It’s easy to talk about big plans, like what your club, faculty or school is going to accomplish this year. But while vision has its place, big plans are built on the little things.
We just finished a training with our East Coast Collegewise counselors. And over two days, we spent only about an hour discussing our big plans for this year, like where we’ll be expanding, what kind of counselors we’re looking to hire, and how many students we hope to enroll. The rest of the time was all about the little things.
How can we improve our speeches with better introductions, examples, and wrap-ups at the end? What are the best questions to ask in our introductory meetings so we can do a better job of identifying what kind of help a potential customer needs—or doesn’t need—from us? How can we make sure our customers are finding the fun and enjoying their college admissions process?
In every one of these discussions, we drilled down to the little things—the specific actions we could take to make each part of our process even better. And those little things filled up our entire two days.
Big ideas and grand visions are important. They define where you want to go. But the little things define how you’re going to get there. They’re what you do every single day, bit by bit, to make those big dreams actually happen.
If you want to get serious about achieving your big plans, get serious about doing little things well.