What’s Your Area of Chosen Greatness™—and Why It’s the Key to Strategic Clarity
By Coco Sellman
🌐 Featuring the Area of Chosen Greatness Identifier™ — Free Until July 20th!
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What if trying to be good at everything is the thing quietly keeping you stuck?
Many founders fall into the trap of spreading themselves thin—serving diverse audiences, offering too many features, or striving for excellence across every domain.
Why “Doing It All” Kills Growth
Visionary founders—women especially—often possess a wide-ranging drive and capacity for excellence.
But without a singular focus, even brilliant businesses can find themselves stalled:
Resources are squandered across unfocused initiatives
Team members become exhausted and lack clear direction
Customers don’t know what you’re famous for
Growth flattens, and profit lags
Instead, defining your Area of Chosen Greatness™ can transform your company’s fate.
What Is the Area of Chosen Greatness™?
Your Area of Chosen Greatness™ is the single area your company chooses to master above all others—the intersection where:
You are uniquely suited to be great
Your customers long for you to be great
Being great will drive the economics of your business
It is the place where you and your team choose to spend 10x additional time, resources, and innovation—at the priority and even expense of other areas—to be remarkably great.
This is not simply a niche or clever marketing hook.
It is the beating heart where your greatest strength fuels your customers’ greatest need and creates the highest sustainable value for your business.
How the Area of Chosen Greatness™ Creates Strategic Leverage
When you define and commit to this area:
Focus replaces confusion. You stop chasing every opportunity and instead say “no” to distractions. Your energy isn’t scattered—it’s multiplied.
Team alignment emerges. Everyone knows what “great” looks like and where to invest their best effort23.
Your brand sharpens. The marketplace knows why to choose you—and repeat business, referrals, and reputation grow.
Profits follow conviction. When investments flow into one area, advantages and uniqueness compound, creating economic momentum34.
The Anatomy of Area of Chosen Greatness™ (with Litmus Test)
The process is rigorous and reflective. Using the Area of Chosen Greatness Identifier™, you work through:
1. Brainstorm: Identify all the areas where your organization could be world-class, drawing from your core purpose, values, unique assets, and current strengths.
2. Customer Longing: Map where your customers’ deepest desires or most important needs intersect with your strengths.
3. Economic Drivers: Pinpoint which potential areas, if mastered, will tangibly drive growth, profit, or market position.
4. Intersection Analysis: Shortlist areas where these three circles overlap.
5. Prioritization and Testing: Stress-test finalists through the Ten Tenets Litmus Test—criteria such as DNA fit, clarity, relevance, measurability, differentiation, and willingness to invest disproportionately.
Only when a candidate area passes these criteria do you commit. This ensures your chosen greatness is not accidental or superficial, but both purposeful and operationally relevant.
Real-World Examples: Companies with a Singular All-In Focus
Here are examples of organizations that achieved impressive results and unmistakable market clarity by dedicating themselves to a singular Area of Chosen Greatness™—the central intersection where they were uniquely suited to excel, where their customers most longed for them to be excellent, and where greatness fueled their economics.
Southwest Airlines made a defining commitment to rapid, friendly, point-to-point service. Unlike most airlines, Southwest refused to spread itself thin by serving every possible airport or becoming all things to all travelers.
Instead, it honed its operating model around flying direct routes between specific city pairs, prioritizing quick turnarounds and a fun, approachable customer experience over the amenities and reach of traditional carriers.
This intense focus allowed Southwest to optimize scheduling, minimize operating costs, and build a fiercely loyal customer base.
The result: operational simplicity, industry-leading profitability per flight, and a powerful reputation for reliability and value.
IKEA is another vivid example. The company staked its future on flat-pack, self-assembled, affordable furniture—an approach that deliberately traded away certain consumer conveniences to double down on scale, choice, and savings.
By requiring customers to locate products in the warehouse and assemble furniture at home, IKEA unlocked efficiencies unmatched in the furniture sector.
This choice enabled extraordinary selection, modern design, and consistently low prices, which in turn created unique brand loyalty and propelled IKEA to become the most recognized—and profitable—furniture retailer in the world.
Allumé Home Care (the healthcare services company I founded in 2016 and successfully exited in 2024) found breakthrough growth not by simply aiming to provide excellent care, but by zeroing in on recruiting and retaining reliable nurses who would never “call out.”
Through deep analysis of their customer journey, the leadership realized that families needed just as much as clinical skill—they needed consistency and trust.
Allumé retooled its hiring, training, and culture to support reliable scheduling and warm, engaged caregivers. This focused area of greatness led to fewer call-outs, happier families, drastically improved retention, and 5x faster company growth in less than 18 months.
Each of these companies made a conscious, strategic choice: to be remarkable at one thing that lay at the intersection of customer longing, company DNA, and economic leverage.
Their stories illustrate how true greatness—and sustainable success—comes not from trying to be the best at everything, but from choosing one place to go all-in and shaping the company's future around it.
How to Identify Your Own Area of Chosen Greatness™
1. Reflect on Three Core Questions:
In what areas is your company uniquely suited to be great?
Where do your best customers long for greatness?
What area, if mastered, drives economic scale and profitability?
2. Test Possibilities via the 10 Tenets:
Evaluate each option through specific criteria (already in your DNA, customer passion, impact on profit, team buy-in, differentiator, and more).
3. Make a Bold Choice and Commit:
Don’t just brainstorm—decide. The power of this method is in real commitment. Invest, measure, and organize your growth strategy around it. Add it to your 4-Page Growth Plan™.
4. Institutionalize the Choice:
Build a High-Leverage Habit™: a weekly or monthly ritual to measure and iterate on your Area of Chosen Greatness.
Take a High-Potency Action™: a bold move to anchor the choice immediately—from rewriting onboarding, to launching a new customer-facing promise, to making your entire team responsible for one metric tied to your Area of Chosen Greatness.
Why Most Founders Resist—and Why You Shouldn’t
Common blocks include:
Fear of missed opportunities: Thinking that “focus” equals lost potential, despite evidence that scattered excellence is mediocrity.
Success masks underlying issues: Early market response can hide the necessity of choosing a signature strength until growth stalls or margins shrink.
Confusing purpose with operational excellence: Purpose is crucial, but only when paired with repeatable, operationalized excellence in one area does greatness compound.
Lack of reflective time: Few slow down enough to truly identify their business’s unique “brilliance lever.”
But those who make the decision—and live it—unlock scale, brand clarity, team engagement, and legendary impact.
Ready to discover your Area of Chosen Greatness™? Use the Identifier and tools—then go all in.
This article is part of the Force for Good ToolKit Series. The full FFG ToolKit is available with the book, A Force for Good: Empowering Visionary Women to Lead High-Impact, High-Growth Enterprises.
Got a question about building, scaling, or selling your business? Ask me anything.
Whether you're stuck on growth, dreaming about an exit, or just need a sounding board—I’m here for it. Drop me a line at coco@aforceforgood.biz. I read every single email myself and reply to as many as I can.
And here’s the fun part: the most thought-provoking questions may be featured in a future issue (with your blessing, of course), so we can lift others while we learn together.
Watch the companion episode to today’s article with Coco Sellman on the Force for Good Business Show:
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About the Author:
Coco Sellman believes business is a force for good, especially with visionary women at the helm. With over 25 years of entrepreneurial experience, she has launched five companies and guided over 500 startups. As Founder & CEO of A Force for Good, Coco supports purpose-driven women founders in unlocking exponential growth and prosperity. Her recent venture, Allumé Home Care, reached eight-figure revenues and seven-figure profits in just four
years before a successful exit in 2024. A venture investor and advisor, Coco’s book, A Force for Good, reveals a roadmap for women to lead high-impact, high-growth companies. She is the host of #WisdomOfWomen Show and the Force for Good Business Show. Coco partnered with ChatGPT and Perplexity to write this article.
Sources
1. A Force for Good: Empowering Visionary Women to Lead High-Impact, High Growth Enterprises, by Coco Sellman