Good ideas are killing your business

A ghostwriter recently posted on LinkedIn about getting rejected by a CEO.

The offer? Free LinkedIn ghostwriting. No strings attached. Write posts for the CEO's personal brand, build his thought leadership, grow his reach.

The CEO's response: "Thanks for the offer, but being LinkedIn famous isn't on the bingo card this year. I really need to focus."

The ghostwriter couldn't believe it.

He wrote an entire post about how the CEO was wrong. How he was "paying a tax on anonymity." How if you're fighting for meetings, struggling to hire, or explaining who you are on sales calls, you're leaving money on the table.

Then he shared his own data: 49 posts, 1.3 million impressions, thousands of profile views, tripled his MRR. That's 27,000 people seeing his face every time he hits post.

His message was clear: the CEO thinks fame is a distraction, but he's missing out.

Reading that post, I had the opposite reaction.

This is a CEO who gets it. But “LinkedIn fame” has nothing to do with my takeaway.

Morgan's post is a perfect example of how we rationalize our lack of focus.

This is the pattern. Someone offers you something—an opportunity, a partnership, a new initiative. Or you’ve got a new, big idea. And we start telling ourselves stories.

Story #1: There's massive upside. We convince ourselves the opportunity is too good to pass up—FOMO kicks in and we see all the potential wins.

In Morgan's case, it's 1.3 million impressions, thousands of profile views, tripled MRR. That's 27,000 people seeing your face every time you post.

But is the upside guaranteed? Or even realistic?

I see people complaining every day about posting on LinkedIn with zero traction. About launching new products that go nowhere. About partnerships that sounded amazing but delivered nothing.

You've got to be an optimist to build a business. But that same optimism helps us justify exaggerated expectations about upside.

And that says nothing of the opportunity cost of what you could be producing if you were hyper-focused on one thing.

Story #2: It'll be easy. We underestimate the scope—thinking something is one simple thing when it's actually ten different workstreams.

With Morgan's ghostwriting example, you think it's "he writes, I approve." It's an easy button.

But then you start and realize you've got to establish content pillars, nail the messaging, get the voice right, build a feedback loop, review and approve content, look at the data to see if you're getting results.

It's the same with new products ("just add this feature"), partnerships ("just a quick intro call each week"), or new markets ("we already know how to sell, just different buyers").

What looks like one thing frequently turns into ten with layers of hidden complexity we don’t see up front.

Story #3: It won't take much time. We underestimate the depth—how much time it actually takes to make something work well, not just get it started.

You think you'll just stroke a check and the ghostwriter handles everything. But you've got to invest hours establishing positioning. nailing down the content pillars, getting the voice right, iterating, reviewing content, and providing feedback.

Same thing happens with that new hire ("they'll be ramped in a month"), that software implementation ("30-day rollout"), or that content initiative ("just post once a week").

The time to launch something is nothing compared to the time to make it good.

And we justify it all with these little slivers. Let me add this one small thing. And this one. And this one.

Before you know it, it’s death to your calendar by a thousand cuts.

That CEO understood something Morgan didn't.

As tempting as it may have been, as easy as it would’ve been to minimize the time investment, he said no. Because he needed to focus.

And that's fucking hard.

It's harder than it sounds because we want the upside to be true: fast, simple, easy. But it’s how we end up taking on more than we can execute.

Trust me, no one knows this better than me.

I'm creative. I've got a ton of good ideas. I've got ADHD, which means I love starting shit and don't love finishing it. And I'm good at sales—so I can sell myself on an idea, then sell it to the team.

And if I’m not very intentional, we're marching down that new path with yet another distraction on our hands.

Which is exactly how businesses die.

And what I’ve learned over the years is, most people don't really know what real focus looks like.

Real focus means saying no to almost everything. People won't understand what you're doing—they'll tell you it's not that much work, it won't take that much time, why can't you just do this one thing?

Just like Morgan did with this CEO.

But would you rather make everyone happy in the short run, or achieve your goals in the long run?

2 years ago, I had five or six streams of revenue. But none were reaching their full potential.

I was making good money, but nothing was optimized. I was overwhelmed. Constrained for time. And spread way too thin.

Money was decent, but the business was incredibly frustrating.

This past year? We killed a whole bunch of shit.

We focused on one primary market. One primary service. And said no to virtually everything else.

We made that service really damn good. Laser focused on optimizing it, iterating it, hiring for it, systematizing it, making it scalable.

In less than a year, we went from zero to $93,000 a month in sales.

For a few years prior to that, I'd worked on multiple things trying to get a few of them to that same level. But I was trying to do too many things at one time.

One year of focus did what years of diversification couldn't.

And here's what nobody tells you: making the decision to focus is the easy part. Conceptually, we get it. Focus on one thing, you'll do it better. The benefits seem obvious.

But when you start to implement it, the anxiety kicks in. The FOMO screams at you. And you start selling yourself.

"But this one thing is doing $20K a month and only takes a few hours a week. Let me keep this one."

"And this one. And just this one too."

I've gone through this entire process more times than I can count. And I'm telling you—that's exactly how we stay distracted and let businesses die.

Focus is the thing that's going to accelerate your business more than anything else.

More businesses die from indigestion—trying to do too much—than they do from starvation.

There are always going to be more good ideas in your business than there is capacity to execute them really well. No matter how big the business gets.

The companies that win master the discipline of focus.

That CEO who said no to free ghostwriting? He wasn't wrong. He wasn't missing out.

He was protecting something more valuable than LinkedIn impressions—his ability to actually execute on what matters.

As it says in the book Essentialism: Do less, but better.

It may not feel like it in the short run. But in the long run? Your business, your team, your market, the margin on your headspace as a CEO—everything will be better for it.

Adios,

Ray