One of the questions I’m asked most often by business owners is surprisingly simple.
“Where do I start?”
Not because they don’t know what’s wrong. Usually, they know exactly what’s wrong, the problem is that there are too many things competing for attention.
- Sales need improving
- Margins have slipped
- The website is looking tired
- A key member of staff has handed in their notice.
- The bookkeeping is behind
- The office needs decorating
- Everyone’s talking about a new CRM
- Someone has suggested AI
- Another person says the business should be on TikTok
By Monday lunchtime, they’ve done… nothing.
Key Takeaways
- Taxation is now the biggest obstacle to growth: cited by 61% of SME employers in 2024 up sharply from 45% in 2023 and 41% in 2022.
- Profit doesn’t mean easy cashflow: 77% of SME employers reported a profit or surplus, but growth expectations and turnover confidence both fell compared with the last two years.
- 27% of SME employers: sought external advice in the last year, and accountants remain the single most-used source, ahead of consultants, trade bodies or solicitors.
- 72% of SME employers: use external finance, most commonly credit cards, overdrafts and bank loans all more expensive ways to plug a cashflow gap than planning ahead.
- Technology adoption is accelerating: 69% of SME employers now use web-based tools to sell or manage their business, up from 50% just two years ago.
The curse of too many good ideas
Most owner-managed businesses across Rochdale, Oldham, Bury and areas surrounding them don’t struggle because they’ve run out of good ideas; they struggle because they try to act on all of them simultaneously, and nothing gets finished.
I know the feeling. I’ve done it myself. You come back from a conference, read three business books over a holiday, or watch a handful of YouTube videos, and suddenly you’re convinced the entire businesses needs rebuilding.
It doesn’t. It probably needs improving. There’s a big difference.
This isn’t just a hunch that data backs it up. Research into small business closures found that 13% of failed businesses cited lost focus as the reason things fell apart, putting it on par with team issues as a cause of failure. Separately, workplace research on multitasking suggests that chronic context switching can consume up to 40% of a person’s productive time which means an owner splitting attention across ten projects may be getting meaningfully less than a tenth of the output on each one.
The biggest myth in small business
The biggest myth in small businessBusinesses don’t transform in one dramatic leap they change through hundreds of small, unglamorous decisions repeated consistently over years, not through a single bold relaunch.
People often imagine that successful businesses transform themselves in one dramatic leap. They don’t. Real change looks much less exciting. It happens in odd half-hours.
- An early Tuesday morning before everyone arrives.
- An hour in a coffee shop.
- A notebook opened while waiting for a client.
- Twenty minutes after dinner when everyone else has gone to bed.
Businesses aren’t rebuilt during strategy weekends. They’re rebuilt in hundreds of small decisions made consistently over several years. Waiting until you have a completely free week is usually another way of saying you’re not going to start. It’s worth pairing this mind set with a proper framework for setting business priorities, so the small decisions you are making are pointed in the same direction.
The Two List Method
Keep one long list for every improvement idea you have, and a second list capped at exactly three active priorities; nothing moves onto the short list until something else has been finished.
Years ago, I settled on a very simple approach. I keep two lists.
The first contains everything I’d like to improve, and it can be as long as it needs to be. Ideas go on there as soon as they occur to me, no filtering, no second-guessing.
The second list contains just three things.
Not ten.
Not twenty.
Three.
Those are the only improvements receiving serious attention right now. When one is finished, another moves across from the long list. Nothing else gets promoted ahead of its turn.
It’s surprisingly difficult to stick, we naturally want to chase the newest, shiniest idea. But businesses don’t improve through excitement. They improve through completion.
There’s a practical reason this works better than a single master plan. A short list forces trade-offs out into the open. If a fourth idea genuinely deserves attention right now, something already on the list has to make way for it which means you are constantly testing whether your current three priorities are still the right three, rather than simply adding to an ever-growing pile of half-started projects. Most owners find that exercise alone is clarifying. It’s rare that a fourth idea actually beats all three existing priorities, usually it’s just newer and louder.
Progress beats Enthusiasm
Planning and enthusiasm feel productive but change nothing on their own, only finished projects actually move a business forward, so completion, not activity, is the real measure of progress.
There’s something satisfying about making plans, buying notebooks, drawing diagrams, colour-coding priorities. None of that changes a business. Finishing things does a new pricing policy, a better onboarding process, tidied-up bookkeeping, ten genuinely useful blog posts, a member of staff properly trained.
Small improvements accumulate. Burnout compounds the problem too; research into business closures found that 22% of failures were linked to burnout driven by poor work-life balance, often the direct result of owners trying to hold too many active projects in their head at once.
The owner who quietly completes one worthwhile project every month is almost always in a stronger position five years later than the owner who starts fifty initiatives and finishes five. 12 finished projects a year sounds modest next to a whiteboard covered in ambitious plans. But compounded over five years, that’s sixty ideas that were discussed once and quietly forgotten. Momentum, not ambition, is the resource most businesses are actually short of.
Ask yourself one question
If you could genuinely only improve three things in your business over the next three months, name them then ignore everything else until one of those three is done.
Not the forty things that irritate you day to day. The three that would genuinely make everything else easier. Write them down. Ignore the rest for now. Then start.
You might be surprised how much calmer the business feels, and how much actually gets done, once you stop measuring yourself against everything you haven’t touched yet and start measuring yourself against what you’ve actually finished. If you want a simple way to track this, our guide to running a monthly business review walks through how to check progress on your three priorities without letting the long list creep back in.
This idea comes from my latest book, The Business You Meant to Build, which I wrote with Andrew Barker. It’s a practical book about running an owner-managed business without the hype, jargon or promises of overnight success. If you’ve ever felt pulled in twenty different directions at once, I think you’ll recognise yourself in its pages.
It’s available now on Amazon.
Final Thoughts
Most business owners don’t need more ideas they already have a long list of things they’d like to fix. They just need the ability to be able to disregard most of them and complete three before starting a fourth.
This transition, from pursuing all great ideas at once to safeguarding a small number of current priorities, can frequently make the difference between a chaotic enterprise and a well-organized one. It does not necessitate a strategic weekend retreat, expensive software, or an entire makeover. Two lists and the willingness to see projects through are all that is required.
Need help turning your long list of “should probably sort that out” into a workable set of priorities whether that’s the bookkeeping, the VAT position, or the numbers behind a bigger decision?
Carter Collins & Myer (CCM) has been supporting owner-managed businesses since 1957, with a team bringing over 100 years of combined partner experience to every client engagement. We work with businesses across Rochdale, Oldham, Bury and surrounding areas, helping owners get a clear, practical handle on the things that are genuinely worth their attention.