Part 3 of my 10-part series Top 10 Mistakes Small Business Owners Make and How to Avoid Them.
Mistake #3: Small Business Owners don’t allow themselves to FOCUS on the most important things on their plate.
As a small business owner, your choices are critical. Never more so than when deciding where to invest your time & energy.
As Socrates once said, ‘Better do a little well, than a great deal badly.’
Your decisions about what gets the bulk of your attention and when can make or break your business.
As an entrepreneur it’s only natural to have eyes bigger than your stomach. You’re always going to be reaching forward and pushing for the ‘next thing’. The real challenge is tempering that desire with a realistic approach to managing your priorities.
You could probably list off a thousand things you’d like to do for your business right now. And yeah, you could probably eek out a few extra hours a day for some short term productivity boosts. But, eventually you’re going to run out of steam and hours in the day.
The hardest thing for a business owner to do is to look at a great opportunity and say,” I’m not picking this up right now.”
You may have 30-50 projects on your plate. All things being equal, maybe you get to devote 1 hour a week on each. And that’s WITH a ton overtime — robbing your of free time, flexibility, AND recuperative time you need to give everyday your best.
Kind of defeats the purpose of owning your own business doesn’t it?
Now what if you could FOCUS on the most important project on your plate? What if you had COMPLETE CONFIDENCE that what you were working on — right now — was the most important thing you could be doing for your business?
If you were able to immerse and significantly advance just one project a week - THE most important project — I guarantee you’ll do more for you business than the guy trying to do it all.
The hardest part with all of this? Deciding what the most important project is. Determining how you focus your time is the most important responsibility you have.
How to Avoid this Mistake:
Business owners struggle to bring focus to their agenda should start by taking an inventory.
You have your goals. You know where you want to get to.
So what’s stopping you?
An approach I’ve found successful:
- Inventory - Start with one goal at a time. Then brainstorm all the items that could be preventing you from reaching this goal. Try not to judge at this phase, you’re just trying to get it all on paper in this collection phase.If at all possible, invite people you trust who are familiar with your business to be a part of this process. Optimally, this is a partner or an employee — but hey I bet your husband or wife can provide GREAT insight as well.
- Prioritize - Use the power or Parerto (80/20 rule) to rank those items from most to least significant. What’s MOST responsible? What’s causing you 80% of your headache? This is not an easy process, but you’ll probably be able to quickly identify 3-5 of your top candidates.At that point, it’s a process of debate and empirical data collection. In other words, where possible try to find numbers to back up your theories here. Through a little research, a bit of number crunching, and hopefully some heated debate with a colleague you should be able to focus in on THE first item you need to tackle.
- Project Focus - In a similar process to you Inventory above, what could you do to improve on this situation? What project would you start with?
- Define your successful outcome - We’ll touch more on next week, but here your trying to articulate what it will look, feel, even smell like when you complete this project successfully. Your goal is to identify the tangible AND intangible benefits of completing this project.
At its most basic level It’s as simple as completing the sentence, ‘When this project is complete I will…’
But more on that next week in Part 4: The importance of outcome thinking.
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