// chapter 03 of 13

Focus is division

Matt Roberts
By Matt Roberts, co-founder, ZOKRI
From Trading to Scaling, the free book

Focus is arithmetic, and almost nobody does the sum.

The numbers

Take a hundred-person company, because the arithmetic is easier to follow at that size. It has roughly 184,000 working hours in a year. Take holidays, sickness, and the honest amount of time that goes into email and meetings and the ordinary friction of a working week.

Most of that runs the business, and it should. Serving customers, closing books, shipping what is already promised, hiring, answering the phone. Call it seventy per cent, which is generous in its ambition.

That leaves about thirty person-years to change the company with.

Thirty person-years is a lot. It is also all of it. There is no second pool.

Now divide

I have sat in planning sessions where each member of a leadership team named their most important thing, in good faith, and the list came to eleven.

Divide thirty person-years by eleven priorities.

Two and three-quarter person-years each. Which is roughly one and a half people, part-time, on something the annual plan calls critical.

Nobody decided that. Nobody would have signed it off if it had been written that way. It is simply what eleven priorities mean once you divide, and the division never happens because nobody's job is to do it.

Why the sum works when the argument does not

Arguing about focus in the abstract is unwinnable, because everybody's priority is genuinely important. That is why the list gets to eleven: eleven people were right.

The division is different. It is not a judgement; it is a consequence. Nobody has to lose an argument for the arithmetic to change somebody's mind.

And it works in the other direction too. If you have three choices and thirty person-years, that is ten person-years each. Ten person-years is a real team, for a real stretch, with room to be wrong once. That is what a resourced choice looks like, and most leadership teams have never seen the number written down.

What it looks like on paper

Now ours. Four lines, and it fits on a napkin.

Figure 2 · Focus is arithmetic, and the division never happens
People200
Available hoursroughly 368,000
Share on running BAU70 per cent
Hours to change the company with110,000 · about 60 person-years
Current priorities9
Which is 6.6 person-years each.
Nine bets
6.6
6.6
6.6
6.6
6.6
6.6
6.6
6.6
6.6
Or three
20 person-years
20 person-years
20 person-years
Twenty person-years is a real team, for a real stretch, with room to be wrong once.

Then one question: would you fund that as an outsider?

Would you back nine separate bets with six person-years each, or three with twenty?