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By PASCAL FINETTE

The Heretic is a free dispatch delivering insights into what it takes to lead into & in the unknown. For entrepreneurs, corporate irritants and change makers. Raw, unfiltered and opinionated.

be radical.

Jul 8th, 2016 Share: Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn

Relentless Focus

As you grow your business you will be faced with lots of potential, exciting opportunities. New customer segments, new markets, new product variants. Surely one would say that this is a good thing. And of course it is.

Yet — it is also one of the main reasons why companies never reach their full potential and sometimes fail.

Typically when you start out, life is simple. You identified a problem and target market (and if you’re careful about truly understanding the problem, it will be a highly targeted solution). You start delivering your product and hopefully get to product/market fit quickly. Clean, clear and simple.

Then you grow. And you see all these new opportunities. Often they are in adjacent markets. Sometimes they are more of a one-off solution but financially lucrative. Maybe they require just a few tweaks to your offering — or a lot.

The challenge is to say “no”, staying focussed on what truly moves you forward and gets you closer to fulfill your vision. Every opportunity is a potential distraction. Sometimes it is worth following the opportunity as it is aligned with your long-term goals. Often it requires the hard and painful commitment of gracefully declining the offer.

It requires relentless focus to dent the universe.


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