I just got through reading Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban’s latest blog post on success and motivation and comments and it hits home harder than a juiced ball off a corked bat in the hands of Bary Bonds. I’ll probably end up reading that post a dozen more times.

Here are his #2 and 3 business rules:

Win the Battles you are in before you take on new battles; You can Drown in Opportunity

And my followup thoughts:

There isn’t a week that goes by a business idea pops into my head that I think will make a profit. If I got paid for ideas, I’d be a millionaire many times over. And as Cuban pointed out, these ideas can be exciting. Exciting for one reason: they are ideas. Ideas fundamentally are exciting. They are filled with hope, dreams, the unknown, unlimited potential.

Even though Boston Offline is far from a mature company, the thrill from registering the domain, designing the intial layout, getting business cards are all gone. This is where the work begins and work, as we know, can get boring. So the ideas try to take over the mind again. And those ideas distract from the battles already going. One of these ideas is to create an entertainment and recreation division. Organizing events like bowling nights or musical showcases on a regular basis. However the time spent on that would distract me from making our signature (and only) event, the E & E Club mixer, grow from an average of 40 ppl this year to 60 ppl next year and attract a half dozen sponsors which is no small feat.

Another idea is to add a deeper social networking component to this website. First of all that would require an increible amount of hours and money. Even with Content Management Systems to handle design, I’d have to provide or outsource tech support. Second, why the heck would anyone bother using it with MySpace, BlackPlanet, Migente et al. Could the idea work? Yes. It is a battle worth trying to win now? No.
All these ideas would pull the business focus away from its core competancy, an ethnic forum that provides advertising and promotions for local events and businesses. What I believe are the two core parts of this site, the event calendar and classifieds section are barely utilized yet. And these are free features! So if those features are still teething, why on earth should I be pumping out more babies. The most responsible action is to feed and nurture what is already out the womb.

(No more birth analogies, I promise. This is what happens when you post after 2am)

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