I recently met with a couple of entrepreneurs over lunch and a mutual acquaintance of all ours was brought up. Unfortunately, at least for myself and one of the others at our lunch, this mutual acquaintance (whom we’ll call “Bob”) owed us some money from past services we provided over a year ago.
Now Bob has, at least it did have, his own business. Well, that’s not quite true. He had several businesses and services. Most of them had nothing to do with the other, ranging from financial services to entertainment (yes, you read that right). And throughout Bob’s day, he’d get into character, dressing and appropriately doing his hair depending upon whether he was in his financial or entertainment or whatever else mode he was in. The unusual part of this was that he wasn’t necessarily bad at any one of his services, just not necessarily great.
In a meeting with Bob one day, I remember one a statement he made: “I have to earn 280.00 each day, that’s 8300.00 a month, 100K a year.” I appreciate that he had his goals, but how he went about earning that 100K a year seemed, to me, a little discombobulated. He was so diversified, so all over the place, he didn’t really seem focused on one thing and, therefor, it probably effected how well he kept his clientele loyal to him. In fact, that was one of the issues a client of his had mentioned to me. Predictably, there were several more issues, but you get the point.
Keeping things simple is one of the lessons I learned early on when I started my business. I tried, very briefly, to offer two marketing services to my clients – social media and as an outside marketer for my clients. That lasted a couple months before I realized I was taking away from my strength, that being in social media. Once I stopped offering outside marketing, my social media side of the business (now the ONLY side) took off. All my efforts and all my time went to that and that only. I became very highly specialized, more efficient and more effective for my clients.
So maybe take a look at your business. What is it that you do best and are you actually doing that? Or, are you like Bob, who wanted a piece of every pie out there? Unfortunately for Bob, being so stretched out had left him only crumbs by the time it was his turn for that slice.