6 Ways To Massively Improve Core Business Focus
A lot of companies make doing business too complicated. They focus on everything and anything in the environment, including new things they see online and suggestions made by their peers.
However, if you really want to be good at business, you have to just get used to the idea that you’ll focus on one thing. Having a solitary goal to deliver better services to customers while outsourcing everything else is the best way to proceed.
In this guide, we’re going to look at how you can massively improve your ability to focus on your core operations. You’ll learn what you need to do and how to avoid mistakes that most businesses make.
Define Your One Thing
The first thing you’ll want to do is really consider what your business actually does. The best way to attack this problem is to consider the value that you offer.
A lot of businesses focus on processes, products, and services, but what customers really care about is what they get at the end of it. Therefore, you want to look at ways to position yourself to maximally provide this value while outsourcing everything else that you can. If you can’t outsource something because the value isn’t there from a third-party’s provider, that’s the only time when you’ll bring it in-house.
For example, think about your IT systems. Most companies will invest in in-house systems at high cost and then get IT professionals to manage all of their software and operating systems. But you can avoid a lot of this trouble with colocation. Once you outsource all of the physical infrastructure and maintenance tasks to a third party and run your business through the cloud, you’ll find that your expenses go down considerably and you are able to run leaner and more efficiently while also serving customers better.
Kill 90% Of Your Projects
Another thing you’ll want to do is kill off all of the projects related to your business that don’t move the needle at all.
A lot of companies like engaging in multiple new initiatives and product lines, adding features here, there, and everywhere. But if you look at the best businesses, they avoid this temptation. Instead, they stick to what they do best and never change anything. If they do change something, it’s usually only in response to changing consumer tastes or technological disruption. When absolutely necessary.
If you want to know whether something is strictly necessary for your business, ask yourself what would happen if you stopped doing it tomorrow. Would anything change? If the answer is that your company would carry on as normal, then you know the project is surplus to requirements. If this happens, then ditch it. Don’t stick with projects that drain your resources and take you away from your core operations.
Fire Your Worst Customers
Think about how much time you spend dealing with problematic customers. Usually, these are the people who always want to pay less and are constantly bargaining with you. They also complain more, point out mistakes, and generally try to extract value from you that they haven’t earned.
If you can get rid of these people and replace them with better customers, you will find that your business runs much more smoothly. Once you remove your worst customers (usually the bottom 25%), you can claim back up to 80% of your time. Most of your customers simply want to pay you to do the job. Only 20% of them are there to cause trouble. Removing these with clever marketing or premium pricing can be extremely beneficial long-term.
Implement Your Budget Focus
One of the best things you can do as a company if you want to focus more on your core operations is to budget with focus points. The idea here is to create budgets where the money goes towards the things that really matter and avoid those that don’t.
Obviously you still need to pay things like wages and rental costs, but discretionary spending should be highly targeted at the goals of specific departments in your organisation. For example, you can assign up to 100 points for each department based on proportionality of the effort that tasks take. When the points are gone, then you can stop allocating money to those specific activities as they may be yielding a low return on investment.
Ban All-Hands Meetings
If you can get into the habit of banning all-hands meetings, that can help as well. Not everybody needs a status update about every aspect of the company. Therefore, keep any major meetings down to once monthly or less, and then provide written updates where necessary to staff. When you avoid these general meetings, you can claw back between 10 and 20 hours per week per team. Or perhaps more. You hold focus meetings only involving key stakeholders, avoiding the temptation to exchange information more widely than is necessary.
Sometimes you can avoid the need to hold meetings entirely by using chat tools like Slack. These can provide updates and information to workers, allowing them to apply new data to their workflows without wasting up to an hour in a meeting.
Put 80% Of Your Team In One Physical Location
Finally, one of the best ways to improve your business’s core focus is to put almost all of your team in one single location. When you bring everyone together, you’re better able to own your one thing that makes you special. When people are constantly working together and discussing how to achieve your mission in real life, it keeps everyone in line and ensures that you don’t get the remote work sprawl that often kills focus.
As part of this, you want to avoid hiring generalists for core work. If you are focused, usually you should be outsourcing your non-essential activities. Only bring in specialists when you need something essential done and nobody else can do it. This means that you will need to hire weird or obsessive people who just want to fix things.