Perfection is the enemy of scale
Do you wonder if you should strive for perfection or if “good enough” will hurt the impact your marketing has on the consumer?
As John A. List once wrote in The voltage effect: Perfection is the enemy of scale. It never became so clear to me as when the measurements of my performance were related to the bottom line of a company. It’s easy to be consumed by doing your job perfectly, and it makes sense to do so. But the actual cost of perfection is extreme for a growing company.
Spending 4 hours more creating a slightly better film or discussing what word should come first or second; spending those extra hours following up with people, not about them doing the work, but the quality of the work, creating a parallax scrolling website because it looks nice.
My first learning as Head of e-commerce was brutal in this sense. The most significant limitation to your team will almost always be time, and perfection kills your ability to get the most out of it. Those hours spent on the photoshoot meant SEO-work was pushed. Following up on the quality of the work hindered the workflows of colleagues, lowering their productivity and ability to think for themselves, making them more reliant on the leader to make decisions, making the leader an even bigger bottleneck. Creating the parallax scroll on a Landing page meant less time optimizing and adding features on the website that actually would have helped conversions. You end up creating a great impression of our brand - without anyone seeing it. While this is just one example, striving for perfection will kill the efforts that together create a profitable D2C brand.
To grow profitably with e-commerce, you need to do more than just one thing well. You need to do countless things well: creatives, e-mail, content, ambassadors, conversion rate optimization, and SEO, to mention a few. While you don’t need to do all of them, it all fits together into a big network of actions for profitability where each action impacts another. Perfection is the reason why you neglect what could- and should have made you profitable.