In his entertaining book, “The Pumpkin Plan: A Simple Strategy to Grow a Remarkable Business in any Field”, author Mike Michalowicz shares several interesting ideas for growing a business.
One of them is based on the famous Pareto Principle. Pareto was an Italian economist from a couple centuries ago who noticed a pattern that often 80% of the country’s wealth came under the control of just 20% of the population. He noticed other similar patterns which we now know as the 80/20 rule.
Based on this premise, The Pumpkin Plan uses the analogy of growing a prize pumpkin by gathering the seeds of just the best pumpkins through the years, and concentrating all of that gigantic growth in a single pumpkin seed.
So the author recommends concentrating your focus on just 20% of your customers. He even goes so far as to say that you should give away the other 80% to someone else, and just focus all your time, energy and services upon your top 20% customers. In this way he has been able to grow and sell several large businesses. He recommends this same process for others.
Whether this will work in your situation or not, you will have to determine. it seems like a strategy more for service businesses than consumer or retail businesses. But he does raise some interesting thoughts about concentrating one’s energy in the small area where it will do the most good for all involved.