Don't Play Whac-A-Mole
28 Oct 2023In the busy world of starting a new business, lots of problems can pop up at the same time. Each problem needs attention and work to fix it. But if we try to fix all the problems at once, we might not do a very good job. It’s like when you try to juggle too many balls in the air, and they all end up falling down. Instead, it’s often better to focus on fixing one problem completely before moving on to the next.
Now, some people might say, “But if we only fix one problem, the other problems might get worse and we could lose customers!” That’s a good point. So, what we need to do is find a quick way to stop the other problems from getting bigger, even if we don’t fix them completely right away. We can call this putting a “temporary band-aid” on them.
With these temporary solutions, we can then put all our energy into fixing the biggest problem. Our goal is to fix it so well that it won’t be a problem again for a long time, or maybe it won’t ever be a problem again. This way, we don’t have to keep coming back to it, and we can move on to the next problem.
Focusing on one problem at a time has a lot of good points. First, we can fix problems faster and better because we’re not trying to do too many things at once. Second, it makes us feel good and gives us energy to keep going when we see that we’ve completely fixed a problem.
But, it’s not always easy to do this. We have to be really good at deciding which problem to fix first, and we have to be okay with not fixing everything at once. Plus, once we fix the biggest problem, we have to be ready to move quickly to the next one and not just leave the temporary solutions in place.
To wrap it up, even though it might feel like we should try to fix all the problems in our new business at once, it’s often better to focus on fixing them one at a time. By putting temporary solutions on the smaller problems and putting all our energy into fixing the biggest problem, we can get things done better and faster. This helps our new business to grow strong and do well.