We are all guilty of occasionally over-thinking the challenges we face in starting up and serving our first customers. When you are nervous about the success of your business or your project, it’s easy to get bogged down in trying to perfect your system before doing anything with it. But often, we don’t find out how to make our systems better until they get tested. So without over-analyzing your process or worrying too much about your future success at this point, you need to do the best you can with what you have and take it from there. Here’s a recipe for the right kinds of actions that will keep you moving forward:

Execute: When you have the opportunity to put a plan into action, do it. If you have just thought of a new way to streamline an old process, try it. Whatever it is, just do it without being afraid of the consequences. This is one of those times where you put your best foot forward and have a little faith that things will work out at least pretty well!

Assess: After you have put a plan or new process into action, sit down and list everything that went positively with the experience and anything that may have come as a disappointment. This is not about judging or blaming – whatever you do, don’t beat yourself up! That will rob you of valuable energy that you’re going to need coming up real soon…

Adjust: Put your thinking cap on and come up with ways to improve the plan or process you just tried. No matter how things look at the beginning of your project or start-up, you are going to get another chance, so take the time now to decide how you’re going to do even better the next time out of the gate.

Correct: Make whatever improvements you thought of when you were assessing your previous performance. Put them into place now so that the next time you are contacted and your services are requested, you are ready to go.

Repeat: At this point you are ready to put your process through another trial.

Every time you go through these steps your thinking will become clearer on how to proceed in the future, and you will gradually refine your system one step at a time. You don’t have to improve every bit of your process all at once. Small changes over time with attention to detail all the time, plus being responsive to your customers if they have any questions or problems, will help you grow and improve at a steady rate.