The Importance of Being Focused

How many international recruiting initiatives are you using?  Have you been able to devote enough time to those initiatives to be extremely effective?

Time and resources are always our greatest enemies.  There are so many great services to utilize but unfortunately for most of us we just don’t have the time or man power to employ them effectively.  So rather than using a new service or social media initiative because it is new and popular, first realize if you are going to be able to devote enough time and energy to make it worth your school’s while.

There was a great blog post from the Toilet Paper Entrepreneur about being ‘The Master of Too‘.   He asks, ‘…Name the athlete who won gold medals in swimming, fencing, gymnastics, and basketball – in the same Olympics. Stumped? That’s because no one has done it, and no one ever will.’

The idea that someone could spend enough time and energy to be the best at such a wide variety of sports is unrealistic.  The same goes for the international student recruiting industry.  If we don’t have a focus on which type of students we would like to recruit or which initiatives we can be the best at, we will continue to see mediocre results from all of our efforts.

The secret is to be focused.  Cut out all the fat so to speak.  Eliminate the services that sound great in theory but that are not given the attention necessary to make them successful.

We just embarked on a new year.  This is a great time to reassess which services we are using and eliminate the ones that we don’t have the time or energy to be the best at.  It is important to see results with any initiative we utilize so make sure when you do say, ‘This is so cool, I want to use this service’, you can devote the time and energy necessary to use it effectively.