An Equal Opportunist

by Jennifer Gleeson Blue, NYWSE member

I sit down in the morning and in front of me are three beverages - coffee with soy milk, cranberry juice and water. Drinking large amounts of good ol' H2O throughout the day, I supplement at 11am with a cup of hot, herbal tea. Just after Noon, I enjoy a mug of two-bag plain black tea. I may hit up the herbal stuff again before the work day ends and I move on to a glass of wine or a beer. And my entire day would feel askew if it didn't end with a hot cup of Yogi ginger or Celestial Seasoning's Tension Tamer tea.

As I told a friend the other day: I'm an equal opportunist when it comes to beverages.

Naturally, this hydration obsession got me thinking about business!

As entrepreneurs, we receive a whole lot of messages about the importance of specialization and finding a narrow niche. And this runs counter to our internal beliefs and fears telling us that by limiting the pool of prospects, we limit our potential for success. For some businesses, the latter may be true. For most of us, narrow makes sense.

In looking more closely at my beverage routine, I see that, while I'm an equal opportunist when it comes to beverage genre, I'm rather narrow when it comes to exact beverage choice. I'm also rather narrow when it comes to time of day to enjoy certain beverages.

In other words, I've specialized.

I'll be narrowing my focus this year in my business in an effort to:

1. attract more business
2. attract the kind of business I really want

To side-step the fear that this might limit my potential for success, I'm simply telling myself it's a 12-month experiment. If it works, I stick with it. If it doesn't, I am more than welcome to go back to being all things to all people.

I'll let you know how it goes. In the meantime, what about you? Are you willing to stop being an equal opportunist?

Jennifer Gleeson Blue, through her company Get There From Here, specializes in supporting creative and entrepreneurial professionals to live and work authentically, and in helping organizations create collaborative strategies to address intergenerational diversity.  Core to her methodology is the idea of story - the notion that people are living their lives, pursuing their careers and running their businesses based on deeply held and oftentimes subconscious narratives that guide them. She uses this as a touchstone to unlocking their potential.