I want to change the way you fundamentally think about work.

Hey, today I want to talk to you about the way you go about thinking about your work.

As a business owner

You probably do annual planning. You probably think about projects as these gigantic 18, 24 months, things that you have to do, and to get this workout, and I was the project manager in corporate America for a couple of decades.

A project would get defined and funded by an executive team.

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Individual elements in the blob of work were all assumed equal. No piece of the work was more or less important than any other.

If you have been brought up or learned that process, I want to break that. You probably were taught that in school.

You probably were taught that at home. You were probably taught that in your job and this, this needs to change.

Traditionally we thought of developing a product as a PROJECT. One big blob of requirements that has got to get done to finish a project, right? In corporate America, you said, “This is the scope. When the scope is all done, then you are done. If you don’t finish this scope, you failed, and the project failed.”

I want to tell you that’s Baloney {for lack of a better word} and we can fix that and save you a lot of money in the process.

And as a small business owner, that’s critically important, these big old corporations, they, they can benefit from it, but they don’t seem to care. Believe me; I’ve talked to him.

Fortune 50, fortune 500 fortune 1000 they, they don’t get it at this level. So here’s what I want you to do. I want you to take that Blob of a project in your head and imagine that I want to use the example of teaching a class.

Imagine you are teaching a class on writing, Facebook ads. If you think of a course on writing Facebook ads as this blob of things, and when this blob of elements is complete, then the class can be launched. It will take you 18 months to start it.

The very first thing that we want to do is we want to make the items in your brain discrete. So separate them. Don’t think of the snowman, think of each snowflake that makes it up.

I want you to make things discrete in your mind.

I want you to separate the writing of the scripts from the delivery of the texts. Then sperate the editing of the scenarios from the publishing of the video. Also, isolate the writing of the deck for the PowerPoint deck for it. I want you to separate that from the writing of the workbook that has to go with it. I want you to separate the workbook from the writing of the worksheets that needed to go with it. I want you to separate the writing of the marketing materials from everything.

You get the idea separate, separate, separate, separate.

Make it discreet, making all as independent as possible.

You want each piece to be independent, and what I want you to do is take those things and write them down on a sticky note. You know, the little three by four, whatever size they are, sticky notes, and write all those things down.

Just brainstorm all that crap out of your head. You are just barfing ideas out because it’s in there, and it’s causing you to feel like this like it’s all of this mishmash, and I want you to put them down on discrete pieces of paper so that they’re separate. And don’t worry that this one’s bigger than that one or something like that.

Just keep breaking them down and keep making more and more on an as you come up with a new idea in the shower, hop out of the shower and write a new sticky note, and just keep going until you’ve got all of these things down, and you won’t have them all, but you’ll have a good start.

Now, what I want you to realize is not all of those things are as important as all the rest of them. You know that some things are more critical than others.

Imagine the top three items, for example, maybe these are the writing of the first module of the class and, and, and recording the first module of the course. Perhaps that is the most valuable thing that you could deliver to your customer.

You want to think about value as what your customers see as value! In this case, the customer is going to see value as I have an ad campaign that’s generating revenue, right?

You want to teach them how to start generating revenue as quickly as possible. So what is the very first thing that you would have to teach your students? Well, you want to teach them about probably good headlines and good copy.

Even before you teach them how to configure a Facebook ad or any of those things. The students need to understand that the HEADLINE is of primary importance.

(I may be wrong, I’m not a Facebook ads expert, I’m just using this as an example, so please don’t spam me with, oh, that’s what the most important thing.)

You figure out what the most important thing is, but there is something more important than everything else, and then there are other things. There’s the next level of things that are more important than all the other stuff, and then there’s all the other stuff. So what I want you to do is I want to take you, have you take all of those sticky notes that you have, and I want you to lay them out on a big table and make three piles continually thinking about your customer, only your customer, not yourself. Thinking about your customer.

You don’t think about what’s going to bring you the most money.

Think about your customers and what’s going to bring value to them, and I want you to take those sticky notes, and I want you to make three piles. High, this delivers high value to them. Medium, this brings average value to them, low. Low-value things may still be critically important to the overall success, but they bring low value to your customer, high, medium, low, right, and then I want you to make three more piles.

Start with that one that says high and break it into three piles. High, medium, low, high, highest value things to my customer. Low, medium value things to my customer, low value, even the low-value items in this stack are going to be things that bring high value. And do that again and again until you’ve got this sort of prioritized list.

The things on the high, high, high, high, high end are very granular, very granularity prioritized, and the stuff on the low-value side of things are very grossly prioritized because I don’t care about those yet.

I care the most about the things that my customers are going to get the most value from, so then what you do is you start to build, and you begin to create those very first highest value things complete them, and this can’t be something that is, well, this one-piece needs these seven other things in order to work.

Each one of these items must be discreet. It has to be fully functional by itself, so you create the first thing. You create the second thing and get them out, get something to your customer so that they can see it and they can give you feedback because you think this is what they need, but they may think they need something slightly different and so you want to be able to adapt that without having to have built the whole thing. Remember, if you went back to the traditional model, you’d have no feedback until 18 months in, and then suddenly they say, oh Geez.

That thing, that very most important thing to me would be great if it came in red, well crud, we haven’t. We built everything around blue. However, if I’ve only made these two little things and you get that feedback, you respond, “Oh, it would be better if it was in red. Great. We’ll make it red.” Boom. Increasing your product-market fit your ability to satisfy and delight your customers much more quickly than you build the next set of things. And then you create the next set of ideas and finally, you produce a last set of things. Maybe.

What happens if you get here and your customer is delighted, they’re ecstatic. They’re buying, and they’re buying like crazy. The truth is 80 percent of your customers’ value is going to come from 20 percent of the crap you make. So if you make 20 percent of it here and your customer is delighted with it, maybe you don’t need to make these other, 80 percent of the things.

Maybe you can stop there and move on to creating a different new product, a new project, something different, that came out of this project. So think about that when you’re doing this, be discrete, separate things out. Don’t think it has to all be one thing. Prioritize by value to your customer, not by the way. I believe this process should be architected. If your customer doesn’t need all that, then don’t make it!

Stop here. That’s it.

That’s what I wanted to share.

I get a little bit passionate about stuff like this.

I appreciate you and appreciate your time.

I just wanted to share that with you today.

If you like this article, please “like” it and share it with your friends. I appreciate your taking your time. If you’d like to work with me on building your products and services out faster, better, cheaper, using this kind of process because it can be hard to wrap your head around, drop me a line either on my page. You can instant message me or type down below a private client or something like that, and I’ll get back to you. Thanks. I’ll talk to you soon. Bye. Bye.