Since 1997, Jonathan Willcocks has focused on fun – with a purpose. His business, Pinnacle Pursuits, offers adventurous team-building experiences for corporate clients and schools. The company also organizes fundraising events based around outdoor adventure activities.
Like many entrepreneurs, Willcocks said he suffers from “shiny-object syndrome” – being drawn to something that looks good but may be of little real value. An intervention from an employee woke him up to the fact that the company was chasing too many low-value projects.
“A staff person came up to me and said, ‘We have 42 different projects on the board in the office, and we find this quite distracting sometimes,’” said Willcocks.
“‘A lot of these seem like things you really love to do, but we’re not really sure how this fits into the business model and into the vision that you’ve talked about and created with us.’”
Willcocks revamped how the company selected projects using a matrix developed by the Harvard Business School, where one axis represents profit and the other tracks growth. But he decided to make one modification to the graph.
“I decided to keep profit and take away the word growth and put vision,” he said, “because we are a very purpose-focused company around people and team-building.”
He and his staff then plotted every project on the matrix. Those that were low on profit but high on vision became “hobbies for Jono to do on the weekend.”
It’s a process they continue to use with new ideas.
“We saved a lot of time,” said Willcocks. “Everybody could make this assessment in their heads before we got too scattered.”
