Staying focused in a business is critical to the success of the business. Over the past 20 years, I've had the great pleasure of working with some fantastic companies. I've also been dragged through the gut wrenching experience of working with companies who refuse to focus. The companies that refuse to focus are so busy grasping for every bit new business they can, that they don't focus on any particular business.

Let me use an example of a specific home builder to illustrate the point. The builder himself and all the partners were good people. They all had a technology background and created a business working within a 3-D visual environment. There was a reasonably unique concept for a custom home builder. The buyer could walk in and walk through their house virtually speaking on a 60 inch big screen. Picking colors and changing the floor plan as they took their virtual tour. It was a very exciting process.

The problem came in actually building the house. The salesman who was also one of the partners couldn't suppress his technology side. Every house he built was a new experience. It was a new experience for the subcontractors, a new experience for the office and a new experience for the customer. As we talked about before, becoming an expert takes 5,000 to 10,000 hours. For a heart surgeon completing 500 procedures before they are considered extremely proficient probably compares to a builder building a hundred or so similar homes. This builder was grabbing any customer he could, and failing to focus on a single home type and customer type.

Three very successful custom builders I know all follow a focused building system to the letter. Every home is different in its floor plan layout and feel, yet the overall construction technique is the same on every house. As a subcontractor, we know exactly what to expect. We know what the builder expects, and we know what the other subcontractors expect. Imagine if you had to go to work everyday and find out it was a different office, and it was your job to figure out how to get into the office and find everything you needed to work before you could even start work. How can that ever create focus that leads to success?

In contracting most of our misery is caused by fixed-price contracts. The builder who didn't stay focused increased our costs and headaches exponentially. Since it is very rare for us to get a time and materials contract, we continued to work with this builder for some time before we changed the rules. It was a big mistake on our part to let him get us out of focus for so long before we changed the rules. The builder is no longer in business.

By the third house with this builder, we realized we had no idea how to price for this guy. The very first house we did was a typical 2 x 4 single story constructed home. The second house was a 2 x 4 single story constructed home with foam insulation sprayed in. The third house, used metal frame construction with packed foam. Each of these houses required us to use a completely different technique and different tools in order to do our job. The expense for us as a subcontractor made these jobs very unprofitable.

Since each subcontractor had to learn how to do their job over on each of those three homes, the projects took significantly longer than planned. Homeowners would become frustrated, the builder would have cash flow problems and eventually subcontractors started walking off the job. The contractor became so desperate to keep subcontractors. He would beg them to get anything done.

On one of the jobs, the homeowner wanted to add a home generator. Desperate for cash flow and seeing this as another income opportunity, the contractor begged the electrician to install one. The electrician finally agreed. By the time the homeowner moved in, the electrician still hadn't figured out how to get the generator working correctly. Two weeks after the homeowner was living in the house electrician decided to test the generator. As luck would have it one of our technicians was there and I was pulling into the driveway. Within 45 seconds, the computer in the study burst into flames and started burning a brand-new hardwood floor.

With quick thinking our technician grabbed the fire extinguisher from his truck and put out the fire. The incident led to a lawsuit and damage to everyone's reputation that worked on the job, including ours. What the electrician did was reverse wire the safety switch. This switch is supposed to disconnect main electric power any time the generator turns on. In normal circumstances, the power fails and the generator turns on keeping the house powered. The switch disconnects the main power grid so that when power comes back on, you don't have two sources of electricity supplying the house.

In this case the master safety switch did not flip, and both the generator and utility company powered the house. In a very strange electrical anomaly the voltage remained at 120 since the systems were parallel. The problem was the fact that the systems were out of phase. The phase is the number of times the electricity goes up and down every second through the wires.

In the United States, we use 60 Hz electrical systems’, meaning the voltage goes up and down 60 times every second. By being out of phase this house now had electricity going up and down 120 times each second. This caused several transformers to overheat and melt down in a matter of seconds. The most critical was a cheap surge protected outlet, which burst into flames catching the computer and the new wood floor on fire.

All of this resulted from a builder who couldn't focus on just building a good home.