Over the years I have been asked to step into a number of businesses that were running late, had got stuck, or were heading somewhere they did not really want to go. Sometimes it was a product launch, sometimes a regulatory deadline, a funding round or a turnaround. The details were always different, but looking back, the way out of the situation was often very similar.

In my experience it is rarely a lack of talent, effort or ideas. Most of the teams I have worked with were working very hard, sometimes too hard. What I tend to find is that they are working hard on too many things at the same time.

I wrote a while ago about focus and alignment when scaling a business, and the idea of choosing a couple of goals and getting everyone pointed at them. In this article I wanted to go a little further and look at what focus means when one particular goal really matters, the deadline is real and missing it is not really an option. I think it applies just as much to a sales push, a market launch or a fundraise as it does to a technology project.

If I had to sum it up, I would say you usually get there faster by removing things rather than adding them. I tend to call it ruthless focus, and I use that word on purpose.

Three months to save a business

A few years ago, the founder of an early stage e-money platform got in touch after falling out with his CTO, who had left and taken the whole team with him. The business had three months to go live and pass its provider's certification, otherwise the providers would walk away, and without them there was really no business left. To make things harder, his investors were seriously considering shutting the company down.

When we sat down to agree a plan, most of it ended up being a list of things we were not going to do. The business had plenty of ambitions, from features customers had asked for to improvements the founder was keen on and polish that would have made the product look better. All of it was perfectly reasonable, but very little of it was going to matter within three months.

The one thing that did matter was getting certified, so the business could keep trading, and so anything that did not help with that was put to one side for the time being.

We went live and passed certification on time, which gave the business some breathing room and unlocked £750k of growth funding. Over the following 18 months the team grew to 5, the business reached revenue with a clear path to profitability, and it went on to raise a further £2m.

I am fairly sure none of that would have happened if we had spent those first three months trying to work through everything on the wish list.

Stop, and start again

The second example sits at the other end of the scale. It was a large regulated business running a mandatory regulatory project alongside a lot of other initiatives. The project had been reported as six months late, but nobody was able to explain why clearly enough for the business to decide what to do about it, and missing the deadline would have meant failing to stay compliant, with very serious consequences.

When we looked into it, we found that the regulatory project had become tangled up with another initiative. The two had been bundled together at the start, and for good reasons at the time. Since then the business priorities had moved on, and the timelines of the other initiative had started to push the regulatory deadline around. The same people were being asked to deliver two quite different goals, and the two had become so intertwined that separating them cleanly was no longer realistic.

In the end we recommended something I had never recommended before, and have not since: to stop, and start again with a single goal in mind.

As you can imagine, that led to some very difficult conversations with the board, and I think rightly so. Restarting something that is already running late sounds like the last thing you would want to do. It took some time to show why it was actually the fastest and safest route, and we were then asked to oversee the restarted project ourselves, with a team of about 20.

The project was delivered by the original regulatory deadline, despite the restart, and we went on to oversee wider delivery for the business, growing from around 20 people to nearly 100.

Why do businesses lose focus?

I don't think anyone sets out to lose focus. In most of the cases I have seen, it happened gradually, one reasonable decision at a time.

Every item looks sensible on its own. It might be a new market, a request from a big client, a promising partnership or an internal project that nobody quite wants to stop. None of these is wrong in itself, but put together they are often what turns a three month goal into a nine month one.

The business moves on, but the plan doesn't. In the regulated business, the two initiatives had been bundled for good reasons. Over time those reasons changed, but the plan stayed the same, and nobody went back to ask whether it still made sense.

Saying yes is a lot easier than saying no. Adding something to the list costs nothing in the meeting, whereas removing it usually means disappointing someone, and often someone senior. New opportunities can feel urgent, while the main goal can feel quite far away.

People end up split across goals. In my experience, asking the same team to deliver two things at once rarely gets you two halves. What you tend to get instead is constant switching, competing priorities and a lot of noise.

The cost of all this rarely shows up in any single decision. It tends to show up later, as a delay. I have found that a six month delay is very rarely one six month problem, and much more often the result of dozens of small yeses along the way.

What ruthless focus looks like in practice

A lot of what I end up doing on these engagements is simply driving that focus, being quite strict about the business priorities and removing pretty much everything else. In practice, it tends to come down to a few habits.

Agree one goal and one date. In the examples above, that was getting certified within three months, or being compliant by the regulatory deadline. It works just as well for something like ten new customers by the end of the quarter, or a term sheet signed by March. If the team can't explain the goal in a sentence, I usually take that as a sign they aren't focused yet.

Check everything against it. The question I keep coming back to is whether a piece of work will get us closer to the goal by that date. If it won't, it waits. It isn't cancelled, just parked for later, and I have found that makes the conversation with whoever asked for it a lot easier.

Give each team one goal. If two goals really do matter, they generally need two teams, or one of them will have to wait.

Start with the polish. Nice-to-haves, extra features, the presentation that could be perfect or the process that could be a little neater. That is usually where most of the noise is, and it is often the easiest thing to put off without customers noticing.

Be open to starting again. Very occasionally, untangling what is already there will cost more than starting from a clean slate. It is an uncomfortable decision and it should stay a rare one, but I don't think it should be ruled out.

Keep repeating it. Focus has a habit of fading. New requests and opportunities come in every week, so the goal needs to be repeated to the board and the team, probably more often than feels necessary.

I should add that ruthless doesn't mean careless. Legal and regulatory obligations, commitments to customers and anything that keeps the business safe are never on the list of things to cut. In the certification example, compliance was the goal itself. What does get cut is anything that doesn't serve the goal, however attractive it might look at the time.

So what should you take from this?

The two businesses could hardly have been more different, one an early stage company with no team left and the other a large regulated business with dozens of people involved. Yet in both cases, what made the difference wasn't adding more people or putting in more hours, it was doing fewer things.

Whether your goal is a launch, a sales target, a fundraise or a regulatory deadline, I think it is worth asking yourself honestly how many goals your team is really working towards, and how much of this week's work will actually matter by the date that counts. The answer can be a little uncomfortable, but in my experience it is usually the quickest way to get things back on track.

Focus also isn't something you set once at the start and then forget about. It needs protecting every week, right up until the goal has been delivered.

If you have a goal that matters and is starting to slip, or a deadline you can't afford to miss, we would be very happy to help. Click here to contact us.