Focusing on a smaller number of customers might actually fuel your growth instead of impeding it. Here are four ways to make it work.

Growing means expanding your business, right? That's what many entrepreneurs and CEOs assume they need to do. But, in almost every successful growth story we've seen, the CEO has done exactly the opposite.

In a recent article, Growing Like Gangbusters?, we discussed the three things that companies need to do to adapt their business as they grow. As they move from a start-up to an established company, they need to adapt their organization and leadership model. But, at the same time, growing companies need to find a way to create more value for their customers, and then scale that customer value.

Small entrepreneurial companies need to adapt to their customer needs, adjusting their business model accordingly to grow revenue. But once you've built a successful company, you've also likely built a reputation and distinctiveness around a specific product, service, or customer segment. CEOs who are able to sustain this growth actually get more narrow in their focus, which allows them to scale the business around that key strength.

The CEO of Rise Interactive, Jon Morris, recently told us, "We focus on doing one thing well: Helping companies drive traffic to their website."

Duncan Barbaro Sant, a director at Alberta, a 200 employee fire, safety, and security company based in Mriehel, Malta, shared his plan of action. "Rather than focusing on winning all the projects we come across and trying to spread our wings further than we possibly can, we have taken to choosing carefully the projects that make sense for us and that can sustain the company's healthy growth," Duncan told us. "This will give us the time to monitor and exploit all the projects we are being awarded/accepting whilst keeping our clients faithful to our company."

Here are four things CEOs can do to narrow their customer focus and create more growth:

1. Find your most profitable customers. Do some back-of-the-envelope math to rank order your customers in terms of high to low profits. The customers that pay more and cost less to serve are creating the most value for your business.

2. Understand the unique needs of your most valuable customers. How are they different from your less profitable customers? Identify the drivers of why they rise to the top.

3. Understand what you are doing for these customers that no one else can do as well. Determine your key strengths and the offerings that they find the most value in.

4. Ruthlessly prioritize and focus organizational resources and investment on these customers. Always choose projects and investment that favor your most profitable customers. Challenge yourself to free up time and resources to devote more to these customers.

Creating a narrower customer focus is somewhat counterintuitive to growth. But when it's done right, this approach typically results in more growth rather than less.

Send us your experiences with focusing on your core customers. We can be reached at karlandbill@avondalestrategicpartners.com.

If you find yourself putting things off, the culprit may be a weak sense of identity rather than a weak will.

When you put off tasks that are important for the betterment of your business, do you beat yourself up for having a weak will?

It may feel like your inability to push yourself to do the unpleasant but unnecessary is to blame when you procrastinate, but psychology suggests there actually may be another culprit: your identity… or lack thereof.

Timothy A. Pychyl, a professor of psychology at Canada's Carleton University, has written on Psychology Today, that identity is "knowledge of who we are. Knowledge that is hard won through a real 'exploration' of possible selves (perhaps those crazy teen years or campus life in your 20's) and finally crystallized with a 'commitment.'"

What does identity have to do with procrastination? According to research done by one of Pychyl's grad students Matthew Shanahan having a less firm sense of the one leads to more of the other.

"Ego identity development was negatively correlated with procrastination. That means, the more achieved the identity, the more the participants knew who they were, the lower their scores on the measures of procrastination," Pychyl explains.

The moral of the story for Pychyl is that "we all have to 'grow up' a bit to decrease our procrastination." That's good news for frustrated parents of teens and deadline-challenged college students, but what does that have to do with business owners? You are, after all, not some teenager currently experimenting with a new goth look or vegan diet.

But while your fundamental identity as a person in general may long since have been sealed, if you're relatively new to entrepreneurship, your sense of yourself as a genuine business owner could still be tentative. When embarking on a new career path, it's common to feel like you're somehow faking it—that you don't really have the right to the identity you're claiming.

This discomfort with your new identity, at least in mild doses, isn't something to worry about, according to the New York Times, but it just might make you more prone to procrastination. The good news: as you get more comfortable with your identity and commit fully to seeing yourself as a business owner, your tendency to put things off should fade.

Conclusion: it's time to start believing in your identity as a business owner.

Does this connection between identity and procrastination make intuitive sense to you?

Yahoo's Marissa Mayer publicly said that she constantly thinks of who should replace her top execs. Cold blooded?

During the recent Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference, Yahoo's CEO Marissa Mayer said something that raised my eyebrows.

According to Business Insider, Mayer said she "constantly thinks about who could do a better job" on her management team. "I think about who could be a better COO. I think about who could be a better CFO."

Since coming to Yahoo in July of last year, Mayer has replaced much of the company's senior management team with her own, having brought in Henrique De Castro as COO and Ken Goldman as CFO, among others.

Goldman was apparently in the audience when Mayer made her remarks, which she then followed up with, "Sorry Ken, it's just a thought experiment I do."

Now, I'm not going to say that kind of thing doesn't happen all the time in the boardrooms of corporate America. It does. I've had far worse things hurled at me by a CEO or two when I was a senior executive in the tech industry. But always in a private conference room; never in a public forum. Never like that.

A board director once told me a story about a well-known high-tech chief executive. He said the guy would sit in his executive staff meetings and imagine each of his top execs with their compensation emblazoned on their forehead and ask himself if they were worth it or not.

Sure, that's cold-blooded, but he kept it to himself, which is no big deal.

What is telling is that the kind of behavior Mayer exhibited at the Goldman conference reportedly was often on display when she worked for Google. I believe that.

In any case, Mayer's comments at the conference were probably humiliating for the executives in question. They don't reflect well on her or on her potential for retaining executive talent at Yahoo.

When I was discussing this with a colleague, she said, "I sure hope those guys are paid plenty to put up with that kind of crap." Indeed, they probably are.

Still, that's no way to treat employees. I don't care how much they make.

Elizabeth Grace Saunders is the founder and CEO of Real Life E Time Coaching & Training and the author of The 3 Secrets to Effective Time Investment. You can find Elizabeth on Twitter @RealLifeE and at ScheduleMakeover.com.