Narrow your focus
Focus is not a constraint on growth. It is the thing that creates it.
Everybody says they want to grow as quickly as possible. What they do not talk about enough is how hard it is to make the choices that enable it, mainly hyper focus on a few variables that matter at the expense of everything else.
Because early on, focus feels terrifying.
It feels like you are giving up opportunity. It feels like you are leaving money on the table. It feels like you are shutting down vectors of growth before you have earned the right to. If you go all in on one vertical, one market, one geography, one wedge, and it does not work, then what?
So instead, most companies do the opposite. They spread themselves too thin across too many buyer types, too many personas, too many geographies, too many use cases. They tell themselves they are being ambitious. They tell themselves they are creating optionality. A lot of the time they are just making it harder to learn. Feedback loops slow down. The message gets muddy. The product gets pulled in too many directions. Brand compounds incrementally because nobody really knows what you stand for. It looks like motion, but it usually does not create momentum.
I have been thinking about this a lot over the last couple of weeks because I have now seen the same pattern show up three different ways. I saw it in a conversation with a close friend who runs a really successful consulting shop. I saw it at Flock when we were rolling out a new segment. And I am seeing it now at Edia as we reorganize the business around a smaller set of states.
The lesson in all three cases is the same. Most companies are not losing because they are too focused. They are losing because they are not focused enough.
A close friend of mine runs a really successful consulting shop. They work across Fortune 100 companies, nonprofits, and state and local government. On paper, that sounds great. Broad customer base. Diverse revenue. Lots of ways to grow. But as we started digging into how they actually scale growth, the issue became obvious. They had not really built a repeatable go to market motion outside of the founder selling by word of mouth.
That is not uncommon. A lot of good businesses get built that way at first. But there comes a point where you have to stop confusing founder led selling with an actual GTM engine. And as we got deeper into the business, one thing became clearer and clearer. They had a massive opportunity in one of those verticals. Better fit. Clearer pain. Better proof points. More natural momentum. A real shot to become known for something specific instead of being vaguely relevant to a bunch of different buyers.
That is where the fear kicks in.
It feels scary to go all in on a vertical, especially early. You feel like you are giving up opportunity. You feel like you are giving up vectors of growth. You start asking yourself what happens if you commit and it does not work. But what I have seen time and time again is that being very specific about what you do and who you do it for is, by far, the best way to grow. Not because it sounds good in a deck. Because it is how you actually learn fast enough to build something repeatable.
I saw this at Flock too. When we were rolling out a new segment, we could have told ourselves the aggressive move was to go broad and launch in all 50 states. Instead, we focused on five. We went really deep in places where we already had customers. That gave us the ability to test the motion where we already had some credibility. It gave us a better chance to find repeatability. It gave us customer stories. It gave us a shot to tighten the message and actually understand what was working before trying to force a national motion.
That depth mattered way more than breadth. Going deep in five states taught us more than being loosely active in fifty ever would have. It let us build around real signal instead of fake scale. It let us create proof before trying to create reach. That is the part a lot of teams miss. Winning in one market is not just about the revenue from that market. It is about the learning. It is about the references. It is about understanding why customers buy, what stories resonate, what objections keep coming up, and what actually feels repeatable.
I am seeing the same thing now at Edia. We are underway with reorganizing the business around the top 10 states we are most keenly focused on. That is not because the other states do not matter. It is because especially in SLED and gov tech, one of the best ways to get a customer in a state is by already having a customer in that state.
These markets are more local than a lot of people want to admit. Trust compounds geographically. References matter more. Familiarity matters more. A district or agency does not just want to know that somebody somewhere uses you. They want to know who near them uses you. They want to know who took the risk first. They want proof that feels close enough to matter. In these markets, density matters. Focus is what creates density.
Most companies do not struggle because they are too focused. They struggle because they try to do too much before they have earned the right to expand.
This is why I keep coming back to the same point. Most companies do not struggle because they are too focused. They struggle because they try to do too much before they have earned the right to expand. They want the map of a broad business before they have actually won somewhere specific. They want more markets, more products, more personas, more geographies, when what they really need is more signal. More repetition. More proof. More understanding of where they actually create value.
There are plenty of examples of this outside my own experience too. Veeva is a good one. They did not try to be generic enterprise software for everybody. They went deep in life sciences and stayed there long enough for that focus itself to become part of the advantage. The company still describes itself as the industry cloud for life sciences. That kind of clarity matters. It sharpens the product, the message, the customer base, and ultimately the moat.
That is also why focus feels so uncomfortable. Saying no always feels like loss in the moment. Every opportunity you walk away from feels like revenue left on the table. Every market you do not enter feels like a missed shot. Every persona you ignore feels like a growth vector you are giving up. But the trade is usually worth it.
Focus speeds up learning. It sharpens the message. It improves the product because you stop bending it around edge cases. It helps brand compound faster because the market can finally understand what you are actually for. And once the market understands that, growth gets a lot less random.
The hard truth is that a lot of teams hide inside breadth because breadth gives them cover. If you are chasing everything, you can always tell yourself something is kind of working somewhere. You never have to fully confront whether the pain is real, whether the message lands, whether the product actually solves the problem, or whether the motion is repeatable. Narrowing strips all that away. It forces honesty. That is what makes it hard. It is also what makes it valuable.
So yes, going narrow feels terrifying. It feels like you are betting too much on too small a slice of the market. But over and over, what I have seen is that the teams that get painfully specific are the ones that actually create real momentum. They learn faster. They build conviction faster. They get references faster. They become known faster. They earn the right to expand because they first proved they could win.
Most companies are not losing because they are too focused. They are losing because they are not focused enough.
Go smaller than you want to. Stay there longer than feels comfortable. Get known somewhere specific. Then expand from strength.