Yes. It only takes one weakness to prevent business growth, especially if it is a critical one. How much weight can a chair hold with one weak leg?   Only as much as the weak leg. If one leg broke, there may be ways to prop it up or repair it to a certain degree. It may even be possible to re-engineer the leg structure to mitigate the weakness. However, the best way to hold more weight is to have good, capable legs at all four corners of your chair.

Following this analogy a little further, if one leg of the chair broke, what would you do? It would be ridiculous to continue to sit in it ignoring the broken leg. Sure, you could simply throw out the chair, but if this is metaphor for your business, that becomes a really terrible idea. The most logical thing to do would be repair it or replace it so that it is stronger than ever. This may expose the other legs as weaker than the new one, but it should allow you to shift focus to other areas. So why is it so easy to ignore glaring weaknesses? Why do we let just a few elements be weak and not do anything about it? Our focus is shifted to the areas that are strongest or more fun to deal with. These continue to strengthen increasing the gap between the strongest and weakest legs.

If this were the broken chair would you work on the other legs? Probably not. With one bad leg preventing the chair’s use, I would be pinpoint focused on that problem until I had done everything there was to do to repair it. If there was a time when I was required to wait for glue to dry, parts to arrive or something else outside of my control, I might then shift to another area, but probably not until it was repaired or all avenues were exhausted.

Maybe chair repair is a bad analogy because it assumes the other legs are intact and not at risk of deterioration while I am repairing the fourth. If the chair were continually in use, which seems impossible, the remaining three would feel increased strain.  Thus the remaining three could not be fully ignored while the fourth was being fixed.

Perhaps gardening would be a better example. My yard is a bit of a mess. The house we purchased had not been lived in for three years, sits on two acres, much of it wooded and at one time had very established and attractive landscaping. I see the yard as a renovation project as much as the interior of the home. Some areas of the yard have received more renovation attention than others and we’ve made significant improvements. However, those areas that I have focused on to improve cannot totally be ignored. Yes, they may not require the same level of attention to simply maintain versus the renovation, but what if I never circled back around to check on it and maintain it? Those ignored areas would revert back to a native state in need of total renovation. This is what makes business more complex. It is never truly static. Strong areas may not need the same level of attention to maintain, but ignoring them could lead to them being weak areas. Yet still, if my yard was perfectly manicured and maintained in all areas except one that was terribly overgrown, those that looked upon it would remain unimpressed. That one weakness would hold it back from being impressive.