Art Of Money

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One of the things I’ve realized lately (yes it seems to be self-evaluation week) is that having too many active projects has hindered my success.

The best way I can describe it, is that I have been trying to push three shopping carts around the grocery store at the same time. Even if I need A LOT of groceries, it is pretty obvious that pushing one cart until it is full, then parking it and getting another cart until it’s full and then doing the last one is a much more efficient method of doing the grocery shopping.

Yet in my Internet business, I’m trying to push, at last count, 11 substantial projects at the same time.

Taking Action and De-Cluttering my Business

What I decided to do was de-clutter. I believe in all of the projects, but some of them I love more than others. I don’t feel like if I just sold any of them I would get an amount equal to full value, since most are not complete.

So my goal is to evaluate them and then figure out the most effective way to get them off of my plate, and still have them continue to grow into their full potential.

In order to accomplish this I created a spreadsheet that lists the projects, a set of evaluation criteria and then applies a formula to arrive at a “score” for each project (scroll all the way to the right for the score).

Project Evaluation Spreadsheet

Since the priority in my business right now is Cashflow, the scoring algorithm is weighted towards monthly profit in the least amount of time. That way I can use the profits from the most quickly profitable to pay for the longer term projects.

If your goal is to build asset value then you may adjust your scoring factors to favor “home run potential.”

Here’s the scoring formula:

K3 = ((B3-I3+E3)*D3*C3)/(F3+G3+H3+J3)

The purpose of the spreadsheet if to give me a way to decide what order to work on eliminating the projects from my list of daily activities.

Now even if I have a new project that looks promising, I can add it to the spreadsheet and evaluate it and get a pretty good idea of where it belongs on my list of priorities.