Graham McGregor: The power of focus

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Opinion

Marketing consultant Graham McGregor on why focusing on one thing could be helpful in your business.

I had the pleasure recently of interviewing Christine Clifford recently for my 'Unfair Business Advantage Report.' Christine is a hugely popular speaker on sales and marketing and is the also the co-author of one of my favourite little books on business and success called "You-Inc the fine art of selling yourself".

In our interview Christine shared her most important marketing secret that had bought her and her clients the most profitability. Instead of being a "Jack of All Trades", Christine said we should focus on becoming a "Master of One."

It's very easy for corporations and individuals to want to be all things to all people.

But with the limited amount of resources that we all have in business: our time, our money and our people, we need to focus. So by choosing one area of expertise and putting all of our resources into that area, you can truly watch your business flourish.

Christine shared a great example of the power of focus in our interview.

Christine's brother is a carpenter in Montana in the United States. Several years ago when the economy was booming, he was busy working on multimillion dollar houses. When the housing market in the United States came to a screeching halt, so did his building work. The builders that had been contracting him to come in and work on these homes stopped calling.

So Christine went to visit her brother and they drove around his community looking at these houses that he had helped to work on. Christine quickly realised that her brother was lovingly pointing out the woodwork that he had done on these homes: shutters, decks, stair rails etc. Then he was talking about how on the inside of each home, his speciality was hardwood floors and internal pieces of fine woodwork.

So she said to him, "You know, Greg, what you really are, is you are a master of fine woodwork. You've been positioning yourself out there as a carpenter, and they are a dime a dozen. So let's go home and create a simple one page flyer for you that just says, 'Greg, Master of fine woodwork' and see what happens.'

Well, you can guess what happened. People started calling up her brother to come and do the woodwork in their home. And since he is also a carpenter they would ask him, "By the way, now that you are in my house, I've got these doors that are broken, and the deck needs to be fixed. Can you help?" Of course he was able to do all that work, but he was putting his resources- his time, his money, and his people-into getting the message out there that he was a 'master of fine woodwork.'

What happened to Christine's brother is his business became so successful; he had to hire people to work for him!

That's a great example of how if you spread yourself too thin and try and help everyone, not only do you have a lot of competition, but no one looks at you as an expert in your field.

In our interview Christine went into a lot of detail about how to focus and become a master of one thing in your business.

Action Exercise:
What one thing could you focus on becoming very good at in your own business?

"Most people have no idea of the giant capacity we can immediately command when we focus all of our resources on mastering a single area of our lives."

Anthony Robbins

Graham McGregor is a marketing consultant and the creator of the 396 page 'Unfair Business Advantage Report.' www.theunfairbusinessadvantage.com (This is free and has now been read by business owners from 11 countries.) You can email Graham on graham@twomac.co.nz