To Find Your Next Great Business Idea, Narrow Your Focus

image credits to shutterstock
When you’re just starting out in business, narrowing your target market can be difficult for fear you’ll be excluding part of your potential customer base.
But if you can clearly define a market and its needs upfront, you can tailor your product or service offerings narrowly to meet that demand and quickly gain more wallet share than your competitors.
Related: How to Target Your Message to Find Customers
What exactly does this mean?
1. You could be like the enterprising young woman in northern California who discovered a secondhand store’s almost hidden section of distinctive children’s clothes and toys. As it turned out, the store’s owners wanted out of what they saw as a dead-end business. The woman took over the lease and reoriented the entire operation to focus only on children’s products, turning a 1,200-square-foot “dead-end business” into an 800-square-foot startup that was profitable in six months and expanded into a new downtown location.
2. You could be like the mechanic who went through the lengthy and fairly expensive process of getting his auto dealer’s license so he could go to the local car auction to make bids, specifically on older model BMWs. He didn’t want to sell the whole cars, but rather to take them apart and create a line of aftermarket parts for BMW owners and mechanics.
3. You could be like the computer repair technician who decided to strike out on his own in the highly competitive field of information-technology services, only to discover a more specialized market that offered higher rates, more loyal customers and more referral business. That narrow market turned out to be Apple computers.
These examples illustrate a general truth about business opportunity: The true opportunity may not be apparent at the outset. Niches exist in every broad category, and your job as an entrepreneur is to figure out what they are and whether they offer a profitable business opportunity.
Related: Three Ways to Find an Edge in a Crowded Market
Looking at the marketplace this way could also change your thinking on the true nature of a startup. There’s no rule that says you must start from scratch, in your garage or the back bedroom of your house.
Simply walk or drive along any street and you’ll pass any number of businesses struggling to make ends meet because they aren’t selling what their market truly wants or needs. Like the owners of the dead-end secondhand store, they may not even know what their best-selling and highest profit items are -- or that those very specific items are sitting in a neglected section of their store or office.
Category leaders tend to be highly focused, and many times, that focus can appear too narrow. But companies with focus grow precisely because their niche is so distinctive. If you think this applies only to the small retail store or the Macintosh repairman, take a look at what BrandZ, a division of WPP, lists as the 10 most valuable brands in the world:
1. Apple
2. IBM
3. Google
4. McDonald’s
5. Microsoft
6. Coca-Cola
7. Marlboro
8. AT&T
9. Verizon
10. China Mobile
These companies have built their business on a single word: focus. In the case of top-ranked Apple, its greatest success has come from a single product, the iPhone.
Related: How to Maintain the Focus to Run a Business (Video)
So start to expand your focus by doing a more narrow analysis of your market and what people are buying -- or would buy if given the option. Don’t worry about the sales you might be missing by not offering everything to everybody. Your narrow focus could deliver more business than you can handle, producing higher-margin cash flow to enrich your bottom line.
The author is an Entrepreneur contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.
Brad Sugars is the founder and chairman of ActionCOACH. As an entrepreneur, author and business coach, he has owned and operated more than two dozen companies including his main company, ActionCOACH, which has more than 1,000 offices in 34 countries.

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The $340 Million Die Hard Entrepreneur “Gurbaksh Chahal” Shares His Advice For Success

I was fortunate enough to catch up with the $340 Million Silicon Valley Entrepreneur “Gurbaksh Chahal” this week to find out what it takes to succeed in life and in business.

Gurbaksh had sold 2 successful online advertising companies by the age of 25 for a total of $340 Million and is onto his 3rd and biggest company yet, RadiumOne. Gurbaksh will be launching RadiumOne in over 70 markets and is excited to announce that Australia is one of them.

Read on to find out what it takes to become a successful entrepreneur like Gurbaksh Chahal

Success Advice From A Die Hard Entrepreneur

Joel – The first company you created “Click Agents” was founded by you at the age of 16 and not long after that, it sold for $40 million. Nine years later you sold your second company “Blue Lithium” to Yahoo for $300 Million. Making close to half a billion dollars in the space of 9 years, can you tell us, is there some secret formula that we should know about?

Gurbaksh
– Well I think the secret formula comes down to success in general, and you’ve got to constantly keep an open mind, be creative, and don’t be afraid to re-invent yourself.
When I was 16 I didn’t really have a clue about business, so you could say “I got lucky
“, whatever that means. The second time around I learned what it was really like to be a CEO and I believe that both of these opportunities have prepared me for my current company, by every metric whether it’s revenue, size, opportunity, mission or geography, Radium One is the biggest of all of my endeavors.

Joel – Do you believe it when they say “Ignorance is bliss”? Do you feel that when you were younger that maybe you were a bit ignorant and that could be the reason why you didn’t see a lot of the obstacles ahead of you that some of the more experienced and older entrepreneurs would have been scared of?

Gurbaksh
– I wouldn’t say “Ignorant”, I think the thing that was probably my biggest virtue was that I didn’t know the meaning of failure. I think the older you get with the traditional message of schooling, or the methods of society, whether it’s family, friends or situational you end up trying to play it safe. At 16 I didn’t really know what I could lose. There is an essence of, when you are fearless, you become more creative, and the more fearless I became, the more creative I was.

Joel – What would you say has been one of the biggest fears you have ever faced and what did you do to overcome it?

Gurbaksh
– So here’s the thing, there is constant fear in business. You’ve got to have the stamina to realise that is the very path to success and you’ve got to be able to stomach it. There has been several times when I have put everything on the line and I have had to re-invent myself or I’ve had to hire a completely new leadership team and make significant product changes and all of those were betting the company on something. All of those are triumphs to success, so there’s no real path, success is never linear, it’s almost like a hockey stick. The more risk you take, the more of a U-Shape formula you should end up with.

Joel – I just came back from a holiday in “India“, I understand you were born there but grew up in San Francisco. One stand out thing that I noticed over there is that they are very committed to their traditions.

Do you still carry on any traditions from the motherland?

Joel – How do you balance your life? I find it a challenge at times to balance mine, and I only run a blog and a couple of other business ventures so I could only imagine that you would have your plates pretty full most days.

Gurbaksh
– From a cultural stand point and a family stand point I am Indian by heart, but at the same time I’m probably more spiritual at the end of the day, and that’s defined in the inner you and I think that defines who we are as people.
Living a life that has a greater purpose and living up to it is the ultimate degree that we should strive for.


Gurbaksh
– At the end of the day, you have to look at Success itself as a balance. There are a significant amount of things that you have to do to achieve happiness at the end of the day but you’ve got to have balance and there are a number of things that we need to do as Entrepreneurs to be successful but what is success at the end of the day? Is it your bank account? Or is it happiness? And I think that at the end of the day it’s happiness.

In an article I did for LinkedIn, I talked about Un-plugging yourself from the wired world. The importance of continued learning, giving back, less over thinking, being grateful for what you have, realising that relationships are everything in life, making peace with your past, being authentic and learning how to forgive.

Gurbaksh
– One of the key paths to technology is that it changes significantly and quickly. I have been blessed as I have stuck to my roots of advertising technology and I have been given the opportunity to re-shape it and create it 3 times around now and I think the key secret there is that you should stick to what you know.

I’m a very different entrepreneur than many others. I look at Elon Musk and think of him as a genius because he is that guy that can juggle many different things in many different industries, but I don’t think many of us can do that. Even when you look at the late Steve Jobs, he re-defined 8 different industries. I, on the other hand just stuck to my core which I think is kind of a testament were “If you can do everything that’s great, but if you can be really great at just one thing then that’s also not bad.
” I have looked at that as an opportunity and a blessing to continue to innovate.
Part of the key metrics to success in an enterprise is to know how far you are really willing to take it. Are you pushing the boundaries? You can’t make safe bets. Even today, 4 years into this, 300 employees worldwide, profitability, significant amount of revenue and so forth, the decisions I make as the CEO goes from choosing the color palette on the website, choosing the design of what the reporting looks like, down to what the product ends up becoming.
So you really have to:
Be someone who pays attention to detailBe creativeProblem solveAnd always be creative with the way you solve those problems.
Gurbaksh
– I think success is defined by understanding purpose. If you live a life of purpose then you’ll never be bored.
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