The Essential Entrepreneur, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 14What business am I in?

Many entrepreneurs fall into the trap of trying to be ‘all things to all people’. They jump at every opportunity presented to them and in the process diminish their resources to the point where they don't do anything well, run out of cash and fail.

By nature, entrepreneurs see opportunities along the way that may be complementary, but not core, to their business. These ‘opportunities’ must be screened very carefully.

Staying focused

The temptation with a business, particularly after raising capital, is to try and do more. More is good if you're staying focused and true to your product and vision and adding value to your business, but if more means stretching yourself or your resources too thinly and doing things that don't add value to your core business, then you're losing focus and wasting valuable resources.

You might argue that you're developing an aligned market and that at some point in the future this will add value, but I implore you to always ask yourself, ‘What business am I in, and would this add value to the business or put it at risk?’

Again, the key risk here is running out of money by not staying focused on the vision and mission of the business and trying to do too many things that aren't core to your success. As I say a few times in this book, but probably still not often enough: if you run out of money, it's game over!

A while back, one company came to me with a business model to build satellites. There are many people who ...