In the past 30 years, I’ve had the good fortune to be involved in 3 successful start-up companies and each became a leader in its niche. You might imagine there have been many peaks, valleys and “lessons learned” along the way. That’s why I loved writing   You Can’t Send a Duck to Eagle School  because I got to share my 28 simple truths of leadership. Enjoy this chapter titled: “When You Chase Two Rabbits, Both Will Escape.”

Excerpt from:
You Can’t Send a Duck to Eagle School
by Mac Anderson

At Successories in 1997, I learned about the power of focus the hard way. I didn’t – and I paid the price. Golf was the hot sport because Tiger Woods had just come on the scene. We decided to purchase a small catalog company called British Links, a leader in golf art and golf gifts. The logic was simple:

1. We understood the specialty catalog business, and were already mailing 20 million catalogs a year.
2. We understood the wall dcor/framing business. Successories had become one of the largest framers in the country and half of the British Links’ sales were from framed wall dcor.

I won’t bore you with the details of why this venture flopped, but within three years we sold the golf company for next to nothing. However, the most devastating part of the deal was not the money we lost from the sale of British Links, but the momentum we had lost growing Successories, our core business.

In hindsight, I was an idiot! It was like Ray Kroc saying, after having opened twenty McDonalds, it’s time to get into the pizza business. Many other businesses – like Starbucks and FedEx – focused their way to success. Repeat after me,

LESS IS MORE,

LESS IS MORE…

Author Jim Collins who wrote the best-seller, Good to Great, “nailed it” when he said: “In business, real discipline comes in saying NO to the wrong opportunities.”