I’m not suggesting that perfection is bad – if you’re writing the software for the new Airbus aircraft then please take your time and do it right! But that quest for perfection can stop the rest of us from progressing. We don’t want to try something new until we’ve done it perfectly – but we never have the time to do it perfectly – so we don’t do it at all! On top of which – that vision of perfection exists exclusively in our own minds!

Last year in Australia I was bored and started writing an email to my SA clients – at least the 250 of them for whom I had email addresses. At the same time I put up the saddest website in creation. Both efforts were amateurish – but cost nothing.

Last week, this email went out to 7000 people [grown from 250 in just over a year] and 103 people bought a seat to a seminar through the same amateurish [but free] website – paying me at the same time! Yet I had about 20 folk contacting me to tell me why ecommerce doesn’t work!

If I had waited to get it right, the project simply wouldn’t have happened. Which means my level of knowledge about processing orders via the Net would still be zero. Mervyn Niland [the man who invented Flight Hand Cleaner] wrote a book some time back about his experiences. In it he says he has a simple philosophy – First – just do it! Then – do it right. Lastly – go for excellence.

Before someone comes back at me with a huffy email about how poor an approach this is, and how they aspire to excellence – let me re-assure you. We all aspire to excellence – but the road to excellence is long and hard, and never stops.

You have to start somewhere. For example, Roger Bannister ran the first-4 minute mile in the 1950’s – after years of trying. He was told it was impossible because bits would fall off him because the body wasn’t designed to go that fast! I have a few questions. Did he start running with the goal of breaking the 4-minute mile – or did it develop as his running developed? Did he succeed the first time he tried?

An obsession with time is really an obsession with perfection. My brother Mike is an example. Mike likes stuff to be absolutely perfect before it leaves his desk. But what is perfection really? It’s YOUR vision. So when Mike drops his latest perfect email on my desk [by his estimation] he doesn’t know that I handle 100/day and see a wide range of stuff – and his isn’t the best. But it’s not how it looks that is important to me – it’s the information it imparts. That’s why I read it.

If you’re telling me something interesting you can write it on toilet paper – I don’t care. [Sorry Mike] You can’t please all of the people all of the time – so don’t try to.

Which brings me to this nonsense about client service. We all talk about it as if it were the Holy Grail – yet why is service so bad in SA? I’ll tell you! It’s because we forget to ask our clients what THEY think is client service. So we spend all our time giving our clients something we THINK they want – not what they really do want. And we forget to ask them what’s important to them.

Love your clients – and if you can’t love them find some you can love! If you can’t love them then sooner or later it will show. The best way I know to love your clients is to spend some time with them. You – the boss – not the workers! Only then can you find out what drives them and makes them give you their money.

Back to the issue of time. Your business has a few things that accountants call assets. And because accountants call them assets we think that that is just what they are. But they’re wrong. An asset only has value if someone is prepared to give you money for it. That money comes from someone that is called a client.

The only true asset in your firm are the people prepared to give you real money for the value you’re adding to their lives. Spend time with them.

© Peter Carruthers, www.petesweekly.co.za

Back to www.bizland.co.za