Have you ever thought about what is best for you as a person: to focus on only one business or discipline or to start several businesses in parallel?
It’s a damn hard question and I’m 100% sure there are different opinions on it. I would like to share my opinion on this topic in this article on Medium and look forward to feedback.
First, perhaps let’s clarify the difference between the two options:
1.) Concentrate on only one thing
This means really focusing on only one area of expertise. Let’s assume that you are planning to gain a foothold with an online store. This means that almost 100% of your work time should go into the web store. So everything else is incidental. (Of course, there are other areas that need to be covered in order to run an online store at all or to generate sales).
2.) Concentration on different projects / diversification
In this case you don’t have one project, but several. Often 3, 4 or even 5. So the available working time is divided among the corresponding projects.
What can you infer from the description of the two possibilities?
With “Concentrating on just one thing”:
Advantages:
- You put all your energy into one project
- You have much more time available and can tackle/solve problems more intensively
Disadvantages:
- Lack of diversification: You put all your eggs in one basket. If this fails, you have no real alternatives and have to start all over again with a new project
With “Focus on different projects / diversification”:
Advantages:
- Diversification itself, of course: You don’t put all your eggs in one basket and you might think that if out of 4 projects, 2 fail, you still have 2 left that work or have the potential to be scaled up
- Variety: Yes, I definitely see this point as a big advantage. Instead of always focusing on one topic or one thing, with the diversification approach you have several topics that you deal with every day. For people who like this balance, definitely a big plus
Disadvantages:
- Possibly not enough time for the particular individual project. This can be very successful if you invest enough time in it. But unfortunately you can’t find out
- Overview of current progress of all projects falters. The more projects, the more red tape is usually involved. The logical consequence is that more and more time and effort must be put into management rather than operational work. At the same time, this makes it difficult to keep a good overview of all projects
Now that we have defined the two approaches and listed their advantages and disadvantages, the final question is, “Which of the two approaches is better?
This is exactly the question that I have had to/can deal with intensively over the last few years. I was in a position to try both approaches and will describe my experiences in more detail below.
My experience with the diversification approach:
Imagine getting up on a Monday as normal and having a list of 4 completely new ideas in front of you that you want to implement in the next 6 months. From the idea to the project schedule. The first question that comes up is: Starting with what? Should I try to execute each project in 1.5 months and then jump from one project to another? Should I start all the projects in parallel? Questions that are not necessarily easy to answer and where there is no real right or wrong. My approach was to start a new project as soon as one ended.
By the end of the 6 months, I had actually managed to complete all 4 projects. A result that filled me personally with some pride. The only problem with the whole thing is that none of these 4 projects were really well set up or I constantly felt like something was missing. And that was the case with each project. Even though I knew that the go-live for each of the 4 projects had been successfully executed, this feeling did not really dissipate.
But what did success look like?
After a full year, essentially only one project appeared to be successful. Now one has two different schools of thought:
1.) Did I not put enough time into the other three projects?
2.) It’s a good thing I’m setting up 4 projects at a time, so at least one is solidly successful.
Unfortunately, I can’t really answer the first question because I set up a total of 4 projects at once.
The second thought is very reassuring at first glance. But the next thought that comes to mind is, “Darn, 3 of the 4 projects didn’t work out and still took about 4.5 months in total.”
After these realizations, I quickly wanted to try a different approach: “Just focus on one thing!”.
My experience with the “Concentrate on just one thing!” approach:
The project idea was already there. This time, however, I took much more time to really set up the project as a project. So the whole planning phase was better thought out, the idea and its potential success were looked at from different angles. Standard assessment schemes were implemented: PESTEL, SWOT & competitive analysis, etc.
Then I started the week again on a Monday. This time, however, only with one project. I postponed all other things I had to do in my operational business until a certain day and communicated this to my clients accordingly. So I was able to devote 5 full days a week to one project. And here begins one of my biggest advantages and disadvantages with this approach: Commitment! You really commit to the topic/project and have the opportunity to spend a lot of time on even the smallest details. But in the course of this process, you also come across work steps that you don’t like as much or that irritate you after a while. In the approach described above, I simply looked for a, shall we say, quick fix in such situations. This should just solve the problem, even if it is not necessarily the most elegant approach. But when you spend a lot of time on one project, you want to work towards perfection more and more. So the quick approach is almost obsolete.
After several months of intensive work, the project came to a close. The result: very well thought out, with some room for improvement, but all in all a satisfactory end result. The next step: Go-Live.
After the go-live it became immediately clear to me: I have been working for 4 months now to execute the project in the best possible way. Now it is finally live and will hopefully be received positively by the customers. And there lies the problem. One can only hope that the project will be successful. You don’t have a second project at the beginning that can compensate for the failure of another project. There is no such thing with this approach. However, one could now ask the final question:
“Is the probability of success greater with one project on which one spends several months than with several projects at once in a similar time frame?”
My answer to that: Unfortunately, I cannot say that 100%, because there are far too many factors involved that make it almost impossible to answer the question with an exact “yes” or “no.”
What I can say, however, is my own current take on the two approaches:
I am convinced that the end result of a project will be better if you focus on just one project rather than many different projects at once. I believe that this is not only best for the project, but also makes the entrepreneur’s involvement in his project much greater. It becomes something very personal, especially since you spend several hours on this topic/project almost every day. After a certain time, you no longer ask yourself the question “Will it work when it’s done?, Will I sell something?, etc.?” but become more and more convinced that it has to work. In my opinion, the mindset changes the most when you only work on one project instead of trying to do multiple projects at once.
I am aware that many people have a different opinion and almost always prefer diversification. Somewhere it also makes sense, at least at first glance, because it allows risk to be minimized. Ultimately, success is not guaranteed with either approach. Only for me, the “focus on one thing” approach feels better. Both from the standpoint of my own productivity and from that of my own mindset and commitment to the project.
So at the end of this Medium post, there’s only one thing left to say:
Figure out for yourself what works best for you. For me, in the future, there will only be “sticking to one thing” until I have successfully completed the project in question from my point of view.
