Paul Hoyt

You know how you only see one seventh of an iceberg above the surface of the water, and the rest is hiding underneath? Sometimes in business I see folks make the opposite mistake. Instead of not seeing what is hidden, they see what isn’t there – they see opportunities and problems as seven times larger than they really are.

This happens a lot in sales. You make a connection with a prospect, and your imagination runs wild. You think they are going to be a huge client, and you focus a lot of time and attention on them. In the worst cases, I have seen people not only count their chickens before they hatch, but imagine that there are far more eggs than there really are. A prospect opportunity that legitimately may turn into a $10,000 sale is imagined to be a $70,000 certainty. They see what isn’t there, and their pipelines are grossly over inflated.

On the flip side, you may find yourself imagining your problems to be seven times worse than they actually are. A slow paying customer may have just misplaced the invoice (or perhaps you never sent it), but instead, you imagine that they are not going to pay at all. An employee may be having a temporary personal issue, but you think they are going to run off to work for a competitor. You see what isn’t there.

So ask yourself – REALLY – how often do you overstate your opportunities and unnecessarily expand your problems? How often do you see things that aren’t there?

Business owners and executives have a lot on their plates. It is often challenging for them to focus their attention long enough to complete a task when so many things are coming at them and they are having so many ideas all day long. Lots of things mount up and nothing seems to get done.

So here’s what I recommend: pick your top three things and focus your attention on them as follows:  60% of your time on the top priority task, 30% of your time on the next priority, and 10% of your time on your third priority (or everything else).

The key is in picking a planning horizon that works given your schedule and attention span. For some people it is a quarter, others a month or a week, and for some it is just for today. With my most creative client, we had to focus his efforts one hour at a time.

If you choose one work day as your allocation timeframe, that means spending five hours or so on your top priority, 2 – 2.5 hours on your second priority, and about one hour on your third priority (or everything else).  Just make sure to allocate your time and focus your attention in this way until you complete a job or two, and then start over with a new top three things.

So just get started!  Pick your top three things, pick your time horizon, and start working on your top priority. Setting your priorities with the 60/30/10 model helps you “get ‘er done”!

One of the toughest challenges that business leaders face is changing their team over time. Company growth, market changes, new economic realties, and altered competitive offerings all contribute to a need to periodically change the capabilities and performance of your team. On top of that, the people on your team are constantly changing too! At any given time, if only 10-15% of your team is “out of position”, then you have a very strong team indeed.

With an ideal team, everyone is contributing to their full potential, team dynamics are stellar and synergistic, productivity is excellent and improving, and results are predictable and fantastic! When someone is “out of position”, they may not have a great attitude, which can cause the rest of the team’s morale and performance to suffer, or they may not be doing the job as expected or required.

If they have never performed well in their position:

• The job may not have been known or defined well, or someone hoped they would grow into the position over time. And the problem may not be their fault – it could be their leadership. You have to ask yourself if they will ever be right for the position, and if they can be saved with training or a transfer, or with better supervision.
• They are still learning the job.  They may have been hired or promoted based on their potential, and still have a ways to go.  With time, these are usually keepers, if they are learning fast enough to perform well in the position in a reasonable amount of time.  Growing employees takes an investment.

If they used to perform well in their position, but are no longer doing so, then:

• The position may have changed or outgrown them.  It is a rare job in which the roles and responsibilities remain constant. In almost all cases, the person has to change as the job changes – and sometimes the job changes much quicker than the employee. Again, they might be saved depending on how much they need to learn and grow and whether they are closing the gap between performance and expectations.
• They may have outgrown the position. Maybe the employee learned and developed faster than their job, and now they are frustrated or bored. Maybe this is just in their own mind. Once someone thinks they are way better than their position, it is hard to keep them without promoting them, soon.
• They may be self-destructing for other reasons. When life is challenging outside the job, we see people do things on the job to incite their demise; they need a big change in their life and don’t know how to get it otherwise. Counseling may help if they haven’t gone too far.

So take a look at yourself and your team. Are you out of position? Are they? What are you planning to do about it?

One of the keys to being a great project manager is developing a plan that can be executed successfully. That is not always easy. To create a great plan, you have to have a very good idea of the things that need to be done, the sequence of the tasks, the resources and levels of expertise required to complete them, the dependencies between the tasks, etc. You need enough experience to understand that there are a lot of things out of your control, and be able to judge not just that something might take a couple of days to complete, but also that it might take from one to three days to complete – and you have to make a plan that takes that variability into consideration.

So what does this have to do with icebergs? Good question! We know that icebergs only show about one seventh of their total volume above the surface of the water. So when you look at an iceberg, you can create a pretty accurate estimate of how big it is, even though you can only see a relatively small portion of it. When you have a lot of experience with a particular kind of project, say for example, home construction, you can look at a plan and estimate with a good deal of accuracy the amount of contingency time and dollars (the “fudge factors”) you should put into your plans because you understand how much typically shows, and as with icebergs, how much is usually hidden below the surface.

When you have a lot of experience in a particular area with really large projects, software development for example, you begin to develop a sense of looking at a field of icebergs. You not only understand how much of the icebergs you can see are hidden beneath the surface, you also have a sense for how many icebergs are hiding behind the icebergs. “I bet there’s a lot more of those suckers back there” is something I hear real experienced project managers say a lot.

And that’s the bottom line: the larger the project, the more contingency time and dollars you need, because you don’t know what you don’t know. You can’t see all of the icebergs. You need a little contingency time and dollars for small projects (say, 20%) and a whole bunch more proportionately for large projects (say, 50%). So if you can see 100 hours of work in a project, you might estimate it at 120 hours, and when you see 500 hours of work to be done, you might estimate the project at 750 hours (not 600 hours). When you see a hundred man-years of work to be done, well, then choose your own fudge factor.

So that’s one big reason why large projects always take longer and always cost more than you think they will.

Icebergs hiding icebergs.

Brrrr….!!!

I was talking with a prospective client yesterday about the challenges they had in balancing their schedule, as I have done with many, many fine folks who are in business alone or with a very small team. Success requires quite a balancing act! For most people I talk to, there are four primary jobs:

• Sales and Marketing (finding leads and closing them),
• Delivery (doing the work),
• Administration (bookkeeping, scheduling), and
• Product Development (building / writing new products).

And on top of all that, you have to lead your company (build your team, set direction, develop plans, execute them, etc.). It is quite the challenge!

Many people find that they are caught in a “feast or famine” cycle, where they focus time on sales and marketing until they land some deals, then they work on servicing their customers, only to find that they are once again without and work to do and the cycle starts all over again. Managing cash flow is tough.

Here’s what works best for me: setting and keeping appointments with myself to focus time on sales and marketing every week, always being aware of what business is closed for the next few months. I also have to set appointments with myself to write. I have to take care of tomorrow and today, while keeping the delivery of high quality products on time as my highest priority.

Oh yes, and we can’t forget about our families!

Welcome to my business blog! I am going to write a few words every now and then about interesting business problems and opportunities I run across, and may make a point from time to time regarding best practices in starting and growing a business.

I have been a business consultant now for six years, and have worked with hundreds of business owners and trained thousands more. Before I started consulting I worked in 30+ positions for 20+ companies (including summers and part-time) in the previous 30 years, so I have seen quite a few amazing and curious things over time! Even with all this experience, I learn something new, and am inspired by someone nearly every day.

I really do believe that small business owners and executives are among the finest people on the planet! They have brains, courage, and integrity. They deserve the respect of others and the support of our government. And we have to do something about the rate at which which they fail, which is way too often, and way too painful to watch.

By consulting, writing, speaking, and blogging, I am doing my part to support them. How about you? Won’t you join me in this journey to success?