How do I know what my core business is?

One of the aspects of running a business that we at Brath always try to pay close attention to is focusing on what is the very core of our operations—not on other things. We often fail at this, but we are getting better.

Doing what you’re good at sounds simple, but it’s actually a difficult exercise. Above all, it can be hard to stay away from things you probably shouldn’t be doing. And then there’s the balance between sticking to the core and learning new skills as an organization. When it comes to the basics of our business, things are fairly straightforward—at least for us. We work with driving profitable traffic from search engines. The activities surrounding this, however, raise more questions. For example, should we really manage accounting and bookkeeping ourselves?

What is core business?

There are many definitions of core business. A good one might be: the activity that makes up the service or product you generate revenue from, or the part of it that is unique to your company. In many ways, it’s what you said to yourself when you decided to start your company: “That’s it, I’m quitting my job and starting a company that…”

If, when you introduce your company in an elevator pitch, you don’t say, “We’re an agency that reports our operations to the tax authority and cleans our own office space,” then perhaps outsourcing cleaning and accounting makes sense. But if your business is giving motivational talks, it would be both difficult and risky to outsource that service to another company.

How we choose to prioritize

The idea is simple: if it’s core business, then we must do it ourselves. If it’s not, then someone else can handle it. Let me share an example where we’ve made a clear decision, because we know what we want. Let’s talk about recruitment.

Recruitment as core business

In my view—and I know the rest of Brath’s leadership team shares this—if you are growing as a company, you need to recruit constantly. It’s an exhausting process, it takes a lot of time, involves endless administration, and sometimes you end up hiring the wrong person and have to start over. It would be tempting to let someone else, more specialized, handle recruitment.

Despite this, our view is that getting the right person in the right place is so critical to the type of business we run that recruitment is one of our core activities. Growth is part of our company’s mission, and that means we must own recruitment. If it leads to headaches, wasted time, or mistakes, so be it. If we’re not good enough, we need to learn.

Content?

An interesting question for us is whether producing content is part of our core business. Today, we have a relatively large department dedicated to content production. It has also been part of our operations from the very beginning and was a cornerstone in some of our first major contracts. We’ve earned solid revenue from producing and publishing content.

Content is often also a major part of SEO (which is without doubt a core activity for us). Still, we’ve given a resounding “Maybe” to whether content is a core business area. For us, content production supports SEO, but what we actually sell to our clients is our expertise in search engines. Since content often turns out to be the solution to a problem, it doesn’t necessarily make it the core.

We buy in a fair amount of content today, in several different languages. But we also produce more ourselves than we purchase.

Where do you draw the line—and does it matter?

I realize not every company shares our perspective (of course), but for us it feels extremely important to ensure that we handle our own core tasks. Partly because of the long-term perspective we want: if you need to recruit for the next 30 years, it’s wiser to get good at it than to hire outside help. That’s about becoming better at it on a personal level as well as building an organization that excels at it.

It’s also about having a purpose greater than just money. Sure, you can outsource even parts of your core activity from time to time, but there has to be a will in the organization to master the craft you’ve chosen to pursue. Technically, we could choose to be “just” a sales organization (and there’s nothing wrong with that—core business is simply different in that case), getting clients and outsourcing specialists to solve their challenges. But that would mean we’re not being who we want to be, and it would limit our growth in the long run, even if it might earn us some extra money today.

Sitting down and writing down where the boundaries lie is hard—unless it’s just an exercise on paper. Unfortunately, I don’t have any better answer (and would gladly hear your thoughts) than that you must start from the heart and draw conclusions from there. Start with “What do I want?” and let that define what you should do.