Google isn’t the only search engine around but it is the biggest and most popular and that means it’s the search engine that 99.999999% of us tend to use in our searches and when we’re considering keywords for marketing. So when I say “search engines” I’m generally talking about Google (so if you use another search engine, be aware that there might be differences). Also, when I say “keywords” I could mean a single word or I could mean a phrase (which is sometimes called a “key phrase”).

When someone goes to Google to search for something, the words they type into the text box are the keywords that they are looking for. So you need to know what keywords you want to be searchable for and then you need to build your website and your external marketing to target those keywords. (Most of my readers know most of this already, of course, but I need to start somewhere).

Step 1: Imagine the possibilities (Duration: 10 minutes)

The first thing to do is to pull out a piece of paper or open a Word document and write down what you do in a couple of sentences. Write it the way you normally would, which is usually from your own perspective. (For example, I might write: “I am a coach who helps small business owners with productivity and social media and project management” or something along those lines).

Once you have that, try rewriting it a couple of times using different words. Bust out the thesaurus if you need to. If you can’t think of anything, imagine what your mom would write if she were to try to describe what you do to her friends. And, imagine what your top 5 customers would each write about you to a peer who they think might benefit from your services. You should end up with 3 or 4 total summaries (yours plus a couple of others). And it’s here that you can start to put together the keywords that are important for you.

Look over the list you’ve created and think about what an internet searcher would type in if they wanted to find your services online. It’s usually (but not always) a derivative of the words you used in the paragraphs you just wrote. For example, from the one sentence I wrote about myself earlier, I imagine that someone is going to search online for the keywords “productivity coach” or “social media coach” or “project manager”, so those might be keywords, as well as their synonyms (like “social networking consultant”).

Don’t worry if these don’t exactly describe your services perfectly. That’s not the point. The point is that you first need to find the possibilities; you can always narrow the list down later. Now that you have a list (hopefully a longer list than the few I’ve just listed as examples), you can move on to the next step.

Step 2: See what Google has to say about it (Duration: 10 minutes)

Go to Google’s keyword tool at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. This tool lets you type in a keyword and see a bunch of information about it. Now, you can type in all of your keywords at once and do a single search, and that might work fine if you do one thing. However, many of us (myself included) might want to target keywords for slightly different audiences (i.e. project management, social media, and productivity) so I prefer to separate the keywords out into individual categories (i.e. I’d put “project manager” in one and “social media coach” and “social networking consultant” into a second one and “productivity coach” into a third one) because they can be downloaded to your hard drive and I like to keep them in different files based on what I’m working on.

So, type in one (or all) of your keywords, then type in the “I’m-a-human-being” security word and click “get keyword ideas”.

You’ll end up with a big list of keywords and key phrases that people use when searching for services that are similar to yours. Some will be relevant to you, others won’t be, and some will be somewhere in between.

In this list you’ll also see the number of local searches for the phrase in the past month and the average global per-month searches for that phrase. At this point, I like to choose a “top 10″ keyword list for each of the original keywords I had found. There were 3 original “categories” of keywords – “productivity coach”, “social media coach”, and “project manager” so I have a list of about 30 (give or take) keywords – a top 10 preferred list for each one.

There isn’t a formula that will identify which keywords you might prefer. You don’t have to base it on search popularity: A keyword with hundreds of thousands of hits is obviously more popular and therefore might be more difficult to appear high on the rankings, but a small piece of a big pie can still be good. Likewise, a keyword with only a few dozen searches might not be as popular and will therefore probably be easier to get higher rankings, and a big piece of a small pie isn’t that bad, either.

Step 3: See it in context (Duration: 10 minutes per day over a couple of days)

Once you’ve found your top 10 keywords, start looking around the web at each one. (This might be a good project to outsource, by the way). Find out what the top 10 results on Google are for each of the 10 keywords. Yes, you’ll end up with 100 websites but you’ll also have a clear idea about where you fit. It’s not uncommon to find that a couple of the keywords just aren’t quite what you want to be searchable for. Or maybe the competition is so fierce somewhere that you don’t think you have a chance and therefore don’t want to bother trying to be searchable for that keyword. Or perhaps you see an area where the competition is fierce but you add real value.

This can take some time so break it up over a few days if you need to.

Step 4: Narrow (Duration: 10 minutes)

Now you need to narrow your list a bit. 10 keywords might be a bit much to be able to market effectively. Aim to narrow it down to a core list of 3-4 primary keywords that you want to be searchable for. This doesn’t mean that you’re going to ignore the other keywords, but it just means that you’re going to focus your energy on a few places where you can make the most difference rather than spreading yourself too thin and being ineffective at all of them.

Narrowing your list is pretty easy because of the information you collected in step 2 and step 3 but you may still need to do a bit more work to narrow further. Deepen your search to see what other search results there are beyond the first page of the Google search and expand your search to http://search.twitter.com to see how people are talking about your keywords there.

By the end of this effort, you should have a list of 3-4 (no more than 5, seriously!) keywords that you can then use.

• Embed them in your website and blog content
• Write articles about them and post them at an article distribution site
• Write guest blogs and articles for online magazines
• If possible, incorporate them into your URL
• Make sure they are in your bios
• Create a Google Profile with the information
• … and the list goes on and on.

There! You’ve done keyword research in just 10 minutes a day that you can use to set the course for an aggressive and effective marketing campaign.

Related posts:

1. Competitor Research in Just 10 Minutes per Day
2. Success with Informational Sites – Part 2
3. Mastering Google AdWords in 10 Minutes – Part 1

“Okay, now Heather has officially lost her mind – 90% of my job is project management.”

So true, so true! What I have learned, though, is that the key to project management is “organization”. A project is almost everything in your business – either a client’s work, or something as common as waiting on the web designer to update your web page. I always have at least 2 dozen things going on at any time and the way I keep it organized is through a simple spreadsheet. It was not simple to set up but it is simple to use.

Don’t worry, I am giving you that spreadsheet for free, so download it here – and let’s show you how to use it.

Initial Spreadsheet Set Up:

Note: This spreadsheet was developed in Microsoft Excel 2007. It has been found to work fine in older versions (97 – 2003) as long as you have the compatibility pack from Microsoft installed. It has also been tested in Excel 2008 for Mac and worked fine, as well as loaded into Google Docs and works like a charm.

There are 6 tabs:

By Project
By Client
By Project Manager
By Staff
Data Fields
Copyright Information
The last tab (copyright information) you can ignore – it just protects me.

Most people are going to use two tabs, but I have found that some use them all, so I have provided them here for you.

First determine how you want to keep track of your projects: By project, client, project manager or staff?

I prefer By Client, so I would select the By Client tab and begin working.

Prior to populating the data, I need to update my data fields, so I would click on the Data Fields tab.

The first column is Project Statuses. I have listed typical project statuses used in project management but feel free to change/update any of them.

Then the second column is Staff Names, the third column is Project Manager names, the fourth column is Client Names, and the fifth and sixth columns are the corresponding client details.

Go ahead and populate the fields to make them correspond to your business. (Note: It is set up for a list of 8, I will show you in a minute how to work/change those for larger lists)

Going back to my By Client Tab I can start entering my data, the first field under column name is a drop down box, it lets me pick from my list of clients in the Data Field. You will note that it then automatically populates the fourth and fifth column with the corresponding client data.

If this is an internal project I would just leave the client column blank, or I would customize my client name field to include company projects or company departments. Maybe I might put IAC (the name of my company), or better yet, I could put IAC-Web Department and then put my Web Guy’s email and telephone number where the client email and phone number are in the data field.
Then in the second column I enter my project name and in the third column my project description.

Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth columns are drop downs. Again, I’m picking from Data in my data fields tab.

Then my notes column. Notes are very very important. The notes really should not be used to tell about the project. That should be the description. The notes should help you understand “where” the project is at any given time. Here are some examples of good notes:

Key: Adam = Project Manager, Keith = Graphic Designer, Daniel = Web Developer

Status: Waiting on Client | Notes: Adam sent mock up of 3 logos to Client and waiting on response. – 1/5/2009

Status: Waiting on Staff | Notes: Keith sent new icons to Daniel for placement in clients site. – 1/7/2009

Status: Waiting on PM | Notes: Project assigned to Adam. – 1/9/2009

So, the goal is to get all the data in for my open projects.

If you have more than 8 of anything, you need a larger list on your data fields page. That can be done by entering the additional staff, project managers, statuses, or clients, however you have to change the preset name array. I don’t have every version of MS Office to tell you how to do this so I will give you instructions in Office 2007:

Click on the Formulas Tab –> In the Defined Name Section click on the Name Manager Icon –>  A list of your array names will show up. You should have 4 clearly labeled as “ClientNames”, “ProjectManagers”, “ProjectStatuses” and “StaffNames”.

Highlight the one you want and click Edit –> In the Refers to: field you will see something similar to =’Data Fields’!$D$2:$D$10. What that says is the field array is Column D Row 2 through Column D Row 10. So if you now have names all the way going down to row 25, you would just change that last “10″ to a “25″ and click OK.

Once you have the project management sheet set up the way it needs to be:

When you start your day (or after you finish your email), it’s time to go through your list and make sure you have updated statuses and that everything is correct. What you have created is a snapshot of everything going on and you’ve created an ease-of-use factor.

Step 1: Make sure that you have updated the statuses and notes columns to correctly reflect any notices that you have received in the prior day (i.e. an email from a staff member saying it is ready for your review or an email from a staff member saying that they sent it to the client).

Step 2: Go through the list and see what is waiting on you. Do your part and turn it over to the person it needs to go to next. Then update your status and notes.

Step 3: Look at each status and note combo and see where the project’s at and what may need to be nudged along or updated. It very well may be that it is farther along than you think, but nobody has clued you in, or you have overlooked an email. Take Action.

To give you some examples, I will use my 3 statuses above. Let’s assume it is the 10th of January and I have these three statuses:

Status: Waiting on Client | Notes: Adam sent mock up of 3 logos to Client and waiting on response. – 1/5/2009

Status: Waiting on Staff | Notes: Keith sent new icons to Daniel for placement in clients site. – 1/7/2009

Status: Waiting on PM | Notes: Project assigned to Adam. – 1/9/2009

First one: We are waiting on the client. The client was sent the logos on January 5th and it has been 5 days, so it definitely needs to be updated. So I would send an email: “Adam, Logo Project for Client X is not moving along. Please check in with client and see which logo he wants. It has been 5 days, update me accordingly.”

Second one: We are waiting on Daniel to do his web development work with the icons Keith sent. It has been 3 days and developers get easily distracted. So I would send an email (and cc: Adam his project manager) “Daniel, please confirm that you received the icons from Keith 3 days ago and provide Adam and I with an ETA on completion.”

Third one: We are waiting on Adam to do his thing (signing it out to the staff), but it only has been a day, so we don’t need to do anything with that.

Step 4: Save and Close and work on it tomorrow.

Every business is different and it may be that you don’t want to do this or need to. It may be that your project managers are very efficient. So why not pass this email and spreadsheet along to them and just have them turn their spreadsheet in to you on a daily basis? Then it is all done for you. It may be that you don’t have a project manager and that you are the project manager. So in that case you can just ignore the project management column.

This easy 4-step process has proved invaluable to Coaches, Independent Professionals and Freelancers that outsource work to independent contractors.

Related posts:

1. Self-Directed Project Management in Ten Minutes a Day
2. Horror story from the front lines of project management
3. Project management best practice: The report

Number crunching
First, let’s think of the numbers: According to The Economist’s Pocket World in Figures, there are about 6.4 billion people in the world and about 28% of them of them are under 15 years old. Using some broad assumptions about the age of kids who believe in Santa (let’s say 10 and under), along with the understanding that not every child in the world lives in a country or practices a religion that recognizes the fat jolly man (let’s say three quarters to be safe, but it’s probably far more), I’m estimating about 300,000,000 children get toys from Santa each year.

Project management schedule
Now, let’s work backwards in Santa’s production timeline, beginning from his delivery: If he starts about 8pm on Christmas Eve at the International Date Line and stuffs stockings all the way around the globe back to the International Date Line at about 4am on Christmas Day, he actually has more than 24 hours of effective delivery time. (Closer to 32 or 36 if my chronological estimates are correct).

There’s probably a week of loading and likely some drop points along the way, so let’s assume a week or two of distribution. And if he takes Mrs. Claus on a two-week Caribbean cruise, he’s left with about 336 days of the year to make toys for three hundred million children.

As a project management guru, Santa is not only an expert at delivery (as we’ve seen) and distribution (as we’ve safely assumed), but he’s very likely also a master of delegation. If every stocking holds an average of 10 gifts then Santa has 3 billion gifts made in 336 days. What kind of staffing delegation is required for that effort?

Delegation is the key
If every elf can make 3 toys a day then one elf can make about 1000 toys in a year (with 2 weeks off for vacation, plus other duties during the distribution phase that leads up to Christmas). Using that calculation, Santa needs 3 million elves to do his work.

When you consider that Santa also needs raw materials to make the toys, he seems to have set up an impressive supply chain that rivals anything created by Dell. And do I need to mention: Animal support for his eight tiny reindeer, plus time to read and answer children’s letters, plus the inevitable union challenges and HR headaches that come with having that many employees working together.

And will all of this attention to detail, he still has time to be jolly and make tireless public relations trips to malls and parades around the world. Amazing! If he would only write a book to tell us his productivity secrets, he’d have an army of productivity coaches and enthusiasts lined up to read it.

Merry Christmas!

Related posts:

1. Horror story from the front lines of project management
2. Project Management Tip: Feedback Best Practices
3. Project management skills to make the holiday season better

• You’ll be more successful when you identify a problem that your target market is facing… and you solve it.

• While many of your customers will leave happy, some will return the product or express dissatisfaction with the service – that’s a problem.

• You’ll also encounter problems each and every day – whether staff issues or accounts receivables challenges or vendor concerns – all of which can hold your business back from the success you desire.

• Even working on big projects, which requires a certain amount of project management, also requires a healthy dose of problem solving to navigate complex projects through to their successful completion.

With so many problems facing you, how do you run a successful business… and how do you do it enjoyably?

One of the first things you need to do is accept that there will be problems. Actually, don’t just accept it; embrace it. Realize that you WILL encounter problems in your work and determine that you won’t let them hold you back but you will over come. This is a simple mindset switch that can make all the difference in the world. (Compare it to the small business owners who try once, fail early, and become “guy-shy” after that, never willing to try again).

The next thing you need to do is learn to be creative. Yes, creativity is a learned skill and the more creative you are, the more proficient you will be at creative problem solving. The site jpb.com is a rich resource of creative ideas and solutions and content. One place to start on that site is this article: Ten Step for Boosting Creativity.
Third, and this is the point that inspired me to write an entire blog about problem solving, make problem solving fun. I was a consultant for a company who contracted several consultants at the same time. We all did our jobs and produced quality work, but the highlight for all of us – and some of the best quality we ever produced – was when the company put on a fun little competition pitting teams of consultants together to come up with creative solutions to their problem. I just read a blog this week at the Harvard Business School, How to Make Solving Problems Fun, that outlined some successes businesses had when they made problem solving fun among their staff. They rightly point out that money is highly valued but a fun prize for problem solving can even trump a monetary reward.

With a three step list like this, problems disappear: Every time they surface, you simply follow these steps toward a solution and then move on to the next problem. There WILL be problems, but that won’t be a problem for you!

Happy problem solving!

Related posts:

1. Solve Your Business Problems in Just 10 Minutes
2. Nine Tips for a More Successful Business
3. Project management best practice: The report

10 Things You Can Do in the Next 60 Days to Market Your Business and Close More Sales

The fun theory … it works! – Make sure you click the link and watch the video on this one. It really is amazing.

Finding Inspiration in Sleep

How to Get Started with Twitter Lists

The Future of Work

How to Kill the Scope Creep Beast

6 Reasons Why You Need to Consider Email as a Communication Strategy on Your Blog

Happy Reading!

Related posts:

1. Weekend Reading: My fav’s from this week: 2/19/10
2. Weekend Reading: My fav’s from this week: 1/29/10
3. Weekend Reading: My fav’s from this week: 12/25/09

The reason is simple: Even though you might have good days and bad days working as an employee, your job is generally predictable: You show up and do your work and you go home at the end of the day.

It’s not like that for entrepreneurs. Here are three skills that aspiring entrepreneurs need in order to be successful:

Embrace the unknown. Small business ownership is not predictable. Some days will be quiet, other days will be insane. For many businesses, the question mark of “where do I get the next client” always seems just around the corner and it never goes away. I have one colleague who has been a successful consultant for years and tells me that it took him years to accept the fact that he was only two weeks away from having no clients. That means he needs to keep an ongoing marketing system in place to make sure that there are always clients who “appear” regularly in order to mitigate that two week cliff.

And, as I write this, I’ve just thought of another client who wanted to become a freelance writer. I helped get him set up, got him some clients, and then he realized that he wasn’t comfortable with the unknowns so he decided to go back to his more predictable (but far less profitable) job in inventory management.

Commit to personal discipline. Why do entrepreneurs fail? Sure, there are a lot of reasons but many of those reasons stem back to a lack of personal discipline: Perhaps they aren’t organized and spend all of their time building a website and none of their time doing billable work. Or perhaps they can’t adequately manage a project (and many aspects of business ownership are related to project management). Or maybe they work too much and don’t take enough personal time to recharge their batteries. Or maybe they spend more time on the phone, at Facebook, or at coffee with friends because they are their own boss.

Another true story example: Someone I know owns six businesses and each one has proven itself to be profitable. Unfortunately, he lacks the personal discipline to focus on a single business so all of them sputter along. I keep telling him to call back the people who are calling him to place orders; I keep telling him to focus on doing two or three things really well, but it doesn’t look like any of his six potentially successful businesses will flourish.

If you’re about to become an entrepreneur, invest in some tools to help you – including systems, processes, and resources to help you stay disciplined.

Realize that your products or services don’t sell themselves. This is a huge problem for new entrepreneurs. Many people who become entrepreneurs but don’t come from a sales background don’t realize that selling something requires more than marketing. It requires some kind of sales effort, too, which is very different than marketing.

I blame the “get rich quick” mentality that is pervasive on the web. This has done a lot of damage to entrepreneurs who could be making a meaningful living by running a business, but instead they are squandering their time and money on less-than-effectives schemes. If you’re about to become an entrepreneur, invest in some sales training and it will make all the difference.

Good Luck!

Related posts:

1. Customer-to-Client: How to Make the Transition
2. Project management skills to make the holiday season better
3. The conundrum of committedness – part 3

But at the same time, trying to take time off for business owners is extremely difficult. With so much to do, it can be extremely difficult to break away at the end of the day. Twelve or fourteen hour workdays may soon become the norm as you try to keep your head above water. Success breeds success, leading you down an ever busier path. No matter how much you love your work, sooner or later you will begin to feel ready for a vacation.

When a business owner considers taking some time off they inevitably begin asking themselves:

• What will happen during your vacation?
• Will you be able to completely clear your schedule for a week or two?
• What happens if you do?
• Will you lose track of important clients, or possibly even lose work due to the inability to get things done in a timely manner?
• Will you lose out on future clients simply because you were unable to answer your email before someone else was hired instead?

There are no simple answers to these questions. Every business owner’s personal, vocational and financial picture is different. However, a basic truth holds for every person on Earth, whether or not that person is a business owner. We as human beings need down time. We need time to relax, spend time with loved ones, and have fun. Not allowing yourself some time off is a sure path to burnout.

Here are some tips on how to take time off for business owners

Begin by outsourcing as much as possible. A virtual assistant can transform the small business experience for the business owner who is struggling to keep up. Your virtual assistant can manage many of the day to day tasks of business management, from bookkeeping and accounting to answering phones and email. He or she can also manage your calendar, sending you reminders of important upcoming events. A VA can work as many or as few hours as you require, and those hours may change by the week, month or project. The cost of a VA is generally much less than that of recruiting, hiring, training and retaining an employee.
Plan your vacation well in advance. Work longer hours to get as far ahead as possible before you leave town. Let your clients know about your vacation well ahead of time. Plan realistic project deadlines that account for the time that you will be away.

Working during your vacation is a viable option, as long as your work hours are limited. There is little point in paying for a hotel room that you will sit in for days on end, working. However, setting aside an hour a day to check email and return phone calls, and perhaps one or two days a week to complete work tasks is a reasonable goal.

Let your VA work for you while you are on vacation. Arrange for him or her to answer your phone and respond to emails. Have anything that requires your attention forwarded to your voicemail or email for you to respond to at your leisure.

Balancing work and downtime can be difficult for any business owner. However, time off is essential to mental health and stability. Outsource those tasks that you do not need to personally handle and structure your schedule to allow for vacations. The peace of mind and refreshment of mind, body and spirit are worth the effort.

About the author: Heather Villa, MBA CMA MSM, is a Business Coach and Entrepreneur. She helps business owners achieve success in operations, productivity, project management, and social media. Read her other articles at http://hireheathervilla.com/resources/articles/ and visit http://heathervilla.com for more information.

Disclaimer: © 2009 Heather Villa. Permission is granted to repost this article. Article must be published in its entirety, including author bio, and all links must remain intact.

Related posts:

1. A “workout” regimen for small business owners
2. One Small Step for Business
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I’m reminded of a story once where I worked on a project (as an employee who participated, not as the project manager). The project manager had to create a weekly report that estimated the time we spent on the project. They had each employee estimate the number of hours we worked on the project. Then they took those numbers and (fully admitted to us) padded the numbers to bring them in line with expectations (I guess we were too efficient or the project manager needed to justify their budget). It made me look at project management reporting with disdain so I’ve revised how I manage projects ever since.

It seems like in some of the projects I’ve worked, the reporting can take just as long as the project itself: You write a report then you print it and give it to everyone… and then you have to go into a room and read it for everyone because they didn’t read it. Then you field questions. (And somewhere in there, the project has to get done).

Project management reporting best practices

First, create a quick, one-page report that is visually appealing. A report that requires a small forest to be cut down so that everyone can stay up-to-date isn’t going to be read anyway. This might be necessary for an end-of-the-project report but an interim report doesn’t have to be very long. It’s funny, people might resist the idea of shorter reports in the interim but they will at least read them!

This one page report should be set up in the following way: At the top, using a nice visually appealing diagram like an overall fishbone diagram or Gantt chart or whatever you’re using as a primary tracker. Keep it small and neat and just an overview. Indicate where in the project you are and where you had hoped to be.

Below the diagram, list current milestones you’re working on and (if it’s not clear from the diagram) previous successful milestones (although this can get to be lengthy if you’re not careful).

Next, highlight a couple of successes that you’ve had and a couple of challenges that you’re working on. Don’t put in really redundant challenges. Instead, put in challenges that you could use some help and/or guidance on from the group to whom you’re reporting. (So, if you’re reporting to a bunch of Executive Vice Presidents, don’t write in that a challenge you’re facing is motivating your troops. That won’t look good on you. Instead, write in a challenge like some of the budget clawback has threatened the timeline).

If you want to really avoid any questions, maintain a blog or project management site (which will probably require a login and password) and invite people to read that if they want to stay informed. I’ve found that people won’t read it but will ask fewer questions because they don’t want to admit that they haven’t read it.

I don’t want to give the idea that this report is something you do to avoid doing the work of reporting. But I do want to make reporting a practical step in the project management process… and often it’s not.

Related posts:

1. Project Management Gone Wrong
2. Horror story from the front lines of project management
3. Project Management Success Requires Flexibility

There, I said it.

If you’ve said this, you can be forgiven for saying it because few people realize just how poisonous it is to a project. Part of the reason is that most of us have grown up in a democratic society (whether the US or somewhere else – many places have some kind of democratic process in place) and we value democracy as a right and a key to our freedom as human beings. When we have a say, we have power and provide a check and balance to those we have asked to be in charge.

Democracy is a “must have” in politics… but it should not be present in project management. Project management is not a democracy. There are a few reasons for this:

• In the political arena, points of view are combined and large groups of people speak as one. Individually, they might each have massively varying views, but within a pre-defined category, they vote en masse. However, a project is a smaller group of people so each voice (and each individual’s point of view) can be heard loud and clear.

• In the political arena we theoretically have one vote per person (although even this has some flex with concepts like the USA’s electoral colleges). In projects, not all people are created equal. Bosses have more authority. The janitor doesn’t get a vote. Some people are paid more than others. Some people have more “skin in the game” than others. Some people know more than others.

• In the political arena, our votes are private, secure, and no one else’s business but our own (unless we share it with others). In projects, a show of hands around the table looks like democracy but isn’t because a sharp glare by a highly influential person or a desire to “not make waves” can sway a vote.

Instead, projects need to be consultative. In other words, one person is the decision maker and bases his or her decision on the full input from every other person on the team, as well as other critical parties (like the project’s sponsor). That person needs to be trusted with the power to make those decisions and to expect them to be followed-through by others.

In politics, few of us would want to live in a place where the leader had that kind of authority. But in projects, it’s a different story. Democracy is good in the right place but in projects you shouldn’t invite people to raise their hands.

Happy Blogging!

Related posts:

1. Mitigating Risks: The Key to a Stronger Project
2. Tweets in 10 – All Hands on TweetDeck!
3. An all-too-common project horror story

It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about a large business, a small business, a start-up, a department, or a project that is being managed within an organization – businesses need to work towards high quality completion but NOT perfectionism.

Here are some great examples (“war stories” from colleagues, mostly) that illustrate why perfectionism should not be the end-goal:

• On a project for a large organization, one shareholder wanted to strive for perfectionism. Their seemingly small changes/recommendations/demands/improvements (intended to turn a great project into a perfect project) cost just as much to make at the near-to-finished stage as the rest of the project cost to do, and doubled the timeline. Their changes were minor – a period here an extra line there, another review, a semi colon instead of a comma, etc. Their effort to take “great” and make it “perfect” doubled the budget and timeline… on a project in which the audience would not notice the changes that were made.

• A marketing website meant to capture the attention of prospects could have been rapidly deployed with effective results, getting prospects signing up quickly. Unfortunately, the company went through hundreds of drafts by dozens of writers because it wasn’t perfect. At the time of this writing, six months after the project was supposed to be live, it is not live yet.

• Back when the housing market was better than it is today, one colleague was waiting to buy a house. He patiently waited through the tiniest of interest rate changes, calculating that one more point might be the perfect time to buy. He was not impressed when I pointed out to him that the months of high rent he was paying in the meantime would surpass any savings he made on the single point of interest.

Here’s where I see it most frequently… and where it is most relevant for small business owners: If you are in sales or have a sales department where you work, I predict that this is one of the biggest challenges. If you put all of your sales people into a room and ask them about their sales, the ones who are less successful will tell you that they are still working on their pitch or their presentation material or trying to perfect the marketing brochure or PowerPoint to use. And the most successful ones? They have material that is “good enough” – it is high quality, there aren’t glaring errors, and it’s accurate – but it’s not perfect. And yet they are successful because they know that these elements do not have to be perfect.

You might notice something else I’ve hinted at: The cost (of money, time, and effort) to take something from poor to good and then from good to great can be equivalent to (or even less than) the cost to take something from great to perfect. In sports, an amateur athlete needs to do less work to go from good to great than an Olympic athlete needs to do in order to go from great to perfect. And if business is a sport, no one is expecting Olympic-style performances. They’re costly and only come once a year. What people really want is consistent business wins, day-in and day-out.

Business owners and project managers: Take a look at your list of projects (especially your to-do’s related to marketing and sales). How much of it is “good enough” but currently unused because it is not perfect? Try using it anyway and see what happens. I believe that your “good enough” material can be made great on-the-fly as you interact with your marketplace. And because you didn’t invest disproportionate amounts of time and money up-front to make it perfect, you’ll be willing to make changes if the marketplace tells you that it needs something different.

Trust me. It works. Perfection is a myth. Aim for great, achieve it, and succeed. Leave perfect for fairy tales.

Happy Blogging!

Related posts:

1. Embracing the recession
2. Project Management Gone Wrong
3. Yes, you even need to know how to sell