From Good To Great: 5 lessons for bloggers and online business owners

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Ever wondered what makes the difference between a successful business and an unsuccessful one? Here are 5 key lessons from From Good To Great by Jim Collins…

Have you ever wondered what makes the difference between a successful business and an unsuccessful one?

That is the question that one of my favourite business books, From Good To Great by Jim Collins, seeks to find the answer to.

Jim Collins (and his large team of researchers) sifted through hundreds of companies to find just a handful that not only went ‘from good to great’ but stayed there. And then they analysed those ‘good to great’ companies and compared them to their near rivals who did not make the same leap to uncover the ‘secrets’ of how a company can go from good to great.

While some of this book is not directly applicable to blogging, there are 5 key lessons we as bloggers and online business owners can learn from this book.

Lesson 1: Confront The Brutal Facts

One of the great things about Jim Collins’ book is that for every ‘good to great’ company they analyse, they also have a ‘comparison’ company – a company which is similar, but did not go from good to great.

And one thing that stands out about those comparison companies is that, when faced with a changing economic landscape, they did not move with the times, but rather they stuck their heads in the sand and carried on doing things the way they always had.

On the other hand, the ‘good to great’ companies confronted the brutal facts and pivoted their businesses to adapt to the changing economic landscape.

This is a lesson that directly applies to bloggers. Right now we are seeing a lot of change: AI, Google’s Helpful Content Update, the proposed changes to third party cookies that are on the horizon… Those bloggers who are willing to ‘face the brutal facts’ and adapt their businesses accordingly will be the ones who not only survive but positively thrive.

On the other hand, bloggers who stick their heads in the sand and refuse to accept that they need to change will be very unlikely to survive.

Lesson 2: The Hedgehog Concept

This lesson is very simple – find the one thing you can do better than everyone else and double down on that.

The ‘good to great’ companies in the study looked around at all the possible things that they could do and picked just one. They then focused all their efforts and energies on doing that one thing better than anyone else.

Meanwhile, the comparison companies were scattered – trying to do a bit of everything, lurching after every new idea, but never achieving greatness in any one thing. The result was never good, and most of these companies now no longer exist.

(This is called The Hedgehog Concept after an ancient Greek saying: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’ – in other words, no matter what cunning tricks the fox tries, the hedgehog can just curl up into a spiky ball and will therefore always win.)

There are two key lessons we can learn from this as bloggers…

The first is to ‘niche down’ – pick one narrow niche you can become the go-to expert in, and focus all your efforts and energies on doing that one thing better than anyone else. This aligns very much with Google’s direction of travel too, in terms of Topical Authority and E-E-A-T.

But even when you pick a tight niche, it’s still easy to be scattered and lack focus in terms of what you actually spend your time on. And that’s the second lesson here: don’t try and do everything but instead take a look at everything you could be doing with your time and focus on the 20% of tasks that will deliver the 80% of results. (This is what I cover in depth in my book 80/20 Blogging.)

Lesson 3: A Culture Of Discipline

The next lesson is perhaps the hardest: once you have confronted the brutal facts and have figured out what your ‘one thing’ is going to be… you need to get on and do it. You need to have the discipline to keep working hard on that one thing until it comes good – even on days when you don’t ‘feel’ like it.

This lesson comes with a delightful analogy that to go from good to great you have to ‘rinse your cottage cheese’. This analogy comes from a highly successful ironman triathlete who was so dedicated to being the best in the world that he would literally rinse his cottage cheese to get the extra fat off. (The point here is not whether or not this made nutritional sense, but rather his level of discipline and dedication!)

The lesson for bloggers here is pretty straightforward. Once you’ve identified what you should be spending your time on… do that, with the discipline of an athlete who is so determined to win a race they are willing to do whatever it takes… even rinsing their cottage cheese!

Even when you know what you ‘should’ be doing, it’s incredibly easy to fritter away your blogging time on timewasters and busywork. If you struggle with this, I have two blog posts that will help…

Lesson 4: Keep Going

One of my favourite quotes in the book is “This particular overnight success story had been more than 10 years in the making“.

None of the ‘good to great’ companies were overnight success stories. Instead, their incredible success was based on years and years of small steps in the right direction.

In fact, the success stories of these ‘good to great’ companies were never based on one ‘great’ decision or one ‘big thing’ that they did right, but rather “a quiet deliberate process of figuring out what needed to be done to create the best future results and then simply taking those steps, one after the other…over an extended period of time.“

As bloggers, it’s very easy to get distracted by so-called ‘overnight success stories’ and then go off in one of two directions: either jumping around chasing every new strategy trying to find the one ‘big thing’ that will deliver that ‘overnight success’, or else attributing every ‘overnight success story’ to that person having more money / more time / more talent / more luck and concluding ‘it’ll never happen for me’.

The reality is that, even in the blogging world, the key to success comes from:

Confronting the brutal facts, not sticking your head in the sand
Picking one thing and focusing all your efforts and energies on doing that one thing better than anyone else
Staying disciplined – not frittering your blogging time away on timewasters and busywork
Keeping on going until you get there – even if that takes quite a long time

This last point is reinforced very well in my annual Blogging Income Survey, which shows that one of the biggest success factors in blogging is how many years you keep going for: average monthly income for bloggers in their first year is $1.07, whereas average monthly income for bloggers who’ve been blogging for 5-10 years is $5,450 – perseverance pays off!

Lesson 5: Do Less

The final lesson from Jim Collins’ book is that success is not about doing more. It’s actually about doing less – focusing in on your ‘one thing’ and doing that really well, rather than trying to do 101 different things.

So often, bloggers believe that the biggest thing that is stopping them from being more successful is TIME. But the truth is time is almost never the problem… it’s what you do with the time you DO have that makes the difference.

Again, it circles back to that 80/20 concept: spend your time on those 20% activities that really move the dial and ditch those 80% activities that don’t move the dial. This will not only make you more successful, you’ll also have more free time!

Why time is NOT your biggest problem…

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In this fluff-free, action-oriented, productivity masterclass I’ll show you:

How poor productivity is costing you MONEY!
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