Big Projects, Small Business
With the end of the financial year approaching, many of you will be planning your goals and outcomes for the year ahead. Plenty of that thinking goes towards projects and items you will need to tick off above and beyond client work to be successful or to set yourself and your business up for long term success.
If you are a small business owner, this list can be extensive and many of the items fall on your shoulders. Also, some of these items need considerable time and attention to get done.
How do you get to these projects when you feel like you have no extra time to give to them? Also, as is often the case, your skillset and experience are required to research, decide and implement the key elements.
You aren’t alone! In small business you need to be leader, innovator, client lead, subject matter expert to name a few of the different hats you are expected to wear on a daily basis.
Think through your own business to do list. How many different projects are on it? How many are you struggling to find time to get to but could provide benefits within your business.
Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet to this!
The key can be as simple as ensuring you are giving yourself time to prioritise these projects and sticking to it. Is it an hourly spot once a week for projects? Is it a half day? The bigger tasks can be completed piece by piece with the other BAU work filling the time around it.
In Gino Wickman’s book Traction1, he explains through a glass cylinder on a table with rocks, gravel, sand and a glass of water. To paraphase, the glass cylinder is all the time you have in a day, the rocks are your main priorities (projects), the gravel represents your day to day responsibilities, the sand represents interruptions and the water is everything else you get hit with during the day. If you, as most people do, pour the water in first, the sand second, the gravel third and the rocks last, then the big priorities wont fit inside the glass cylinder. That’s a typical work day!
What happens if you do the reverse? Big projects first, day to day responsibilities next, add the interruptions and then finally add the water to the cylinder… everything fits in the cylinder. The bottom line is that you need to work on your biggest priorities first and everything else will fall into place.
The other part can be to list these projects and prioritise the most important to achieving your business goals. As expected, you have limited time available and as a result you should limit how many projects you take on per quarter. This leads to clear direction to your project time and also planned outcomes that can be achieved. Taking on 10 plus projects per quarter may lead to all of them half completed and poorly executed. Taking on 1-3 and being thorough in execution can be a greater way to allocate your time.
Trying to complete a few big rocks every quarter is a way to itemise them and not lose track of what you are trying to achieve. Remember these are pieces of work that if you are not careful can get pushed to tomorrow by the noise of today.
If you are wanting to kick off a few of these bigger tasks and don’t know where to start. Happy to help provide some insight on where to kick off. Email through to david@huntandhook.com.au.
1 Wickman, G (2007), Traction: Get a grip on your business. Benbella, Texas.