After spending more than 20 years as a consultant and trainer to small businesses and social enterprises, I recently became an enterprise manager. My social enterprise, which is a programof a registered charity, sells training and publications to business development professionals – people who help entrepreneurs start and grow businesses. We deliver this training and sell our resources throughout Canada and occasionally abroad.

It’s a good gig; a chance to practice what I’ve been preaching all this time. Yet, imagine my surprise when I began finding out just how much work was involved in growing an enterprise. Recommendations that I had dispensed to my clients, while not hard to do in and of themselves, are hard to do on top of everything else. So, I’m taking this opportunity to reflect on my new-found experience, and attempt to identify the 20 percent needed to achieve 80 percent of the results, for very busy managers like me.

Focus is a fundamental issue. What business are we in? What business should we be in?

When I started in my new job, we had 15 training products being sold in four very different national markets, all competing for my limited time, budget, and attention. That was just too many (products) for an enterprise with one full-time manager, one part-time assistant, and five independent contractors who do the training.

Each one of these offerings had merit – customers who liked it, staff who liked delivering it, and revenue sources. In a perfect world, we might have invested in offering all of them. But with limited time and resources, we simply couldn’t do an excellent job at developing, marketing, and delivering all 15 products. We could play around at doing this, but we would never have taken anything to its full potential and would never have achieved the scale of impact that we really want to make. So, we’ve had to make choices.

Even if all our offerings were good, they were not equally good. Some were better than others, and those were the ones that we needed to make an intentional investment in. Otherwise, we’d just be playing around. But, how do you choose?

In my previous life, I consulted with dozens of social enterprises and trained hundreds who struggled with this same challenge to achieve a scalable focus. As a result, I’ve come up with four key considerations that managers need to make when they’re trying to identify real opportunities:

• Mission alignment – Will it make the right impact?
• Operational capability – Can we really do it?
• Customer demand – Do the end users, the people or organizations who will use the product, actually want our product?
• Financial sustainability – Can we get the money we need to meet our goals?

I ran our product offerings through these questions, and I narrowed the list down to just four unique pairings of product and market to which I could say “Yes!” to each question; four real opportunities to build a profitable, high-impact social enterprise. The other offerings, at least for the moment, just didn’t make the grade. They were either community services (no money), hard sells (no demand), a means to no end (no mission), or a trap (no real capability).

So now I’ve got some focus. I know where we’ll invest our R&D, marketing and delivery of resources. This doesn’t preclude me from selling a product that isn’t on our priority list should a customer come to us with a lucrative offer. But I’m not going to spend any time or money looking for them. Not right now, at least. I’ve got my hands full with some real opportunities.

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