Your boss hands you a project. You've got no training and a sinking feeling that this will be a mess. Here's why projects go wrong in small businesses, and what helps people get them right.
Your boss emails on Friday afternoon. Can you lead the implementation of the new system? You've got your actual job to do, no project management experience, and a sinking feeling that this is going to be a mess.
Sound familiar? Most small business teams run important projects without anyone trained to do them. They learn by trial and error, which means expensive mistakes, missed deadlines, and a lot of unnecessary stress.
But here's the thing: project management isn't mysterious. The fundamentals are learnable, practical, and they make an immediate difference.
In big companies, there are actual project managers with
training and career paths. Small businesses don't have that luxury. Instead,
projects get handed to whoever seems capable: the operations manager who's
already swamped, the marketing person who's good at organising things, the
finance director who once mentioned they're 'pretty organised'.
These people work hard. They care about getting it right.
But without the basics, the same problems keep appearing. The project starts
without clear boundaries, so requests and changes never stop. Nobody agrees
upfront what 'done' looks like, so everyone's got different expectations. Small
problems get ignored until they become expensive disasters. Timelines get set
by guesswork rather than reality.
None of this means you're bad at your job. It means you're
doing something you were never taught to do.
Good training for small businesses doesn't look like traditional courses. Those cost thousands and take days you don't have. What works is different.
It needs to be cheap enough that you can actually afford it. Not £3,000 for a five-day course. Something you can justify when margins are tight, say £39 for a course.
And it needs to fit around your actual life. You can't disappear for three days. You need something you can do in spare half-hours, pick up when you need it, and apply to whatever you're working on right now.
The difference shows up fast. You stop redoing work because everyone finally agreed what you're actually building. You stop firefighting because you spotted the risks early. You stop chasing people because communication got clearer from the start.
And it builds. One successful project makes the next one easier. Your team develops a shared way of talking about work. You create simple processes that mean you're not reinventing everything each time. People start to believe that projects can actually finish on time and on budget.
For the business, this is huge. You can actually predict when things will be done. Your team wastes less time on confusion and miscommunication. You stop needing to bring in expensive consultants every time something important needs doing. You build capability that stays.
You don't need to transform everything overnight. Pick one thing that would make the biggest difference right now. Maybe it's helping someone who's drowning in their first big project. Maybe it's fixing the thing that keeps going wrong (scope creep, terrible communication, whatever it is). Maybe it's giving three people the basics so they stop making the same mistakes.
Keep it simple. Find training that's practical enough to use immediately. Start with the fundamentals before worrying about advanced stuff. Let people learn at their own speed.
And remember: you're not bad at this because you haven't been trained. You're just doing something you were never taught. That's fixable.
Small businesses succeed by doing more with less. Training people to actually manage projects does exactly that. Less wasted time, fewer expensive mistakes, more things that actually get finished. And you build something that lasts, not just patch problems with expensive consultants.
The gap between winging it and knowing what you're doing isn't that big. But the difference it makes is massive.
We're here to make project management feel less like a mystery and more like something you can genuinely handle. Because you absolutely can.
Let's make projects clearer, simpler and a whole lot less stressful. Together.
Marc Bates is Head of Communications at Iterato Training. He is also the founder of Balanced Marketing, a consultancy that helps organisations plan and deliver marketing projects to build stronger brands and smarter communications. With over 30 years’ experience in publishing and advertising, Marc works across strategy, content, and design to make learning experiences clear, engaging, and commercially effective.
