Garry McGuire is entertaining you in those little moments of boredom throughout your day. Whether it be waiting in line at coffee shops, watching CNN while on the StairMaster or while on a flight, he and his team of about 70 people places television-quality media there for your entertainment pleasure as CEO of RMG Networks.
When he came on board two years ago, the company provided content to about 10,000 screens but now reaches 60 million viewers each day through more than 190,000 screens.
“As we are growing and expanding rapidly, we are trying to stay focused on what we do best, which is entertaining and informing people when they are on the go throughout the day,” McGuire says.
Smart Business spoke with McGuire about how he’s grown RMG.
What is the key to successfully growing a business?
The key to growing a business is singular focus on one, two or no more than three objectives — and being able to be flexible and change your plan as needed to stay focused on those same objectives.
How do you choose what to focus on?
The most important one is really focus on the customer and the problem you are trying to solve. A lot of companies try to focus on how great their product is without keeping in mind the problem you are trying to solve at the end of the day. A lot of technology companies in particular tend to do that. They invent a really cool technology that does a really cool thing, but it might not actually be solving a problem that people care about. Timing your product with a particular pain in the market place is probably the most important element.
Just stay focused on what you do best, what you do better than any other company in the marketplace. As you begin to grow your business, don’t lose focus on those core fundamentals that you’ve become successful at or that you’ve become known for in your quest for new business or adding new features to your business.
I worked for really small companies and really large companies. At one point in my career, I worked for Compaq when it was in massive acquisition mode, and it was sort of a race to become the biggest computer company in the world. It made all kinds of acquisitions — some of them were brilliant and some were disastrous mistakes. What I was able to ascertain from that was that in your quest for getting bigger, bigger is not always better. I’ve seen that in so many examples, large and small. Sometimes you get very wed to an opportunity, and it’s very emotional rather than rational. I’ve seen a lot of business leaders make mistakes based on that.
