With 5 words, Mark Cuban taught a lesson on how to stay focused on your mission

Do you have a mission? If you run a startup or other business, chances are the answer is yes. You can also have a personal mission that you use to guide your own decisions.

But having a mission is relatively easy. Staying focused on this mission is much more difficult. It's a distinction Mark Cuban made last week in an interview on Adam Grant's Re:Thinking podcast. Earlier this year, Cuban helped launch Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, and although he's listed on his website as an investor, not a co-founder, it's the first company he's been on. put his name. Cost Plus has a radically transparent, but not easy to execute, business model. Cost Plus sells generic drugs to consumers at exactly 15% more than the cost of the drugs to the company, plus a flat fee of $3.

This can offer significant savings compared to traditional pharmacies. Those taking Gleevec, an oral chemotherapy for leukemia, can go from $10,000 a year at a traditional drugstore to around $200 a year at Cost Plus. Cuban himself takes a drug for hyperthyroidism that went from $200 to $9.90 when he started buying it at Cost Plus, he told Grant.

A very simple mission.

But when Grant asked if he used his own experience as feedback to improve the Cost Plus customer experience, Cuban's response was telling. "We try to eat our own dog food, and yes, we try to enhance that experience," he said. "But...our mission is to be the low-cost provider of every medicine that we are legally allowed to sell. Period. It's a very, very simple mission. But fulfilling that mission is hard because it's really hard. to stay focused on not adding bells and whistles."

As an entrepreneur, he adds, there is a natural tendency to tweak things in order to improve the customer experience. "But then we have to do this cost-benefit analysis, right? Because doing this on tens of millions, potentially, of customers could mean, OK, we can't stay below that 15 %."

If you want it tomorrow, it's not us.

So, he said, Cost Plus would not offer telehealth or publish blog posts by famous doctors, and it could take a caller 11 minutes instead of 2 minutes to reach a customer service person. "If you need to pick something up tomorrow or if you have a concierge doctor and expect them to deliver it to you tomorrow or today, it's not us. If you want to save 9 $ on your 30 pills every month, we're here to This is the problem we're solving. And it's a valid problem that needs to be solved."

That's the problem we solve.How many businesses (and business leaders) could make better decisions if they kept these five words front and center? You will always feel the pressure to match your competitors' offerings. Customers will always ask you to add features and services. But if you can stay focused on solving the problem your company is uniquely good at solving, you can use the same test as Cuba. Will it help us solve our particular problem or make it more difficult? Will adding this new feature or enhancement prevent us from doing the best? If you are still thinking about this question, you will always know what to do.

Of course, your unique value proposition can be something other than price. In fact, it probably should be. Unless, as a Cuban, you have very deep pockets and can finance an unprofitable business for a long time, price competition can be tough, say many experts. But the principle and the lesson remain the same.

There is a growing audience of Inc.com readers who receive a daily text from me with a micro-challenge or some self-care or motivational advice. Often they text me back and we end up in a conversation. (Want to know more? Here's some info and a special invite to an extended free trial.) Many are entrepreneurs or business leaders and they tell me that understanding their own core mission is critical to success. What...