To go big, you have to go small.
To become a master, you have to narrow your focus.
To grow your company, you have to narrow your target market.
To make your job profile stand out, you have to narrow (and perfect) the things you tell about.
It is counterintuitive, and that’s why so many people get this wrong. But the only way to go big, is to go small.
Google’s mission was to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Today, 81.3% of their revenue comes from advertising, which admittedly has little to do with making information universally accessible.
Facebook’s mission was to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. Today, 97.7% of their revenue comes from advertising, which admittedly has little to do with giving people the power to build community or bringing the world closer together.
If you don’t measure the right things, it’s very easy to end up in a very different place from the one you initially had in mind.
Scripts are out there, they are easy to replicate and scale.
Script #1 – Send LinkedIn contact request faking interest in profile, then send follow up pitch upon acceptance of request.
Script #2 – Collate information you find on Google in an eBook, gate the eBook to collect email addresses, then sequence them.
Script #3 – Map what competitors have on their blog, then have a piece of content to match all topics, possibly changing the content only marginally.
There are more. The problem is that they work for about 10 minutes, then they are old, start annoying people, and you are left wondering why.
If you want to stand out, you have to do something that is not scripted.
It’s not easy.
It’s not supposed to.
It’s difficult for any content creator to accept that people – some people, most people – don’t want to hear from them. Just as it is difficult for a founder to accept that customers – some customers, most customers – don’t want to do business with them.
It really is nothing personal. We are all overwhelmed by constant busyness, plus not everything is for everybody.
Of course, the only way to overcome this is to make what you do indispensable for 1, 10, 50, 1000, 10000 people. It’s incremental, and it starts from just a few. If you think at 1000000 from day 1, you have lost already.
There are two things you can consider when building a team.
In the first case, you are looking to build the capabilities of the team. That is fairly typical for small teams, or teams that need to grow into unexplored territories.
In the second case, you are looking to build the capacity of the team. That is fairly typical of large teams, or teams that need to scale fast.
The problem is when small teams hire for capacity, and therefore do not get the type of knowledge and expertise they would need. Or when large teams hire for capabilities, and therefore get the type of knowledge and expertise they don’t need.
Be aware where you stand and what you are hiring for.
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