The point here was, had I stay solely focused on being a good travel business, we would have missed an even bigger opportunity to evolve the business into a big travel media business. Continuing with another story from iExplore, there was a major pivot point in our history, when iExplore began to sell advertising on our website. But, my fellow executives passionately made their case to do a small advertising test on our website. But, in chasing that business, we quickly learned that the corporate incentive business is driven by a B2B sales team, not consumer marketers (and we didn’t have the right team with meeting planner relationships to be successful). And, that just wasn’t our consumer model (since we didn’t actually have to run the trips ourselves). They over-inflated the hype around their true product capabilities, which didn’t hurt them during the sales phase (only during the renewal phase when clients would drop them after being disappointed with the reality). The media business required less people to build, drove 3x the profitability and was very sticky with a high level of repeat clients.

One of my Red Rocket clients was a pioneer in their industry, had the largest market share by a wide margin, and was perceived as the best in the market. If you can zoom in on this map, the red dots show the 12 lots that have already been sold in this new area. The entrepreneur that can keep the team focused, and not easily distracted, is the one that will most likely and successfully get to the finish line. They would price their product at half of market value, trying to steal accounts and get their foot in the door, even if it meant big losses to their bottom line. Yes, even yours truly has fallen victim to a loss of focus during the early days of my executive career. And, this example from my iExplore days will pound home the point. So, the point here: don’t let your “flavor of the month” lead you down any rabbit holes, as those rarely bear fruit long term. These are known as activities, and lead indicators.

This term may hold complex definition in the financial dictionary but we are referring to the money wastage that may occur due to miss calculation of product information. You may have to enter the Wi-Fi password. There may be some confidentiality clauses in place which prevents some information being disclosed, but if you don’t ask you don’t get. Attempting to get into the corporate incentive business for iExplore, was the equivalent of me leading the team down a rabbit hole. I actually thought having the two business lines fighting with each other would create a good balance on the website, in terms of not letting the user experience get too gummed down by too many ads on the page. I really wanted to stay focused on being a travel revenue business only, as I thought the ads were going to clutter up the site and hurt the user experience. And, that ruffled a lot of feathers internally from our travel department, that thought that the media business was actually hurting the company. Co-Workers – Believe it or not, there will be some co-workers who dislike your hopping within the company. This can be repaired by Apple (but it is pricey and isn’t covered by warranty) but there are several places online to have the repair done for a much more reasonable price.

Although these useful devices are blamed for making us lazy, there is no doubt that without these things we will lose our social and personal life. The best way to define focus, is to give you a personal example of what focus is not. It is difficult, especially to do it in a fresh way each time. And, once the plan is set, your job as the CEO is to make sure your entire management team is staying focused on hitting those goals and not running down any new rabbit holes that come along over time. Focus, focus, more focus, will help you achieve your business goals a lot faster. In order to define the key business goals that the management team needs to focus on, that requires a more formal strategic business planning process. Some viral marketing plans even use alternate reality games in order to promote a particular product.

Besides that, Bitcoin mining rig operators can find a lot of eco-friendly mining alternatives in order to reduce their carbon footprints. And, the skillsets required for customer success, were a lot more than marketing; we need professional event planners and boots on the ground to be really successful. In some cases, the need would arise to work on weekends as well. In fact, you can place rental orders online as well. With a person’s achievement, you can know about an individual’s success in the market. And, most entrepreneurs don’t know how, or don’t take the time, to run that process. Here is a link to how to run a strategic planning process like this. Explore was a consumer portal to research and purchase adventure tours, where our primary strength was consumer marketing online, relying on ground operator partners to run the trips. Various factors like market research, branding, sales promotion, advertising, pricing strategies, consumer behavior, etc., also form important aspects of marketing. Which ultimately distracted us from focusing on continued success in our consumer business. While each business is distinctive, most take after a progression with practically identical sales stages. Just in the past two weeks we had board members with some great ebay sales.