What should the business owner, who needs to allocate time to getting jobs of their own finished do when schedules keep slipping?
Should we allow all important growth enhancing projects to keep slipping because they are so large that we can never finish them? Or is it important to admit that though perfection should be something we strive for as a business, sometimes it’s better to phase growth, to produce something tangible in key phases and allow the business to grow organically? (Even if that means a few faults are on show at times?)
To answer these questions I’m going to bare all by using sb as an example.
We recently redesigned this website. For months we knew it was to be in with the new. Every minute detail was planned to absolute perfection. We had one major problem though — our schedule kept slipping. New jobs came in and scheduled projects took longer than planned. We never seemed to get the final site good enough to go public with.
About a month ago the deadline to complete this website sailed by. Again. We needed to take drastic action. We bit the bullet and did what every uncompromising business owner is terrified of.
We made phase one of three live even though we knew it wasn’t flawless. For example, we’ve yet to spend time on the SEO (search engine optimisation). A lot of our work comes from referrals and networking contacts, so right now we needed our site and portfolio up more than we needed people to find the site cold. Our portfolio only has three projects in it and does not show a wide enough variety but three up to date projects on show are better than none. These are just two examples from a long outstanding to do list!
In short, you may feel like you are settling for less when you know your customers may spot imperfect aspects of your business. But for a small business that hasn’t got massive budgets or teams of people to get jobs done the conundrum is a difficult one. It’ll be different for every business but overall it’s better to get out there, get active and get visible than to hide away and use incomplete projects as an excuse. After all, a clever step by step approach may help you to appear more human and actually appeal to your potential customers. At least we hope so!
4 Comments
This is a great blog post sara and so true! Get your product/site/idea out there and get some feedback! I just heard a podcast this week explaining that this is exactly what Bill Gates does with his windows platform. It always comes out with bugs, its never quite finished, but they get it out there, and know their users will make it better as time goes on.
I’ve just taken the same advice and done something i was very nervous about, and that was standing in front of my video camera and talking about my work. Its what i do, i have all the tools to do it so i just right, get on with it!
Really pleased you got what this was all about Phil. It’s so important to get out there rather than wait for perfection which is more likely to be achieved from experience and feedback! And if Bill Gates has this approach then hey, how dare anyone argue?
One of my favourite sayings is “You don’t have to get it right, you just have to get it going.” If you wait for all the lights to be green before you make a start, you’d never make a move so well done on getting your message out there.
If you are paying someone else to do work for you (or if they are paying you) then you want the result to be as close to perfect as possible but the beauty of this type of blogsite is that it will always be an ongoing project.(Good for SEO!)
A blogging tip: when you send a link to a post, click on the title of that post to get the permanent link: http://sarabrown.co.uk/2009/11/a-small-business-conundrum/#more-173 rather than just send people to the home page which will change as each new post is published.
Great feedback Ann! Especially the blogging tip which I immediately understand the power of. Would agree that if you are paying someone to do work for you, then it’s a different kettle of fish and you do need to make sure you get what you paid for.
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[...] Many business owners (especially new ones) can hide behind perfection before they get their proposition out there. Plans can take up a lot of time and can stand in the way of you going out there and learning from experience and getting some business along the way. I wrote about this in, “A small business conundrum.” [...]