#godynamo

Okay, that last part requires some serious sleeve-rolling and can be loosely translated to meaning “success” but that in and of itself is always relative and indeed worthy of a separate blog post. For now, I’ll begin with how expert focus came to my attention and will then discuss the two most important elements of this notion and how it will affect you in 2014.

It started off as a blog post from the New York design, development and strategy house, Barrel, on the subject of “slimming down” their client roster. I then found myself thoroughly breaking down, line by line, one of the books referenced in the blog, “The Win Without Pitching Manifesto” by Blair Enns (I totally recommend it to all those looking for motivation and guidance to take their work to the next level). I am now as passionate about the subject of expert focus as I am about foosball and that my friends, as my colleagues at Dynamo can attest to, says a lot.

Although Enns’ book discusses twelve proclamations that every creative business should learn and apply to their enterprise, I am going to share what I believe to be the two most important: specialization and expertise. It is from these two, that the other proclamations can truly come to fruition.

The concept of specialization is simple in theory yet quite difficult to implement in reality and goes like this: as a creative person, your job is to choose a focus, position yourself as an expert on that focus and work day and night to support your claim of expertise. As result, your deepened expertise will be the critical element that will set you apart from others as your clients will hire you for your expertise, not your services. According to Enns, this is a fundamental business strategy that many creative firms have a hard time pinning down. It isn’t easy to make that bold decision to choose one path and one path alone. However, once you make that decision of positioning yourself as the go-to source for say, designing and developing online-only clothing retailer e-commerce websites, get ready to proverbially roll them sleeves up and expert-ize yourself (yes, I said expert-ize, it is the act of making an expert of yourself).

How does one become an expert? For starters, you must work hard and often on adding to and deepening your current skills and capabilities - ideally, those that complement your new focus. And, as Enns explains, the best way to accomplish this is to put pen to paper (or fingertip to keyboard, your choice) and write. Simply put, writing gets you found, formalizes your thinking, helps to solidify your claim to expertise and is the best way for you to deepen your knowledge. Enns also discusses the importance of getting into the habit of writing down your work process: document how you work; define how you want to work in the future; and, always be refining your approach to problem-solving. Essentially, always be writing because experts write.

So you now have your objective for 2014: become a focused expert. The only thing you really need to do is to make this objective your reality and unless you didn’t notice, the recurring theme throughout this post is to work. 

Work on improving your skills. Work on writing more. Heck, even the act of choosing a specialization requires considerable thought and hard work. Therefore, as the title above indicates, make 2014 the year of rolling up your sleeves and making things happen. The more you work, the more you bring to yourself and, ultimately, the more you can bring to others around you, including your clients.