David Dennis learned the
dangers of wandering
from his core competencies the hard way.
His advertising and marketing
services company had been
focused on retail marketing, but
then began picking up accounts
outside its expertise. And
before long, SBC Advertising
found itself going head-to-head
against the largest agencies in
the country.
“I’d find myself waking up
every day and having to be a
knowledgeable expert on
something different every day,”
says Dennis, co-owner and
president of SBC, which posted 2007 revenue of $11.7 million. “It was an impossible way
to live your life.”
Fed up with the frustration,
Dennis led his company back
to what it does best, and
today, the 110-employee firm
has a solid focus on providing
solutions to retailers and
national brands.
Smart Business spoke with
Dennis about how he got his
company back on track after it
wandered off course.
Q. How did you realize
you needed to regain your
company’s focus?
It was hard for everybody in
the company during that period, and we — as the owners of
the company — could personally feel the stress of losing our
focus. It was virtually impossible to train people to be good
at all these different things.
At one point, the light went
on, and we said, ‘This is overly
complicated and overly difficult. There has got to be a better way to do it.’ We had to
refocus on the business and refocus on the core competency. It wasn’t hard; it was actually refreshing and easy to
strategize moving toward it.
That’s the way to be great at
what you do and feel great
about what you do every day.
You want to be great at something, as opposed to being adequate at a number of things.
Q. How do you refocus your
business when you’ve gotten
off track?
You have to look at your list
of your core competencies — what you know
and understand better
than other companies do.
Identify what’s really relevant to the marketplace
and then ask, ‘How do
we get to be No. 1 in that
core competency? How
do we build this business
to make it better than
anybody else with that
core competency?’
For us, once we identified retail advertising
and marketing as what
we’re really all about,
then we began to hire
people that have skills in
that area, understand
what level of detail we
want to go into in various services, offer specialized
services and send people to
training so they understand it
better. Study the industry, and
study the competition. You
really build your business
around that core competency.
You have to have focus and
clear positioning that differentiates you from your competition. There are always a thousand things trying to pull you
away from that target and that
focus, and it’s really easy to
drift off of it, but it’s the job of
the people at the top of the company to keep true to that
positioning and that focus that
you’ve got with the business.
