It's Not The Opportunity That Counts!

The real challenge is that we have all been incorrectly conditioned and trained to believe that the most important thing in business is the opportunity.

However, if you try to make use of all the opportunities that show up, you lose all focus. By trying to be all things to all people, you end up being nothing to everybody.
I had a financial services company that was operating out of Zurich, Switzerland.

Several months after the launch of our business, we got together for a meeting with the principals and the owners, and one of them said, “Well, I’d like to open up the meeting to discuss the possibility of issuing credit cards.”

I looked over and said, “Credit cards? Why would you want to issue credit cards?”

He said, “Well, because we can.”

And I said, “If you say that again, I will walk out of here. Never do anything just because you can.”

I managed to put that idea down, and then somebody else said, “Let’s now talk about establishing a private bank.” I said, “Why would you want to do that?” He said, “Because we can.”

The fact of the matter is that although we are limitless beings with limitless potential and limitless power and the things we can do are completely limitless, the time we have to do these things is not.

Never do something just because you can!

So, by the end of the week we managed to get our focus down to one thing.

Our Chairman looked at everyone and said, “It has become apparent through this week that we have one product to sell. I don’t care if you thought you were in accounting before, I don’t care if you thought you were in human resources, it is now the job of every individual in this company for the next 120 days to sell this product and do nothing else.”

I want you to think about the power of that decision for a moment. If you had only one product to sell, could you learn to sell it well?

If day in and day out, from morning to night, the only thing you did was to make one pitch, would your pitch improve? Would you find a pitch that works?

And it goes even further. If you were a manager and you had people working for you, and the only thing you had to do was manage people who had only one job, which was to sell one product, could you manage that process and do it effectively? The answer is yes; anyone could.

This is what is so important, because in companies you are eventually going to be working with everyday people and average employees. If you become a big company, you can’t have 100,000 outstanding employees, because if you have 100,000 people, they are by definition average.

The net effect of our focus was that 120 days later we had sold $660 million of the product. Focus produced $600 million in sales in 120 days!