Dangers of spreading yourself too thin

Ben Chiganze A Bassfisherman’s Approach

LAST week my friends and I went fishing, we had an interesting character among us called Simba. His goal was to catch every type of fish species in the dam. Thus on Saturday last week Simba brought his full artillery for fishing. The artillery comprised rubbers, rapplers, spinner baits, worms, crickets, zerera, sadza and ishwa.

In addition, he brought 10 fishing lines. Two lines were for catching bass, four for breams and five for catfish.
It took him time to just to unpack and put baits on this expensively assembled equipment. On the other hand, we each had two rods, the one that we were using and the other one for back-up.

John joked that Simba had brought equipment for the whole clan but Simba paid very little attention to those jokes.
He was firmly focused on the job at hand and he concentrated on just doing that. His thinking was that if he missed a bass he would catch a bream.

If he missed a bream he would catch a catfish. The probability of not catching any of the species was remote to him.
Nevertheless, Simba grossly underestimated the energy required to fish these three species simultaneously.

The methods of fishing these three species are totally different. For instance, one has to continually pull the line (to create motion) when fishing the bass so that the bass perceives the bait as a living organism.

Unless there are serious waves in the dam it might not be practical to leave the bass line unattended because if it is not continually pulled, the bait’s chances of attracting bass are remote. It is in most cases not practical to fish simultaneously with two bass fishing lines.

Furthermore, bass fishing requires a lot of leg work. A fisherman has to hunt throughout the dam to find attractive fishing spots.

This is in contrast to bream fishing where one just identifies one spot and can fish at that spot the whole day.
The DNA of a bream fisherman is totally different from that of a bass fisherman. A bream fisherman is a territorial person whereas; a bass fisherman is a full-time hunter.

Cat fishing is slow and requires grounding as a method of engagement because a catfish is a slow feeder.
However, the fisherman needs to check periodically whether the bait will still be intact and attractive.

It might be possible to combine cat fishing with bream fishing or bass fishing but to combine the three with too many fishing lines is a difficult assignment even if one is a gifted all-round fisherman.

Simba found the going very tough when it came to choosing which bait to use though he was spoilt for choice.
A day was simply too short for the number of baiting options he had to choose from for just one fish species.

To add to his complications, baits such as zerera and sadza cannot be grounded in water for a long time as it can dissolve so such baits require constant monitoring.

Another challenge, Simba had to contend with was fixing line entanglements which affects nearly all fishermen.
The more fishing lines one has, the greater the problems of entanglements which eat into valuable fishing time.

The rest of us only concentrated on bass fishing using one fishing line. Our collective harvest was above average.
This was not surprising given that the fishing lunar calendar had rated the day to be four out of four (four out four is an excellent fishing day).

Simba’s harvest was unsatisfactory though he appeared to be extremely exhausted at the end of the day.
He failed to catch fish as well as he grossly underutilised his baits. At the end of the day he had to throw away non-reusable bait such as sadza, worms, and crickets.

To a great extent Simba’s ambitions mirror the ambitions of many business entrepreneurs.
They want to have as many customers as possible. In their minds they are convinced that they have a solution for everyone.

I once came across a company that had the payoff line “Chenga ose manhanga hapana risina mhodzi” (There is no work which is too small or too big for us).

Many also misconstrue having access to credit or capital as a licence to venture into any business opportunity even when their hands are already full.

Any new type of business venture comes with a new set of challenges (which you might not be familiar with) ranging from marketing, human resources, infrastructure, inbound and outbound logistics.

Understanding and aligning the whole value chains of more than five business (to attain competitive advantage) is difficult for average entrepreneurs.

Though Simba was well capitalised, he failed dismally which implies that well capitalised institutions can still fail if they expand rapidly into fields they do not understand or if they expand without capacity.

Spreading yourself too thinly is normally literary misconstrued and restricted only to capital and capitalisation levels.
Capital is a necessary but not the only condition required to achieve success. Simba was well capitalised for this fishing but he did not have adequate human resources to execute his strategy of catching all the species in the dam.

The task simply overwhelmed him. He toiled the whole morning and afternoon. Resultantly he was over-exposed physically and mentally without a corresponding benefit.

One is likely to fail if they deploy capital to areas where one has no competitive advantage or where one’s ability to supervise the operation becomes overstretched.

Therefore, spreading yourself too thin incorporates aspects such as capital, human resources competences in various areas, firm infrastructure and technology gaps.

Certain skills are not easily transferable, especially when they are of a specialist nature. Specialists in the field of medicine, for instance neurologist, anaesthetist and urologists have their core competencies that can never be applied elsewhere easily. Skills should be applied appropriately and with required intensity.

Though most builders in Zimbabwe claim to be skilled (and have tools) in carpentry, tiling, electrical installations, plumbing and plastering, research has revealed that very few of them hardly have skills in more than two trades.

Therefore, attempting to use a builder for more than two skills at a house is in most cases costly to the developer as the skilled builder will in most cases do a shoddy job in either plumbing or electrical installations.

Resource mobilisation for any tasks must be matched with attendant skills for adequate discharge of jobs at hand.