Movement or Meditation?

A lot of business owners, myself included, spend a lot of time “meditating” on business projects and ideas. We think about how they will look in our company when they are done, perfecting them in our heads. There are a lot of perfectionists in the entrepreneurial ranks, even in our little carpet-cleaning world.

But, when push comes to shove, any mediocre plan in motion will get you farther than an idea that is being endlessly perfected inside a meditating head. Movement always outperforms meditation.

This lesson continually crops up in my life, to remind me to keep myself in motion. I spent over a year waiting to sit down and plan out my perfect web site. Because it’s a big project, and has a lot of potential revenue-generating facets to it, I put it on my important projects list.

But I had a problem finding big blocks of time to work on it. And I finally realized after a year that I needed to just delegate the layout work to someone else and pay them to get it done. It wouldn’t be exactly the way I had planned, but at least it would get done.

It’s been a few weeks up and running now, and I’m already making sales with new rug clients. If I had made this decision a year ago, I would’ve made a lot of money by now. Another lesson learned. It makes me mad, because I already know how to put motion to a plan; I just forgot to stick to the same strategy I do with everything else.

In case you have forgotten your implementation strategy, here is mine that you can swipe and use:

Define your project goal (e.g. web site up and running)

List all of the action steps needed for this project to become a reality (find a server, set a budget, find a designer, create the content, etc.)

List names of people who can help you with each action step (if you have yourself on every task, you need to get help quick)

List a timeline by each action step, and set a deadline for the project

Meet with your team to see your progress

This isn’t a revolutionary strategy, and it is similar to many you’ve probably seen before, but it’s simple enough to use, which is why I like it. And when you meet and see that steps are being taken and movement is happening, then you do not get that heavy feeling that you aren’t putting important projects in motion.

If you don’t currently use a strategy for implementing, think about trying this out for a while. Remember that Connections 2003 is this fall and, when you go to this amazing event you are going to be flooded with a lot of new ideas, you’ll want to have a system for making these ideas a reality in your company. Make sure you go to the CFI web site at www.carpet9.org to register for Connections.

Until next time, I hope you have lots of motion!