Find Your Trail: Evaluate your daily activities
At Elevation Business Consulting, we are focused on helping small business owners stop scrambling through their daily operations. The journey involves building a map to guide you towards success on your terms. The process starts with finding your trail so you can plan your course and then keep yourself moving forward on your trail.
You are invited to follow the journey of a small business owner eager to end the daily chaos and spend more time doing what he does best to expand his impact on his local community. By studying Travis from Hunchback Graphics’ experience, you will be better positioned to start your journey to end the daily scramble. Previously, Travis assessed his current state and then determined where he wanted to go. Now he needs to spend time evaluating his daily activities.
Find Your Trail: Evaluating your daily activities
As we have learned, Travis has ideas. He chases opportunities to use his creativity and gets energized by what he can create. It often results in frequent scrambling to complete the activities required for the business’ success. He knew something needed to change when he engaged Elevation Business Consulting, but he was not sure what the change would entail.
The Struggle
Ultimately Travis wants to design all day. He loves his work and enjoys jumping from project to project, idea to idea. When inspiration strikes, he chases it. It keeps him energized throughout the day until he realizes there is a ball that is going to be dropped in a different area of the business. When he rushes to complete the other tasks, the quality is not up to his standards and the process takes longer than expected or is rushed. As the only employed owner in the business, he feels alone in making decisions and driving projects from proposal to completion, which causes him to question the quality of work he is creating. As a result, he is moving at a frantic pace that is neither healthy nor sustainable and does not move the business forward to the extent Travis would like.
Taking action
A key component of his engagement with Elevation Business Consulting was reducing the chaos of each day and focusing on the priorities for the business. The first step in reducing that chaos was to document everything Travis did over the course of a week including how much time was spent on each activity. Once he completed his week, Travis was shocked to see how much time he was spending on proposals that did not generate significant income. He spent a weekly call with Elevation Business Consulting evaluating why the proposals took so long and realized that he was procrastinating starting proposals and agonizing over every word and how the services were offered because he did not have a colleague to bounce ideas off or have review the content. Feeling the pressure to create strong proposals without a reviewer created stress which resulted in an excessive amount of time being spent on the process. Once at the root cause of the issue, Travis reached out to his co-owner to ask for support. The two agreed to meet weekly to work through proposals and other bottlenecked areas of the business.
Success on your terms
Meeting weekly with his co-owner, Travis found inspiration to generate proposals without anguish or procrastination. He was better able to create documents knowing he had the support of his co-owner and a second set of eyes before any proposal was sent out. While he still spent his day going from project to project and idea to idea, he no longer procrastinated or felt stressed about meeting proposal due dates.
There were other areas of Travis’ daily activities that he was able to streamline and outsource, but none had as significant an impact as recognizing how much of his time was being overtaken by proposal writing. His mind was blown with how simply evaluating how he spent his time could create so much opportunity to do more better.
Stay tuned for the next step as Travis moves forward to Plan Your Course: Prioritize your daily activities.