A few years ago, a friend who is also an entrepreneur told me what he was doing to transform his business. “It starts with focus,” he said, before going on to describe several very specific actions, all of which had to do with focus.

At the time I thought it was his passion that had intrigued me, but in fact what really struck me was the concept of focus. I now realize that I didn’t understand focus before, and therefore couldn’t comprehend its power.

Recenly, I was golf-ing with friends, and for the fourth consecutive game, I was playing horribly. My mind was on our business and my family, not on golf. After the front nine, I had marked 54. Bogeys, double bogeys, triple bogeys—even a quad ran rampant. No pars. At the 10th hole, I started to concentrate and managed to focus on that particular swing. I shot 36. For those who don’t know anything about golf, 54 is a very bad score, and 36 is actual par. I don’t think I’ve ever played with anyone who shot par. It was an exhilarating success, and a feeling I had never experienced in golf before.

I thought about that score for a long time. I stared at the card. There had to be something more to it, but in the end I could only attribute the successful swing to focus.

I recalled my friend’s commitment to focus driving his business. Since then, I have started to notice what happens when you are completely focused on one thing. Enormous amounts of work get done, the path becomes clear, you set out to accomplish something and it gets

done, success results, and you actually know that you’ll meet or exceed your objectives.

We’re now going through a focused transformation of our business. We’re redefining our objectives and aligning our people to meet those goals, and our communal focus is aimed at achieving them. I’m spending most of my time with clients so that the company is in a position to understand their needs and objectives, and, as a result, we can work to achieve both our goals and our clients’ goals.

Our plan is to become employee oriented, customer centric, and sustainable—environmentally, socially, and within the community. In our research we find that,more and more, an intense focus on the people in the business and their relationships with customers, the community, and the environment results in profits.

Many readers will be miles ahead of me when it comes to understanding the great power of focus. There are hundreds of companies in our region that already possess people-oriented, customer-driven, and socially responsible business plans. Many have helped me understand how my business needs to operate.

After more than 20 years of slugging it out in the trenches of one of the more challenging sectors, I’m strangely serene. I now know the path that must be followed in order to succeed at this business. I’m so confident, in fact, that my “focused friend” and I are going to go out and try to shoot par on a full 18.