Your planning time is not going to be wasted.
So I look statistically using a pretty simple statistical model
at the number of hours people spent on a project and
how much the hours spent in preparation changed the outcome of the project.
And so you should take this as sort of a loose number, but
I think it's representative,
which is an average successful project that has ten hours of prep time a week.
Makes $9,000 less than a successful project that had 40 hours of prep time.
So those numbers scale, depending on what your goal is.
But it's worth thinking about that the hours of prep that you spend actually make
a difference.
And as we'll talk about in a moment when we talk about how to do pitching,
you should think about things like building prototypes in advance.
Think about doing budgeting and figuring out your logistic planning.
Go through a risk reduction.
Where are the risks?
What do you not know, how do you find out more answers to
problems that are unresolved in your campaign,
about how you going to do budgeting, how you'll deal with bank accounts?
How are you going to hire people?
The more you think this in advance the more you reduce risk of failure later.
Think about a media plan.
How are you going to get your information out to the media and
make them interested in what you're trying to pitch?
And how are you going to go and produce the videos and
the pitches you need to kind of make your stuff successful,
make sure there's no grammatical and spelling errors?
So there's a lot of things to do in planning.
The more of it you do in advance, the more successful you're likely to be.
So an interesting question I often get is about whether you should consultants or
helpers on your projects.
I found that about 8% of successful projects actually use
specialized consultants.
But a lot more people hire people to help with particular roles, shipping or
accounting or helping produce videos.
Generally I find people feel happy with the choices they have made.
But I should have warn you that I can't find any statistical impact
of using consultants on your campaign.
So maybe he make you more likely to succeed, I can't judge that.
But campaigns that higher specialize traffic consultants raise no more money
than of those that do not hire those consultants.
So this might be because there's some very good consultants and
very bad consultants out there.
But you should realize that consulting is not going to solve all your problems
you specialized consultants can be useful.
But they're not going to significantly change the impact of your campaign.
So you should consider using consultants that are helpers
if you have time to find and manage good people, if you really do need the help and
if you don't expect them to do magic.
So, one problem I find in entrepreneurs overall is,
they don't know how to do some things, so they hire someone to do it.
And they realize that because that person doesn't understand
the context of the community they're in, the thing they're trying to build,
the innovation that they're working on.
That consultant actually is not that helpful or
that helper is not that helpful.
Because they need a lot of things explained to them.
So make sure that you hire a consultant to do a narrow task that you can't do and
then you manage them very closely.
And also, if you don't have the money to hire a consultant or
helpers, you should realize statistically that doesn't make a big difference.
And you shouldn't stress over this kind of issue.