Promote My Site

Yep, that makes no sense at all, yet that is what you have to have to be successful in a small business. Eyes in the back of your head and the ability to predict your competitors moves in advance are handy too. But Focus is really the only thing you have the ability to develop - that other stuff is more art than craft. Like good poker, really.

Let me try to explain a bit about what I think Focus means. When I was a computer programmer I developed an ability to slip into problem solving mode in just a few minutes. You see, I was just “ok” in my ability to mentally solve a problem, so I decided I would write technically excellent code (easy to do if you practice) and I would be very very productive by having excellent focus on the problems I was solving.

Which was neat - I ended up working on much more interesting stuff than the much quicker and smarter guys. Because my stuff got done and it always, always worked. Then I pretty much stalled at the senior engineer level.

So I developed the ability to come out of focus on my particular problem and focus on the big picture: the project plan, the HR issues, management (mis) direction as implied, etc, etc. So then I’d alternate between those two states.

Which may sound schizo, but it turns out that this is exactly the skill you need to successfully run a startup. Doing a marketing plan? Concentrate like heck, but make sure you lift your head up frequently to check on the other balls in play. Out in the valley raising VC dough? (Never again!) Better make sure you make the daily call with the sales team. I once stepped out of a three hour second meeting (beauty contest, swimsuit edition, you know?) with a brand name VC to run my sales call. I’m not sure they “got” why that was so important, but the fatuousity of the inbred VC is another subject.

Why do I think of it as a Zen thing? Well, when I was doing karate my sensei used to tell me to shut off my mind and sense the right thing to do. Then he’d make us listen to all these koans (what is the sounds of one hand clapping?) and do kata with mirror glasses on to make the room seem upside down. I later realized that he was teaching us to learn to intuit the proper response when we were getting strange input.

Last month we had a kind of a rolling blip of revenue (up one week, down the next, then back to normal) across a number of profit centers. In a smaller business you have to be careful not to hie thee off after every damsel in distress, but something about this was really really bothering me. We did some investigation (three people, a few hours) and found that our credit card company had switched our structured terms several times. Huh. So we got *that* $1,600 back (but did not give them back the $2,100 we saved - I’m not the Pope, ok?) after some paperwork.

And that was in the midst of all the work leading up to the launch of Promote-My-Site. Zen Focus - you just have to learn to de/re-focus when it’s right.