Great acronym, eh? Or maybe it’s a recipe for disaster – certainly that’s what a lot of experienced business consultants tell me as I go around speaking on Focus. They remind me that Einstein said that it’s the definition of insanity to carry on doing the same thing, and expect a different result. And of course, they’re absolutely right.

What they’re missing, is that the FOCUS acronym doesn’t say “one track”, “one path”, “one thing” – it says “one course”. Just like an aircraft travelling from London to Paris doesn’t fly, undeviating, in a straight line, or a road through the mountains may need to take the odd twist and turn, our course to success may need the occasional deviation or correction.

And in business, we can even do a few different things that all have a common theme, and still be following a single course. It’s what author & journalist Katie Ledger calls a “red thread running through everything we do”. The trick is to arrive at a course that’s not too broad, or a thread that’s not too strained. The narrower our course, and the more relaxed and natural our thread, the easier it is for people to understand how we add value. And to engage with us or refer us.

My red thread is “helping people focus on what they’re great at, and they enjoy” (essentially, my Core Process) of “Encouraging Potential”), and I’m the first to admit that it does get a bit strained at the extremities. Some of it, like my key accounts work, I’m not actively promoting any longer, because it’s stretching the thread more than I want to. And some of it only seems to be a stretch – my computer business, Cloudberry, for instance. It may seem to be a bit removed from a business advice thread – in fact, the thread runs through it in two ways. The service itself frees independent entrepreneurs from worrying about their laptop crashing, and losing data if it does. And my business partner is brilliant at dreaming up exciting and effective new ways to do that, but he’s a complete disaster when it comes to admin; I love analysis and admin, so I free him from worrying about landlords and HMRC and stuff.

The trick is to understand where you add the most value, and set your steady ‘course’ towards it.