Focus is what you say no to, even when it pays

Saying no to bad work is easy.

Anyone can do it. It's practically a reflex.

The hard one is saying no to work that pays.

Focus isn't a feeling

For years I thought focus was something you had. Like a good memory or a straight back. You sat down, you concentrated, you were focused.

I don't think that anymore. I think focus is a list. Specifically, the list of things you've decided not to do.

The rest is just wanting to be focused. Which everyone does. Which helps nobody.

Focus isn't what you choose. It's what you're willing to lose.

If your list of "no" is empty, you don't have focus. You have a to-do list with ambitions.

Why it's so hard when nobody funds you

When a company has no investors and nobody to ask for money, every euro looks like oxygen. I know that feeling well. In the early years, saying no to a paying client felt almost irresponsible.

And the logic has a point. Services pay for the products. Maintenance pays for PagoCRM. More services, more fuel.

Except it doesn't scale like that. Every hour of a client is an hour that doesn't go to the product. That's the deal we chose. And when the hours that pay start eating the hours that matter, the deal stops working.

That's the trap. It isn't bad clients. Bad clients are easy to spot. The trap is the reasonable work, decently paid, that slowly turns you into someone you didn't plan to be.

A no with a date

This month we told our Kit Digital clients we were stopping. I won't retell the whole story here. The short version: it was money on paper, and it was costing us the thing we're proudest of, which is answering our clients properly.

What I want to keep from it is the order of the reasons.

The money was bad. But I suspect that if the money had been good, I'd still have had to stop. And that would have been much harder to do.

That's what scares me a little. Not the bad deals. The good ones that pull you in the wrong direction.

So I'm trying a simple test. Before saying yes to any work, one question: if this goes well, does it take us closer to what we want to be, or just further from being broke?

Both answers are allowed. But they're not the same answer.

Freedom before size, I keep saying. Focus is the boring, everyday version of that sentence. Size is saying yes to everything. Freedom is being able to afford the no.

Saying no to bad work is easy.

Saying no to work that pays is how you find out what your company is actually for.

P.S. I've added "say yes to fewer things" to my to-do list. It's the longest item on it.