What’s Your North Star?

Let’s play a game.

First question: Which choice below best represents the level of focus at your company?

  • We’re a food industry company
  • We’re a food service company
  • We’re a restaurant
  • We’re an Italian cafe
  • We’re a cupcake shop

Second question: Which company above likely has the employees that are best equipped to answer the following types of questions:

  • What do we do best?
  • What are we known for?
  • Who’s our target customer?
  • What’s the key to our success?
  • Why do our customers love us?
  • What do we do better than anyone else?
  • Where should we innovate?
  • Where should we invest?
  • Who should we partner with?
  • Who are our biggest competitors?
  • What’s our north star, the thing that guides every decision?

You don’t have to be a cupcake shop to have laser focus. In fact, there are many pretty large (and very successful) companies out there that have not outgrown their ability to focus…maniacally. But, without a laser focus, especially as a small company where market opportunities seem a-plenty and time / bandwidth is not, you’ll always struggle with effective strategies, commitment, performance, employee engagement, sustained excellence, innovation, scalable decision making, product positioning, marketing…pretty much everything. As you grow, focus becomes even more important as there are more market opportunities, more market feedback to consider and more employees to keep aligned.

The reality is that most companies are in the middle (e.g., we’re a restaurant), which means there’s just enough focus internally to create the illusion of a “north star” but plenty enough ambiguity for everyone to have different visions of success. Thus, ongoing chaos ensues.

So, if you’re not already the cupcake shop, get there as fast as you can. Your company’s future will thank you!

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Don has the rare ability to lead at the level of strategic prioritization and also drive effective processes to ensure each iteration is better than the last. In one instance he helped us cut ⅔’s of our scope and still deliver the core value to our users - it’s hard to think of a better investment than his ruthless prioritization that helped us ship a great product 3x faster.

MIKE SCHNEIDER, CO-FOUNDER & CEO

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