What kind of cake makes your mouth water? Chocolate? Red Velvet? Vanilla?
If you’re like most leaders, you likely battle with perfectionism in some area of your life.
When building a product or new venture, I speak with entrepreneurs all the time who continue to iterate past their MVP (minimum viable product) to the point of exhaustion. At great expense. I’ve fallen victim to the same habit many times.
I recently met with a friend who has invested over a million dollars into her own self-funded tech startup. They’ve rolled out countless software updates at great expense, yet not secured a single large client or project to implement the vision.
I shared advice with her that a mentor gave me: “Aaron, you can ice a cake to perfection, but if you take too long it'll be stale before anyone eats it.” What this meant to me: Resist the urge to “perfect” every part of a product or service before testing it with your intended audience. You could be serving vanilla cake to a group that wants to eat chocolate. They could prefer simple sprinkles instead of fancy fondant.
Craig Groeschel, my former boss and founder of Life.Church coined the phrase GETMO (Good Enough to Move On) a phrase that he says “helps teams achieve a better return on their investment of time, money or effort.”
“Perfectionism can actually be the enemy of progress when we over-invest in an area, and we don’t get great results because we’re wasting too much time or energy.”
When you’re attempting to innovate, and achieve things before your competition does, I’ve learned from experience that it often pays to GETMO. Quit icing the cake to perfection and take the nerve-wracking step to serve it! Once folks tell you they love it, bake another, ice that one even better than the first. Repetitive improvement, iteration and tweaking based upon actual customer feedback is the key to success in any business.
A big lesson I've learned from failure: Get your product in front of a test group as fast as possible. You’ll love the delicious results. When you GETMO, you can have your cake and eat it too!
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