Focusing your enterprise – saying ‘no’ – selecting priorities for development as new opportunities arise

Being creative gives rise to lots of ideas about how to develop an enterprise, but in a sense this is a problem too, because we end up with more ideas than resources to actually implement them. So how do we select priorities as opportunities arise? We need to make astute choices: creative choices and business choices.

In the early stages of business, a lack of focus is often driven by a need for cash, leading to ‘doing everything and anything - for anybody’. Later, growing enterprises are tempted to diversify into new markets with new products. At every stage there is the temptation to take on too many projects without doing any of them as well as possible.

As well as causing stresses and strains within the organisation, an enterprise that spreads itself too thinly is in danger of appearing as a ‘jack of all trades’ and consequently being perceived as ‘master of none’. The intention is to offer more services/products to get more business, but what the customer sees is a generalist for everyone, when what they want is a specialist for their own needs. Looking at customer perception of your market position, Seth Godin says “If you can’t state your position in eight words or less, you don’t have a position.”

The strategic way to make choices is to use your Unique Business Formula as a compass, since this is made up of two essential components: your competitive advantage and careful selection of customers. In other words, the guiding principles should be (a) let’s do only what we can excel at in relation to competitors and (b) let’s develop those things for which there is a suitable market.

One of the ‘Ten things Google has found to be true’ is “it’s best to do one thing really, really well”. And actor Bill Cosby said “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is to try to please everyone”. Many successful creative entrepreneurs would agree.

Strategic focus is about deciding, positively, what not to do. Saying “No” to many options is essential if we are to say “Yes” to the things that will help us achieve our own particular version of success.

This ruthless prioritisation applies not only to business strategy but also at the personal level in terms of time management. The answer to the problem of having too long a ‘to-do’ list is to draw up a ‘not-to-do’ list. As writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said: “We always have time enough, if we will but use it aright”. More recently, poet and business coach Mark McGuinness has written an excellent free eBook called ‘Time Management for Creative People’.

Even the biggest corporations have to make strategic choices and find a way of selecting the most appropriate projects from a plethora of possibilities. The General Electric Company devised what became known as the GE Business Screen to identify the best opportunities for the corporation to pursue in order to achieve its goal of profit maximisation. For creative entrepreneurs, the Feasibility Filter (p.90) helps to identify the best options in terms of competitive creativity and market suitability.

Ansoff’s Matrix is a useful tool to help make strategic business choices, including whether to develop new products for existing customers or find new customers for existing products. Market penetration and diversification are also options.

In conclusion, we each need to develop our own rules for how to select the best options for development, taking into account our goals, passion, values, competitors, customers and financial objectives.

Being able to say “No” is vital if we are to make the right creative and business choices.

Copyright © David Parrish 2009. www.davidparrish.com