Faster, Fewer
Faster, Fewer
I’ve had lots of conversations lately with friends, clients, and other founders about how to better manage time, how to prevent project scope creep, how to say no more often and effectively, etc.
My strategies won’t apply to everybody in every industry, but here’s a thought for you fellow service-based business owners—could you shorten your project timelines? And/or could you create and enforce project timelines?
OR, if it feels truly impossible to do your thing any faster or in any fewer steps, could you schedule your workload so that you only engage one or two clients at a time? Perhaps if you weren’t managing so much at once, you might actually retain more brain power for working faster, and then you could circle back to the first two options.
Yes, seriously. We’d deliver a draft, the client would ghost us for several months, when they finally replied they’d request millions of open-ended edits, ghost again, and on and on. And, of course, while waiting on them, I’d take on more clients, and projects started to layer overwhelmingly. Eventually I was forced to think through streamlining our projects to make them faster and simpler, and to keep clients accountable through their completion.
AKA,
Maybe we shouldn’t schedule five projects at once.
Maybe there’s a way to work with one client at one time. Or two.
Maybe we could complete the bulk of each project in two weeks rather three to four months, which might help hold clients’ interest through the finish line.
What fluff would we need to cut out in order to make that happen?
Turns out, a lot.
We cut
down our deliverables significantly, for a couple of reasons—
The profit margin on tiny deliverables that we often added onto projects (because we thought we had to) was next to nothing.
The main things our clients care about are brand identities and website designs. All the other project components were hardly, if ever, used.
Fast forward to now—
We work on two week timelines: for custom projects, two weeks for branding, two weeks for websites. Our semi-custom design work takes two DAYS.
Now, before you call me crazy, here’s the magic sauce to working this quickly—we budget for prep time in our project calendar (without the client knowing) before each technically starts. So our team can work as far ahead as we want, only to deliver the thing within the two-week/two-day timelines. The communication, the delivery, the fireworks stuff, all take place within our advertised and contracted timeline, but we’re never rushed.
Could a strategy like this work for your service-based business? It might be worth a shot!
If you’re an interior designer, could you develop an offer that simplifies your process to just what’s most important and, therefore, expedites your timeline, and make it available to people without the budget for full-service design? Or, if you’re a coach, could you develop packages that focus on achieving specific milestones within a particular timeframe, such as launching a product or developing a business plan?
