Don’t let the Big things Kill the Small Things

 

Have you noticed that when you are working on a big project in your business that you often don’t reap the rewards you expected? I see this in my customers when they attack something big like a re-branding, restructure, new product or anything that is large.

Often this is because so much energy is put into the big thing that there is little activity around what happens afterwards or just the usual day-to-day. Of course this is totally understandable yet also destructive – it means that when the big event is actually rolled out, the business may have lost momentum. So what do you do about it?

I suggest one or all of three actions:

1. If your business is big enough, have someone focused just on the day-to-day operations and/ or planning leveraging the change you are making. Have this person as minimally impacted by the change as possible while they are doing this work.
2. As part of your business’ overall objectives and action plans for each month, ensure some of them are not tied up to the big project.  Common topics here would be marketing activity and staff retention or motivation.
3. See the big project differently.  Often we say once we have finished the larger project we will get to the smaller ones – this is often a fallacy.  There is often significant progress you can make on smaller projects independent of the large one.

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