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New business owners love to work on their logo.

They ponder colors, designs and wrestle with size.

After all, working on a logo is a concrete task with a beginning and end. It can be tweaked endlessly and divert your attention away from the messy parts of starting a small business.

But what could you do with your time if you forgot about the logo (for now)?

How about this:

On day one, make a business plan. A simple spreadsheet that projects:

• The money you think you’ll make, by month
• The cost to make your product or provide your service? (“labor” and “cost of goods” sold in accounting terms)
• The cost to run the business each month (overhead like electricity, rent, snacks, vehicles)

On day two, write down your sales goals.

• Ideally you might break the larger monthly goals into weekly or daily goals (“Sell 80 thingys in September = 20 thingys a week”)
• By the way, while you should do research, you are really just making educated guesses at this point.

On day three, write a one-page overview on exactly how you plan on getting customers, including:

• A profile of your ideal customer (with details about their age, habits etc.)
• Where you can find these customers (geographically, online etc.

• How you will these customers find out about your business (marketing tactics)
• How much will it cost to find them (marketing costs)
• A guess at how many people you’ll have to talk with to reach your weekly sales goal. For example, “Attend trade show and demonstrate service to 450 people to make 20 sales.”

Day four, start executing your plan.

So even if you’re a lawyer, dentist, or quilter on Etsy, you have to also think of yourself as a salesperson. And a marketer. And accountant.

Your plan won’t be perfect at first. Mine surely wasn’t. But with experience, it will become more and more rooted in reality.

Then, in month six, when sales are rolling in, you can hire a real graphic designer to make your logo.

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