Find out what your competitors are actually doing

Not the famous ones. Not the chain with the billboard, not the one with the biggest following. The five a customer compares you with before they pick up the phone. Say you run a salon: it's the three salons within ten minutes of yours and the two your regulars mention when they come back from trying somewhere else.

If you can't name five off the top of your head, that's the first thing you've learned. Here's where they are.

Five is enough. With ten, you'll never do the monthly check.

Open Claude and make a Project called Competitors. A Project remembers what you put in it, so you set this up once and never re-explain it. Into it go the five names, their websites, their Google Business listings, and what you offer and charge: your price list, or a paragraph.

These are the five businesses I lose work to. For each one: the name,
the website, and the Google Business listing.

1. [Name], [website], [Google Business link]
2. [Name], [website], [Google Business link]
3. [Name], [website], [Google Business link]
4. [Name], [website], [Google Business link]
5. [Name], [website], [Google Business link]

This is what I offer and what I charge:
[paste your price list, or describe your services and prices]

When I ask about them, compare against what I offer. Say where each
thing came from: the page, the listing or the review. If a price or a
detail isn't public, write "not public". Don't guess.

Claude reads public pages. If it says it can't open one, paste the text of the page in and carry on.

Then the monthly question. Plain language, five things, the same every month.

Look at all five competitors again. For each one, tell me:

1. What they offer that I don't.
2. What they charge, where it's public. Write "not public" for the rest.
3. What changed on their website and their Google Business listing
   since last month: services, prices, hours, photos, a new offer.
   Compare against last month's answer in this Project.
4. What their recent reviews praise, and what they complain about.
5. What they've posted in the last month, and roughly how often.

One short block per competitor. Then one last block: the three things
worth my attention this month, and why.

What comes back is five short blocks, one per business. Where a price is on their site, you get the price and where it saw it. Where it isn't, it says “not public” instead of guessing. Where the reviews keep saying the same thing, it tells you what and how often. A page or two, not a report. Read it with a coffee.

One limit: Instagram sits behind a login, so for what they post you mostly get their website and their Google Business updates. If their Instagram matters to you, give it five minutes yourself.

When something looks too good or too bad to be true, ask for the source.

Show me where you saw that. Quote the page or the review, with the link.

Save each month's answer into the Project as a file. That's how “since last month” works: next month it compares against what it wrote this month.

The answer is information. This step turns it into a decision. Three columns, filled in from the answer, on paper or in a Notion table, whichever you'll open again next month.

What they do better

Online booking where you take calls. Sunday hours. A price on the site. Whatever the answer says they have and you don't.

What they charge

Only where it's public. Above you, below you or about the same, and for what exactly.

What customers complain about

From their reviews. Waiting, no-shows, nobody answering the phone. Every complaint about them is a line you can put on your own site, if it's true of you.

Then one change. Say you run a clinic and two of the five list their prices and you don't: the change is a price line on your site. Say three of them get the same complaint about nobody answering the phone: the change is a line on your booking page that says you reply within the hour, and then doing it. Say one of them sells a package you don't: decide whether you want one.

One change a month, actually made, beats a list of ten.

Run the monthly question yourself in month one and month two. Trim the prompt where the answer rambles; add a line where it missed something. By the second time you know what a good answer looks like, and that's what a routine needs from you.

Then save the steps as a routine and schedule it: first Monday of the month, delivered to your inbox. A routine is the saved procedure, what happens. A schedule is the trigger, when. Together they're level four of the map, and from then on the check happens whether you remember it or not. Your only job is step three.

If you use Claude Code, the same monthly check can run overnight on your own machine and land in Gmail as one email.