As someone who blogs (a lot), is starting to appear with greater frequency in conference programs and who has a book coming out, I tend to get a fair amount of unsolicited job inquiries appearing in my mailbox. Some I dismiss completely, but others I will at least open up the company web site. What I am looking for in small, startup-ish companies is not the technology, or the industry, or anything along those lines.

What I am looking for is whether I can determine what they do without having to use the word ‘and’.

In my experience, quality requires disciple in all aspects of an organization. Including its mission and reason.

We help individuals, [and] non-profit organizations, [and] cities, and enterprises do (this), [and] (this), and (this) is a pretty strong indicator that quality is being sacrificed in favor market reach.

And really, that is a perfectly valid strategy from a business perspective. But from a quality one it is atrocious. Those three markets have very different drivers and feature requirements. By targeting all three what you are essentially doing is splitting your attention three different ways resulting in three 1/3 completed products. Instead of that strategy, why not pick one and absolutely dominate it in terms of features and quality. Then take on the next.

Similarly, the three actions mentioned above are also a concern, but not necessarily as bad a one. It all depends on where in the growth curve the company is. For a brand new company it is a huge problem. You should absolutely kick ass with one action before expanding into another.

But! By constraining focus to a laser point are you not turning your back a large part of the market?

Yes. If quality is your goal, you will be rewarded.

Imagine that the market for your multi-limbed product is 100M per year and split into four, clear, sub-markets of 25M each. You could try to fight in all of them and win some battles but generally tread water as you have to spread your efforts across four distinct audiences and this results in say 20M and a reputation in the market as meeting requirements, but meh customer experience or joy. Or, you could focus in on a single segment, kicking ass along the way, still make 20M per year as the dominant force and have an awesome reputation in the market.

As someone who is deeply rooted in the idea of delivery a quality product, the latter option is much more compelling a story.

To a business owner though I completely understand why it would not be. Narrow focus companies tend to be smaller in terms of potential revenue and have a slower growth curve; two items that often run counter to why the company was started. Narrow companies are (likely) not going to change or save the world either. They can however change or save a specific segment of it which hopefully is enough.

So how about your company? How many ‘Ands’ do you need to describe it? And what can you do to decrease the ands and increase the quality?