I remember the day I brought my first business plan to a successful friend I knew. I was sure he was going to tell me how brilliant and useful my business plan was. So much so, he’d probably even offer to invest in it. I gave him my pitch. He looked it over and asked me a few questions. I was confident his sobering tone must have part of his initial negotiating tactics to get a piece of the pie. Finally, he said what if I just focused on providing just one core service and do it better than anyone else? Sure I wanted him to tell me how brilliant and useful my plan was, but brilliant and useful doesn’t always equal profitable. Let’s be honest for moment. What are we all after here? We’re after making lots of money. We don’t start businesses for any other reason than to make lots of money and ultimately do what we want, when we want. Not to be brilliant and useful.

So what’s this mean? It’s means starting or operating your business with a singleness of purpose. Offer one product or service. I don’t mean that if you want to sell keyboards you can’t sell monitors. I mean you don’t also start selling running shoes. Deviating from a singleness of purpose diminishes your efficiency. This is because you now would need to start managing multiple inventories, hiring or training employees in new areas of expertise, and spending big dollars to reaching new and mostly unknown market segments. If you sold keyboards it would be a lot easier to sell monitors to your existing customer’s than running shoes. Ultimately by not keeping a singleness of purpose you won’t be as good as your competition in any one of your separate offerings. Let’s dig a little deeper on efficiency. Besides sticking with a focused and potent offering what functions could be outsourced in your business to keep you from getting side tracked? Where for instance could you use the Internet that would shift some order taking functions from your phones to your web site?

The other night I went into my favorite pizza shop to get a couple of slices and a coke. I couldn’t help but notice that any one of the 3-4 people working the cash registers would stop whatever they were doing if the phone rang. By providing their customers the ability to order pizza on the Internet they could reduce busy signals on the phone lines and lesson the time, errors, and missed opportunities by taking orders on the phone. Take it a step further and outsource the function of taking the remaining orders that do come in over the phone. What benefit is there in having a counter person answer the phone? The answer is none and you’re probably even missing up-sale opportunities. Have you ever noticed the chaos in a pizza shop during the dinner rush hour? Tonight go in to pick up a pizza for dinner and see if you notice other areas where efficiency could be improved and then use that same approach to look at your own business or business idea. The real point here is don’t force your customers to experience a rush hour ride on the L-Train in New York City just to get a slice of pizza from you. Shift as many functions as possible away from your business that doesn’t fit its singleness of purpose. This includes everything from cold calling to answering phones to designing your web site or web based customer relationship software. Outsource these functions to people whose singleness of purpose it is to do these things.

David Erickson can be reached at dave@instantsalesoffice.com or www.instantsalesoffice.com