Do what you can repeat
22nd December 2008
It's a shame that some of life's most profound lessons can be such a pain in the ass.
By nature, I've tended to be one of those crazed 'try-anything-once' types, forever throwing myself into uncharted waters like a hyper-caffeinated lemming on a rain-slick precipice. (This is more fun than it sounds).
It isn't a great recipe for lasting success or happiness. The problem is our world and it's our pesky free market is so damn well adapted at, well, everything. Odds are, whatever you're doing has already been done, and a lot better, by a lot of other people.
So say you sell websites - like one of my companies does - and you want to start branching out and doing Flash corporate presentations (kind of like PowerPoint only interesting to watch). It looks like a good synergy - after all, both use graphic designers, Flash animators and general creative / tech wizardry that we have in abundance. What could possibly go wrong?
The problem is simple. Look at building content managed websites - something we've done a hundred billion times over the last 7 years. We've learnt the quirks. We know to allow 60% of our time for the client delivering content late, and the other 60% for making the site work in Internet-bastard-Explorer. We know that if you don't ask for the web hosting details when you start, that you'll delay launch by 3 months when you need them at the end, and that'll become your fault. We're rarely even surprised when someone hands us the text for their webpages - in Microsoft Excel.
But Flash presentations are a different story. Every problem was unexpected, and without enough experience it was hard for us to truly excel - we didn't fully understand the parameters for doing a great job. So we learnt as we went along, and it was painful - for us and our clients.
As time passed, and we repeated the experience with more projects. As we did, we got better, but still not up to the standard of our bread-and-butter work. And so it continued, each improvement slow and painfully hard fought. Ultimately we stopped doing them entirely.
The problem is there are whole companies that spend their days doing nothing more than this. Their staff probably read Flash Corporate Presentation Weekly. They almost certainly have a hugely refined process they take all their customers through, with pretty flowcharts and presentation slides, that took them years to perfect. They've probably got 10 man-years minimum of experience at that one thing. Compared with our part-time 2 months.
There are always vastly more opportunities available for doing work - even good work. But to truly compete and succeed, you need to be doing excellent work. To do excellent work takes a lot of time, money, blood, sweat, tears, teeth and occasional hair loss. Yet somehow small businesses - perhaps from an eagerness to expand - endlessly fall into the trap of diversifying themselves out of existence.
Of course I'm particularly guilty of this crime, and I've got the scars to prove it. I think it ran against my baser instincts at first, but turning work away because it's not our focus may be the most empowering skill I've learnt so far.
Learning it is a pain in the ass though.
