Strategic focus is essential to business success. It is the ability to identify the one path that the business intends to take to accomplish its objective and to then relentlessly pursue that path while ignoring other paths along the way.

Many businesses fail to focus which dilutes their resources and can eventually drain or drown the business. The reason that companies fail to focus is a fear of missing a business opportunity. This is especially true for young entrepreneurial businesses. Granted, we hear of stories in which a business pursued something out of their ordinary line of business and serendipitously found a great business opportunity. But this is the exception rather than the rule.

Lack of strategic focus dilutes resources because the organization spends its resources pursuing opportunities that have cross purposes. The danger comes in when one day the organization is pursuing business that requires lowest costs, the next day they pursue business that requires higher levels of production capabilities, then they pursue some business that requires unique customer service commitments, and so forth. As these different customer requirements come into the business, the organization spends time, money, and energy to develop each of them. And the result is that resources are cast about and the capabilities are given (at no cost) to customers who do not value them.

We should clarify here that strategic focus is a different, although similar, concept than a focus strategy. In the classic book, Competitive Strategy, author Michael Porter defines three broad or generic choices for strategy:

• Cost leadership strategy in which the business pursues the lowest cost of producing or delivering its product or services.
• Differentiation strategy in which the business pursues unique design or production capabilities that provided added value in meeting customer needs.
• Focus strategy in which the business pursues a well-defined segment of the market in which it is able to develop either a cost leadership or differentiation advantage for a certain set of customers.

The smart business finds a business strategy in which they have faith and relentlessly pursues it. Strategic focus is this ability to define and pursue a clearly defined strategy that delivers value to a clearly defined set of customers. Strategic focus causes the organization to ignore business opportunities that do not fit within the strategy and the customer definition. It unites the organization in its effort to continually build the capabilities that make it unique. Strategic focus drives the organization to identify and pursue the customers that value the firm’s capabilities or product/service offering.

One of the purposes of strategic planning is to communicate and unite the organization to pursue the defined strategy based on the belief that this strategy will produce results that meet the firm’s objectives. In turn, the organization needs to have a culture that draws the organization together in pursuit of this strategic focus.

Does your organization have strategic focus? Is everyone on the same page and pursuing the same strategy?