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Happy Thursday!  

Welcome to the CablesAndKits CEO daily email. Read more about this email by scrolling to the very bottom. 

Focus focus focus …. At CK we do a lot of things – Networking, servers, and even safety supplies. But at the end of the day, you can’t do everything in the world and be the best at it all too. Some things that we sell have a history that no ones knows. When we did the inventory liquidation sale a little while ago we were getting rid of oddball things that hadn’t sold in a decade. And I wondered – who added this to the site and inventory and why?? And why did it take us so long to realize it wasn’t selling?  

That sort of thing can happen as a result of a lack of focus. I once heard Jim Collins ask an audience if they had a todo list, followed by asking if they had a stop doing list. He said that sometimes what you choose to stop doing is more important than what you choose to do. It declutters your mind, and in our case, our warehouse, so you can spend your energy on what matters the most to achieve the goals you have.   

When the inventory reduction sale was in full swing we were talking about what we would do after it was over. Do we keep selling some of these products? For the most part, no. What about Ethernet? We have this random color in an odd length but it’s Ethernet! No. If it’s not selling, we don’t need it. We are not here to be a museum. So in many cases we made the decision to get out of the random obscure item business.  

How did it happen? Lack of focus. Lack of accountability. The goal is to execute our strategy of Product Management and Product Marketing to solve for both.  

By cleaning up the catalog a bit we cleared the way for all our effort to be put on what was remaining. Then, we took another look at what was left and decided where we wanted to focus our energy, and be “best in the world”.  

Those items are fiber, Ethernet, transceivers, and switches. Basically, connectivity. We are good at those things. Maybe even great at them. We have a good supply chain and great operations and a loyal customer following. Rather than trying to be all things to all people, we are going to focus focus focus.  

What about everything else? Some things we will say “no” to and get out of. Some things we will say yes to but without a lot of dedicated attention at first. Then later we will either hire and assign a product marketer to that group of products, or eliminate it.  

You’ll hear about all this as it unfolds, and there are no immediate plans to kill anything off. In fact, we are building up new server offerings and are about to launch Yealink VOIP phones. It’s just that we will focus our brand, homepage, and marketing around the 4 major food groups mentioned above. By doing so, we believe we can get even better at those things than we are today. That will be good for us, and great for you.  

Where are you spread too thin? Just because something is a good thing doesn’t mean it’s the right thing, or the best thing. What do you need to put on your stop doing list?  

Interesting  ……