So many things to do and too little time to do them in! Does that resonate with you? It’s a rare day when I meet a business owner who feels they have the perfect amount of time to get their things to do list done on a regular basis. There are numerous ways to generate extra time in your day and I’ve covered some of them in previous blogs so today I’m going to talk about prioritisation on a more strategic level. We can all look through our things to do list on a daily/weekly basis and pull out the most important tasks and prioritise them but it can be a little trickier to do this when you are looking at a longer term view of your business. One specific challenge I get asked frequently about is how to prioritise a list of business growth options when you only have the bandwidth to do one or two of them. To be honest I like to keep things simple so I am not about to give you a complex formula for this, but instead I’ll give you my quick and easy way.
Right then:
- On a sheet of paper write down your options for business growth (in a column on the left hand side, let’s call it column A). These could be things like…launch product X, run a webinar, develop new service etc.
- Next to each of them (column B) write down the approximate amount of profit you could expect them to generate in the next 12 months. Now this is meant to be a quick & easy tool so please don’t over complicate this, go with your gut reaction for all of these questions.
- In column C write down how long it will take you to complete the work so you can start generating profit from each option.
- Now think about how hard or easy it is to do each one. This needs to be reasonably “all encompassing” so you need to consider how easy it will be to create the time to complete the work, will it involve much cost to develop it, do you need help from other people and so on. Thinking about all of these give it a “hard, average or easy” score. Score them relative to each other as having them all score the same will not be helpful!
Now look at what you have written down. You should be able to identify which business growth options are your quick wins, which will be generate the most profit in the next 12 months for the least effort, and which could be the most advantageous longer term.
Now think about the strategic direction you are taking your business in (this should be easy as you have a 3 year vision for your business right?!) and make sure the answers that have been generated by this exercise align with that overall vision.
You should now have the answer about where best to focus your time to grow your business in line with your vision and hopefully it’s only taken you 10 mins or maybe even less.
This week’s challenge is to prioritise your time so you are spending it focusing on the most strategically important elements of your business.