How I tackle big projects in my business
A behind-the-scenes look at how I'm planning my new group programme
In January I’ll be launching my new group programme, Marketing without social media, which will begin on March 1st. It’s my first time running this programme and creating it is a big task. I’ll be sharing more behind-the-scenes looks at this programme over the coming months with you, but in this post I’ll start by writing about how I tackle a big project like this—a project that has many moving parts, is completely new and takes months to create.
Stage 1: percolating
In July 2022 I first created an outline of a group programme that I called “slow, gentle and profitable: the marketing programme”. It was the kind of thing that came to me more or less fully formed: I wrote out the structure, workshops and ideas for the sales page in one go. I’d planned to run it sometime in 2023, so I let it rest for the time being.
One of the things that I have discovered about myself is that I’m really good at percolating. I know that I can write out the plan for something—a course, a workshop, a programme—and not act on it immediately, but enjoy having it simmer in the background. In the course of 2022, other things became more important than the initial plan for my group programme: I decided to move my newsletter to Substack and as I was planning for that had the idea for the Substack mini-course.
While the marketing programme was still on my 2023 list, I did very little with this idea until late May when I created another page in my Notion: “marketing without social media: a gentle and effective group programme”. At this point I’d decided two things: I wouldn’t be focusing on marketing in the broadest sense and I wouldn’t be running the programme in 2023 because I wanted lots of space and time to prepare it.
A real benefit of percolating for me is that I can go back to a topic or plan and add to it when I feel like it. Sometimes, of course, percolating turns into deciding not to do things. Especially when I was still working in academia I would sketch out ideas for articles and entire books which I then wouldn’t do anything with. But it was the act of sketching out and subsequently not feeling drawn to the project anymore that was so valuable: rather than going through with something because I felt I had to, my loss of interest in the project was a clear sign that I shouldn’t pursue it.
Stage 2: planning
I should note that I am naturally good at planning. There’s something about the way my brain works that makes it relatively easy for me to get an overview of large projects and break them up into small parts. This serves me really well in 1:1 mentoring and in tackling big projects like this. This post, then, isn’t necessarily a “how to”, as much as it is a “this is how I do this”. I know our brains all work differently, so what works for me doesn’t necessarily work for you.
Between May and July 2023 I kept adding little things to the Notion-page about my project. I collected ideas whenever I had them and topics that I might want to potentially cover. By late July I had a longish list of ideas, workshops, sales page phrases and thoughts about the price and group size.
Stage 2a: creating an overview
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