When Good Is Good Enough [Rant!]
When you run your own business, it’s easy to get personal about what you do. You care passionately about the images and messages that are used to represent your business. You worry if a spelling mistake or grammatical error causes offence. You worry that the price you want to charge isn’t too expensive to put people off.
You may even go to extremes and worry that the image on your About Us page is 10 pixels out of place and that the letterheads you got printed specially for a direct mailing do not quite match the Pantone of your logo.
Your business is a representation of you … and you want it to be perfect!
But the problem with this ideology of this perfection is that perfection causes rot.
Rot in your marketing. Rot in the products you create. Rot in the way you attract clients to your business.
Perfection is a disease that kills your business in a matter of months!
When I first started up in business in 2004, I discovered a coach called Andrea J Lee. One of her catch phrases was ” Completion, Not Perfection”. And thank god I saw the light early on.
This is a message that I carry with me day in, day out. I slap it in the faces of my clients when they go on for too long about the detail of wanting to get it “just right”. And it was the BIG message that I got again when I attended a Nigel Botterill’s Marketing Madness Day in Bolton.
Nigel and the Entrepreneurial Circle team decided it would be kind of exciting to change the agenda of the normal marketing day planned and launch a business, live to an audience of 500 people. At 7 pm Sunday evening, Nigel told us what they were launching and they had just 24 hours to make sales.
Everything was built from scratch: the website, e-commerce platform to enable them to make sales online, the Facebook Fan Page (which incidentally created 62 likes, converting 2 of these Likers to paying customers, proving that when social media is done right … it can be profitable!), email campaigns, voice broadcasts, Google AdWords campaign, SMS texting … in fact there were 16 different types of communications and marketing channels used to set up and promote this business.
OK, they had a team of 4 giving it their all to get this business up and running. But even with that team of 4, none of us were in any doubt that they proved what could be achieved in 24 hours was quite inspiring.
You see they didn’t faff about with image placements. They didn’t change the logo, even when the whole room thought it would look better with a quick graphic change. They made a mistake and missed out a tracking url in one of the email campaigns, but still sent it out anyway.
They were against the clock … and good was good enough.
And that clock clicks for you too! So you may not be under pressure to perform in front of 500 people within a 24 hour time period. But you are under pressure to create that product so you can generate revenue. You are under pressure to get that website live so your potential clients can find you and do business with you.
If you don’t think you are under that pressure, then give up. Just pass all your leads on to your competitor down the road. Your clients aren’t that fussy. They just want their problems solved and they will hand over their hard earned cash to someone who can meet their needs, wants and expectations.
Tough love? Well, that’s what I give. Because good is good enough.
And if I find you moving a website image around by 10 pixels to the right. And then again to the left. Or spell checking an email newsletter for the 3rd time … I will hunt you down.
Get implementing because good is good enough [rant over!]
