Ideas and Plans won’t pay the bills. 4 traps to avoid.

January 20, 2010 by Matt Eve · Comments Off
Filed under: Irish Business Tips 

Ideas and Plans won’t pay the bills. 4 traps to avoid.

So you’ve come back refreshed after the Christmas break with lots of good ideas and plans for your business in 2010. This can often be the case, time away from the daily tasks and interruptions of running a business can be when a lot of the brainwaves occur.

So should you pat yourself on the back and congratulate yourself on coming up with these new ideas?

Well yes and no.

To be brutally honest ideas and plans on their own are worthless. What you really need to do to put money in the bank is to IMPLEMENT.

It may seem obvious but you’d be surprised at how many people come up with great ideas, ideas that could generate huge income or big improvements in their business. But for whatever reason they fail to implement.

The traps that people can fall into when trying to implement include:

1. Wanting Everything to Be Perfect

How often have you fallen into this trap? I’ve seen it time and time again. For example you decide to put up a new website but in doing so you realise that your logo is looking a bit out of date. So rather than just getting the site live you go off and get the logo redesigned and this pushes out finishing the website. Then you procrastinate about whether the sales copy is quite good enough so that delays things further and before you know it 6 months has past. Well guess what even if it isn’t 100% perfect put it live anyway, you can tweak it as you go and improve it. But just be getting things done you far increase the chance of getting results. In the case of the website example 6 months of missed traffic waiting for a new website to be perfect could cost you a lot of lost sales. More often than not ‘Good Enough is Good Enough’

2. Being easily distracted

This is the second biggest killer of getting things implemented. Rather than just getting on with the task at hand you get distracted by other tasks and ideas. You start these as well as they seem like a good idea. Before you know it you have loads of tasks all at different stages with nothing actually getting completed. This can be exhausting and a huge waste of energy. Identify a small number of tasks and focus yourself on getting these implemented. Only when these are done should you start the next ones.

3. Always looking for the next big idea

Related to the previous trap this is when you start working on something only to stop and ask yourself if perhaps there is a better idea or opportunity you are missing out on. What happens here is that you end up abandoning the original idea for the new one. Then when you start working on the new idea another one comes on the horizon. Well guess what there will always be lots of ideas. Picking one and sticking with it until completion is going to give you far better results than continually chasing the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

4. Not being able to delegate

The final trap I see people falling into is the feeling that they should be doing everything themselves. Often we look at those who are very successful and wonder how they get so much done. Well the secret is delegation. You will get much more done by investing your time in delegating tasks to others, particularly others who may be suited to those kinds of tasks than doing them yourself.

So now I’ve given you a heads up on the potential pitfalls it’s over to you. Are you looking for better results this year? If so you will need to do things differently. Implementation is the key. Just put your head down and get things done. Sure some things might not be perfect and yes there may be better ideas out there, but really what counts is putting things into action and making your ideas and plans actually happen.

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