A few years ago I found myself wearing an over-sized Hawaiian shirt, sipping an umbrella drink by the pool, at a hotel resort in San Diego, trying to start up conversations with perfect strangers.

I was attending a conference of about 1,000 specialists in a particular industry that I had a hunch would make good clients for Cedarcrest. The problem was, I really didn’t know if my hunch was correct, or whether my Polyester-Polynesian-shirt-umbrella-drink-poolside-networking-in-the-sun project would just result in needless suffering on my part.

When I introduced my company and the service we provide to the first person poolside, he looked at me thoughtfully and said:

“Ah, so you’re like that guy, Bob, in San Antonio.” [Names have been changed to protect the innocent.]

I replied that I didn’t know Bob in San Antonio, but that I supposed I was like him if he provided the same or a similar service to that group of professionals.

Throughout the rest of the evening most of the professionals I met requested my card and said they could use my help, while a handful of others referenced Bob, and exclusively Bob, as the only other competition I had.

As I left the conference (and my suitable-only-as-upholstery-Hawaiian-shirt) behind me, I realized a wonderful thing: My competition consisted of one person, and that there was a great niche Cedarcrest could fill.

A couple of times a year I like to attend conferences in my industry, to try to ascertain how competitive the field is getting. My happiness about the conference is inversely proportional to the number of attendees who do what I do.

As a small business owner, I want to meet the competition, but I also want to find areas in which I do not have any competition at all. If I have to suffer with my umbrella drink by the pool to find these areas, well, so be it.