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How Your Greatest Strength Becomes Your Weakness

What’s your greatest strength as a CEO?

• Sales?
• Marketing?
• Operations?

Whatever you do well, know that it might become your Achilles’ heel. As owners, we tend to invest in areas where we know we’re weak. We know we have limited resources, so we spend what we have on backstopping the places where we’re most vulnerable. 
This tendency leads many founders to under-invest in areas where they have natural strength. Two of the most common functions are sales and marketing. Most owners are decent salespeople, so they figure they can compensate for a weakness in generating revenue through force of personality and sheer will. 
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But determination only goes so far, and you may reach a plateau where your greatest strength becomes what’s holding you back...

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One Counterintuitive Strategy Led to This $380 Million Payday
 
When David Perry started his video game company, he filled a dartboard in his office with the names of companies he thought would want to buy his company, Gaikai, one day.
 
Why would a startup business with no revenue or employees be thinking about potential acquirers so early? For Perry, it comes down to something he refers to as “down-the-track thinking.”
 
Perry was recently interviewed about Sony’s $380 million acquisition of Gaikai, and he described his philosophy by using a moving train as an analogy. He described a train full of people representing an industry. Most people are comfortably inside the train watching the countryside go by. There are some people scrambling behind the train, hoping to jump on. Then there are a select few people who are obsessing over where the train is going and are constantly thinking about the upcoming stops along their journey.
 
Perry described himself as one of the people thinking about where the train is going next, so it only made sense to him to have a list of businesses he could sell to.
 
Sony was in the bullseye of Perry’s dartboard of companies to sell to so when his partner suggested they name their company Gaikai, a Japanese word that roughly translates to “open sea”, Perry agreed. The word gaikai is hard for the average English speaker to pronounce, but Perry knew the name would be irresistible to Sony.
 
Perry and his partners went further and named other parts of their product line with Japanese words and designed the company for the global gaming market, not just American customers, as was the habit of videogame makers at the time.
 
Years later, when Perry was ready to sell Gaikai, he approached all the big video game makers about buying his company, and Sony was the most enthusiastic. They were thrilled to see the extent to which Perry and his partners had gone to make Gaikai fit Sony’s culture.
 
Visualizing a shortlist of potential acquirers when you make key decisions is a good way to vet your next move. Imagining how your potential acquirers would react to hear how you are thinking of evolving your company can inspire a more strategic lens through which to make big bets. Whether you are looking to sell soon or are years away from selling, the process of developing a shortlist of potential acquirers tomorrow will help you make better decisions today.​

One Personality Trait Most Successful Entrepreneurs Share
 
Survey a group of founders about the personality traits that made them successful, and they will be quick to use words like determination, sacrifice, and hard work. Others will show more humility and chalk their success up to personality traits like curiosity. Still others will credit dumb luck.
 
However, there is another personality trait that many of the most successful founders have in common: discipline.
 
They have the discipline to stick to their original vision despite the temptation to veer off course.
 
The discipline to stick to their original product or service offering despite clients asking for different things…
 
The discipline to ignore whatever shiny ball is demanding their attention and instead focus on what they set out to do…
 
Steve Jobs, the legendary co-founder of Apple, said it best:
 
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to one thousand things.” 
 
How Saying No Led to a 7-Figure Exit
 
Andy Cabasso studied law but never really practiced. Instead, he co-founded JurisPage in 2013, an agency specializing in helping law firms with their marketing.
 
Cabasso understood the marketing services lawyers need, and his partner, Sam Brodie, knew how to build websites that ranked on Google. Their service was popular among lawyers but also attracted the attention of other service businesses that needed a website that ranked organically as well.
 
Cabasso and Brodie were tempted to wander outside of their niche but ultimately turned down the opportunity to work with other types of companies, knowing they had something unique to offer lawyers.
 
They also knew the importance of recurring revenue so insisted that their clients use JurisPage for website hosting, which gave the partners a base of recurring revenue. Prospects offered JurisPage thousands of dollars to build them a website for someone else to host, but Cabasso turned them down, knowing that the recurring website hosting revenue was a fundamental component to building a valuable business.
 
In the end, Cabasso and Brodie’s discipline paid off because they attracted the attention of Uptime Legal, an Inc. 5000 business specializing in technology and practice management software for law firms.
 
The two companies fit together like peanut butter and jelly, which is why Uptime Legal acquired JurisPage in a seven-figure deal that closed in 2016.
 
The moral? While curiosity and grit are important personality traits for any would-be founder, the ability to remain discipled in the face of opportunity may be the most important attribute of all. 

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