How to Prioritise Your Projects to Make the Most Impact

Whether you’re taking a break this summer, or it's work as usual, the often-slower pace this month is a perfect chance to pause, reflect, and plan. How has this year been so far? Are you doing what you set out to do? Have you made an impact and earned the money you wanted?

Your business will thank you for giving yourself space to take stock and reset if needed, so you focus on what’s really important for the next four months.

When it comes to prioritising where you focus your time, there are ongoing activities that are required to keep your business running. These include working with your clients, administration, and marketing, and you have to make time for them.

But there are also projects. These have the potential to make a big impact on your business and tend to be the place where holistic practitioners struggle to focus. You may want to juggle 10 things at once or get distracted by the next big bright opportunity - but, in reality, you can only focus on one main project at a time. Unless you have a team in place, which I'm guessing you don't!

The fastest way to make progress for the rest of the year is to pick your priorities strategically and focus on one project at a time.

What’s your #1 priority?

• Income - For most holistic practitioners it’s income! Earning enough to pay yourself and run your business has to be the priority if you want to survive. If not, your business is an expensive hobby - fine if you don’t need the income, but if you do, something needs to change.
• Time - Once you are making the money you want, the challenge often moves to time – how can you continue to earn the income, but more efficiently? How can you streamline what you do in your business whether that’s in your marketing, business systems, or client work to give you the time and space you want?
• Impact - For many holistic practitioners, making an impact is a priority. But this will still come down to income and time. You need to either grow your business to reach more people or have the available capacity and resources to support your cause.

Increasing Your Income

If you need to increase your income, identify where to focus your efforts first.

• Marketing - Are you marketing yourself effectively so that people know about you and your services? Are you making it easy for potential clients to understand how you can help them?
• Sales - Are you getting enough enquiries about working with you, and are these becoming paying clients? If your marketing is good and you’re attracting enquiries, are you converting them to clients or not?
• Pricing - If you have enough enquiries coming through, and plenty of clients but you still aren’t making enough money – you need to review your pricing.

Increasing Your Time

Time is your most precious resource and once you’re at capacity, you need to find a way of streamlining it to free you up. If you need more time, consider the following:

• Systems - how can you add systems and processes to streamline your business for your everyday tasks, marketing and client work that will save you time? It’s easy to get so used to doing things the way you do, that you don’t realise how much time you could save. Systems are a great way to buy back time.
• Boundaries - having clear boundaries with clients (and family and friends) around when and how you're available will help to protect your time and energy.
• Get help – what are the tasks you struggle to do that take you ages? When you’re starting out you may need to do everything yourself, but there comes a time when letting someone else do it will not only give you better results. And it will free you up to do other, more important or interesting things.

Connecting Your Projects to Your #1 Priority

Before you go into the autumn, look at all the projects you want to do and answer the following questions:

• Does this project fit with the #1 priority in your business? If your priority is increasing your income and you already get enquiries, but they don’t convert into paying clients, creating a new workshop isn’t going to address the problem.
• Is this something you want to work on? Whilst there are the jobs that are necessary for your business (like your accounts) there are the projects that you have on your list that you really don’t want to do but think you ‘should’. These will be a struggle so why torture yourself if there are other options available? It's better to do something that you're comfortable doing or even enjoy, as you're more likely to stay focussed and finish it.
• How long will it take? If it’s a big project, this could be your focus outside of the day-to-day running of your business for months, so it needs to be the best option for you now. Writing a book may be on your bucket list but if you don’t have enough clients right now, it’s not your priority.
• How much will it cost? If you’re struggling to make ends meet, investing heavily in a new ‘thing’ is going to increase your stress levels – make sure you have the budget to pay for the project or have sound reasoning for purchasing whatever is required.
• Do you need to learn new skills? Anything you need to learn takes time. Does this project involve lots of learning and is it appropriate for where you are in your business today? If you have enough clients and want to increase your offers to them, learning how to use technology to do this, or a new approach is a great opportunity. If you’re struggling to find clients, getting another qualification will not help you fill your diary.

Grade Your Projects

Now you’ve gone through the questions, grade the priority of your projects in your business – are they a high, medium, or low priority? Use this grading system to identify the project(s) that are relevant and will move your business forward the most. If there is more than one, you need to decide which one to focus on first and commit to doing and finishing that project before starting another.

Get Help!

If you’re struggling to get the important projects in your business finished, it’s time to get help. Having a support network that will help you identify your priorities, provide hands-on support and keep you accountable will make a huge difference to the rest of your year. The doors are open to join my Holistic Hub Mastermind for the next four months - an exclusive community of 8 like-minded holistic practitioners, all passionate about making a difference and creating a successful business. Get the full details here.