One of the advantages of being a small company is that you can rapidly change the company's direction. Well, this is also a disadvantage. Companies that succeeded are ones that had a very specific direction and were very focused on that one goal. One of our advisors told me: "you need to be able to define your company" - I believe this is a very valid point.
Sounds easy - right? Well, It's not. There are so many distractions along the way. Potential customers telling you that your product is not good for them and you should do something else, advisors that try to push you in a direction that they want to pursue, existing customers who aren't representing the largest market opportunity but constantly ask you to meet their needs, and more and more.
The key for keeping your company focused is doing less things despite of the distractions. In order to do that, you need to be very clear about what you do, but more importantly what you don't do. One way of doing less is limiting the amount of new initiatives. Don't get me wrong, it's important to explore the market every now and than and there might always be opportunities for you to improve the company. However, it's important to understand that exploration has a price and needs to be managed to make sure you are exploring only direction that has high potential of significantly improving your business.
Another way of doing less, is cutting down activities. There are countless publications about the Pareto Principle (or the 80%-20% rule) and I believe it also applies to management attention - 20% of the activities take 80% of the attention. If you find these 20%, you will have a lot more mental resources to drive your company to success. Examples of such "attention takers" might be: customers, employees, advisors, products, markets and territories.
Making the necessary cuts or applying enough control to not pursue new directions is not easy and usually not vary popular. However, the easy decisions and the right ones are rarely the same ones.
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