Want to run a profitable business? Focus on sales, customers, and product — and cut admin, re-tooling, and politics.

Our former president of the board had a saying:

Business is easy: Revenues up, costs down. What’s so difficult about this?

What might sound placative, isn’t so. He is right. At the end of the day, running a business is about being profitable, especially in those times of high interest rates and VC hesitation.

I’d much rather have a profitable business at a lower valuation than an unprofitable business at a higher valuation in the troubled times we live in.

And being profitable comes from — guess what — higher revenues at lower costs.

So let’s dive into the details. What should you focus on to become profitable?

What to Focus On

1. Sales and Customers

In their early stages, most startups are highly focused on their product, often referred to as the minimum viable product (MVP). That’s a great focus for the very early stage because you can’t win customers without a product.

However, the product doesn’t give you revenue. The customers do. That’s why the focus needs of any company beyond the pre-seed stage needs to be sales, sales, sales. And of course, as soon as you have won your first customers, the focus needs to be extended to keeping those customers.

We have adopted a do whatever it takes mentality in both sales and customer success. We go above and beyond to close a deal, and to make and keep a customer happy. No matter if it means a tender presentation on Sunday morning in the Middle East, an urgent hotfix release on Friday afternoon, or an extra on-site meeting to discuss and solve issues a customer might have with our product.

2. Product

Even after leaving the very early stage, product development needs to stay the focus of your entrepreneurial activities. As the Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company, I am taking a software product angle here.

With the growing number of customers, product performance automatically comes into focus, and needs to be constantly monitored and upgraded. Performance issues are often the defining trigger for refactorings, such as migrating to a cluster database or rewriting cross-platform apps in native code.

Naturally, the first few customers have a defining role in what your product does, and how it works. Come more customers, come more feature requirements. But interestingly enough, with more customers, some features can be simplified. When n=1, you implement a feature just as your first customer needs it. When n>10, you will strive to find a solution that works for all of them, and with adequate performance.

What to Unfocus On

So much for the easy part. Focus on sales, customers, and products, and you’ll be fine.

So what makes life so difficult then? It’s the tons of distractions in organizational life that divert energy away from the main effort of sales, customers, and products.

3. Admin

Admin is my enemy of the state. If you’re not constantly on the vigil, admin will suck up valuable resources at all levels of an organization, no matter how small or big an organization is. That’s why I am advocating a minimally viable administration rather than a minimum viable product. In plain terms: Do admin only to stay out of jail. That means getting payroll, social security, and tax right, and forgetting about the rest.

4. Re-tooling

The easiest way to not do something is to discuss it. In organizational lingo, not doing something is often hidden behind a discussion that starts with “we need a tool for that”. Very often, people rather want to migrate data from an existing tool to a new tool, only to find out later that the new tool has other flaws.

We decided to stop re-tooling. We are equipped with adequate productivity tools, and there is no need to spend time and energy evaluating and trialing new tools.

5. Politics, Egos, and Power Games

This one is my favorite and the one that sucks away most time and energy. It’s the ugly world of office politics, larger-than-life egos, and power games.

No matter the size and the type of business, if politics, egos, and power games plague your organization, you have the wrong people on board. Take the courage to remove the toxic guys and those who don’t fit your culture, and focus on sales, customers, and products.