best practices. And inverting those things, doing the opposite of it, might hurt you, right? So you need to make sure that if you're just doing the opposite for opposite sake, that you're not leaving value on the table, you're not shooting yourself in the foot. So I want to share with you an opportunity that you can take on here in 2026, an opposite

• 16:07Speaker 00

  move that nobody's making in any market that I'm seeing. Right now, the entire world is obsessed with AI. Everybody's talking about AI. You need AI this, you need AI that. Our service is AI-powered, our business is AI-first, all this stuff. All these people that are shouting AI from the rooftops are missing is that a lot of people don't love AI. They're actually scared of it. Many people don't trust it. They don't like the companies behind it, or the people that run those companies. Many people are drowning with AI-generated sameness, and they're really craving for something that's human. And a lot of these people are your customers, are the people that you're trying to earn their business and go after.

• 16:48Speaker 00

  And the opposite play here is saying, I am proudly human. We don't use AI to deliver our products and services. For example, you're an AI-free copywriting service. We will write all your sales copy on your website, on your landing pages, on your sales pages. And every word is written by a human being that is an experienced copywriter that knows what's converts, knows how to get people to keep reading and to buy your products and services. That's compelling. People are like, yeah, I want somebody that is a craftsman, I want somebody that's actually going to do this, and not just chuck my website into AI and cough it up and then charge me a bunch of money. Some people that are watching or listening to this episode are going to build a business like this. Why not you? Okay?

• 17:31Speaker 00

  And there's a lot of room in the market to do this, and every market has its own kind of niche, and you could be doing this in fitness, and somebody else could be doing this in wellness, and somebody else could be doing this in business, somebody could do this in finance. The point here is that not everybody is in love with what's happening in the world that's trending. You know, right now, it's AI, it could be something else in the future. And you have to realize that most people are happy to get the result of what they're looking for, regardless of the trends. What do I mean by that? Let's go back to the copywriting example. If I want somebody to write me some really good sales copy for my website, at the end of the day, I'm not actually looking for the copy. I'm looking for somebody to help me get more customers with the copy, right?

• 18:14Speaker 00

  So as long as I get the outcome, AI or not, people are happy to pay. And in fact, a lot of people feel like AI is a bit of a crutch, and maybe a little bit of a fad. Now, you could believe that or not, but the fact of the matter is, there are people that believe that, the people that don't really love it. So you should go to where those people want that service, which is an empty ground, no one's talking about human businesses, no one's talking about, hey, we don't use AI. You're actually going to sound really novel, and people are going to really be attracted to that, that love this message. Listen, I like to eat my own dog food, so let me share with you, how am I doing the opposite, or using this strategy, in my own business, in my own life right now? In my personal brand, in my space, in the business education space, people are saying

• 18:58Speaker 00

  the same things over and over again. They're telling you that business is easy, all you got to do is X, Y, Z. No, I'm here to tell you that business is not easy. It's actually very challenging, it's very hard, and it takes time. And the reason why I say this is because I want the people that are following my content to know what it takes, to know what they're stepping into. But also, when I was starting in business, I was listening to those people saying, oh, business is easy, you could just, you know, be a millionaire in just a year. And I, I thought I was slow, I thought I was dumb, I thought there was something wrong with me, because I wasn't a millionaire yet. But then I realized, wait a minute, business is actually hard. And everybody who's being honest about entrepreneurship actually say, it's hard, it's difficult.

• 19:40Speaker 00

  So I don't want to set you up for disappointment, and let you know that, hey, it's supposed to be hard. And by being hard, it's kind of a rite of passage, and that's what makes it so rewarding. If you notice, I like to share some fun stories. I like to smile here and there, make some jokes. A lot of people in my space, they barely smile. They're super serious. They're really angry. And I like to smile and give you a little bit of tough love along the way. But I like to speak from empathy. And there's a lack of empathy in the business education space. People forgot what it's like to be a beginner. They forgot what it's like to struggle. They forgot what it's like to work so hard and not get enough sales to pay your bills. I know what it's like and I still remember, you know? And I like to teach from that perspective.

• 20:24Speaker 00

  I mean, heck, the people that you know in my space, the people that are famous, the people that are trending in the business education space, they all kind of look the same. They have a plain t-shirt on, they have zero personal style. They kind of look the same, sound the same, showing off their big guns. Listen, I've got some guns, but I don't need to show them off, right? The point here is, is that like I'm intentionally trying to do the opposite in my own way. I'm comfortable, I like to look good, like to dress nicely. But I do it intentionally because I do believe people are tired of the same old, same old. Seeing this repeated over and over again, being shouted at, not being empathetic to what it's like to be a beginner. So I want to recap today's lesson.

• 21:06Speaker 00

  Everyone that's doing A is an opportunity for you to do Z. Okay, for you to do the opposite, to go into a blue ocean. But only do the opposite if it delivers more value. Don't be a gimmick, don't be cheesy. Make sure what you're doing is actually serving an audience, a customer. You could literally do this. Look at your industry this week, this weekend, right now, after this episode and write down, what does everyone do the same in my industry? Well, how do they deliver their product? What do they do all kind of the same way? What do my customers quietly hate about that? Right? And a good way to look at that is like, look at customer reviews, go on Google reviews, look at the three-star reviews.

• 21:49Speaker 00

  What do people say that they're complaining about? What would the opposite look like? And would it genuinely serve those customers better? This is a brilliant exercise because you start to realize there's so much opportunity out there to do something differently, properly. As I shared with you today, I built two businesses doing this opposite move, this podcast and webinar ninja by focusing on customer service and being human. What is your move in your business? How are you going to do something contrarian that serves your customers? If this episode has helped you see the power of the opposite position, I want you to go ahead and watch this recent episode or listen to this recent episode. How do I raise money for my business?

• 22:32Speaker 00

  If you're looking to raise money, if you're looking to raise funds, this is the episode for you. It's a Q and A Wednesday episode that I do with Nicole, which is a great episode. Go ahead and check it out because the opposite move is one weapon. But this episode is really about how do you leverage your ability to raise funds? But also, what do you do instead of raising funds? What are the other options? Can you do this on your own? Can you have some traction first before you raise that capital? Thanks for tuning in and I'll check you in the next one.

• 23:03Speaker 00

  If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast. Hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now, whether it's Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you've subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.

• 23:37Speaker 00

  Hey, Fidelity.

• 23:40Speaker 00

  How can I remember to invest every month?

• 23:43Speaker 02

  With the Fidelity app, you can choose a schedule and set up recurring investments in stocks and ETFs.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  Oh, that sounds easier than I thought.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  You got this.

• 23:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I do. Now, where did I put my keys?

• 23:57Speaker 02

  You will find them where you left them.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE, SIPC.