It’s been a long time since I’ve undertaken something as big as this month’s expansion of the Entrepreneurial Women’s Club (EWC) from Connecticut into the Boston area. It’s been a good reminder of the stretch (and anxiety!) my clients feel when they do the same.
Now that our launch is just days away, here are some observations I hope will help with your next big project:
- We set the end date before we started the work. In the case of EWC, my partner and I chose the date of our first Boston meeting back in April. We looked at the calendar and chose October 11th. We knew there would be a lot of work to do, and we weren’t sure about the details, but having a deadline made it real and motivated us to get going.
- We broke the project down into phases and created a plan. Lisa and I knew we needed a new logo, a new website, an updated way to register people for the events, and a list of people to invite. At the same time, we wanted to form a new LLC, open a new bank account and formalize our business arrangement. We categorized our to-do list according to milestones so that we would make sure everything we needed for phase 2 was completed by the end of phase 1, and so on. From that list we created a project plan.
- We had regular meetings. We scheduled meetings so that we could make decisions together, review progress and alert each other of any new ideas or issues. This kept us on track and kept our communication open.
- We were decisive. When we needed to make decisions, we quickly gathered the information we needed and analyzed it. We found that 99% of the time we had everything we needed to make a decision. We just needed to commit.
- We had to set aside extra time. Both Lisa and I are running full-time businesses – working on a big project like this didn’t fit easily into our already packed schedules. That often meant working on our project during nights and weekends. But we knew it was going to be over after a few months and that it would be worth our effort, so we kept going.
- We spent money. Although our budget was small and we did a lot of the work ourselves, we brought in outside expertise when necessary. This kept our momentum while we created a professional website, logo, and legally valid business entity.
- We visualized the end result. There were times when we were tired, when we wondered if we would be able to pull this off, and when we had second thoughts about the whole thing. But we knew these were worries that all entrepreneurs face with something big and new. What helped us stay on track was thinking about where we were heading – our first networking meeting in Boston, the women filling the room, seeing old friends and making new ones.
Big projects are scary, no doubt about it. But thanks to these seven steps, we are now just one week away from something we are already proud of!