Should we pursue small revenue opportunities or stick to our main game?

There are some small revenue opportunities we could pursue, good ideas but not core to our business. Should we do them or stick to our main game?

Is it worth the bother? That’s what I found myself wondering last week when the CEO of Company B told me that his business was starting three little revenue offshoots. The new revenue streams looked to me to be very small and non-core and I couldn’t work out for the life of me why they would want to start doing them.

Puzzled I asked the CEO. He agreed that the revenue streams were largely irrelevant to the business but “a few people had suggested it and it won’t be that much work anyway,” he said. Not that much work maybe but surely enough to distract someone from a more important task.

It reminded me of a conversation I had had with a Rabbi just a couple of weeks earlier. The Rabbi oversees the running of a busy community kitchen staffed entirely by volunteers and he told me how supporters, volunteers and the wider community just love to bring him ideas. “That’s great,” I said, but I had misunderstood. “It’s not great,” he replied, “anyone can have ideas. It’s actioning them in a worthwhile way that’s the hard part and where are the ideas-people when you need someone to roll their sleeves up to make it happen?”

It’s very welcoming to have unsolicited ideas, it means that someone values you and your business enough to make a suggestion. And some of these ideas may indeed be masterpieces. But because most people outside the business have a scant understanding of your strategy many of the ideas are likely to be marginal. That’s not to say you should necessarily ignore suggestions but I’d rather you back your own judgment and measure them up against the direction and priorities you have set for the business.

Over at the community kitchen the Rabbi runs a lean, boot-strapped business with a great sense of purpose. No marginal ideas are tolerated here because they detract from the core deliverable. When you are as focussed as the Rabbi it’s easy to dismiss irrelevant ideas. And because he asks people to put their money where their mouths are – if they have an idea they are invited to help implement it – the ideas are to some extent filtered.

Company B would tell you that they are resource poor, but they are in the luxury league compared to the community kitchen and accordingly can afford to tinker with little sidelines. But, like all businesses, they have a number of competing strategic priorities, priorities that won’t get done if the business continues to pursue it’s funny little, barely profitable, off-shoots.

Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses:Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses. Julia is the author of “How to Bake a Business” and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).