Your To-Do List Is Costing You Money

In the past we have talked a lot about how to grow your business and scale without sacrificing your life and personal relationships. And today, I wanted to introduce you to the concept of “fewer and better” and how this very simple concept has allowed my own business (along with thousands of others) to grow faster than we ever thought possible.

Aligning Yourself Around Your Fewer and Better

Many business owners try to take on too much at one time, which can really slow down growth and sales. In order to scale quickly, you must have a laser like focus on the things that will help you reach the next level. You, your attention, your company’s resources of time and money should always be focused on those fewer things that make a bigger difference. We call this the fewer and better.

How To Spot Your Fewer and Better

By choosing those fewer things that make the biggest difference, effectively what you’re saying is as a company there are A and B focuses in different areas of the company and there are C and D focuses in other areas of the company. So you would make a commitment as a company to focus your best attention, your best time, your best people, your best resources and your best money on those most important A or B things inside the company.

Here’s a few examples of how other businesses have used their fewer and better:

We work with a medical group where the recruitment of new medical providers is huge for them. That’s one of their fewer and better things. For a manufacturing company it’s the design of new and better proprietary parts, not the commoditized stuff that they do but their branded line of proprietary parts that they make, the design of new ones, coming up with new ones faster to meet market demand.

An Exercise in Fewer and Better

One of the best ways to get used to this way of thinking is to dive right in and give it a try. Over the next 30 days I want to encourage you to pause and spend some time thinking about the fewer and better within your own company. What are the fewer better things for your business as a whole to focus in on? What are the things that really create the most value for you or the places where success or failure turns on that hinge? Those hinges are what your fewer and better are.

Get Your Team On Board

You are going to realize early on that some departments are going to end up on the fewer and better list more often than others, and I want to encourage you to introduce this concept to your executive team so that they can utilize these concepts as well.

For instance, in your next marketing meeting you can ask: “What do you guys think are our fewer better here in marketing? Those few things that create the most value, those few things that as the hinges that success or failure turn in the area of marketing in our company?”