Is Distraction the Biggest Risk Your Business Might be Facing?

Sometimes success isn't about what we are doing but what we have stopped doing.

I recently met a lady who was experiencing a major financial hiccup in her business, in fact her revenue had virtually halved in the past two years. This decline had been gradual, but the end result was her business was now in big trouble.

We sat and chatted about the things she had been doing over the past couple of years, trying to get a grip on what was going wrong. Sure, we could blame some of the impact on the economic conditions, but nowhere near a drop of fifty percent. This lady had built her business up to a very successful level over the previous five years and then she got a little bored and started to look for other opportunities. She started to expand, setting up some satellite offices and even two franchises in other cities

This expansion started about two years ago--you guessed it, the same time that her main office started to go downhill. Of course, it is easy to see that her focus was on the other new and exciting business opportunities, not on her core business and that is what caused the problem.

Once we had figured out the lay of the land and where she was right now, it became clear that we had to put some serious effort and energy into the main business and we had to do it fast. So I started to rattle off the list of things that I would do to get the cash register smoking such as increasing communication with existing clients, develop more targeted and inspirational promotional material, follow-up sales religiously, instigate a refer a friend campaign, get out in the community and tell the network what is happening in the business, do some media releases and so on.

As I worked through this list my client was shaking her head somewhat forlornly and I asked her why? She said she used to do all of the things I was suggesting back when she was first building her business, but she stopped doing them a while back, actually about two years back, because she got too busy focusing on her expansion.

Sadly this is a common story that I hear on a regular basis. Businesses often struggle financially not because of what they are doing, but because of what they are not doing. The business owner gets distracted by chasing other opportunities and their primary business is impacted adversely.

In this case the lady I met went from having a highly profitable, successful and easy to manage business, to having six troublesome, struggling businesses that had created a world of stress, financially and personally.

As we stop doing the things we should be doing, the flow on affect is not immediately clear. The impact is often gradual and it can sneak up on you, just as it did with my client. I know that it is hard to keep going, to keep putting energy into your business day in and day out, but it is easier to do a little every day as opposed to having to do a huge amount to save the business if it gets into grief.

My questions to you are "what have you stopped doing in your business and how much is this costing you?" Entrepreneurs chase opportunities because that is what we do. But the most important rule to always follow is never pursue an opportunity at the expense of your main business.