That one thing…

In the first part of my career as an entrepreneur, I made a very common mistake.

Full of energy and ideas about how I’d do things differently, I set out to build a company. Step by step, I got in my own way. I made things far too complicated, devising elaborate marketing campaigns, creating products and services with every feature I thought a client might want and adding steps to our delivery process that made it long-winded and unwieldy.

Over time, the business became so complicated that my team didn’t really understand what they were supposed to sell or how to communicate it. The market was just as confused. One person I’d known and worked with for ten years called me on a Friday afternoon to ask, “hey, do you still do that recruitment stuff?” That recruitment stuff was 90% of our business.

That call was the notice I needed. I sat down with my team and started stripping things away, taking each part of our offering down to bare essentials. Our guiding principle was to ask, what’s the one thing we think we can be the best in the world at, that people will love and that we can reliably deliver? We then engineered all of our efforts to discovering what that one thing was, and making it happen over and over and over again.

Clear is better than clever, and simple is better than smart. Business leaders, though, feel the need to “improve” and “enhance” things that don’t need to be fixed. Often removing things is the way to go, rather than adding them.

Most businesses are confused about why their customers buy from them, too. They have theories, but they’re usually untested and much of the time, well wide of the mark.

Once you’ve found the one thing that your customers care about, that you can be the best at and you can reliably deliver, building a business is really just a case of consistently executing - and this is another reason we run into trouble. We get bored. We feel we have to innovate and develop new initiatives, expending energy and resources on untested, unproven initiatives that distract from the core of why our business is great.

Finding the one thing requires curiosity and open-mindedness. Delivering it time and again demands patience, focus and discipline. In a world where you can open up a chat window and build a piece of software, add new features or spin up a landing page in minutes, it feels old-fashioned to resist the urge to diversify. Becoming really, truly great at something first, before expanding, is a much truer route to success, however - on a personal level, as well as for businesses.

So, as we rapidly head toward the halfway point of another year, ask yourself: what’s that one thing we’re exceptional at? Or what could it be, if there’s nothing already? How much time are you spending on it? How could you focus more on that one thing that makes all the difference? What would it mean if you did?

That one thing could change everything.

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