Winston Churchill is famously known for saying “perfection is the enemy of progress”. And that quote most relevantly applies in business, perhaps more than any other sector. You may say, why is perfection a problem? Isn’t perfection a noble goal when doing your work? The answer is: perfection takes time, and time in the business world can often be a deal killer. If you can produce A- work in one week and A+ work in one month, that incremental benefit of the “perfect” work product, is most certainly lost in the form of the three weeks of lost time. When an A- is good enough to get the job done, take the win, and move on. This post will teach you how to better keep your business running at “light speed”.
Examples of How Perfection Can Get in The Way of Progress
There are many examples in the business world where perfection can be your enemy. Let’s talk through a few examples. Firstly, in your sales efforts, a client waiting an extra three weeks for your proposal, is mostly like still shopping with your competitors. Close the sale faster, to ensure that client ends up with you and not your competitor. Secondly, when disposing of owned assets, like real estate, most often times your first offer is your most seriously interested buyer with the highest odds of getting to closing. Don’t hold out for an even better offer that most likely will never materialize, and risk losing the “bird in hand”. Thirdly, let’s say you are negotiating the sale of your company, don’t dig in, holding out for certain points in your contract or a certain valuation in mind. Making a three-month sale process turn into a six month sale process will negatively wear upon the other party, potentially having them walk from the deal after the excitement of buying the company has worn off. The examples are limitless here, but hopefully you get a better picture of how perfection can hurt you.
An M&A Case Study on How Time Can Be Your Enemy
One of my clients was recently trying to sell their business. They started the process in February 2024 and were hoping to be done six months later in August 2024. At every step of the process, the business owner was “over engineering” everything. Instead of picking a business broker and attorney in a few days, he ran an exhaustive process of interviewing many prospective brokers and attorneys over several weeks, looking for the best one. Additionally, instead of turning the sale book around in one or two rounds of comments, he required over ten rounds of comments, trying to tell the perfect story. Furthermore, instead of having the business broker quickly start making calls to the first 200 prospective buyers on their list, this same individual kept pushing the broker for more and more names to be added to the calling list, slowing down the process as the broker needed to shift focus from starting calls to expanding the list to the requested 1,000 prospective buyers (requiring 5x as much work). Finally, during negotiations, instead of one or two turns of the purchase agreement, he kept digging in on few deal points with over five turns of the documents, seeking “the perfect deal”.
Collectively these actions materially slowed down the process. Then guess what happened? Instead of being closed by the original August 2024 target date, they were still in discussions with buyers in November 2024 (three months behind plan). And remember what happened that month? A new president was elected, one talking about his big plans to launch new tariffs on the countries where this company sourced much of its products. All of sudden a cloud was hanging over this business and the industry, and it spooked the originally excited buyers to the point they all stopped their conversations and there were no more interested parties to sell to. Those three lost months ended up causing the owners of the business near certainty a deal would have been closed in August 2024 and lost them millions of dollars in sale proceeds in the process. What a mess!
Know Your Goals—Knock Down Walls
You need to keep yourself accountable on what the most important goals are and manage towards those goals. In the above case study, the primary goal was: get the business sold in the next six months to lock in the high return on investment the owners were seeking. Nowhere in that goal does it say have the perfect broker, perfect lawyer, perfect sale book, perfect valuation, perfect contract, etc. Seeking perfection at every step along the way was in direct conflict to the primary goal, and now the company is paying a big price, to the point it may never be able to sell its business in the current economic climate.
Keep Your Business Running at Light Speed
At the end of the day, when setting your priorities and managing your workload, always subscribe to the K.I.S.S. method (Keep It Simple Stupid). Anything that overcomplicates things will make what should have been a fast and easy process, a torturous nightmare wearing down everyone that is involved in that project, from your own employees to whoever you are trying to do business with. And when people get demotivated or tired, the easiest path those people have to make the pain stop, could end up having them walk in another direction, leaving you with a revolving door of talent and nobody wanting to work with you. Don’t be that person, as life is too short and your business will suffer if you do.
How do you know if this is you, and how do you manage yourself and keep yourself accountable? I typically live by these two rules: (1) hit your preset timeline (if you are behind plan, don’t let the due date slip, you have to move faster); and (2) make no more than three changes to the same work product (if you can’t get it “close enough” after three tries you are not being effective as a communicator or you are not effectively listening to the needs of others in creating a win-win outcome for both parties). So, anything that slows you down needs to end—move on with “good” without always seeking “great”. Your team will thank you and your business will increase its odds of success in whatever it is trying to accomplish.
Closing Thoughts
If any of the above sounds like it could be happening in your business—by you, by your team, by other parties—the offending parties need to take a long look in the mirror and figure out how to get moving faster. But my guess is, the offending party (which could be you), may not know they are the offending party, which is even worse. So if you are getting feedback from your team that you are getting in the way of speed and progress—it is time to reverse course and get out of their way (that is not a time to dig-in to get your way towards perfection). Frankly, more successful businesses are lead by the person that is perfectly happy with “breaking things” and “imperfection”, as good things typically come out of that process and quicker timeline.
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