Procrastination is a fifteen letter word

After a short break I'm back on the blog - thanks for the prod Simon!

I have been doing quite a lot of coaching of SME's over the last couple of months. It seems to go in cycles. Sometimes I'm doing business plans and marketing plans back-to-back for weeks, at other times I'm getting used more as a sounding board, exterior perspective and coach.

I have one client (who shall remain nameless) who runs a business that potentially generates over £1,000 profit per person per day - an astonishing business in a very specialist niche that attracts public sector money. Having said this they are only managing to attract these fees for about 1 day per person per week.

And yet there is plenty of business out there and a demand for the skills in question. If I had a PHD I would be changing careers that's for sure.

So what's stopping these people upping the number of productive days per person? It would appear to be good old procrastination. They want the extra profit, they have the mechanisms to analyse the business and create a plan (provided by me) and yet they have spent the best part of 8 months fine tuning something that I could have done for them (given carte blanche) in a couple of weeks. They know it needs to be done but it almost seems to be below their intellect or at least outside of their comfort zone.

So why haven't I demanded carte blanche and done it for them? That's easy. It's not my business and I won't be there for very long as the support scheme I am providing assistance under strictly limits the days given. If they don't own the approach they won't act on it. So I can't nag them because they need to take the initiative themselves.

It's frustrating. The client company is packed full of very intelligent people with impeccable academic qualifications and a track record in providing successful outcomes for the company's clients. So why won't they act?

Procrastination is a terrible thing. Not knowing how to start something can kill a project. We have all experienced it - you sit pondering how to approach something and suddenly the day has disappeared.

Sadly I have to sign off from this client in another 7 hours of support. The goals is tantalisingly within reach and I have let them know this. It occurs to me that less qualified and less intelligent clients of mine seem to be more focused and more able to make progress. It's almost as if the intelligence is a curse as minds tend to wander and continuously branch off down interesting little side-avenues rather than chase the goal. Less curious minds will occasionally fall foul of not looking at the wider picture but they do seem to be better at getting stuff done.

I value intelligence above most things. The ability to process information and create new things is important in my book. But pondering the balance of people in an organisation I can see that you need a handful of intelligent types and many less intelligent ones with experience of doing the job in hand. My client is top-heavy in brains and woefully short in selling and doing skills. They may or may not make it but I will be advising them to get some pragmatists on board ASAP. The problem is that they will spend months deliberating over whether to do this or not and by then I will be gone. I just hope the message stays.

If you know how to cure an epidemic of procrastination in an SME please let me know.