Last month, this column offered three great lessons for success-plus the more general lesson that you should recognize how precious your time and attention are to your life and practice. Your personal resources are much more effective when they're focused, laserlike, on moving forward. If you can find a way to harness your intention and energy wisely, you will move past advisors who might have greater talent and skills, but less focus.

Of course, this is never as easy as it sounds. The world conspires to distract you with all its kerfuffle, as do the tired bromides and hot sales strategies that fill up the trade press. On some level, you know that most of what you read and hear is just time-wasting background noise. To make things more difficult, most of us find a strange kind of comfort in being busy, as if activity alone would lead to better things.

It reminds me of the soldier in the novel Catch 22 who was caught speculating in the black market during the Second World War. His sentence: to dig large holes in the ground and fill them back up, over and over. "It's hard work," he observed philosophically, "but I guess somebody has to do it."

Making a commitment to focus can change your life. You might actually feel a new intensity as you seek out those all-too-rare sources of information that have one purpose: to help you direct your efforts where they'll be most effective, by offering ideas, strategies and insights that are worth your priceless time and attention.

THE MULTIPLIER GAME

The first insight is called the 10X multiplier, and comes from Dan Sullivan, the legendary founder of The Strategic Coach organization. His 10X multiplier concept is simplicity itself. All you have to do is sit down and imagine that your business is 10 times the size it is today. That means you have either 10 times as many clients, or 10X assets to manage, or 10X revenues-or all three.

Let's make this exercise as scary as possible, and imagine that all those clients are all knocking on your door right now. What are the capacity constraints in your business today that would make it impossible for you to help everyone? What would be the most effective way to open up those bottlenecks?

For some of you, it might take years to get all that client data entered into your financial planning software. Realize, then, that there are outsource providers who could do that for a fee. (See www.virtualsolutionsconsortium.com.)

If handling paperwork is the issue, there are autofill programs and probably a lot more support from your custodian or back office than you're using currently. If it would be impossible to manage so many assets, then chances are your client portfolios are one-off affairs that could be consolidated into three or four modifiable model portfolios, allowing you to track and make changes globally at a fraction of the time and effort. Or, you could outsource the portfolio management (but not portfolio design) to companies that will do the rebalancing, reconciliation and reporting for you-and allow you not only to serve more clients, but also spend more time with them.

Now I'm reading your mind, and it's telling me that you have no interest in working with 1,000 clients. All the better! With 1,000 clients to choose from, you can focus on the group that you most enjoy working with-and, by more than coincidence, these are also the people to whom you can provide the most value.

Tracy Beckes, a business coach based in La Conner, Wash., says that her most successful clients always end up gravitating to a more focused clientele. When you concentrate on a very specific group of clients-say, chiropractors, executives at a particular local company, owners of horse barns-you can develop deep knowledge of their specific business challenges, their benefits package, the details of their financial and business lives, and offer much more useful levels of service. And here's the amazing part: You can do it more easily.

Who will work with the other 900 clients? That depends. If you're generating 10X revenues with a small, focused clientele, then you might decide to refer many of them out. But there are alternatives.

SEGMENTING SERVICES

Chances are, if you ever really, fully turned on your referral spigot, you'd get a lot of people who not only don't fit your client profile, but are also middle-income or younger persons who are not ideal for your full-service financial planning model. This, of course, is why a lot of advisors never ask for referrals; many business and marketing gurus seem to assume you're too shy or stupid, but the more likely answer is that you're pretty sure you will get a lot of inappropriate prospects, and turning them away will alienate or offend your best clients.