Business Truth No.6 - Focus On The Few, Not The Many.

In my interview with Andrew Deighton, he talked about what he’d do differently if he was able to start his business again.

He explained that he would have narrowed his services down to one or two core offerings and then really honed in on them, rather than trying to offer all things to all people.

In effect, he would have focused on less, to achieve more...

This is the fifth of my "business truths" that I've discovered after having the amazing opportunity to interview 10 more inspirational business owners, CEOs and entrepreneurs.

To listen to the full episode, and many jam-packed business interviews, search for "The Truth About Business" in all good podcasting apps.

Or you can see them all at my blog at www.benjaminbrain.co.uk.

So, let's dive in to truth No.6....

Business Truth No.6 – Focus On The Few Not The Many

Focus on less, to achieve more?

This sounds counter-intuitive but when you take a deeper look at any truly high-performance person, you’ll see it’s an important part of how they operate.

This is especially hard to commit to when you first start out and it takes some courage when there will be a number of outside forces working hard to fool you into expanding what you do.

You’re excited, passionate, ready to take on the world and the seemingly obvious choice is to pursue various different income streams, offer varying levels of service and attack multiple marketing channels to grow the business as quickly as people.

But what actually happens is your efforts are diluted and your results become sub-par at best.

Doing more, gets less done.

And multi-tasking is overrated.

In fact, really, there’s no such thing – it’s an illusion.

You have a finite amount of focus and if you’re working on more than one thing, you’re not giving 100% of your focus to either.

How you get things done, and done well, is by concentrating all or your focus on one task, project, service or product line until you’ve nailed it and then moving on to the next.

Multitasking, which is now a staple attribute proudly displayed on 99% of CVs, was never meant to describe humans.

It first appeared in print in 1965 and was used to describe the capabilities of computers that were able to perform one task whilst another was holding in the background.

Unfortunately, it’s that good old FOMO, fear of missing out, that forces us to add “more” when we don’t immediately get the results we’re looking for – instead of working on what you’ve already got to refine it and make it better.

For example, if you’re planning on usual social media, don’t go setting up accounts on every single platform.

Pick one that’s best suited to your target audience, learn how to get really good at it and master it.

I can speak from experience on this.

To begin with I set up accounts on Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Facebook and LinkedIn.

I felt it was what I needed to do.

Surely you’ve just got to be on every platform, right?

Wrong.

I invested so much time in trying to learn to use them all effectively, optimise my profiles, use the right hashtags, employ the right growth strategy that I was getting nothing else done and all of that time was resulting in about two more followers per week.

Looking back, I don’t know how I expected it to work – but all it took was a comment from somebody like “Oh you’re not on Twitter” – and then boom, I’d be on Twitter setting up a brand new shiny account.

Now I’ve scrapped the Twitter, I’ve scrapped Instagram and I’m focusing most of my efforts on LinkedIn which means I can spend far less time learning how to get exponential growth on the platform whilst having plenty of time to get the actual meaningful work done and it’s made a huge difference.

If your business isn’t producing the results that you’re looking for, don’t look for what more you can add – look at what you can do to make what you already have better – which may even mean taking away from your current suite of product or service offerings.

So, to summarise my sixth business truth, focus on the few and not the many, I’m going use a quote from a popular and successful Youtuber called Sunny Lenaduzzi who sums it up nicely with;

“You’ve got to niche down, to blow up”

I hope you enjoyed reading this article.

If you have any questions, suggestions or stories of your experiences with these concepts, I'd love to know.

Message me on LinkedIn or just get in touch!

Make it a great day and here's to your business success!

Benjamin :)

Host Of "The Truth About Business" Podcast

#business #podcast #leadership