How Entrepreneurs Can Tackle Long Term Projects

Macro and micro managing a business are both skills that need to be understood by entrepreneurs. Think about your business plan and what it entails. You’ll have the large objectives set and you will know what you want to achieve by year 5. However for those plans to come to fruition you need smaller plans that will be used to get to where you need to be. This is the difference between strategy and tactics. The strategy outlines the overall direction or thing you want to achieve but the tactics are how you do so. Long term projects are kind of like walking a tightrope for some business owners because a lot can happen in just 1 business year. So if you have a plan for expanding your business in the next few years, the tactics you employ will either make your move a success or it will cause the strategy to collapse. Even if your strategy and long term plan are completely sound, the small steps you make add up and can be make or break.

Split into sections

Large tasks are often going to need to be split into smaller segments so they can be slowly worked towards. This way you can split the work into sections and have something to achieve each day. For example, if you need to increase your sales of a particular product you will need to know several things first. Why isn’t the product selling in the numbers you thought it would? How could you market it differently? What are the good and bad things about it that you hear in customer feedback? Do you have the time and or resources to fund an update? Splitting up the project is something that David Janeson does when he is running a marina and wants to inject something new and fun for his clients to do. His day is very productive because he doesn’t try to tackle all things at once. He splits up what he needs to achieve and piece by piece gets closer to his objective.

Try not to set time limits

There will come a time when you feel as if you’re falling behind. Long term projects usually have an end goal that is far away in terms of time. So if you want to achieve something by year 3 it can seem like each day you are missing out on due to illness, something going wrong, making mistakes that set you back is causing you too much delay. This is why it’s important to try and not set time limits for every single thing. The project must be achieved by a certain time, but day to day you cannot push and push yourself to get things done and finished before you clock out and go home. There will be delays and mistakes made along the way and to avoid hyper stress levels, don’t set a time limit for every thing or you’ll be constantly disappointing yourself.

Long term projects are the major stepping stones for our businesses that allow us to head onto the next stage of growth and success. Try to split your task up into sections so you can focus on doing one thing only and doing it really well.