Business Baby Steps

You’ve probably heard that the method to eat an elephant is “one bite at a time.” It’s the principle of taking baby steps to accomplish a big thing. Project managers set up milestones and mini goals to gauge progress, celebrate accomplishments, and to avoid getting bogged down looking at the mountain of work. I’ve also heard that rock climbers plan their path and then concentrate on the five to ten feet above them, all the way to the top.

Starting your business is very similar

If you haven’t already quit your job, start small and make your mistakes while you still have a good safety net to fall back on when someone doesn’t pay or you underestimate a quote. I recommend Jon Acuff’s book, Quitter if you’re looking to quit sometime soon to do your own thing.

Figure out how much you want (or need) to make, divide that by the number of hours you can work, and then how many hours of that you can bill for. If you’re doing project pricing, reverse the steps after calculating your need: how long will it take you to do the project and then price according to how much you need to charge over that time. Set up milestones for cash flow if you need to.

An example

I recently sought help for feeling stuck and unable to concentrate on my voluminous list of projects and to-do items. The advice I got back was to cast out thoughts of how productive I usually am and make a daily to-do of no more than 3 items with the 3rd item considered to be a bonus task – if I get to it, great.

Last week, I set out to convert the brilliant code @norcross handed me to redirect login attempts on a WordPress site and turn that code into a plugin that will work for all themes, not just a fix coded into a client’s theme, if needed.

I’ve only written one plugin, and the vast majority of that was done by other friends with experience. This time I wanted to write it. I watched tutorials, practiced for a few hours with things not working and error screens until I got it working. I went step by step with each file to break it down into the readme file, the plugin file, and settings. I broke each of those up into tasks, too. Adding a settings page to the dashboard menu, plugging in the actual function, designing the settings form, etc.

Now, it’s live in the repository and it’s being well-received by the community. I couldn’t have done it if I didn’t break it down into baby steps – Sunday, I finished eating my elephant.

On to my next large herbivore.

What are you breaking down into chunks to achieve? How can I be of assistance?