A business can quickly go off track, becoming distracted by perceived opportunities or overly focused on perceived threats. Or the owner simply gets bored! It is important to define what you do so you can be clear about what you will not do.

Getting this focus is what we are going to refer to as your bullseye. Some call it the sweet spot or core focus. In Good to Great, Jim Collins calls it ‘the Hedgehog’. In Japan, they have the idea of Ikigai. Your bullseye is the intersection of what you are passionate about, what you are good at, what your customer needs and what you can be paid for.

It is the Leadership Teams’ job to establish your businesses bullseye and not let anything distract you from it. There would have to be a very compelling reason to pursue business outside your bullseye.

Find your bullseye, stick to it and devote your energy and passions to being the best at it. Don’t be disheartened if it takes a few goes to get your Bullseye out and all Leaders aligned. 

Allow at least two hours for this activity.

Make sure you have at least two hours of uninterrupted time with the Leadership Team to answer the following 4 questions and have your first attempt at articulating what your bullseye is.

Start by asking each leader to answer the following questions. Once everyone has finished go around and have each person share what they have written. Put everyone’s answers on the board and open up the discussion for debate. Try and get to a bullseye statement you can all live with … for now. The Bullseye may need a few attempts to get it.

Our bullseye model can be represented like this:

What are you passionate about?

Great companies focus on what they are truly passionate about. Through crafting your owner’s story, your vision and purpose this should be clear by now. 

What are you great at?

A whole lot of passion with no competency is not a recipe for success. You can often understand a business’s core competency by looking at the owner’s own experience in a domain. It’s essential to be realistic about what the business can be good at. And not just average good but great – better than the competition.

A business can always hire in or develop competence, but when you are trying to determine your Bullseye, you want to focus on ‘your core competency’ – the ones that are part of your DNA. 

What do your customers need?

You need to be crystal clear about what the customer needs. Sadly, we have seen many businesses fail because the owner assumed they knew what the customer needed or wanted. 

Understanding your customer needs is not a do-once, set-and-forget exercise. It is important for the ‘customer’s voice’ to be in every decision you make about your product or market. In the previous pathway – Gather Inputs we talked about gathering inputs from customers before Building your Strategy for Success.

What you can be paid for?

You need to establish a fair commercial exchange that the customer sees as valuable while providing financial security to your business. Having just thought about what you are good at and what the customer needs now you will consider what you can be paid for. You may not get anything out other than your current commercial model but try and think out of the box a bit. There may be some hidden gems that could lead to some innovation in your commercial model. 

It can be helpful to see if there is an opportunity for some commercial arrangement that could include some form of an annuity or ongoing arrangement that would keep the customer close and therefore better served and support the business’ financial security.

Forming answers to those four questions give you an understanding of your bullseye. Sometimes its useful to summarise this in a single statement. An example might be:

We take a whole of school and community approach to delivering excellence across all six domains