Focus for business success.

One of the secrets of successful business people is their ability to focus.

Our lives, both business and personal are full of distractions and from the moment you sit down at your desk in the morning there is more going on than you can possibly handle.

During a typical day you probably face a myriad of minor distractions such as email, the phone and walk ins and in addition to these you have a bigger set of distractions. Things that are unrelated to your core activity that draw your attention away, an example of one of these is opportunity.

Opportunities can be lethal for someone trying to build a business. Here you are going about your day to day work and someone comes along and says “I want to get involved”, or “would you like to merge” or “let’s start a new business”.

The number of opportunities you should explore further or pay any attention to at all is a very small % of the actual opportunities that present themselves. By far most of them will be a complete waste of your time. Spotting the good ones is a difficult but important skill to learn.

At least once a month a client of mine approaches me and says I am starting another business and I want to form a limited company. I try to advise against this, if possible, but many push on.

In my ten years of working as a Chartered Accountant in Maidstone, Kent, I can only think of one person who has successfully started a second business, see my recent post, Can you have a successful second business, for the most part a second business is just another distraction.

Most first businesses need a lot of attention and there is more than enough to be getting on with building those. So my advice is to focus on your main business make that your sole activity. Try to aim to make your business then best it can be and make as much money as you can from it.

To fully maximise this business start with a vision of what you want the business to become in five years’ time and work backwards outlining exactly how you are going to achieve this. Once you have done this work the plan and make it happen.