The Sculpture Trapped Inside Of Your Business

The great artist and sculptor Michelangelo once said, every block of stone has a statue inside of it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it. What does this have to do with your business? So glad you asked.

Welcome to the Business Brickyard Podcast with Howard Mann. Concise lessons learned the hard way about business, strategy, and life.

You probably have heard that Michelangelo believed that the statues that he carved were already inside the blocks of marble. His job as the sculptor was to simply remove the right marble that would set the statue free. It's a lovely image to consider but in my experience, the opposite of what happens in most businesses. Maybe even yours. Over and over again these past few years, my work has been less and less about pivoting a business to a new market or altering their marketing and or sales strategy.

Instead, it has been chipping away at all of the excess products, services and related expenses that have been added to the business over the years. The statue, in this case, is where the business began. A beautiful and focused core idea built on the specific talents of the founder, owner or partners or team. A problem in the market that they felt needed to be solved and so they focused on doing exactly that. Some success arrived in the form of a bunch of new clients or customers or maybe even, gasp, some profits.

Then somewhere it stopped being enough. Some version of why don't we get into complimentary business lines or what if we offered more services that our clients may need or could use? You know, the popular but damaging idea that growth is about more of more instead of more of less. Every time this has happened, a slab of clay obscured the business until what the business was known for and best at was obscured completely. Profits disappeared or were reduced while everyone incorrectly focused on revenue growth.

Last year, I worked intensely with a business that had obscured their statue beyond visibility. They decided to follow the examples of tech startups and giant competitors as they hired for growth that matched the scale they someday hoped to achieve. They expanded into business lines that were not their true expertise and most importantly, not businesses they even cared about. They had created four different companies when I arrived and none were profitable, just to hope that someday, with scale, they would be. While I am talking about a specific business, I can think of plenty that I have worked with that I would describe in exactly the same way.

Maybe you thought I was talking about yours. In every case, there was enormous pride in being able to say how big the staff had become, how big the annual revenue growth had been, and how many services they offered. But pride is a silent killer of many businesses. The questions that really matter to me are, what are you best at? Why did your clients choose you?

Why are you not doing just that? Some version of these questions answered without ego or pride will allow you to cut deep into the stone. More often than not, the answers do not reveal a new business to build but the earliest days of the same business, the reason it came to be in the first place, the work that it does better than anyone else if it would just let that be enough. If it could see that innovating around what it does better than anyone else will allow it to never be done innovating, improving, evolving and growing. How many activities is your business currently involved in that it's not great at?

How many business lines generate the right amount of profit, meaning enough profit to make it worth the effort, risk and expense? Bonus point question, so you keep fueling your passion, how many parts of your business do you truly love doing? My hunch is that there is a core inside your business, that original sculpture that is sharing a lot of time, attention and money with products and or services that other businesses do better than you. Why are you doing them? I asked my client last year if he wanted a company with 60 people and staff that did 20,000,000 in revenue and $300,000 in profit or an eight person company doing $5,000,000 in revenue and $2,000,000 in profit.

You probably just heard that and you think that the answer is crystal clear. I don't think it is or we would have many more highly focused businesses that stick to what they do best. Sure, it's great to be able to tell people how fast you are growing revenue and headcount. The problem is when most of that is the marble or stone obscuring the beautiful sculpture that could be your ideal business. What is the sculpture that was once your business?

What have you added that is suffocating it and likely choking you along with it? Ironically, the more you focus on what your core business actually is, the more depth you will find you can offer through it. Focusing on the business you should actually be in creates more time to figure out how to be the best in the world at one thing versus three, four or 10. So I challenge you to get your team together, bring your chisels and get to work. My client is now down to a core group of people and will turn a substantial profit this year.

Everything else has been outsourced to businesses that do those pieces as their core business. It is a powerful shift in strategy that saved millions and will generate millions of dollars in profit. It turns out that they are back to the business that they started ten years ago, just brought back to life in a more modern way. The momentum that this focus has created will allow them to double their profits next year if they do not allow anything to ever obscure their sculpture again. Now it's your turn.

Go and find the sculpture that is your business that has been trapped inside what you have turned your business into for far too long. Thanks for listening.

This has been the Business Brickyard Podcast with Howard Mann. Be sure to subscribe wherever you like listening to your podcast or hop on over to businessbrickyard.com.