Is there somebody out there who does the same thing you do (whether that’s your position at work, running your own business, whatever) better than you do?

Or faster than you do? Or smarter than you?

Unfortunately for almost all of us, the answer is yes.

Now I’m not trying to make you feel bad or make you feel like your work is of lesser value than someone else’s.

Instead, I’m suggesting that you can take someone else’s success and efficiency, and with a minimal investment of time and energy, get their success working for you.

That’s really the power of working collaboratively: you get to leverage the success of others to make you more successful.

Identifying the leaders in related businesses.

Let’s say you own a small company that manufactures screws. There are probably hundreds, if not thousands of other companies out there that make screws. And while you may be separated from those other companies by geography, they are still your direct competitors, so sharing your business knowledge with them is not such a great idea.

Instead, take a look around your community. Talk to people. Find out who in your community also has a manufacturing process and start talking to them. The key to this is keeping things informal.

And don’t forget, you’ll often gain the most from people by offering something they want before asking for something you want — offer them a tour of your factory, shop or business to help them to first better understand what you do.

When you’ve put some thought into this, make a list of the names of these businesses. Writing this down is an important step in getting this out of your head and into something concrete and actionable.

Find out what business groups already exist in your community — and don’t forget the web.

There’s a very good chance that a small business group already exists in your community to facilitate sharing knowledge between small business owners. Find out what groups already exist, and pick one to join.

Make up your mind to bring something of tangible value to this group, whether it’s an idea or process that has worked really well for you, or just your next great idea.

Create a new list from this of what you have to offer other businesses as far as knowledge and experience goes. This is where you get to write down all the things that you’re very good at.

If a small business group doesn’t already exists, think about starting one. Or join one of the many communities out there on the web. Get started by talking to others.

Benchmarking: it’s not as scary as it sounds.

The corporate world is a big proponent of benchmarking (here’s Wikipedia’s definition of benchmarking in case you’re not familiar with the term). Benchmarking basically happens in four steps:

1. Figure out where your business could improve. Maybe your salespeople are not performing as well as you’d hoped they would? Your inventory is not being tracked very well? You have a rocky relationship with a big customer and don’t know how to mend it?

2. Take the list of leading businesses in your community that you developed before and determine who is really good at what you’re not. Also make sure to be very honest with yourself at this stage — don’t overestimate your own strengths.

3. Now take your list of strengths that you identified, and start pairing up your potential strength offerings and what you would like to get from other businesses.

4. Approach those people in other businesses and get that knowledge and those ideas flowing between you. The real key here is building a solid relationship with a few people so that next time you have a complex problem to solve, you’re not completely on your own. The goal here is to establish a forum where you can exchange ideas.