Staff Writer Derek Jensen penned an interesting item for this morning’s The Salt Lake Tribune. In an article titled “SL County launches ‘Up Grade’”, Jensen reports on Up Grade” — Salt Lake County, Utah’s, new online resource for business owners and entrepreneurs, inspired by Salt Lake County Mayor Peter Corroon. From today’s online edition of the Tribune

On Thursday, Corroon unveiled a new business-development program described as a “one-stop shopping” resource for small businesses. Called “Up Grade,” Corroon’s brainchild consists of a new Web site that pools federal, state, county and private resources for prospective - or existing - businesses to navigate. “The resources? A lot of them exist,” explained Dale Carpenter, Corroon’s director of business and economic development. “We’re in no way reinventing the wheel. But we want it to be a one-stop center.” The Web site designates business categories under “start up,” “grow up,” “move up,” and “fire up.”

Great. I cannot wait to visit the site.

Oh, wait, hold on… I can’t, because Jensen and the editorial department over at the Tribune newsroom failed to include the web site address anywhere in the article! At the bottom of the page, the Tribune’s own web site address appears, but nowhere in the article itself is Up Grade’s URL ever provided. You would think—wouldn’t you—that a newspaper would be savvy enough to include the web site address of a site they devote nearly 400-words to, but in case you haven’t noticed, publishers do this sort of thing all the time. If I had a dollar for every newspaper, magazine, or newsletter article that contained language like—So-and-so’s web site is a great resource for X, Y, and Z–without specifically referencing the web site address itself, I’d have enough money to pay the annual street value of the hosting fees for my blog two times over.

And it’s not just newspapers and magazines that fail to provide critical and relevant information. Salt Lake County’s own web site does a really poor job of calling attention to the Up Grade web site. One would think that the County would list the site under “Resources” or right in the center of the page under Today in Salt Lake County, but they do not. Instead, they placed a banner ad at the bottom of the left-hand column, a spot that usability experts tell us is the second or third last spot our eyes gravitate towards on any given web page.

In any event, despite the Tribune’s failure to provide the URL, and the County’s weak promotion of the site, Up Grade appears to be a great resource for business owners and entrepreneurs throughout the state of Utah, which is where my company, Doba, is headquartered.

Last week I received an e-mail message from Paul Hutchinson, a managing member of Bridge Loan Capital Fund, inviting me to a networking dinner with other CEOs and company founders from around my area. Paul found me because of an award Doba recently received from the Utah Valley Entrepreneurial Forum (UVEF), and he wrote to encourage me to attend the dinner because of the possibility of being invited to participate in what he called an ‘exclusive executive retreat’ in the spring of 2007 with other world-class CEOs.

My idea of an executive retreat is a little different than most CEOs. As I wrote back on the 5th of June, when Doba takes its Management Team out for retreats, nary a word about work is spoken and not one spreadsheet is unveiled, nor is anyone asked to present their ideas for saving or making the company money. Our retreats are way more relaxed than that and serve an entirely different purpose, and so too it seems are the retreats Hutchinson and his colleagues put together. Last year they climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, and next year they’re thinking about renting a 233-foot ship for a sailing excursion to some pretty remote areas.

The networking dinner is tonight, so I’m definitely going to check it out for myself.

I did something last Thursday I never thought I would do. After conducting a lot of research and talking it over with my family and friends, I underwent Laser-Assisted In Situ Keratomileusis, otherwise known as LASIK eye surgery. If you’re not familiar with LASIK, it’s a surgical procedure that permanently changes the shape of your cornea and is intended to reduce your dependency on glasses or contact lenses. One week removed from the procedure and my vision is as sharp as a Bald Eagle’s swooping down on unsuspecting prey.

To say that I was nervous about the surgery would be an understatement. While almost everyone I spoke with [who had already undergone the procedure] raved about it and encouraged me to go for it, there were still some pretty significant risks, including loss of vision, being under or over treated, developing severe dry-eye syndrome, experiencing permanent sensitivity to light, and more. A classic ‘risks verses rewards’ scenario.

After an extremely restless night of sleep, I arrived at the surgeon’s office last Thursday morning where I was summarily offered a Valium. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m the type of person who doesn’t feel all that comfy around someone who wants to poke around in my eyes. Even with the Valium taking hold of my body and mind, I was still very uneasy with what was about to happen. By the time the surgeon arrived at the table, my hands were clinched tighter than my wife’s during the birth of our first child.

Of course, everything turned out okay. My doctor tells me that the procedure was so successful that I could walk into another ophthalmologist’s office, have him or her examine my eyes, and even they wouldn’t be able to tell that just eight days ago I had LASIK. Now I can see my hair stylist cut my hair for the first time since childhood, and when I lean in to give my wife a kiss goodnight, I can actually see her too!

As entrepreneurs, we face risks verses rewards scenarios—especially from a 30,000-foot level—all the time, but once those scenarios become personal, well, that’s a whole-nother story. For me, the more uncomfortable I feel about something, the riskier it tends to be; and since I’m a serial risk taker, despite the clinched fists, oddly enough, I actually enjoy the experience.

The day after I wrote about doing chicken and doing chicken right, Brad Feld over at FeldThoughts.com wrote about something very similar. In a post titled Lack of Focus, Feld—a managing director at Mobius Venture Capital—makes a compelling case for entrepreneurs like myself to focus and not deviate too far from our initial plan. Feld writes:

When we started Martingale Software in 1984, our original vision was “to write software for the new Apple Macintosh.” That was pretty broad, so as we sat around in a classroom somewhere at MIT (because it had a nice big blackboard that we could scribble on, plus it made us feel grown up), we decided to narrow our focus. After many hours (or was it minutes?) of discussion, we decided we would write “graphics software for the new Apple Macintosh.”

We quickly got distracted. One of my early mentors – Gene Scott (who also happened to be our investor – he put up the initial $10,000 for Martingale) – was the founder and chairman of Scott Instruments – a voice recognition software company in Denton, Texas. Scott Instruments … asked us to write an application for the VET/2 for the Macintosh – we couldn’t resist so we had our first contract. … Of course, this had nothing to do with our vision for Martingale. I’m sure we rationalized this by thinking something like “we’ve got to eat”…

Several months later…we met a local investment management company… They wanted us to do some spreadsheet / graphics stuff for them. Ok – graphics - a little closer. But – they used PCs. So – we rationalized again, went out and bought a Compaq Luggable, and did some more consulting work.

Between school, our “extra curricular activities”, and our two contracts, we never wrote much graphics software for the Mac… The contracts enabled us to “be in business” for a while, but they had nothing to do with the business we set out to create. While the work enabled “survival”, our complete lack of focus (among many other things) contributed to our ultimate demise.

Click here for Feld’s post in its entirety (not terribly different from what I copied and pasted above).

Fortunately, for those of us who started Doba, we’ve never strayed from our original vision. Today, Doba has thousands of customers, and I attribute that success largely to our doggedly savvy determination to do chicken and do chicken right. While that’s not to say that we’ll never serve side dishes with our brand of chicken, you can pretty much bet the farm that we’ll never be a company that offers up beefsteak or lamb chops!

Visit KFC’s web site and you’ll see the following statement right on the front page:

In 1939, Colonel Harland Sanders first gave the world a taste of his most famous creation, Original Recipe Kentucky Fried Chicken, featuring that secret blend of 11 herbs and spices. Since that time, millions of people the world over have come to love his one of a kind chicken, homestyle side dishes and hot and fresh biscuits.

Said differently, Colonel Sanders “did chicken, and he did chicken right”, making him in my opinion the poster boy for specialization.

The notion of specialization recently surfaced in my own life. Just over a year ago, after running out of living space, my wife and daughter and I moved from our small town home into a brand new home capable of handling our growing family. Somewhere along the way—between choosing the right neighborhood and finalizing the custom finishes on our new home—we decided to keep the town house as a rental unit. The way we saw it, owning a rental property was a good investment, not to mention part of the American Dream.

Long story short, a couple of weeks ago, after our first our renters moved out because we decided to not renew their lease, Amy and I chose to put the town home up for sale. It took us a year—a very looooooooong year—to figure out that we’re not the real estate investor types. To say that we had problems with our tenants would be an understatement. After spinning our wheels for close to eight months,, we ended up hiring a property management company to deal with the day-to-day issues, but even that was distracting. At the end of the day, we decided to do chicken and do chicken right.

As an entrepreneur, I’m faced with specialization-related issues on almost a daily basis, and while I’m deeply committed in my belief that specialization wins out nearly every time in business, somehow I lost sight of that fact in my own life. I say, find what you do well, and only do that. I am a good leader and a good entrepreneur. I am not a real estate investor. It’s only a distraction to me from what I am good at.

So the town home is being sold, and I now can focus on my specialty (which if you ask my wife is raking the front yard and taking out the trash). I’ll post more about specialization in the weeks to come. In the meantime, I encourage everyone reading this post to find their specialty and focus primarily on that.