Shownotes
LinkedIn Post mentioned in the episode: https://msp.sale/49Szpiu
In less than a year, I took a new business from zero to $93,000 in monthly sales. I didn’t do it by adding more services or chasing new trends—I did it by killing everything else and focusing on just one thing.
In this episode, I break down why most entrepreneurs completely misunderstand what true focus looks like. I share my take on a controversial LinkedIn post where a CEO turned down "free" work (and why he was right to do it), discuss my own battle with 'shiny object syndrome,' and explain why more businesses die from indigestion than they do from starvation.
If you feel like you’re doing too much but not moving forward, this is the reality check you need.
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Welcome to Repeatable Revenue, hosted by strategic growth advisor , Ray J. Green.
About Ray:
→ Former Managing Director of National Small & Midsize Business at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he doubled revenue per sale in fundraising, led the first increase in SMB membership, co-built a national Mid-Market sales channel, and more.
→ Former CEO operator for several investor groups where he led turnarounds of recently acquired small businesses.
→ Current founder of MSP Sales Partners, where we currently help IT companies scale sales: www.MSPSalesPartners.com
→ Current Sales & Sales Management Expert in Residence at the world’s largest IT business mastermind.
→ Current Managing Partner of Repeatable Revenue Ventures, where we scale B2B companies we have equity in: www.RayJGreen.com
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Transcripts
The number one lesson for me in 2025 was that focus, more than anything else in business, is what separates the winners from the losers. And I've realized from my own personal experience that most people don't even know what real focus actually looks like.
Now, side note: I've got an email newsletter where I put frameworks that you can actually use and a lot of these messages that I send out every single week. You can subscribe if you want at raysemail.com if that's your thing.
Now, let me show you what I mean when it comes to focus with the perfect example. There's a post on LinkedIn from Morgan Snyder. He's a ghostwriter, and nothing against Morgan—I actually see his content frequently, solid stuff—but this post actually reflects a misunderstanding of what true focus really looks like.
Here's what happened: Morgan offered to write LinkedIn posts for a CEO. He offered it for free, no strings attached. Ghostwriting service, and the CEO said no.
In Morgan's post, it says: "A CEO recently rejected my offer to do free work. I wanted to write posts for him, no strings attached. He replied, 'Morgan, thanks for the offer, but being LinkedIn famous isn't on the bingo card this year. I really need to focus.'"
I stared at the message. I pictured him leaning back in his Herman Miller chair, sipping lukewarm coffee, thinking, I just set him straight, back to work. I respect the focus. He thinks fame is a distraction, but he's wrong. If you have to fight for meetings, if you have to struggle to hire, if you have to explain who you are on sales calls, you're paying a tax on anonymity. I pulled some data from my own account: 49 posts, 1.3 million impressions, thousands of profile views, tripled my MRR. That's 27,000 people that see my face every time I hit post. Mr. CEO, if you're still reading this, the offer still stands.
And that's Morgan's post. Here's what he is unintentionally showing: He doesn't know what focus is.
And this is a perfect example to me of a lack of focus and how we rationalize it. Because Morgan is criticizing this guy for not taking a no-brainer offer. But the CEO? He's the one that fucking gets it. When I read this post, I'm like, kudos to the CEO. The way that Morgan's explaining this, the way that he sees it, is how we justify our lack of focus.
Because we tell ourselves, "Hey, there's this huge upside. We've got FOMO—fear of missing out." And we look at like, "Look, 1.3 million impressions, the profile views, the MRR that we're missing out on. Man, there's like all this upside." But is there really? I see people complaining every day about reach on LinkedIn. Posting every single day and not getting traction, not getting results. So is it really massive upside? Does everybody experience it? Eh, you know?
Or we tell ourselves it's going to be easy. "Hey, you know, Morgan is going to be doing all the writing. I'm not going to have to do anything. It's ghostwriting. Should be the easy button." Well, is it, though? Because if you're going to work with a ghostwriter, you got to establish your pillars—your content pillars, what you can and can't say, what you're actually going to talk about. You got to get the messaging right. You got to get the voice right. Figure out the right cadence. You get a feedback loop of when they're publishing stuff under your name; you want to look at it and give some feedback, right? And approve things potentially. You've got to look at the data—what's working, what's not. It's not, "Hey, I'm just going to stroke a check and never look at it again." That's not reality. There's always more work involved.
But that's what we convince ourselves with: that it's going to be super easy. Or, "Hey, this isn't going to take much of my time. I can probably add this on. It's pretty simple. Not going to take much time. Morgan is going to be doing the heavy lifting." But shit, man, establishing all that stuff that we're talking about, and then iterating it and feedback—it all takes time. It all takes attention. And we justify it by taking these little slivers. It's like death of a thousand cuts. "Let me take this small one. Let me take this small one. Let me take this small one." And before you know it, you're drowning and you don't have focus. You're distracted as hell.
And that CEO in this example understood something that Morgan didn't. As tempting as it is to get your free ghostwriting, as easy as it is to think that this is going to be super simple, he said, "I'm not going to do it because I need to focus."
And that is fucking hard. It's harder than it sounds because it's so easy to rationalize taking on more than we can actually execute. And trust me, when I tell you no one knows this better than me. Because I'm creative, I've got a ton of good ideas. I've got ADHD, which means I love starting shit and I don't love finishing it. And I'm good at sales, so I can sell myself on an idea. Then I can sell it to the team. So I can get an idea and get all amped up, excited about starting it. I can sell everyone on the concept, and before you know it, we're marching down that new path and we've got yet another distraction on our hands.
And that's exactly how businesses die.
A year and a half ago, I had five or six streams of revenue. None of them were reaching their full potential. I was making good money, but nothing was fully optimized. I was overwhelmed. I was constrained for time. I knew I was spread too thin. And money was decent, but the business was incredibly frustrating.
And this past year, we killed a whole bunch of shit. We focused on one primary market, one primary service. We made that service really damn good. We have been laser-focused on optimizing that, iterating it, hiring for it, systematizing it, making it scalable. And in less than a year, we went from zero to 93,000 a month in sales.
For a few years prior to that, I'd worked on multiple things trying to get one to that same level, but trying to do too many of them at one time. And one year of focus did what years of diversification couldn't.
We did that by—a big part of it is—me accepting the anxiety and the FOMO that comes with making the decision and implementing the decision. Because conceptually, we get it: "Hey, focus on one thing, you'll do it better." We understand the benefits associated with it. But when we make the decision and start to implement it, we're like, "Oh man, well, let me keep this one thing. Let me keep this one thing. Well, this one's doing like 20k a month and it doesn't take that much—it's just a few hours a week. And let me kind of keep these couple."
And I've gone through this entire process and I'm telling you, it's exactly how we let the businesses die and stay distracted. And what I now, having experienced it, I believe focus is really underappreciated. And I believe that most people don't know what focus really looks like. Because you'll make people upset, right? You'll say no to a lot of things. People aren't going to understand what you're doing, like in Morgan's post. "Dude, it's not taking that much time. Why can't you just do this thing?" But it won't fucking matter.
Because at the end of the day, that's the thing that's going to accelerate your business more than anything else. And I truly believe that more businesses die from indigestion of trying to do too much than they do from starvation of not trying enough stuff.
And there are always going to be more good ideas in your business than there is capacity to execute on them really well, no matter how big the business is. It is harder at the onset when you've got some resources to invest and you're smaller and you feel like you've got to do a whole bunch of stuff. But even big businesses, you're going to be constrained. You do not have enough resources to pursue all of the good ideas in the businesses.
And the companies that win master that discipline of focus. As it says in the book Essentialism: "Do less but better."
And if you do that, I promise you, may not feel like it in the short run, but in the long run, your business, your team, your market, the margin on your head space as a CEO, as a founder—everything. You will appreciate it a hell of a lot more in the long run. So, I hope that helps. Adios.
