Running a Small Business

Lesson 3: Organization and Planning

Planning and scheduling your work

The key to ensuring that you reach the goals you have set for yourself is planning your work. The key to making sure that you reach your goals at a certain time is scheduling your work. In my experience effective planning and scheduling is rare in small businesses and surprisingly uncommon in large corporations which should know better.

I like to use the example of travel to somewhere new because it's easy to understand. You've got a goal - your destination and you have to be there at a certain time. You've never been there so you consult a map. The route you choose is your plan. The times you decide to reach certain places along the way is your schedule. You don't know the route but you have experience travelling so you leave more time on small roads and through the mountains and less on big highways. You leave extra time to get through cities and you leave a bit of extra time for unforeseen events. If you've chosen your route well, you'll arrive at your destination. If you've scheduled well, you'll arrive on time.

The business goals you choose for yourself are destinations. You need a plan and a schedule to get to your destination on time. You can't just go off in the general direction and hope there are no obstacles. If you were travelling north and just went north without a map, it's certain that, sooner or later you'd hit a river with no bridge in sight. Oh, you could just go along the banks until you'd see a bridge - there would be one sooner or later, but by that time your competitors with plans would be across and down the road.

"This year you want to generate additional business from new customers which will contribute a 20% increase in profit based on last year's figures." You can't just go out and sell. Which customers? Which products? What price? Maybe there are few customers of the kind you were going to sell to. Maybe you don't have the capacity to sell 20% more of the product you were going to offer. Maybe the price is wrong for that market.

That's where planning comes in. You break down your work into tiny steps. New customers? Same as we have or new market? New market - approach by phone or by mail? By mail - buy address list or make our own? Make our own - from phone book or referrals? Referrals - from files or phone existing contacts for more? Phone existing contacts - how many and when? Phone ten existing contacts for new referrals starting Monday. Desired result - twenty new addresses at the end of the first week.

For more on breaking down work into components and managing progress, try our recommended resource, "Project Management: Planning and Control Techniques." It gives more details on organizing work from a project management perspective.

Now you have a manageable bit of work to do instead of having the goal of a 20% increase in profit looming over you. All you have to do is, on Monday, phone ten existing customers and ask for referrals. You've got a plan, a schedule and the scheduled jobs are manageable. Now you need to go through the rest of the work, break it down, schedule it and put in results so that the results add up to the original goal.

What this process does is get the work scheduled and out of your mind. Now you can go on to the next goal and get it planned and scheduled. You haven't got a huge task any more - all you're got is a few small jobs to do and if you do them well, the big goals are going to take care of themselves.

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