Put Your Blinkers On

There’s a saying I come back to time and time again: put your blinkers on.

Think about a horse wearing blinkers, those guards fitted against the sides of its eyes to stop it spooking at everything going on around it. That’s exactly what you need to do too.

When Someone New Moves Into Your Patch

Another school opens up nearby, and they come in loud. Really loud, more fluent in social media, or have connections, a friend at the local radio station, a big personal network, people ready to blast their launch out everywhere. Suddenly there’s noise coming from what feels like nowhere, and you’re left thinking, where on earth did this come from?

It doesn’t matter where it came from. What matters is what you do next, and the hardest thing to do at that moment is exactly what you need to do: put your blinkers on.

This applies to competitors generally too, not just new arrivals. The moment you start paying close attention to what someone else is doing, you lose focus on what you’re doing. You get distracted. You start to lose your own voice. “They’re doing this, maybe we should be doing that too.” Before you know it, you’ve built something that doesn’t actually sit with your values, because you were too busy reacting to somebody else’s moves instead of following your own plan.

You don’t have to do anything that they do. Nothing at all.

You’re Different, Even When You’re the Same

Say a school opens a hundred yards away, another ISTD teacher, same syllabus, same tap, modern and ballet classes. You’re still completely different.

You’re different because your values are different. You’re different because the person leading it, the visionary behind the whole thing, is a different person entirely. How you communicate is different. Your ideas are different. Even teaching the same syllabus, you’ll teach it in your own way, not theirs. How you run your school, your timetable, the atmosphere, it’ll all be different, in ways that genuinely matter to the families choosing between you.

Your customers will find their way to whoever fits them best. Some will gravitate towards you, some towards them, and that’s simply how it should work. That’s the customer’s choice to make, and it’s not a reflection of you doing anything wrong.

What’s In Your Control

You can’t stop someone else opening a school near you. There’s no rule against two dance schools sharing a venue, even if it feels like there should be an unspoken one. You may feel like it goes against some sense of integrity, and there is an unwritten code many of us feel around this. But feeling that way won’t stop it happening.

What you can control is how you respond. Everything else is out of your hands, so put your energy into what actually is.

In that moment, dig into what makes you different. What makes your school uniquely yours. What it is that makes it tick. That’s what deserves your focus, and that’s what should show up clearly in your marketing. Because success doesn’t belong to whoever shouts loudest. It belongs to whoever the right customer identifies with. Someone might make an enormous amount of noise, and the very customer they’re trying to reach might not connect with that noise at all. Then you show up, being exactly who you are, and they think, that’s the one for me.

Stick To Your Own Lane

Put your blinkers on, and not only when a new competitor moves in nearby. Make it a habit, all the time.

If a school down the road starts offering acro and you don’t, that doesn’t mean you suddenly need to add it too. Not if it doesn’t fit your plan. Not if it’s not part of your vision. Not if it’s simply not something you want to build.

Stick to your own lane. Trust that the quality, the values, and the school you’ve built, built specifically by you, will stand the test of time, because nobody else can be uniquely you. Trust in that, and let your blinkers do their job.

The first exercise I get my members to do is The Culture Umbrella , it’s a big bit of work, but it is the MOST crucial, MOST important and crucially it’s the one that will set you up for success.  It sits in Fundamental Foundations, this you get as Den Members or you can buy it alone as a stand alone course. Check them both out.