NerdBrand Podcast
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NerdBrand Podcast
Killing Momentum: The Dangers of Perfectionism
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So as Mitch rushes to put his earphones on.
Speaker 2:Okay, yes.
Speaker 1:On this episode of NerdBrand Podcast, we'll talk about analysis, paralysis, how procrastination and micromanaging small problems can kill business momentum and stunt revenue growth. I got all of that out in one breath.
Speaker 2:In our pre-podcast discussion we kind of sort of solved the problem, so okay.
Speaker 1:See you all later. Yep, here we go Up next. Welcome to this episode of the Nerd Brand Podcast, where we talk about procrastination and micromanaging. Smaller problems can kill business momentum and stunt your revenue growth.
Speaker 3:You're like Jim Carrey, don't you? Deep breath, deep breath.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so anyways, obsessing over the small stuff. So I'm going to look at it from the big picture CEO, business owner perspective. You guys, I'd like for you well, especially you, michaela, project manager at agency operation focus grounded kind of executions perspective. But you know, you're stuck tweaking the logo. For the 15th time You've delayed launch by a month because the business cards aren't ready. By month. Because the business cards aren't ready Meanwhile, meanwhile, at the Hall of Justice, your competitors are in market and they're making money. So how does procrastination and obsessing over non-revenue generating tasks they quietly kill the business dream.
Speaker 2:Sometimes I think it's procrastination. You said it's analysis, paralysis. I mean you lead a business, you understand how easy it is to get lost in the minutiae, because there's so much of it, yeah, especially when you're a small business like us and you don't have you don't have other people that you can kind of assign certain responsibilities you're doing all of it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, pro tip, I just ignore it you tell anxiety, because it's also a little bit anxiety driven too, which you know riddens my body and you're like go away anxiety.
Speaker 1:I don't like you yeah, people, people look at me like how do you do that?
Speaker 2:and I'm like I just tell it to piss off and I don't worry about it it's kind of funny I always said this about myself that I have I've hated deadlines since I was in elementary school yeah tell me I've got a book report to do and it's due in three weeks, and I was going to be the one who waited till 10 o'clock the night before to get it done. What am I in? I'm in an industry where time is everything.
Speaker 2:You've got publication deadlines you've got. Brand launch deadlines you've got. And you know, everybody's deadline is my deadline.
Speaker 1:So that's the industry I chose to go in. And now the industry that we are in, we do an ad campaign. We got to get the ad campaign out because Father's Day doesn't change everybody, it's still on the same fricking day. Dates are dates, but if you have a campaign that doesn't really have a necessarily wrapped around a holiday, and you got to get stuff done. How many times have we seen other brands where they've had to pivot really quickly because uh-oh, if we put that ad out, everybody's going to get really mad because now it's tone deaf as to what's going on currently in society. Exactly Right, you got to be aware of that.
Speaker 2:Dreaded 24-hour news cycle.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so those are legitimate things to keep on the radar and be aware of, but this is the stuff that is internal in your head and I see it all the time with founders and owners is waiting for this perfection and, and you know, it's like no, it's never, ever, ever, ever going to be perfect, amen. And the motto of a business owner is figure it out.
Speaker 3:Don't wait for the other shoe to drop.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and from the creative side of things, one of the things I've learned, and you hit the nail on the head I had the benefit of working under a couple of very, very, very seasoned senior art directors when I first got in the business.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and one of them told me very early on you have to stop touching it, you need to go touch grass, you need to take it from there Just to preface this.
Speaker 1:We're talking about a project. Yeah, yeah, thank you, because sometimes you just, depending on where people stop the podcast, you start again. It might you know exactly.
Speaker 2:You have to put it down and leave it alone. At some point you have to be done right, and the irony is that I've I've come to realize as a creative director in my own right now is that the more spontaneous it is, the higher the likelihood is it's going to be right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're going to make it worse.
Speaker 2:And one of the things they preach to us in design school from every art class I had through elementary school was that your first idea isn't usually your best. I've come to the conclusion that that's not necessarily the case. Sometimes your freshest, cleanest first jump concept can be the best because it's not adulterated by rethinking, because it's not adulterated by rethinking overworking.
Speaker 1:Sometimes, yeah, I mean, there's been instances where I'm like, okay, this sounds really cool, and then you kind of think it through and everything, and then you and I have gone back and forth on stuff and I'm like, no, it needs something else to be punchier.
Speaker 1:Sometimes To clarify the point, right, and it's like, okay, we need to do that because it kind of leaves a little bit too much ambiguity to what you're trying to communicate. So you got to do clean, do that work, but yeah, you don't spend six months on it and then do it while your marketing department's trying to figure out like, what am I putting on social media this month?
Speaker 2:you know well here's the thing in a lot of these cases, whether it's working on your financial information for the company or where you're actually working on a creative project, it's like who are you trying to satisfy? Are you trying to satisfy the inner voices in your head? Are you trying to satisfy the objectives, the at the absolute objectives of the process, the project? Yeah, if you check all the boxes, if you're achieving all the top three things you need to achieve in that ad, that logo, logo, that, whatever it is, you've done the job Right. You've done the job.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So on the project manager side, I'll let you kind of take it, Mikayla, if you would. Even if you have to read it verbatim, I'll read it verbatim From the agency side.
Speaker 3:We see clients delay campaigns over stuff that's invisible to the customer. Fonts, delay campaigns over stuff that's invisible to the customer. Fonts, color shades, one more round of revisions. Yeah, I could see that like. But we also have some clients that are like, oh, it's good to go and like you know, those are our bread and butter but like, yeah, those are our favorites, yeah those are our, but that's based on part of that.
Speaker 2:It's because they trust us right just like Jason, trusting he'll hand a project over to me, why he trusts me to get it done. He gives something to you, especially as project manager, because he trusts you that you're going to take these myriad of things that have to get done. He knows you'll get it done.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mostly have a picture in my head of Michaela with the switch and then she's running after you and everybody and just beating you all.
Speaker 2:And I'm just kind of sitting back. Going like this is kind of funny.
Speaker 3:Well you'll be happy to know that that doesn't happen very often. No, it doesn't happen.
Speaker 2:No, I mean sometimes, because you know you got a lot of things to do. Something slips through the cracks once in a while right, yeah, but I don't.
Speaker 1:I don't really lose sleep. You know, mcgayla's like I'm gonna get this photo shoot organized with mitch for the client. Okie dokie, I mean you're're working on something right now with one of our contractors to get an email design for a client and some ads and everything else synced up with Reba and I'm like, okay, and I haven't been keeping track of that because that is me getting into the micro or the minutia, that's it. I get the hell out. I'm done. I did the thing. This is what we need. Bye-bye.
Speaker 2:Procrastination and paralysis can happen a lot of times just simply because you won't let go of it and you don't have enough trust in the people that you're working with to get it done. You're holding it too close. It's an attachment issue.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, it is, it is. It's an internal thing that happens with owners quite a lot, and you'll cause your team to burn out, you'll cause budgets to bloat and eventually the momentum you're trying to build is gone and you will never get it back. So if you're still personally checking every email, editing every social post, you're not leading, you're micromanaging. So you need to trust your team. You hired them for a reason. You're in the weeds.
Speaker 2:You can't see the road ahead period, or if you're a client. I mean I understand how difficult it must be, because I one of the things I've always understood very deeply is we're like doctors and these people are trusting us with the health of their company yeah, okay we have a sacred trust. Well, you chose us to do the work, so I want you to relax. Let it go. Trust us.
Speaker 1:We're going to get it done. Yeah, the neurosurgeon doesn't take a break from doing brain surgery. Go around the table and then work on the heart or monitor the you know, or any of the other things other people do in the room.
Speaker 3:I feel like that also plays on fear too, like kind of tying anxiety and fear, because it's kind of like you know, you get burned by doctors too with malpractice cases.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in our industry there's a lot of people that say a lot of dumb crap and promise a lot of stuff that cannot be promised because there's no guarantees in marketing. Sorry, there's just not. This is not a furniture store. You're not going to go in and get a hundred. You know, 90 day back guarantee.
Speaker 1:Um, you know, if you don't like how things are going in 90 days, then sure you can go to another agency. But here's the thing you know, when you do ads it's like a birthday party. I'm going to throw a birthday party and it's in August, and you start talking to people about it in June and then all of a sudden you're like well, I want to change my birth date, I'm going to move it to October. Well, shit, everybody had on their calendar for August. So now that audience is gone. Now you got to rebuild the audience for the new date, for the new thing, for whatever it is. But here's the thing it doesn't really work that way. They're gone, they're like you don't know what the hell. I got other things to do. We're such a distraction-driven society the moment you don't stay the course and stay committed that 90 days is necessary to build an audience and then to retarget ads to people that have already seen the ad.
Speaker 2:Yeah, momentum. Everything you're doing is everything you're creating, every strategy you're developing is an effort to create momentum.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you don't start on the tactical side and go like I don't feel like it's working, I'm going to quit. Well, yeah, there's also that fear of missing out where it's like well, if I stay with it, then maybe I'll just stay one more time. It's like also, too, I would bring to light you're not mining for gold. Just one more pickaxe swing in the mine and I'm going to find that nugget and we're going to be rich. It's not that either. You know, maybe you're just digging in the wrong spot, but there's a lot of work that's done to figure out where to dig, and that's the, that's the strategy, that's what's important. And and I you know the most successful clients we got. I mean they, they delegate and decide. They don't treat $10 tasks like 10,000 decisions, you know, and it's just $10,000 decisions, and so um, um, yeah, I mean michaela is a project manager and details a lot. I mean it's kind of your job.
Speaker 3:oh, yeah, I mean I, I feel like ever since, kind of like, when you're mentioning book reports earlier I'm like I was very much task oriented but like I had a lot of, especially when we were moving, moving from new jersey to out here I had some anxiety so like, but it was personal life, personal noise that was going on, that I would miss deadlines or forget a textbook and do my homework and stuff like that.
Speaker 3:But once, like you know, I've built a foundation, especially like middle school. That's where a foundation, a routine, is really built. Like you know, time management, you gotta go to the locker on time. You have no idea the stress of just like going to my locker, remembering the combination, having the five minutes to get there, like I I was in analysis, paralysis, wanted to be on time, wanted to exceed a deadline, like the handbooks or agendas that were always given at the beginning of the year where you record your assignments, the satisfaction of just striking it out like it's done I could actually write the paper but the fact that I scraped it off the list, it's like closing tasks for whenever we get stuff done.
Speaker 1:It's just the satisfaction.
Speaker 3:It's like heroin.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is. It's funny you should mention that because I mean again somebody who fought deadlines their entire school life. I tend to try to work as much as I can a little bit ahead For one thing that helps you.
Speaker 1:Jason.
Speaker 2:It helps you and it helps me, because you never know when one of these projects we're working on something's going to happen and it's going to have to jump ahead in a line for some reason. Well, I'm in good shape because I've gotten all these other projects. I've got everything set where it needs to be. I got this accomplished a day early, so it's not going to be in the way. It's because you have margins. It's not going to be in the way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're not working in the margins. You have margin of error built in, right, yeah, and I'll say approve to send. That's me telling you all. I don't need to tell the client here's your things. That level of account management is micromanagement, so you guys can just send it to them. You can talk to them.
Speaker 3:They know who you are. Places like loomly where you can just have like the actual yeah deliverable there and they can just approve it, or you know, or back to the drawing board that makes it so much easier.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's. That's kind of a nice thing about an organization. Our size is. Clients are generally comfortable talking to any of us. Now we still have sort of a point person.
Speaker 1:I'm the point person.
Speaker 2:Jason's the central point of contact for most of our clients, but when it comes to deliverables, they're perfectly comfortable hearing from any any one of us.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, because you both have. You're the project manager, you're the creative director, you're not, you know, you're not the secretary and you're not the graphic designer. And you may do a bit of those roles, because we're in a weird era and decade of civilization.
Speaker 2:Well, we're a small organization, it's a very small part, it's a team effort.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean you're probably going to be faster than me and Mitch at scheduling a calendar, and then you're done. That's for faster at me than me and mitch at scheduling a calendar, and then you're done, and then you're, you're off to something else. Yeah, it's because, don't ask mitch to do that. And for those that are like, is mitch coming to the meeting, we yell at mitch once a month to say would you please accept?
Speaker 2:every time, like you know I just, most of the time, most of the time I just kind of go by. Well, if you put me in a meeting and invite me, assume, assume I'm going to be there unless I speak and say, oh wait a minute, I can't be there because it's so rare that.
Speaker 1:I can't be there. You know, there's a button that says maybe a decline.
Speaker 3:I always put tentative, like whenever I was in Phoenix. I'm like I may not because the time difference, I'm like I'm just going to put it as tentative. Yeah, from now.
Speaker 1:But see, right now it's like for the rest of us what that does on the schedule, especially for you. It's like kind of lets you know, like okay, this is the person that's going to be there, so the meeting may only take 30 minutes, but if these other people show up, then it's going to be an hour because they're going to have a portion of it. If they say maybe, then I don't necessarily need to consider the whole hour is going to be used. We could be out the door in 30, that's okay. I love 30 minute meetings. You know, we're getting there with some of with some clients. They're kind of on their back back foot, so we gotta get them up there meetings are the bane of getting anything accomplished yeah, I mean we've had product launches delay, you know getting into like how small businesses can like get some wins here, okay.
Speaker 1:So we've had product launches delay over tiny packaging tweaks. Meanwhile the market moved on. So revenue doesn't come from internal debates, it comes from shipped products, live campaigns and clear offers action yeah, doing the thing rather than pondering it, right so yeah, for you uh I've seen entire quarters wasted trying to get the website project perfect, perfect before starting ads.
Speaker 3:By the time it's done, budget budgets burn and momentum's gone. Yeah, I tested that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, it's like progress beats perfection always. It just is. Sometimes you just got to get it done.
Speaker 2:Well, and the truth of the matter is 99% of the time the end audience has no awareness of any of the behind the scenes stuff that goes on. They just see the message and 99.9% of the time it's going to hit what it's where it's supposed to hit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, well, and you know, we procrastinate dirty secret. We procrastinate because we're afraid, afraid to fail. No, michaela, hit a nail ahead, fear, fear fear is the most corrosive element in any decision making, and it's just, it's, it's uh, I'll take it from here. Perfectionism is fear in disguise. People want to feel ready, but business doesn't wait for you, for your comfort zone, to catch up. It applies looking at somebody like me, anyways, to make the final call. I'm not afraid of that because I'm not afraid to make mistakes.
Speaker 1:I'm not afraid to put something out there and be like oopsies, that was broke. Let's put that back one away. Let's roll that back. Let's do that. I I don't care, cause I understand attention spans from people. I understand I focus more on people's behaviors than I do, more than anything. I focus more on people's behaviors than I do, more than anything. So if somebody doesn't like something we put out, okay, that's your opinion.
Speaker 2:But that's all, it is Well that's the thing.
Speaker 1:Go somewhere else and you get the same thing. It's subjective.
Speaker 2:Well, that's kind of the thing I mean and I've told you this from the first day we decided we were going to do this thing and that is that you've got to keep a client's mind out of the subjective.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The opinion. Things Keep everybody and this is internally and externally you keep everybody focused on objective things, the things you can check a box and say, yes, we accomplished this. Yes, we accomplished this. Yes, we accomplished this. If you've done that, you've done the job.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we had a client that wanted people to know about meeting spaces in their building. It took an entire year for them to just realize that that business existed down the street Now, nevermind the fact that they had meeting spaces within it. So we were tasked for, hey, we want more people having meetings there. Okay, well, we'll just shove every business organization group we can and tell them about it and get them in there, even if we use blackmail. And it worked and now they have a steady flow.
Speaker 1:Now is it a high dollar value for them in comparison to company corporate events? No, but it opened the door for them to start coming in, because they became aware, and before it was worse than that. It was like oh, we didn't know you had meeting spaces. No, they didn't know they existed, right. So there is a whole year there. So you have to start now, because if it's going to take a year to do something, for something to catch on that no one knows about, you cannot wait, just can't. You're already behind and you know, I've said before, if you're on your back, back foot, it's very difficult for us to help, it's very difficult for us to take on as a client because it may be too late. There's a few businesses right now I'm watching that are closing shop. They may not know it or fully admit it, but they're going to this year and it's because they delayed. They did not invest in marketing and advertising at all.
Speaker 2:Well, it's a lack of focus.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which again goes back to decision making, which goes back to what Michaela said about fear.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So, anyways, if you're struggling with that, you're like I don't know if it's fear, I don't know if it's maybe because I just don't have the right team, I don't have the right budget. You can listen to this podcast on nerdbrandagentscom slash podcast, and you know, like I said, decide fast, have the right people in place, just act, just act.
Speaker 3:That's really it.
Speaker 1:Just do. It's like the Nike slogan Just do it. You know you gotta, you cannot sit and just think and think, and think, and think and think. That's not the market, it's moving past you, literally. So. So, anyways, we hope you found it useful. We'll see you next week and remember, keep your nerd band strong.
