As small business owners, we’ve taken the time to plan our strategic overarching Vision statements, build good solid goals, objectives and activities to make it all happen. We should be really proud of ourselves. Pat yourself on the back for that. Well done.
Has this ever happened to you? I am sometimes really, really busy during the day doing all sorts of important things like paying bills, creating blog posts, and editing images for Social Media. At the end of the day, I feel like I’ve achieved so much… and I have. The problem is that I have spent so much time lost in the weeds of detail, I may not have moved my creative business one bit closer to my goals, let alone my Vision. There may be a huge project coming that could have used my attention, and I spend the entire day, and all my energy, on things that are comparatively unimportant.
I spent 30 years as a librarian, and I know just how important attention to detail is to creating quality, and precise work or in making informed decisions. Getting the details right at the beginning can save a lot of delays later on. I get it, but pulling back from details is essential for any small business owner.
We can get so involved, so busy doing the day-to-day activities, and putting out fires, that we can easily forget to see our Vision in the minutia of the moment. One of the tricks I’ve developed to keep us from accepting projects that have little to do with our core business. When we decide to take on a project, I require us to state which of our goals that project supports. I enter that link in my project spreadsheet, so that periodically we can review real data about how we’re actually spending our time. If it seems that we are starting to wander, we can regroup and change our approach for the future.
I’m not picking on you. That’s one of the realities of running a small operation. It’s not like we have a team of experts helping us run things every day. It would be great to just sit in a corner office and think about big strategic visions, with trusted employees giving me great data and sound advice. It’s just the two of us in our business, and it may just be you in yours. The point is not to become perfect at all this, but rather to find ways to incorporate the strategic stuff, with the everyday grunt work we all have to do. We have to believe that they’re both important.
And seeing the big picture is vital to any business or organization. It’s probably core to any marriage as well. Every time you can pull your thinking or planning out of the weeds and to a higher level, you start to make better decisions that carry your mission much further.
So how do we create strategies to be more strategic? It’s a lot harder than it ought to be. It just happens to be the end of the year when I’m writing this blog. I have to get all my receipts entered and scanned to my accountant so that we can close out the year and get started on my taxes. I also have a bunch of emails to catch up with, and I need to get the newsletter started so I can send it out at the end of next week. At the same time, I need to meet with my business partner, and we need to hammer out our goals and objectives for next year. We also need to take a look at how we did over all with this year’s budget and make any projections of what we’ll need to budget for this coming year. Crap, why did I remind myself of all that I still have left to do?
The point is that all of those things are important. Over the past two days, all I have really done is to enter receipts and scan them to my accountant. I’ve grabbed onto the lowest hanging fruit, the one that requires the least amount of mental capacity, and left everything else to complete in the next 7 days. Perhaps if I broke the data entry into smaller chunks, and did say one hour per day on busy work, and reserve larger chunks of dedicated time to spend on budget planning, meeting with Bogdan, and hashing out those goals and objectives.
I should also have some strategy for keeping those planning sessions strategic. When I was working in New Zealand, we kept two things on the table at all our meetings. One was a toy helicopter, and the other was a stuffed rhinoceros. Thanks Sandra Mann, great boss! Whenever the meeting started to get too specific, and we began to discuss details. Someone would grab the helicopter and call us to raise the level of conversation back to the strategic level. The rhino was there for anyone who was starting to get angry or hurt, we stopped for that too. Those tools may not work if you’re all on your own, but there will be some tools that will work. Your job is to find them.
One option would be to make a poster of your vision statement, and hang it on the wall where you see it every day. You could create a dream board that creates triggers to help you remember what is important, why you’re doing the work you do, or provides visual symbols of what success looks like. Perhaps it’s a quote that is meaningful, or a quarter jar that you drop a coin in every time you cross something off your strategic list. Maybe it’s an egg timer. Find something that works for you,
When you are able to see the big picture, you pull yourself up from operational functions to strategic work, and the strategic work is what is truly transformational in any business or organization. Get the operational stuff done, but spend your best time at 30,000 feet. The view from there is phenomenal.
This month we're offering a free give away. If you'd like a free copy of the spreadsheet template I use to organize all my records, it will only cost you an email address. I'm trying to build my database of emails, so if I send you a newsletter or promotion that you'd rather not receive, you can always opt out at any time. So just send me your email, and I'll get you a copy of the spreadsheet file. I have used this template now for several years, and even if you need to tweak it to make it work best for you, it might be of help to you in organizing your own small creative business. https://www.johnbishopfineart.com/giveaway
John Bishop Fine Art is a weekly blog/vlog that creates a community, a conversation, between creatives in all sorts of fields at all sorts of levels. We want to discuss what we’re learning, what we’ve experienced, and whom we’ve met in our journey of running a freelance creative business. John Bishop is a visual artist living in Houston, Texas. His work is largely abstract, and explores how to turn mythic, archetypal symbols into individual experiences allowing us to see them in a new way, with fresh eyes. His work can be seen online, or at his studio at Silver Street Studios, 2000 Edwards Street, Studio 108, in Houston.
Website: http://www.johnbishopfineart.com
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Twitter: https://twitter.com/JohnBishopart
Buburuza Productions: http://www.Buburuzaproductions.com
Bogdan Mihai: http://www.bogdanfotoart.com
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