Do You Want a Perfect Business… Or a Successful Business?
By Anna Johnson on August 27th, 2008Take it from a recovering perfectionist: being perfect doesn’t always translate into being successful.
Whether it’s a product, a promotion, a newsletter or anything else in your business… spending that extra time or money to make sure it’s absolutely perfect…
…may be a complete and utter waste of your time and resources.
By all means, aim to produce only top quality products. Aim for excellence in your marketing and, in fact, everything you do.
But, trust me, there comes a point where investing any more time, effort or other resources into something, will NOT yield any greater benefits (in terms of sales or otherwise). And there comes a point after that, when further tweaking and refining may actually UNDERMINE your success.
That may be because you end up “over cooking” your product or marketing initiative… because you lose momentum in getting it underway… or for some other reason.
There ARE situations where being anything less than perfect is completely unacceptable. As a lawyer I would never dream of giving a client “imperfect” legal advice. And I wouldn’t want a surgeon to be anything less than a perfectionist either.
So how do you work out when you SHOULD aim for perfection and when EXCELLENCE will suffice?
When faced with that question, I suggest you ask yourself these four questions:
1. Would anything less than “perfect” be acceptable by most people’s standards?
- If not, aim for perfection.
- If so, consider Question 2.
2. Does getting it perfect improve the result in a substantial way?
- If so, aim for perfection.
- If not, consider Question 3.
3. Does being perfect improve the result in a small, but noticeable way?
- If so, aim for perfection.
- If not, consider Question 4.
4. Is getting it perfect necessary to satisfy some internal need?
- If yes, and the matter is NEITHER time-sensitive nor resource-intensive… then PERHAPS aim for perfection. But it would probably be BETTER if to trained yourself NOT to get it perfect. On the other hand, it’s very unlikely that an aspect of your business is neither time-sensitive nor resource-intensive (whether such resources are money, people or simply your energy or attention).
- If no, then…
FORGET ABOUT GETTING IT PERFECT AND JUST GET IT DONE!
