A lot of people talk about the importance of focus in business and life. I’ve recently reached a new level of focus and can feel it transforming my business. I got this from the book Great CEOs are Lazy https://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-Ceos-Are-Lazy-Exceptional-ebook/dp/B01DBAUZT6
All of these lessons apply to a person and not just a CEO. Can replace CEO with a leaders job, or just “your job” / leader of yourself.
This is how I would describe:
A CEOs job is to take the company from A to B – to understand where A is, to paint the picture of where B is, to chart the course, and to navigate the journey.
In order to navigate the journey it is necessary to design and build a plan, a vehicle or a machine or system on how to get from A to B.
Just like a physical machine like a car or bike, there are an infinite number of things and problems that can be improved and solved, but there is usually one or two that are most important for navigating the journey.
As a random example – if a company is like a bike or car it might usually be upgrading the engine – getting an electric motor for a bike. But with a more powerful engine, we need to upgrade other parts of the car or bike so its more safe. Brakes upgrades are probably not necessary when it can go 10-20% faster, but when it can go 100-200% faster then its much more important. So focusing on upgrading the engine might be more important to do first. After that the brakes are the next consideration.
The same is true for building a company. Sales might be the most important factor first, then it will be delivery of the service as the next limitation.
But when you dive into sales, there are multiple parts of sales – awareness, leads, meetings, proposals. If there are hundreds of leads, but only a few meetings, then working on converting those to meetings would be the most important part of sales to focus on, and therefore the most important thing in the whole company to focus on.
So focus is on identifying what is the most important thing to be working on, and then focusing all energies on that. Then moving onto what is then the most important thing to focus on.
It’s a mistake to focus on every area at the same time because we have limited resources, and focusing on the most important is a way to maximise your output by focusing on unleashing the power of the system. If you try working on every area at the same time, such as getting more leads, upgrading the service, and improving the quality of meetings, the improvements that you can make are only likely to be incremental and not as likely to have as big of an impact compared to if you just focused on the most important thing with all your energies and solve that. That’s why an important part of focus is saying no – I know there are other problems but those aren’t as important as fixing this.
