The Path between Entrepreneuritis and Myopia

Posted on February 11, 2007

If you set no boundaries around your business, you fail to focus your resources and energy. If you’re too narrow-minded, opportunities can pass you by. Defining your business correctly helps you avoid these two extremes.

Bentley Publishing Group, the art publishing company where I served as CEO, has really defined itself (many years ago) as two different businesses. One is the publishing of open edition prints and posters, and the other is being an artist’s agency, helping artists earn more income and get more recognition through licensing. We have two management teams, one specializing in prints, and the other in licensing.

How do you define your business? Are you in one business, or two, or three? Knowing the business you’re in, and knowing the boundaries of that business, will help avoid some of the most deadly traps in business. At the one extreme, you could become infected with entrepreneuritis, and at the other extreme, with myopia.

Entrepreneuritis occurs when you can’t stop yourself from jumping on every new business idea that pops into your head. An ex-customer of ours was a classic. Every four months, he’d come by and talk about his new business venture and how great it was going. I’d ask about his last great venture (the one from four months prior) and he’d say it didn’t turn out, or it was ticking along, or he wouldn’t want to talk about it. The first four or five ventures were framing related, and were tangents run from his local custom frame shop. Then it was Y2K network surveys, then sports memorabilia. I remember a bankruptcy, and then I lost touch with him. But he set no boundaries around his business, and as a result, never focused his resources and energy.

Myopia is when the business is so focused and rigidly defined, that opportunities aren’t even reviewed, and threats aren’t addressed either. The business stands as it is, until it crumbles. I remember Helen, who owned the typesetting firm we used in the late 1970’s and early 80’s. She did a great job—but it was only typesetting. Even though I asked her about the role personal computers and word processing programs and good PC printers would have on her business, she insisted that typesetting was her only specialty, and that she would be fine. A few years later, Helen’s business disappeared, and Helen, I presume, got a job somewhere doing something. We had long since stopped using her services.

So are you a retail framer? Or a wall décor specialist? Or a decorative accessory specialist? Or an art resource? Or a wholesale framer and publisher and licensing agent? Or a moulding manufacturer and importer and distributor? The possibilities are endless.

Businesses often define themselves based on the needs of their current customer base, their production capabilities, their knowledge and relationship with key resources, their geography, and their price points. A few things to bear in mind:

• Having two businesses is twice as hard as having one, and often one steals time and attention and resources from your other business. Business auto-pilot never works.
• Having two customer bases is very difficult—typically it is easier to sell more things to the same customer base than to develop a new customer base.
• If you’re not growing, at least somewhat, then you’re in trouble. Businesses either grow or shrink—staying the same is rare, difficult, and fraught with risk. If it’s getting tough to prosper in your current business model, you may need to diversify sooner to insure a smooth transition in the event that your old business model is growing obsolete.
• Once you’ve defined your business, and an opportunity arrives outside your business model, be very careful about jumping into it. Only do so if you’re convinced that it is time to redefine your business model, or that you have the time, resources and energy to start another business.

Defining your business takes a lot of thought, discussion and soul searching. But having a clear definition of your business will aid you in steering the course between entrepreneuritis and myopia—and you’ll likely be here to read this column year after year.

Takeaways:

• Know your business, and know where its boundaries are.
• Whether you have one business or three, a lack of focus on any one of them could spell disaster.
• Avoid being too rigid in your niche. If you’re not growing your business in some way, you’re in trouble.