Byron: Hi, my name is Byron Hebert and this is another Tool Time update brought to you by PKF and the Entrepreneurs Playbook. What I want to talk to you about today is a eight week project team. With many of the mine shop tools, if you’ve been watching these videos, you see we have a way to come up with great ideas. But what we really need after that is to have a project team implement those ideas. Good ideas are no good without some implementation.

And so an eight week project team is a good way to keep a team focused. It doesn’t take too long to get the project done, but then again, it doesn’t drag on for months at a time.

Week one, you want to project brief. Make sure we understand the problem, we framed it correctly. Second week ___ analysis. Where is the company now with this particular issue? Let’s just say it’s sales. We’re at 4 million in sales with a 30 percent margin. Here are our customers. Here’s a breakdown of that. So we want to know where we are now with this issue. Where we want to be. Maybe by the end of the year, next 18 months we want to be at 5 million in sales with a 35 percent profit margin.

We analyze the data in week four. We start drafting the plan in week five. And you may say that seems early to be drafting a plan, but later we’re in week seven and eight we’re gonna selling our plan. It does no good to go through all this work if you can’t sell it effectively. We start developing solutions, start looking for other ideas that we may have missed when we draft the plan. And in week seven we design the presentation. We may go to the CEO with our program and say, here’s where we are, can you give us some feedback? And start pre-selling our plan.

By week eight we’re doing a dry run. Now imagine if every eight weeks you were fixing an issue in your business. How much better your business would be, how much more profitable and effective your business would be by the end of the year. Again, my name’s Byron Hebert. This has been a 90 second Tool Time Update brought to you by PKF Texas and the Entrepreneurs Playbook.

For those of you that are listening in on the radio and would like to see the graphic form of this tool being demonstrated, you can go to thebusinessmakers.com and look for the videos under Entrepreneurs Playbook.