During the check-in portion of a recent quarterly session with a client, several team members mentioned that their Marketing Strategy was “not working”. When I dug a little deeper during the V/TO review, everyone agreed that the Marketing Strategy was correct - they just weren’t sure what to do now that their 3 Uniques™ were defined.

My high school cross-country coach, Chuck Lucas, was a legend. He and his teams won more than twenty league championships, countless district titles and two state titles – my senior year and the year following. There were lots of reasons “Coach Luke” was effective, but one was remarkable. He saw things other coaches never saw.

When helping an entrepreneurial leadership team clarify, simplify, and achieve its Vision, we use a tool called the V/TO™ (Vision/Traction Organizer™). This EOS Foundational Tool™ contains eight questions, and our job as EOS Implementers™ is to get every member of the leadership team to agree on every word of the answers to each of those questions.

When there’s weakness in the Vision component of your organization, it’s not that there’s no Vision. Often there’s too much Vision – you don’t all agree.

It’s not unusual for an entrepreneur to consider “everyone” a potential customer. While the optimism can be exciting and contagious, the harsh reality is that most of “everyone” isn’t the RIGHT potential customer. Many won’t ever buy from you, and some who do become customers won’t be a great fit. They may be unhappy, and they may even hurt your business by damaging your reputation or mistreating your employees.

That’s the bad news. The good news? While it may sound counterintuitive, concentrating on a smaller number of potential customers can actually help you grow faster, make more money, and have more fun. Time and time again, I’ve seen that clients who focus 100% of their proactive sales and marketing efforts on their ideal prospect or customer get a bigger bang for every buck they spend on sales and marketing.

As entrepreneurs, sometimes we can be our own worst enemies. We can get easily bored, leaving us with a need to “stir things up” to make things exciting again. For me, this stems from an intense desire to make things better. Whatever the motivation, this need for change and excitement can cause a crisis in our business.