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Tom Hall has had a very successful business career. He grew Ensslin & Hall advertising into one of the country's top regional agencies in just ten years.

Along the way he also launched the Creative Seminar programs. He sold Creative Seminars to ADWEEK Magazine at about the same time that he sold Ensslin & Hall to the Earle Palmer Brown Companies.

That left him with time on his hands. While he was pondering what to do with that time, Governor Bob Martinez of Florida came calling. He asked Tom to explore how the media could help fight the illegal drug abuse problem in Florida.

The result was The Partnership for a Drug-Free Florida. It is now the national model for the Partnership for a Drug-Free America State Alliance program. Fifty-four organizations around the country use the program and have produced more than $3 billion worth of advertising to help reduce the demand for illegal drugs.

Because of his success, Tom started getting requests to guest-lecture at schools like the University of Florida and the University of South Florida. He's comfortable talking to groups, but he says that talking to a class of business students makes him nervous.

He's found that hanging out with bright young people is one of the best ways to stay both honest and humble. They're usually not impressed by your title or your achievements. And they're absolutely fearless about asking you questions, even embarrassing ones.

Tom knew that he had to show up with more than just his credentials. It seemed like a good time to indulge his passionate interest in fast-growing companies. So he did some research, thinking that it would support his lectures and maybe become a book.

He never got the chance to dig deeply into the research though. The challenges of starting a new business, a public relations firm now known as Tucker/Hall, claimed his attention. The research was set aside for a decade.

When Tom decided it was time to dig into the research again and turn it into a book he contacted me. Tom says he chose me to work with because I've got good business knowledge and I can tell stories and explain things. We had a lot of fun writing the book, but we started out with a major shock.

Only about half of the fast-growing companies Tom had researched ten years earlier were still around and independent. Some had gone out of business. Some had been acquired. Some of the ones that were still around had fallen on hard times.

That shouldn't have been a surprise. It's happened to just about every book or study that highlights successful companies. Ten years on, a lot of them don't look so good anymore.

We shifted our focus from learning lessons from fast-growing companies to learning from companies who had solid success for a long time. We're talking about companies like Wal-Mart that's been successful for half a century. The longest-lived company we describe in the book started during the Monroe Administration.

We didn't discover the formula for business success. There isn't one. But we did discover something important. By looking at twenty-six companies in depth, we concluded that there are things you can do if you want your company to be successful for a long time.

Develop a simple strategy. Decide how you're going to be distinctive. Decide how you'll make money. Simplify the strategy until it fits neatly in a sentence or two.

Then, focus ruthlessly on your strategy and on the business basics. Stay with your strategy until it doesn't work anymore.

That's simple, but it's difficult. There is the temptation to grow at any cost. There are new CEOs who want to "put their stamp on the company." Pundits urge you to practice "creative destruction." And there's always the lure of the newest, shiniest, magic strategy.

Don't succumb. Stay with the simplicity that works.

In Ruthless Focus  we tell the stories of companies that ruthlessly focused on their core strategy for decades. We also tell the stories of companies who succumbed to boredom, ambition, temptation, or just the desire to be "new."

We'll also tell you about some "secrets" that were hiding in plain sight. You'll learn about Nucor's approach to innovation and Avnet's acquisition playbook, how two "beer guys" beat Snapple at their own game, and the real story of how Staples got started.

And there will be some interesting side trips. You'll find out why South Carolina barbecue makes a great study in differentiation and where great business ideas seem to come from.

Check out my latest book, Ruthless Focus, at Amazon.

Posts about Ruthless Focus

Ruthless Focus: How to use key core strategies to grow your business
Annotated Table of Contents
Keep it Simple, Strategist
Strategy: Staying with What Works
Ruthless Focus on the Business Basics
Theo Albrecht, Trader Joe's, and Ruthless Focus
Ruthless Focus: What about Toyota?
Ruthless Focus: Three Kinds of Crisis
The story of Yahoo's shifting strategy
Tom Stemberg, Staples, and the Two Strategy Questions
How Doing Acquisitions is like being a Fighter Pilot
Learning about Differentiation from Barbeque
Danger, Trader Joes!