If you’re launching your own business, it’s likely you have a lot of plates to keep spinning. Thinking about inventory, target customers, online presence (including business blogging) and more can seem overwhelming.
One of my favorite quotes comes from Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project. Gretchen states that one of the secrets of adulthood is “Don’t Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good“. This quote hangs in my kitchen to remind me that some good progress is better than perfect progress.
This is as much true in business as it is in life. While it is important that your brand represents who you are and your target market, waiting until everything is 100% perfect is a recipe for never getting started. Our website has undergone three redesigns since we launched. We’re constantly reevaluating site content and plugins to optimize our customer experience. If we had waited until Eli Rose was perfect we would still have no business today.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not encouraging you to launch a business that is poorly thought through. I’m merely saying that perfect can be your enemy. It’s easy to get caught up in round after round after round of changes waiting for things to be perfect. Many businesses are caught in a cycle of improvement without ever actually getting off the ground.
1. Web Content Your web pages need to have content on them to tell people who you are, what your experience is and what you can offer them. These things will change over time – your experience will grow and what you can offer them will continue to expand. When launching your website, realize that these pages are not set in stone. You can continue to revisit them periodically and update them as your business changes. Waiting until they’re perfect is a recipe for never publishing your website.
2. Service Offerings Finding the right mix of service offerings can be tough. What you may expect to be your biggest seller may stall. At the same time, services you didn’t realize your customers might want can be requested. Start with a list of basic service offerings that are well thought through and carefully priced. From there, you can continue to tailor your services to meet your customers needs. Again, these pages and offerings are not set in stone. However, if you never publish your service offerings or products, you can never make a sale. Start with a good list of offerings and over time you can refine them to get closer and closer to “perfect”.
3. Social Media Presence Many businesses hesitate to launch their social media presence until they have perfected everything they are and what they’ll do. While I understand this mindset, there is a bit of a missed opportunity here. Creating a Facebook page and not publishing content to it for months or years means you’re missing the opportunity to inform people that you exist, what you can offer them, why they should be excited for your launch, and time lost for indexing by Google. Goldieblox is a company that launched through a Kickstarter campaign. While their product was in beta, they continue to use their Goldieblox Facebook page to keep customers informed of what was going on and how excited they were for their impending launch. This helped ensure that when the product officially launched, it had a solid customer base right out the door. Keeping your social media presence under wraps as you approach launch allows you to wait until things are “perfect” but it can slow your initial growth. We’d recommend launching your social media presence at least a few weeks prior to launch.
Let’s face it: none of us are perfect people. Yet we still go out into the world and live our lives as best we can. Similarly, your business will never be perfect. However, putting your best foot forward is better than never getting started at all.
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