Kelford Labs Daily: The more we do the less we help
“Strategy is about focus.”
“At the core, strategy is about focus, and most complex organizations don’t focus their resources. Instead, they pursue multiple goals at once, not concentrating enough resources to achieve a breakthrough in any of them.”
— Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy
“I don’t want to focus, it’s too constraining.”
“We can’t focus, we do so many things.”
“We won’t focus, we want to appeal to everyone.”
I hear this sort of thing a lot. A lot.
Perhaps you’ve felt this way before (or maybe even said something similar).
But here’s the thing: Let’s flip those statements around and walk in our prospect’s shoes for a moment.
When we say, “I don’t want to focus, it’s too constraining,” they say, “I don’t want to work with them, their offering is too confusing.”
When we say, “We can’t focus, we do so many things,” they say, “We can’t work with them, they do too many things and can’t be good at them all.”
When we say, “We won’t focus, we want to appeal to everyone,” they say, “We won’t work with them, they’re not for us.”
We think that if we don’t focus, if we stay broad, we’ll appeal to more people.
But the exact opposite is true—otherwise buffet restaurants would be more popular. The more things we try to do, the more people we try to appeal to, the more we diminish and dilute our actual value.
We confuse, we complicate, and we spread ourselves and our marketing pressure too thin. We can’t achieve breakthroughs anywhere.
Instead, we end up having to lower our prices, or raise our sales costs through aggressive advertising, in a race to the bottom of our category.
But strategy is about focus.
Focus doesn’t remove opportunity, it creates it. Broadness doesn’t create opportunity, it dilutes it.
So, figure out what you do best, what your best prospects want most, and what you love doing most.
And focus.
