Focus Is The Key To A Successful Business

In my experience with building businesses, I know that within days, literally, of starting a business that business starts to lose focus. I’ve learned through all the years of creating more than 35 companies and working in 35 countries that focus is the only challenge in business. nnWhat you focus on is an “incision from your decision.” It subtracts you from everything else. nnWhen you’re in focus, you’re like a 100 percent effective laser beam. nnWhen you’re out of focus and disparate, you’re ambient and useless.nnFocus is about doing one thing supremely well!nWhen I was 16 years old, Ed Sullivan brought the Beatles out, and I wanted to be a Beatle too. I decided to form a band. I called our group “The Messengers” in my mind. I called Gary Youngberg, and he immediately became our lead guitarist. I learned bass guitar right away. We went out and got a great drummer. We got all the people we needed. We focused the group. In two weeks we were up and running. nnThe next focus was on getting places to play. We went from success to success, and all of us had enough money to go to college. Now some of us blew it a little before then, because we bought cars, a motorcycle, and nice clothes. But, we were focused. nn“We are the band, we are the cool guys, we are it.”nnWe are talking about focus in business. There is busy-ness (not useful), and then there is business. nnWhat I see in so many organizations is people on cell phones going to meetings, running here, running there, and putting in long hours. They’re busy. They are generating lots of activity, but they don’t focus on one thing or two things or three things that are core to achieving the goals of their companies. nnThe interesting thing is that if you go out and survey employees in various companies, less than 40 percent of the employees in a business know what is truly important to be done inside that organization.nnThe same thing applies to the Company itself. Focus is the key to victory.nnIn the airline business, for example, all the airlines try to compete in the same way. Whatever industry you are in, there will be three or four or five things that are the basis of competition in an industry, but if you can get focused on one thing that nobody else is doing, you can become number one literally overnight.n