Make More Money with a Stronger Focus

Last week I met with an attorney who has reduced her areas of practice over the past 20 years to Elder Care issues.

She has done what I mentioned recently in my article, 17 Ways To Increase Your Business Profitability, item number 4 was: Reduce the Number of Products and/or Services you sell.

Now you may think that this contradicts numbers 2 and 3 which suggested increasing the products or services you sell.

Not really.  It all depends on where you are now.  If you are a new business and you aren’t sure exactly what direction your business should go in, you may find yourself taking a little of this and a little of that, because they offering you money and you can do the work. 

But as time progresses you will discover that you don’t want to be spread so thin.  You may find that there are somethings that you don’t want to do anymore and so you can eliminate those.

By doing this, you become less of a generalist and more of a specialist.  By devoting your business to your chosen specialty, you also develop expertise and as others learn this about you, you become the authority.

How does this increase the profitability of your business? Two ways:

1. You are now able to charge a premium for your product/service because you are the sought after expert and authority.
2. You have stopped selling/doing stuff that are less profitable and are able to devote your time and space to other things, like #1, or perhaps creating more balance in your life between work and non-work.

Interestingly, you get to decide what to keep and what to drop.  For me, I decided to focus my time and efforts on helping businesses make smart marketing and advertising decisions using radio and technology.  I’ll tell you more about that in the future.  I also decided I did not want to sell television advertising, run social media campaigns, or sell print ads, all of which I have either done, or someone wanted me to do.

Do you need to sharpen the focus for your business?