As the recession bites deeper, with more and more reports of layoffs and businesses in financial difficulties, I’m increasingly hearing of people who are ‘stretching’ the kind of business they will take on into new areas.  And a lot of the time, these new ventures are not really that closely linked to their core expertise, so they’re not only stretching their business, they’re also stretching their credibility.

On Tuesday night, I went to John Williams’ “Scanners Night” at a central London pub; it was a very enjoyable evening, and certainly recommended for restless entrepreneurs.  ‘Scanner’ is a name given to people who are always on the lookout for new things to do, and really aren’t very good at settling to one thing for long.  I’ve been a bit skeptical so far about John’s idea that ‘scanning’ can really work, because as you’ll realise by now if you’ve been following my blogs, I’m a great believer in focus.  I spoke to John about that on Tuesday, and he confirmed that even scanners need to decide what to focus on first – especially in the current climate, when it’s important to make everything you do really count.

So it concerns me to see decent businesses grabbing at whatever work comes along, instead of upping their marketing and PR activity in their real niche, where they are the absolute best.  By allowing themselves to get distracted, I can see a lot of them opening up chinks in their defensive wall, and allowing competitors to slip in and steal their position.  Worse still, they run the risk of diluting their own reputation as the focussed expert in their niche, and handing their market edge to the competition on a plate.

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