Growing Your Business with Marketing, Week 22: Short week, big lesson

This is Week 22 of a 52-week project/experiment in DIY marketing. communicatrix | markets (a virgo’s guide to marketing) › Add New Post — WordPressArmed with nothing but a copy of the 2009 Grow Your Business Marketing Plan + Calendar and my bare wits, I’m applying the skills you need to grow a business in real time, day by day, and reporting on them week by week. I write a topline summary of the week’s theme, as I see it, for The Marketing Mix blog, and the full article here. You can follow along here every Monday.

Short weeks can be incredibly instructive when it comes to pointing out the value of planning, especially when your short week is someone else’s regular one. What the heck am I talking about?

Well, I started this calendar project a week ahead of everyone else, so that the week I’d be reviewing would be the one that everyone working the calendar would be doing that week. If you feel like Alice right now, stepping through the looking glass, that basically means that my “week 22″ (June 1 – 5) actually fell on the previous week (May 25 – 29)—a holiday week here in the U.S., so we had no Monday. Or we did, but most of us spent it doing something other than working.

While it’s great to have the extra day off from an R&R perspective (especially because I took almost a whole day off), it’s kind of disastrous in terms of non-essential project work. This past week I had scheduled a slew of free, fifteen-minute consults for attendees of a webinar I’d given the previous week. It’s important for me to try out these things as I refine my sales pipeline (boy, there’s a phrase I never thought I’d type), but it cut into the time I’d have spent on “regular” marketing tasks: I missed a day of posting to my blog in addition to the day I took off on purpose and I didn’t do any of my own cold calling or follow-up (although I did do some for PresentationCamp LA, the unconference I’m helping out with—if you’re in L.A. or traveling through on June 20 and you’re interested in any aspect of presenting or speaking, please check it out and consider joining us!).

Short weeks also point out some of my, um, areas for improvement. When I have so much less time available, it becomes glaringly obvious where my “leaks” are usually. I do best on a schedule, even though I resist it, and when I spend some time up front planning things out. Last week’s calendar was crazy-crowded with appointments, one after another, from the free consults to a speaking gig I needed to do some prep and rewriting for to two networking events (my bonus-extra was a surprise meetup with Peter Shankman of HARO fame; as I said to another attendee, “If a guy as busy as Peter can make time tape himself from an airport lounge and get it to me within 15 minutes of my asking so I can make a crazy video, I can make the time to come see him when he flies through town.” It was a great meetup, as they always are, and I highly recommend both that you sign up for HARO and make it a point to meet him the next time he comes through your town!)

I know it sounds a little ridiculous to say, 22 weeks into a project that’s all about the importance of scheduling, “Hey! It’s important to schedule!”, but sometimes, it takes a while and some real-life experience to drive things home.

So this weekend, I spent some time reviewing my list of goals AND scheduling stuff into my calendar. My hope is that a little more discipline with this will help me spend the time I should in Covey’s magical Quadrant Two, and help me realize more of the big-time goals I’ve set for myself in life and in business.