Good Enough with that Perfect Service Goal

If you have a service business, your goal is likely perfect service. You’re not like the fast food restaurant that screwed up your order: you’re better. Right?

But perfection is overrated. Let’s aim for “Good Enough” with that service.

This is a continuation of yesterday’s post, which discussed the concept of the Minimal Viable Product. This time we’re moving on to service rather than tangible products.

Perfect Service Is Impossible

The service industry is hard. People can be mean. I’ve been in that orbit almost all my working life, including a memorable moment of getting yelled at for “being deaf” when I picked up some quarters I dropped.

Despite mean people, I want people to be happy with what I deliver. As I started as a tax preparer, focused on delivering perfect service: answering the phone on the first ring, blasting back emails within minutes, promising the return with an impossibly fast turn around time.

It was killing me. Worst of all, the actual deliverable–the tax return– would occasionally have mistakes.

Eagerness, speed…and inexperience. It certainly didn’t add up to that perfect service I aimed to deliver

You’re Learning As You Go–And That’s Okay!

All Indiepreneurs have to start somewhere. Maybe you’ve worked in a sort of corporate apprenticeship and learned some of the tricks of the trade. Or maybe you’re straight out of college trying to establish yourself. Either way, you’re going to make mistakes along the way.

That’s okay. That’s life. The important part is you keep trying and keep getting better.

No matter what, your work at 1 year of experience is going to be worse than at 10 years. That’s just life. Malcolm Gladwell’s popular Outliers discusses the 10,000 hour rule, saying that you’re not really an expert at something until you’ve done it for 10,000 hours.

But here’s the thing: that doesn’t mean you should pick up your ball and go home! No business is perfect at the start. There will be bumps and flaws in your planning and products. That’s fine! Make it good enough, and push it out.

Good Enough–And Better With Time

James Clear has become an expert at habits. His story on becoming an expert is interesting–a perfect example of the “starting somewhere.” But that’s a topic for another time.

In his book Atomic Habits, Clear tells a story about Jerry Uelsmann, a photography professor at the University of Florida (Clear has this excerpt from his book on his website). This professor divided up his class in half, telling one group they would be graded by the quantity of photos submitted, and the other half they would be graded by the quality of their photos.

That quality group would only submit one photo, but it had to be near perfect.

At the end of the semester, he was surprised to discover that the quantity group actually had better quality group.

Why? Because the quantity group practiced! Rather than working all semester on the THEORY of the perfect shot, they took shot after shot, improving with each and every one.

Does This Mean Your Early Work Is Crap?

As you practice your craft, you’re going to get better over time. Guess what? That means when you look back at your early work, you’ll realize it wasn’t that good.

That’s totally fine. This is just the natural progression of things. Think of your favorite artists, authors, and musicians. Their early work typically pales compare to their later pieces.

What’s important, though, is that those artists put themselves out there and found people who liked their early work. It was good enough. Getting something out there allowed them the time to get better, creating later projects closer to perfection.

Deliver something that’s good enough now. In the future, that “good enough” bar will become higher and higher. And that’s a good thing.