Focusing Your Business

One of the hardest exercises for business owners is to determine where they should focus and what they should abandon. Whether it’s determining their ideal target market, outsourcing tasks that don’t drive revenue or eliminating processes that take time and add no value, we all are guilty.

In Valeria Maltoni’s post “What Would You Give Up to Get Back?”, she got me thinking about what I’ve given up to get back some time. When she says:

For your brand, it’s not trying to be all things to all people. Instead, being more focused on the personality it already has and potentially aspire to the one it can achieve.

Business owners are sometimes afraid to focus for fear of leaving money on the table. But to try to be everything to everybody, you never achieve your true purpose, loving what you do and working with those who appreciate what your offer them.

We all make this mistake, usually in the early days of your business. The good news for me is that I tend to be pretty good at turning off the distractions so I can get the client work done (it pays the bills) before I work on my social media marketing plan. So although I’m not turning off Twitter or other social media tools, I do need to work on other areas that by streamlining or eliminating can add more hours to my day.

Here are some areas where I’ve eliminated the clutter and distractions so far this year:

• Eliminated formal contracts for an engagement letter. I recently converted my marketing services agreement to a client engagement letter. It covers the important aspects of my relationship with my clients, but it is much simpler.
• Focused my service offerings by developing value added packages. By offering value added packaged services, you make it easy for clients to select what they need and simplifies the engagement process. In addition, I’m transitioning my business to more of a coaching / mentoring service with selective consulting engagements giving me more control over my time.
• Reduced the amount of subcontracting through me. Sometimes you just have to subcontract out various efforts, but rather than invoice through my company, I’m trying to enable the subs to invoice the client directly. This will happen on a case by case basis depending on my working relationship with the other person. One of my differentiators is to not uplift other people’s rates for my clients, but this sometimes led to me invoicing a client where I didn’t make a dime.
• Unsubscribed from many email lists. Sorry folks, but my inbox has been reduce substantially. Offer an RSS feed option to your newsletter so that if I thought it was worthy of keeping, I could convert it over. My goal is to make email primarily a communication vehicle between me and clients. That way I can check email regularly, but avoid the distraction of reading “news”. I schedule some time throughout the day for that.
• Reduced in-person meetings with clients. Teleconferences work just fine for most of my client work. The value added service packages above are primarily delivered through teleconferences.

Share your suggestions about how you plan to recover a few more hours each week. The more the merrier because I need a few more hours available each week to work on my passion, get ready for the golf season and stay healthy and happy while doing so.