Get Focused: Be A Hedgehog, Not A Fox

Mike and me at the Workshop 

Hi Folks,

I’m back with more ideas from Mike Filsaime’s 2007 Figure Business Workshop last weekend.

Probably the most important thing you can do for your initial business build-up that will also help with long-term success is to narrow your focus substantially. Mike discussed Jim Collins’ description of the Hedgehog Concept in Good to Great. To be great, you must be more like a hedgehog – who has a clear single-minded focus on one big thing — rather than a fox that pursues many ends at the same time, and is often scattered and diffused, never integrating his thinking into one organized concept or unifying vision.

To start working on your hedgehog concept, think about and discover these three things about yourself:
• What can you be best at? (Not just what you do well, but what do you have the potential to be better than anyone else at?)
• What is your passion? (What gets you up and raring to go every day? What would you spend time on even if you never got paid?)
• What drives your economic engine? (What would generate the greatest cash flow and profits for you? If you were to increase profit per X, what would the X be to give you the most robust economic return?)

For more on this, visit: http://www.jimcollins.com/lab/hedgehog.   

Focus your attention on the intersection of your responses and make that what you build your business around. Use this to create a vision of your future and develop a mission statement that describes how you will achieve that mission. Start thinking about this now, but don’t necessarily expect your answers to come immediately. For some people it may take six months, a year, or longer. But the sooner you narrow your focus, the sooner you will begin to improve your results.

It’s very easy – especially when you’re just getting started – to get distracted. What with all the e-mails, free downloads, teleconferences, all sorts of offers to checkout, as well as the stuff that you actually need to learn, you could spend whole days doing nothing else – and getting very little done. It’s essential to set some goals and build momentum. What will you get done in the next 30 days and what will you do each day and each week to move you closer to your 30-day goal?

I’m sure you’ve heard before how all the best ideas are useless unless they’re put into action. Pick one thing you will do and follow-through to do it – the faster the better. Every day, work on this first – before doing the maintenance chores you need to get done.

Don’t let the fear of making mistakes stop you. Mistakes can be the best teachers. Just keep doing it until you get it right. (And when it’s good enough for now, move on to the next thing. After you’ve figured out what works and what works well for your business, do it again with the idea of improving what you did the first time around.)

Next time out, I’ll discuss why using simple metrics is so important and show you some you can use to track your results.

And in a few days, I’ll give you a list of recommended reading that came out of the Workshop. Meanwhile, please give me your feedback.

‘Til the next time,

Eli

Eli Sadownick
esadownick@y2marketing.com

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