I've been in a lot of planning meetings where the room felt smart and the outcome was dumb.
Not dumb in an obvious way. No bad ideas. No unserious people. Usually the opposite. Good leaders. Sharp operators. Healthy debate. Everybody trying to help.
That's what makes it tricky.
You can sit in one of those meetings for two hours and hear ten completely reasonable ideas for growth. A new channel. A new offer. A stronger brand story. A better outbound motion. A retail push. More content. More partnerships. A bigger test budget. A fresh look at a segment you have not cracked yet.
By the end, the whiteboard is full and everybody feels like progress was made.
And sometimes I leave those meetings thinking, I do not think we made a single real decision in there.
We just gave ten things permission to stay alive.
That, to me, is where a lot of companies get in trouble.
They say they have a growth problem. Revenue is flatter than they want. One channel is underperforming. The pipeline is inconsistent. The business is not compounding the way they expected.
So they go looking for another lever.
Sometimes there really is another lever. I'm not against new ideas. I'm not against testing. I'm not against expanding at the right time.
But I've seen a lot of teams diagnose "we need more growth" when the real issue was "we have not focused long enough or hard enough for the right things to work."
That's a different problem.
It's also a more uncomfortable one, because it means the answer is not always sitting out there somewhere waiting to be found. Sometimes the answer is buried inside work you already started and got distracted from.
This is where I think some of Alex Hormozi's earlier stuff was directionally right. Too many offers, too many audiences, too many channels, too many ideas. At some point, all of that stops being ambition and starts becoming self-sabotage. Not because the ideas are bad, but because divided attention kills the repetitions required to get good.
That part matters more than people admit.
Most companies do not fail because they had no opportunities. They fail because they had too many, and nobody had the stomach to narrow the field.
That sounds simple. In practice, it almost never is.
Because lack of focus in a real company rarely looks irresponsible. It usually looks thoughtful.
It sounds like: "I just don't want us too dependent on one channel." "We should probably test this too." "I agree that's the priority, but I don't think we can ignore this other thing." "Let's keep it on the table for now."
None of those are crazy things to say. In isolation, they can even be wise.
But stack enough of them together over a year, and you end up with a business that is active in a dozen directions and excellent in none of them.
That is the part people miss. Focus is not about aesthetics. It is not about making the strategy slide cleaner. It is not just a founder cliché.
Focus is how a business learns.
If you keep changing the bet, changing the message, changing the channel, changing the audience, changing the offer, you never stay with anything long enough to find out what is actually true. You get surface-level data. You get early signals. You get opinions dressed up as learnings.
But you do not get depth.
You do not get the kind of learning that only comes from staying in the work long enough for patterns to show themselves. You do not get to see whether the channel is bad or whether your execution is bad. You do not get to see whether the offer is weak or whether the message is weak. You do not get to see whether the market is tapped out or whether the handoff, onboarding, or pricing is the actual problem.
You just keep moving.
And movement is dangerous because it can feel a lot like traction from the inside.
I've seen businesses burn a shocking amount of energy this way. Not in spectacular flameouts. More in a slow, respectable dilution. Lots of activity. Lots of updates. Lots of things in motion. But underneath it, no real concentrated force.
Everybody is working. Nobody is idle. But the company is spread so thin that nothing gets enough pressure behind it to break through.
That's why I've come to think focus is less about picking priorities and more about killing them.
Every company can make a list of what matters. That part is easy. The hard part is deciding what does not get attention right now, even if it has a champion, even if it has logic behind it, even if someone important in the room still believes in it.
That's where focus gets real.
Because once you actually choose, something loses.
A channel loses. A project loses. A market loses. A product idea loses. Someone's pet initiative loses.
And now the conversation is no longer conceptual. Now it's relational. Political, even. Now a leader has to tell a smart person that their smart idea is not where the business needs to put its weight. Now somebody has to disappoint a team. Now somebody has to stop using "we're exploring a few things" as a cover for the fact that the company has not made a hard call.
That is why so many companies avoid real focus. Not because they do not understand it. Because they do.
They just do not want the consequences that come with it.
They want the upside of focus without the pain of exclusion. They want to be known for something without letting go of all the other things they could also maybe be. They want channel diversification before channel mastery. They want a sharper strategy without having to shut any doors.
And I get it. I really do. In a lot of businesses, saying no feels risky.
But saying no is often the only thing that gives your yes any power.
The businesses I've seen break through were usually not the ones with the most ideas. They were the ones willing to stay with the right idea longer than other people had the patience for. They kept working the message. They kept refining the offer. They kept fixing the handoffs. They kept looking at the same friction points until they understood them well enough to actually remove them.
They did not keep reintroducing novelty every time the work got boring.
And that may be the part worth saying out loud: a lot of teams do not abandon strategy because the strategy failed. They abandon it because the middle got boring.
The early part of any growth initiative is energizing. New deck. New language. New targets. New excitement. Then a few weeks go by and now it is just work. Same funnel. Same message. Same problems. Same review. Same hard questions. Less novelty. Less adrenaline.
That's where weak teams start shopping for new ideas.
Strong teams usually get sharper there.
So when I hear a company say it has a growth problem, I'm not always convinced.
Sometimes the issue is real. Sometimes there is a broken model, bad economics, a weak product, a shrinking market. Those things happen.
But a lot of the time, the more honest diagnosis is that the company has too many priorities, too many half-commitments, and too little shared conviction. It is overfed on ideas and underfed on discipline.
That is not the same thing as a growth problem.
That is a focus problem.
And focus, at least from what I've lived, is not about becoming simplistic. It is about creating the conditions for something to finally work. It is about giving the right things enough time, enough pressure, and enough organizational clarity to tell you whether they were right.
Most companies do not need more possibilities.
They need the courage to stop hiding inside them.
Questions I'd ask if I were in the room:
What are we pretending is a priority that is really just still on life support?
Where are we calling something a "test" when what we really mean is we are not ready to commit?
What have we restarted so many times that we have never actually learned?
Which few things, if they truly worked, would matter most?
What is staying alive because it is important, and what is staying alive because nobody wants to kill it?
If we had to grow with fewer bets, not more, what would come off the table first?