How to Make Actual Progress Growing Your Business

Something I did fairly recently was get a private pilot’s license. It’s been something I wanted to do forever, but only recently have I been able to spare the time and cost to make the dream come true.

It has been one of the hardest things I’ve done in a long time. Running the business can certainly be hard and come with its fair share of challenges but twenty four years into my entrepreneurship journey there aren’t too many brand new things that come up anymore.

Not so with flying- every single thing was brand new! And I had no reserve of prior experience or knowledge to lean on to help me- I had to start from scratch and try to master each thing.

It was hard but it was a good lesson in both humility and in learning to focus in on learning one thing at a time. For me, and for many people, landing the plane is the hardest skill to learn. It’s tough because there are a lot of things happening quickly and there is no way to slow it down or make it easier to manage so you can practice just one part of it at a time.

But as it turns out, I had a very good instructor and he gave me some very good advice on how to work on my technique and see solid incremental improvement. Without that, I would still be flailing each time doing some things right but other things wrong and not doing as well as I could have.

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His advice that made all the difference? He told me: “Fix one thing at a time”. Which sounds simple enough but isn’t something you realize on your own as the plane barrels toward the runway and time and space are quickly running out!

What it meant in practice was that on the approach to the landing there are lots of things that have to happen in order for the landing itself to then go right. He wanted me to work on perfecting each of those variables, one at a time, on each new approach, so over time I had fewer and fewer things wrong that I still needed to fix by the time I sailed in over the end of the runway.

First, get it so your approach speed is always within a knot or two of the best speed. Second, get it so your rate of descent is pegged at exactly five hundred feet per minute. Third, make sure you always go to flaps full at one mile out. And so on. By fixing all these items that had been variables before I was clearing a path to better landings by setting up a rock solid approach.

The same advice applies directly to growing your business. Here’s how.

How to Use the “Fix One Thing at a Time” Process to Grow Your Business

The challenge in growing your business is that there are so many things you could work on. I’ve been writing this newsletter about them for a year now and I haven’t run out of things to work on!

But of course, none of us has the time or attention span to address all these things at once. So what often happens instead is none of them get worked on because we are constantly pulled away to be reactive to some problem instead of being able to be proactive on some growth strategy.

The solution is to simply pick one single thing to work on and don’t worry about anything else until that is on track and set up with a system to make sure it doesn’t get away from you again.

Which thing should you pick? You might think: start with the biggest problem area in the business, and that’s not a bad idea. If you can fix the one biggest problem first not only should it help the business the most but it should make the other issues feel easy in comparison.

On the other hand, that one biggest thing might seem so big it’s almost overwhelming to try and work on. So I might suggest working on some smaller things first you know you can fix. Things like:

• We don’t have very many positive reviews, let’s get up to at least 10 five-star reviews
• We don’t always answer the phone before it goes to voicemail- let’s make sure we always get it before it rings three times
• We haven’t reviewed or raised prices in three years- let’s go over all of them now and plan to have new pricing by the end of the month
• We have over 20% of our invoices over 90 days old- let’s collect or trash all of those and then set up a follow-up system to cut down our open invoices to keep over 80% at thirty days or less

These are single problems with measurable goals that will improve the business. Set one that makes sense for your business and can be achieved in a reasonable amount of time (1-3 months I’d say) and then get to work. Once you have it done, pick the next problem. If you have a team, you can delegate some single item goals to them as well.

A large list of things to fix and improve and grow in the business can be overwhelming and cause you to not end up working on any of them or at least not to the point of actually completing them.

By working on just fixing one thing at a time, you will see real progress and improvement that will lead directly to growth in your business. It worked for me for improving my landing a plane and growing my own business, I am confident it will work for you as well!