Chief Thinker & Strategist at The Shattuck Group. I coach mid-sized professional services firms to their next level.
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Growing a mid-sized professional service firm is a big challenge. For over 20 years, I’ve worked with more than 70 leadership teams at mid-sized service firms. In that time, I’ve consistently encountered a situation that prevents leaders from achieving their goals. They are not highly protective—even jealous—of their focused energy.
You may not be familiar with this concept, so please allow me to explain. Focused energy is about time. Most of us have a certain time of the day, or even the month, when our minds are sharp, our thinking is clear, our bodies feel good and our brains just seem to work effortlessly. This is the time we are most likely to have epiphanies—when solutions just pop right into our brains—even after having thought about a particular problem for days, weeks or months on end. That is my definition of focused energy.
If you want to grow your mid-sized professional service firm, my advice is to know when you are most likely to have focused energy and reserve that time for nothing but solving your business’s biggest problems. I’ve discovered that when leaders zealously—even jealously—protect their focused energy, they become far more productive. More than that, they consistently solve problems that have held them back. The net result is growth.
What Do You Do With Focused Energy?
The idea of calendar blocking is pretty simple. You pick a few times a week to block off an hour or two when you’re unavailable for meetings and you turn off email and ignore your phone. That’s clear enough. But what do you do with that time? I recommend five activities:
1. Identify. Specifically describe to yourself, usually in writing, what big problem you want to solve right now. Get clarity about the nuances of the problem and write them down. The clearer the problem statement, the clearer your brainstorming can become.
2. Think. This is about brainstorming all the potential solutions you can think of today. Make an exhaustive list and then grade each option for what you consider to be its strengths and weaknesses. Don’t be afraid to go down rabbit holes.
3. Research. This is about getting input from outside resources. Sometimes this might mean sending the problem statement to a colleague or an advisor and getting their feedback. It might also mean reading case studies or books about how others have solved similar types of problems. Don’t rule out internet searches because these can produce a lot of good ideas.
4. Write. This is about choosing the best ideas you’ve identified to solve the business problem and articulating them in just a few sentences. The shorter the better.
5. Explore. This is about presenting your ideas to other people at your firm to get their feedback. I recommend that you ask people to punch holes in your logic. I call this “the meat grinder.” This is about discovering ideas that withstand scrutiny and pushback from people you trust. The meat grinder kills weak ideas but makes good ideas even stronger.
One of the biggest challenges I’ve encountered when working with executives at service firms is that they don’t take control of their calendars and arrange them to produce growth. Instead, they go with the flow, allowing busyness to masquerade as business: meetings, emails, texts, client contact. They work so much in the business that they forget to work on the business. Becoming jealous of your focused energy fixes that problem.
How I Learned About Focused Energy
I discovered the importance of focused energy in two ways. First, when I started my business in 1998, I discovered that time was not linear. I could show up in the office on certain days and be incredibly productive, getting more done in a few hours than I had gotten done in the previous days or even weeks. I began to ask myself—why does this happen?
Here’s what I now believe. I accidentally stumbled upon using my focused energy to solve our most pressing business problems. I did this because I could. As soon as I became an entrepreneur, I gained complete control over my schedule. I noticed that there were times when I just seemed to feel really good and during those times, I got a lot done. I began to use that time for the five steps I outlined above.
Now I didn’t have an epiphany every time I blocked off my calendar. Some days, it seemed like my sessions got me nowhere. It almost felt like a waste of time. But here’s what I learned. The more consistently I engaged in these focused energy sessions, the more frequently I had epiphanies. The more disciplined I was to do this, the better the quality of the epiphanies, too.
I believe business is about creativity and problem-solving—for us and our clients. I’ve proven time and time again that a single good idea is worth a million dollars or more. When the idea well dries up, it’s usually because leaders haven’t been diligently pumping it.
The second way I discovered focused energy has to do with clients. Numerous times a year, I’ll host sessions with my clients’ leadership councils. Before each session, I’ll ask leaders to identify what they believe to be the biggest problem the business faces today. I ask them to write problem statements.
When we get together, we plan breaks for checking emails, responding to voicemails and messages and other activities. But when we’re “in session,” phones are put away, laptops are closed and everyone focuses on a single topic at hand. This singularity of focus, along with the preparatory work on problem identification, yields very fruitful discussions and brainstorming.
There are moments in these rooms when the air feels almost electric, like some sort of energy field has taken over. In some instances, we’ll make more progress in two days on particularly challenging problems than they had made in two or more years.
That’s the power of using focused energy intentionally.
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