The Power of Focus

Byte to Byte with Steve Johnsen

A lot of us pride ourselves on being really good multitaskers, and as entrepreneurs we find ourselves having to wear a lot of hats. But today I want to talk to you about a principle that runs contrary to all of these ideas, and it’s called the power of focus.

Hi, this is Steve Johnsen and today I want to talk to you about the power of focus. I’ve been reading an awesome book by Gary Keller (the founder of Keller Williams—the real estate brokerage). Gary’s book is called The ONE Thing. He writes about the amazing power of focus in work and in life.

The key to success, Gary tells us, is to figure out what is the #1 most important thing to be doing and forget everything else. Now, a lot of us have no problem with wanting to figure out what is the #1 most important thing, but I find myself often wanting to take care of three or four or maybe five really important things in my business. But as Gary points out in his book, the key to being really successful (not just moderately successful but really successful) is to focus on one thing. What is the one thing that you could be doing in your business—that no one else can do, that only you can do—and that really has an impact on your business growing—that’s where you want to figure out how to block out more time for that and let all the other distractions go or delegate them to someone else.

Darren Hardy in his success training course teaches something very similar. In order to be really successful, we need to figure out what is the number one most important thing to be focusing on for our business and learn how to let the other stuff go or delegate it.

My approach to building a website is very similar. When a client comes to me wanting their website to be their #1 employee, I bring them through a consulting process to figure out what is the #1 most important thing that their website should be doing. There was a best-selling book on Amazon called 5 Easy Steps to Make Your Website Your #1 Employee that talked about this in the chapter called “Define Your Website’s Purpose.”

Now a lot of times people want the website to do a whole bunch of different things well. They say the website has to sell product and it also has to get people to sign up for our list and it also has to present our brand and it also has to provide information for existing customers, etc. Unfortunately (or fortunately), people just don’t have the ability to focus on four things at once. They can only focus on one thing. If you present four things for them to focus on, typically what happens is they focus on nothing—and end up leaving the site.

So when you build a site you really want to know what is the website’s purpose. It’s amazing how much clarity this brings to the subsequent steps of creating your key messages, crafting the user experience, writing the website copy, and designing the site to communicate your story and your brand. It’s having a focus of what is the one thing the site is going to do that just helps everything else to line up.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am a man of action as much as the next businessman, but if your first step is not pointed in the right direction, then where do you think you are going to end up? Obviously not where you wanted to go.

So some things to think about related to your website:

Who is your website visitor? What are they looking for? What is the context in which they came to your site—-did you invite them there or were they online searching for you? Did they hear about you from someone else (i.e., get referred to you)? What must this person visiting your site know before they will decide to do business with you? These are some great questions to start with in figuring out your website’s purpose.

These questions, and many others, must be answered before you even begin to write your catchy taglines or design a page. These are some of the questions that we start with when we’re consulting with new clients on creating a custom website that will actually make them money.