Finding Authentic Focus (as a Startup)
It’s hard to argue against the wisdom of company “focus,” doing one thing well rather than lots of things just okay. There are also plenty of tools to help leaders decide what to focus on: enter McKinsey’s 7Ss, Porter’s Five Forces, BCG’s 2x2, etcetera.
But when you’re in the crucible of a startup crisis, how do you actually execute focus or make it real, if your whole business may need to be rethunk? When is enough information enough to decide to pivot? Should you do an all-or-nothing pivot, or hedge? Do you make the shift sudden or gradual? And what, really, does focus mean — is it building a product that solves one thing? Or a single product that solves multiple things? Or multiple products under a related business line? Or might a business with several products or business lines still be considered “focused” if there’s a clear vision and hypothesis on how they fit together?
Covid really made a mess of our 2020 plan to focus (and I know we’re not alone, with so many millions tragically impacted). In February 2020 we launched a new B2B software platform strategy that was many months in the making. We promptly acquired a couple dozen clients… and then in early March, COVID hit India and Kenya, hiring froze, and discretionary software spending went poof. We faced a fork in the road: do we put our heads down and barrel ahead with the same strategy? Do we pursue a total pivot of some kind? Or something in between?
One of our investors mounted a vocal push for us to “Focus!” Okay… but on what? We had no shortage of ideas, and no shortage of frameworks or rubrics we could pass them through — but we struggled to define the best way to actually do a pivot. Or pivots. Or a less extreme 30 degree “evolution.” This investor would likely have been pleased if we had walked into a Board meeting in May or June and arbitrarily but confidently declared any of our random ideas to be The Future. It would have made for a nice Powerpoint, with a clean story digestible in <10 slides and with the air of decisiveness and vision.
But one of our core values is “Act with Intention,” and that kind of coin flip didn’t feel like our kind of focus. I instead adopted the following mantra: “Find authentic focus grounded in evidence, conviction, and passion.” Authentic as opposed to artificial, with real data on our side, and with a resounding heartbeat and mission magnetism that feels worthy of our team and company. And I kept that phrase bolded at the top of my to-do list for the next 8 months.
We took a breath and looked for deliberate, intentional ways to navigate through the uncertainty. We were particularly drawn to Jim Collins’ advice to “fire bullets, then cannonballs.” His research found that the most successful companies navigating crisis and industry disruption don’t careen wildly between all-or-nothing bets. Instead, they calibrate their innovation agenda with low-cost, low-energy, low-distraction experiments (the “bullets”) before loading all the company gunpowder behind a resource-intensive cannonball.
We embarked on a process of road-testing three new business ideas. Even though there were overlaps, we kept lines clear and tapped different leaders to take charge and see what they could make of the concepts. This included desktop research to dimension the opportunity (market size, competitive dynamics, etc.) as well as live offers and pilots to test customer appetite and identify subterranean issues. We tried to minimize the distraction for the overall company, keeping the team focused on our “core” and providing what minimum updates felt necessary to respect our culture of transparency. Ultimately, we merged two new ideas into one, we incorporated one idea as a natural evolution of another, and an entirely new idea emerged which we’ve just launched in stealth mode — stay tuned.
Have we figured it out? Of course not — we still have a lot going on, making for a somewhat crowded elevator pitch. But we are now situated with a reframed core business line (which we’re pumped to work on), and with a couple of experiments we’ll continue iterating to see if they can turn into something big. And ultimately, whether a rationalization or not, all of our work still fits squarely under the umbrella of our mission to unlock professional potential and build amazing teams.
It still leaves me wondering, though, about the nature of focus. When evolving your business, when is it right to hedge your bets (e.g., keep the new and old businesses running at the same time) vs. “burn the boats,” going all in on the new opportunity? Of course there are times when doing too much weakens everything (2+2=1). But there are also surely times when business lines can peacefully co-exist (2+2=4) or even synergize (2+2=6), or when running businesses in parallel can mitigate risks in dynamic marketplaces. Any ideas out there?
Ultimately, this may just be the nature of startup leadership: making these sorts of tough calls and living with the consequences.