Written by: Sachin Parmar
Being perfect isn’t just hard, it’s impossible. Find out how your approach to business could be holding you back.
Sachin Parmar, Co-founder and Creative Director from evokeu, London’s leading boutique digital marketing and branding agency, shares his thoughts on perfectionism and how it can have a negative impact on your business.
We live in a world that strives for perfection, from the surgery-enhanced celebrities of Hollywood to the filters that are the norm on social media. These high ideals that society pressurises us to adopt can make you feel like a failure both personally and professionally, so much so that it can prevent you from progressing. Don’t get me wrong, having an eye for detail and taking pride in your work is positive, but unrealistic expectations of perfection will mean that you’ll never reach that pinnacle, will waste precious time and will lose out on valuable opportunities in the process.
You will have heard the phrase before that in business ‘time is money’ and if you run your own business, you will know this to be true. If you don’t invest your time smartly, your business will suffer the consequences. By being a perfectionist throughout my life, I’ve fallen victim to the trap of spending time focusing on the wrong areas. Sometimes it’s paid off and helped to open doors, but more often than not it’s caused me to go off on a tangent and has become a hindrance rather than a benefit. That’s why I now adopt the 80/20 rule and encourage my team to do the same.
How to divide your time
The 80/20 rule, which is also known as the Pareto Principle, denotes that 80% of outputs are created by 20% of inputs; so, to be more efficient in business, you need to identify and prioritise the inputs that are most critical to the objective of your project. If you dedicate your working day to completing these key tasks, you’ll find that your productivity will increase. This means no more procrastinating on making things perfect, a ‘good enough’ approach will give you the same result and will be quicker and more cost-effective. By concentrating on value-added, you might also discover that your role has greater fulfilment, due to the results being more satisfying. The 80/20 approach could even help your business to flourish, as you’ll have the capacity to take on a higher number of projects.
You need the right infrastructure in place
But before implementing the 80/20 rule at your place of work, you first need to make sure that as a business leader, you’ve established the right stakeholders needed for you to bring your ideas to life. Do you have the best team in situ with a skill set that matches your requirements? Do you have your black book of trusted contacts to hand, so that any out-of-the-ordinary requests can be met? Having the right people behind you carries significant weight when aiming to be more efficient. It’s also important that you instil in your colleagues the same beliefs that you follow about perfectionism being detrimental. If you lead by example, your team will know that it’s okay for them to be ‘good enough’ too. We can all try hard, but not when it diminishes our confidence and makes us falter in our steps forward.
Evokeu offers an array of design services from branding to web design and is always on the lookout for like-minded individuals to join the team.
If you’d like to find out more about Sachin and evokeu, please visit here. You can also follow Sachin on LinkedIn, where he frequently posts business advice and inspiring content.
About the author:
Sachin Parmar is the Co-founder and Creative Director of boutique digital marketing and branding agency, evokeu. With decades of design experience, Sachin has a keen eye for detail and a drive to create consistently superior results. Sachin and his expert team work with big and small brands across many sectors to help clients capture customer attention and create growth. Evokeu also has a vertical brand called Graphic Kitchen, which specialises in the hospitality sector.
