Why 80% Is Good Enough For Your Business

Why 80% Is Good Enough For Your Business

I was talking with Adam Liette on the podcast the other day about how to get ourselves as business owners from working in our business to working on our business. This is a very important topic because it is something that holds way too many companies back from their true potential. And that is because owners are human and as humans we have limits. There is only so much of us to go around. So as we build our business bigger and bigger, we start to spread ourselves thinner and thinner. And the thinner we spread ourselves the worse off we and our companies become.

I think there are two main reasons why business owners can’t let go of working in their business. The first reason  is what I call the technician syndrome. The second reason is perfectionism and it comes in two flavors. But first, let’s talk about technician syndrome.

Very early in my entrepreneurial career, I read a book you might have heard about by a guy named Michael Gerber called E-Myth. E-Myth was an abbreviation of the entrepreneurs myth. It was such an important book to me at the time that I kept extra copies in my office to give to prospects that were stuck working in their business and not on their business. I must have given dozens of them away in the first couple of years in business. But I digress.

What Michael Gerber lays out in E-Myth is a great story about a woman who grew up loving to bake pies. She loved it so much that she one day decided to open her own bakery. But as she dove into owning her business she realized all of the hats she had to wear to keep the business running that had nothing to do with baking pies. In the end, she gets burned out because she has very little time to do the one thing she started the business to do, bake pies.

In this story, the woman was a technician and fell into what I call the technician syndrome. The technician syndrome comes from people who start businesses based on a skill they are highly proficient at. Some, like myself and the first iteration of my business, create companies wrapped around something we are passionate about. In my case it was music and I started a recording studio. Others might be baking pies or helping people through a trauma they endured at some point in life. 

The other kind of technician is someone who has worked for companies doing something they are highly skilled in and decided to strike out on their own. You see this a lot in contracting, the beauty industry, and IT services. Like those who started a business doing something they are passionate about also hold a high regard to their craft and consider themselves the expert in their field.

Both kinds of technicians have the same set of problems. They think they are the best at what they do and the most efficient at what they do. Because they are the best, they stay close to big projects that suck a lot of their time. And because they are so efficient, they think it is faster and more profitable to do a lot of rudimentary things themselves. These are the folks that say to themselves, “I can do it faster than it would take to tell someone what needs to be done”. Does this sound familiar to you? The problem these technicians face is that they can’t do it all themselves and trying to is hurting their business and pushing good talent right out the front door. But we will get into that in a minute. First, I want to touch on prefectionists.

The two types of perfectionism are the perfectionist by nature and the perfectionist by passion. The natural perfectionist’s instinct is to make everything perfect in all aspects of their lives. These people, in my opinion, struggle the most as business owners because business is messy and rarely, if ever, perfect. So the nature of a perfectionist works directly opposite of the nature of business and therefore creates this dichotomy the business owner can’t effectively manage on their own.

The second type of perfectionism that holds business owners back is one of passion. These owners are so passionate about their business that they can’t leave anything to chance, so they horde the responsibility of getting everything done themselves. They think no one can do it as good as them, or that they are the only ones that can make the right decisions in critical situations. 

I personally fell into this category for a long time. I think it was driven by fear. The fear that the next client walking through the door was going to change my business forever and so I need to be front and center to make sure everything goes perfect. The fear that the jobs weren’t going to absolutely dazzle the client and I would lose money. The fear that my employees would say the wrong thing and push clients away. The list literally goes on and on. And the crazy thing is that none of it was based in reality. All of these fears were in my head and these are the same fears other perfectionists face every day.

So which one are you? Are you a technician or a perfectionist? Maybe you are a little bit of both. If you are both, my heart goes out to you, no really, I mean that. I think my passion for what I do and my ADHD put me in that category a little too and it’s a tough place to be. But it’s a place I have been able to get myself out of over the last decade and the key is what I call 80 percent is good enough rule.

See, regardless of whether you are a technician or a perfectionist, you have a limiting belief that nothing but 100 percent is good enough for your business when in reality, 50 percent of your best would be good enough for your clients. That’s right, a lot of times, 50 percent of your best would be considered good enough to a majority of your clients. That’s not just a testament to how good you are at what you do, but also the reality that a lot of your competitors aren’t that good at delivering the same goods or services. No really! The bar is much lower than you think.

But just good enough is not what you want for your clients, so 50 percent is not something you are willing to settle for, and I agree with your commitment. But if 50 percent is too little and no one can do things 100 percent like you, we have to find a happy medium. This is where the 80 percent is good enough rule comes in. If you can get someone to do things 80 percent as good as you, they are providing 60 percent better service than your competitors. So even if your competition was to get 100 percent better to compete with you, they still would be falling 10 percent shy of your team.

The great thing about the 80 percent is good enough rule is that your employees will get better over time and eventually become better than you. And that is a good thing. You want to surround yourself with people who are better than you in everything you can possibly afford. The sign of a good leader is filling the room with people that are smarter than themselves. And that’s why business leaders who invest in their employees have businesses that consistently thrive.

When you allow 80 percent to be good enough, you start being able to delegate an increasing amount of tasks and responsibilities that have been dragging you and your business down. And as you shed more of the hats you wear in your company, you create more time to do the things you are passionate about, or give yourself opportunities to grow as an owner; finding ways to propel your business to the next level.

So I challenge you to look at your day-to-day checklist and start taking note of the tasks that you can hand off to others. Look at the simplest things first, like checking your email. Do you really need to be the one to comb through your email multiple times a day? If you are like me, that can suck as much as two hours - a quarter of a day - just to sift through emails. So what if someone else was to take over your inbox; maybe an assistant? What if you only saw mails they weren’t able to delegate for you. My assistant also takes care of billing and other administrative tasks, so she’s able to take care of a chunk of the emails herself. So now I see may 20 percent of the emails that come to my inbox, which saves me a significant amount of time.

Listen to me when I say that you are spending too much time working in your business and not enough time on your business. I don’t care where you are in your journey, the process is ongoing and as small and medium sized business owners, we can be delegating more. If you don’t believe me, read Clockwork by Mike Michalowizc and try to prove me wrong. The bottom line is that any time spent away from making your business better and growing is time lost to a more prosperous tomorrow.