The path to winning and finding your inner core competency

Years ago I was sitting in a board meeting on the campus of my alma mater, Wheaton College, in Norton, Massachusetts. The school was facing a campus issue — the on-site health center provider that had serviced Wheaton’s students was closing. The outside provider could no longer make the economics work.
As a leadership team — I was fortunate to sit on the board at Wheaton from 2006 to 2013 — we explored a range of options.
Effectively, we had two choices:
1. Self-operate the health center by hiring a team of medical professionals.
2. Find an alternative local provider, which would be extremely costly.
My recollection of the discussion was that a healthy majority of trustees wanted to self-operate the center, which would give Wheaton more control. But a wise member of the team asked a great question: “What do we know about health care?”
Focus on core competency
That wise board member was making the point that we were a liberal arts intuition aiming to provide academic excellence to our students through our world-class faculty. We were focused on taking bright, young, energy-driven freshman and giving them the tools to leave Wheaton prepared to lead in an increasingly complicated world. Simply put, we were in the education business, not the health care business.
The board made the right decision that afternoon, choosing to select a provider to operate our center that focuses solely on health care because that’s its core competency.
Deciding what not to do
I am often reminded that Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE, felt that if you couldn’t be No. 1 or No. 2, you shouldn’t be there. I think about that in our business and when looking at how others operate.
Try to ask yourself, “What is your inner core competency as a business?” Making the decisions about what not to do are often the hardest. Oddly, it seems focusing on what not to do or self-operating requires even more energy. While incredibly challenging, putting the spotlight on what you do best is, in my opinion, the first step on the path to winning. ●
Ken Babby is the owner and CEO of Akron Baseball LLC.