As Tiger Wood’s sank his last putt to win the 2000 US Open by 15 shots, promoting some to suggest that the USGA ought to flight future tournaments, a thought crossed my mind. While David Dvaul takes time off to go snowboarding or Phil Mickson reminisces about how great it is to spend time at home with his new baby daughter, Tiger Woods just practices and try’s to get better.
While Nick Faldo opens golf institutes with Marriot across America, Colin Montgomery is doing the same across in Britain. Meanwhile, Tiger just practices. While Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson and Mark O Mera design golf courses, Tiger just practices. While Greg Norman races to set a record for the most businesses ever run by a golfer, by opening more than Arnold Palmer, Tiger just practices.
Strangely enough this single-minded focus seems to be working with a vengeance! It worked for Nicklaus too in the sixties but in the early seventies Jack fired his management company IMG and took on all of his business dealing himself. While you still can’t fault his record who knows how many more tournaments Jack might have won had he not mired himself off the course in a host of business dealings many of which went South! Tiger seems content at least for the moment, to let others handle the minor business of capitalizing on his name to the tune of a hundred million a year. He knows that the money will keep rolling in only if he continues to play great golf! While he does have a host of endorsements he does not own car dealerships like Arnold Palmer. Real estate developments or his own golf club manufacturing company like Jack
Nicklaus. He does not own Vineyards, a turf company, and a boat building enterprise like Greg Norman. He does not as yet design golf courses although the mere addition of his name would mean an instant two or three million dollars. Instead he just plays golf and practices, staying focused on the only goal that matters to him, that is being recognized as the best golfer in the world.
The lesson to be learned from Tiger for business owners is clearly spelled out, Focus!
Do one thing and do it well. Do it better than anyone in the area. Do it better than anyone in the county. Do it better than anyone does in the state.
Most business owners make the mistake of being in too many different businesses at once and for most of the nineties I was one of them. It’s amazing how easy it becomes to justify buying a ten thousand dollar copy machine to cut down on your print shop bills when the payments are just $89 a month. Or to expand the line of products you sell to your existing client base beyond the lines of your core business. While clients may trust you with their billing they may not trust you with their office supplies or visa versa. Focus on being known for one thing and build your business around that core value. Back in my twenties my friends and I used to frequent a certain hole in the wall bar because it happen to feature over 200 different brands of beer. It did not pretend to be a restaurant, a sports bar or an Irish pub, just a bar that offered about every beer in the world! Consequently their overhead was low and the profits were high!
A friend of mine with a fairly large wholesale printing operation decided that he could make a killing in the copy shop business by using them to feed business to his large presses. He opened three shops at once in near by cities. The hours were brutal, the staff un- reliable and the jobs that came in were so small they were hardly worth running. Six months into the venture he sold them at a loss.
The following year he re-focused on the wholesale printing business. This was the business he knew inside and out, this was the business he had made his living from for over a decade. He hired more reps and kept the presses running 24 hours and tripled his business. By working with single minded focus he turned a modest enterprise into a multi million dollar company in just over twelve months. He did this by focusing on his core strengths expanding the one business he knew better than anything else. Discover your core business then mine it for all it’s worth without being distracted by every other opportunity that comes your way. Any business can be a great business if it's run with focus!