Focusing on What Matters

If you wanted to start a movement tomorrow with the goal of reaching the entire world and gaining committed followers around the globe, how would you do it? What if I told you you’d only really have 3 years to work on it?

You might think you’d need to get famous, fast. You’d need a huge social media presence, you’d need to be speaking internationally, and talking to as many people as you could.

Whatever you may believe about the message of Jesus, Christianity is undoubtedly the most impactful and wide spread movement to ever exist, currently spanning the globe despite the fact that Jesus spent his ministry in one relatively confined area. So how did He do it?

Though He claimed to come to save the whole world, what we see from Jesus’s life is an intentional, deep focus on just 12 men. This created a deep faith among them, most of the 12 eventually being murdered for refusing to deny that Jesus was the Son of God He claimed to be. This deep faith inspired many others, and was the catalyst for a message that quickly spread across the known world, and still spreads today.

In order to go wide and far, Jesus went deep. This principle of deep focus is something I’ve seen play out broadly and consistently, and is something I continue to ponder when faced with various decisions.

Knuula

When Jamie and I started Knuula we had visions of becoming the de facto platform for every contract in the world. And while that dream persists, much of our initial learnings were to focus on smaller groups of users.

In starting out, Jamie and I talked about following the Amazon model. Amazon started out with the vision to become what it is today, a marketplace for everything. But it didn’t start with that.

It started with rare books. When it captured that market it moved to all books, then to books and CDs, and today they deliver my groceries and host the cloud that Knuula is built on.

We pretty quickly realized that Knuula needed one initial target market, and decided to focus on the accounting industry. As we got further into that and had more conversations with users, we realized the biggest pain in that industry was engagement letters, so we focused on that one specific contract for our one specific industry.

But we were still too broad. We were selling to any firm that would take a meeting, from Deloitte to the one person CPA firm in a small east Texas town. First we realized that in its current state, Knuula couldn’t serve the top ~25 firms, so we stopped taking those meetings.

Then we realized that any firm with less than ~20 employees likely wouldn’t see enough value from our solution to pay the prices we needed to charge, so we stopped taking those meetings.

Our target market became firms somewhere between the #50-#500 biggest firms in the country. Once we defined that, and focused all of our efforts on acquiring as many of those 450 firms as we could, we blew up. From every contract ever to one specific contract for 450 specific accounting firms.

But now, nearly every firm that uses Knuula raves about it. Most customers are willing to make referrals and give testimonials because they see tremendous value from what we provide, and we end up fighting way above our weight class, winning more often than losing.

There are tons of other use cases for Knuula, and we’ll eventually expand to serve them, but in order to do that, we learned that we first needed to be as focused as possible, and go as deep as possible.

Daily Deep Dive

I’ve been reflecting on this recently and am constantly amazed at the things that can be accomplished when priorities are clear and focus is high.

We can’t be friends with everyone. But if we focus on cultivating a small group of friends who know us deeply, we’ll end up with a few close, rewarding relationships.

An investor can’t invest in every company, but with a clear thesis and conviction around something to focus on, you can build a great portfolio.

A business cannot serve every customer type or industry segment or take advantage of every opportunity that comes across its desk. But a business that focuses on a specific customer in a specific industry will likely become an expert at solving that specific problem and be known as the best in their class.

A non-profit cannot serve every vulnerable person it comes into contact with. But an organization that decides on a mission statement and becomes okay with saying no to opportunities outside of that mission will thrive and more effectively accomplish its goals.

Humans cannot be the best employees, spouses, parents, friends, church members, and community members at the same time. Likely, each season of life calls for an intentional focus on just a couple of these while the others take a back seat.

In fact, I’d argue that often, life dictates that this happens. When we do not intentionally choose a focus area, I’ve noticed that one of two things seem to happen.

Either our focus is dictated by which wheel is the squeakiest, or we focus on everything and achieve very little. Either our attention gets devoted to the thing that would be most annoying to turn down, or we end up doing many things poorly. Both of which I’m very guilty of at various points of life, and neither of which consistently lead to positive results.

The hardest part of choosing is that it requires a lot of saying no. I think most people (myself included) are able to clearly identify what they want to focus on, but when pressed with the consequences of that decision, it becomes a lot harder to maintain that focus.

One of the reasons I believe saying no hard is because doing this requires an acknowledgement of our limitations. We have to first admit that we are not fully in control and do not have the power to do all the things we want to do. I’ve been learning that I can step back from more than I think I can without things going nearly as off the rails as I fear. Additionally, I’ve spent a lot of time recently discovering my unique identity. I try to ask myself the following questions often:

• What things am I uniquely equipped for and called to do?

• What are others more gifted at, and can I empower them to do it?

• Of the things that are uniquely mine to do, what’s the priority order, and is that order reflected in how I spend my time?

  
  

I still say yes to too many things and I still often believe the lie that I’m capable of fully controlling the world around me and therefore must say yes to any good thing I think should be done. But I’m growing at deciphering when, why, and how to say no, and even a little progress here has felt like a lot of freedom recently.