In Making Money Is Not Illegal, Immoral or Fattening, my coauthor Art Freedman describes how a group of owners of Ace Hardware stores changed from viewing themselves as competing for customers to viewing themselves as partners. Here's a reminder of that story, which you can read in full starting on page 5 of the book:
"There are actually 58 of us, and we work very, very closely together. I'll tell you what brought us together, and I'll tell you when it brought us together. In the 1990's, Home Depot was hammering away at us. They were absolutely killing us, and what brings independent hardware dealers together? Fear. We were scared to death of what was going on. The independents were disappearing, the True Values were disappearing, we had some of our own stores disappearing, and we didn't know what was going to happen.
"So we came together. It was a Friday afternoon. There were eleven of us in that room. We sat around the table, and by the way, most of those eleven people who sat together at that table are still very close, very good friends, even these many years later. We sat together and looked at each other and said, 'What are we going to do?' Then we started marketing together, we started doing all of our advertising together, we started trading information together, and it really was clearly us against them. This is the day we went from being competitors to being partners.
"We've done better than many others. Ace Hardware Corporation has been very good at wholesale and good at helping their retailers at retail, but Ace retailers had been falling off the earth every single day. Our coming together in the Sacramento area worked tremendously for us, and maybe it could work tremendously for you."
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