The Hardest Word in Business
Last week, I left a strategy workshop with 30 entrepreneurs doing anywhere from $500K to $30M in revenue.
There was a lot of talk around growth strategies, scaling challenges, and what’s working now.
But the most consistent—and most overlooked—theme that came up?
The better you are at saying no, the faster you grow.
Not just to bad ideas.
Not just to distractions.
But to good ideas.
Ideas that will work.
Because focus isn't just about choosing what to pursue. It's about having the discipline to eliminate everything else—even when it makes money, even when it excites you, even when it’s “almost right.”
Why Saying No Gets Harder as You Grow
Early in the journey, it’s easier to spot what not to do. Your resource-constrained, product-market fit is shaky, and you’re just trying to survive.
Bad ideas are obvious. The signal-to-noise ratio is low. You need cash now, and most ideas won't get you there.
But as you grow?
The options multiply. Your team gets stronger. Your runway gets longer. Suddenly, most of the ideas are good. Many of them will probably work.
That’s when things get dangerous.
Because growth requires tradeoffs. And if you don’t say no to some of the good ideas, you’ll never create the capacity for the great ones.
Success Is in the Sequence
I’m working with a client right now who runs a $5M IT company with great margins and a solid team.
We’re engineering a scalable sales engine to 3x their growth—and there are several viable strategies we could pursue:
Launch a Dream 100 campaign to land strategic accounts
Set up cold outbound with an SDR/BDR
Start marketing outreach with content and direct mail
Run paid ads to target and retarget prospects
All of them could work.
But we had to make a call: Which one are we doing now?
Because doing all of them at once is a guaranteed way to dilute the impact of each—and slow everything down.
It’s like baking a chocolate cake.
Sure, you need the right ingredients.
But you’ve got to apply them in the right order.
Otherwise, you’re getting something other than a delicious cake.
How to Focus (and Stay Focused)
Saying no sounds simple. Doing it is anything but.
So how do you create the clarity and discipline to focus on the one thing that matters most?
Here’s what’s helped me (and my clients) stay locked in:
1. Identify the One Constraint
Start by evaluating your business objectively. What’s the one bottleneck that, if solved, would make everything else easier?
A sales problem? Maybe.
But if you don’t have sales because you don’t have leads—maybe it’s a lead gen problem.
And if you don’t have leads because your offer isn’t strong, then it’s likely an offer problem.
Or—if you’re guessing at your offer because you don’t know what your audience really wants—then you have a market insight problem.
Solve that, and the rest falls like dominos.
Peel back the layers. Get to the root. Then build your strategy around that single constraint.
2. Let Fires Burn
Some tasks will be left undone. That’s not a failure—it’s focus.
But if you stay so busy fighting fires that you never build any form of fire prevention, you’re setting yourself up for an infinite loop. It never ends.
You have to carve out time from firefighting to build systems that prevent the fires in the first place.
Otherwise, you’re just staying busy—not making progress.
3. Reduce the Noise
It’s hard to let fires burn when they’re in your face all day. The question is: how do you filter out the urgent so you can focus on the important?
Here are a few ways to insulate your focus:
Turn off notifications
Check Slack or email just once or twice a day
Hire a virtual assistant to triage incoming messages
Block focused work time where no one can reach you
Create a buffer between you and the noise so you can protect the attention your most important work requires.
4. Revisit Priorities Regularly
Focus isn’t a one-time decision—it’s something you have to reaffirm, again and again.
Personally, I meet with a group of advisors every quarter to re-evaluate my top constraint and ensure I’m still solving the right problem.
But you don’t need a formal advisory board to do this.
You could:
Block a solo strategy day with no meetings or notifications
Hire a coach to help challenge your assumptions
Use a journal or whiteboard session to reflect and reorient
Even run the exercise with an AI assistant if that’s your style
Whatever the method, build a cadence that lets you pause, reflect, and reset.
Final Thoughts
After my recent strategy session, I left with renewed clarity.
And that clarity didn’t come from deciding what to do next—it came from deciding what not to do.
We’ve made the strategic decision to focus on the long-term growth of our SDR Accelerator for MSPs. That’s required tough calls, like retiring certain revenue-generating programs to create the execution bandwidth and mental clarity to make it happen.
We’ve even paused active sales outreach for the Accelerator—even though it’s working—so we can improve the program before scaling it further.
If you know me, you know saying no to sales doesn’t come naturally. But prioritizing long-term growth over short-term gains is the bet we’re making.
So, I’ll leave you with this:
If you’re not saying no to things that are hard to say no to, you’re probably not focused. The better you get at saying no, the faster you grow.
