06/14/2007 The difference that makes the difference.

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A week or so ago, I wrote on the Spirit Lake Forum that honesty is one of the key factors in being successful in a small business. Someone posted a response to the effect that excellence and honesty go hand in hand.

I think she was correct. In the past few weeks, I have been forcing myself to be honest about what needs to be done to keep our products at the standard I think our clients have a right to expect. With thousands of documents on our site and God only knows how many links to other sites, it is inevitable that some of those links would be broken. As a growing company, it is always a temptation to keep moving forward, developing new products, writing new proposals and not spend so much time on maintenance. Maintenance is not too exciting.

A week ago, our wonderful new employee ran an automated check on our site and found over 400 broken links. The vast majority of these were other sites that had changed file names. So, there was a temptation to say, "It's not my fault. They are the ones who moved."

On the other hand, I know how annoying it is when you are trying to look up something and the link you click on does not work. You don't care whose fault it is, you just want the %*& thing to work. This is one of my most useful tips for would-be small business owners.

"Use the things that irritate you to make your own business better."

For example, I know that it irritates me when links no longer work, so I am trying to fix all of those so that people who visit our site don't have the same irritation. I really did not feel like changing all the links to all of the web pages that had moved over the past few months. Willie Davis, one of our consultants, was in Albuqurque for a meeting and I really felt like sending him CDs with broken links to distribute. After all, we have thousands of pages of really good information, interesting, readable and accurate. Wasn't that good enough?

Erich pointed out that one of the pages in our new workshop, Guaranteeing Special Education Rights, has links to a previous workshop on staff training and that people who are not very familiar with computers or the Internet may get confused. About half of the people who attend our workshops on the reservations are not very experienced using web browsers.

I really did not feel like creating 13 pop-up windows, and there was a real temptation to just say, "Oh, they'll figure it out. It's good enough."

The truth is, I have done enough workshops and seen enough people confused that I knew they needed search boxes, drop down menus, next arrows to show them how the workshop progressed.

There is another key to success. When you know deep down that something is good, but not excellent, resist the temptation to lie to yourself and say, "Oh, it's good enough."

I have to agree to the visitor to our forum that most people are not that honest. Which is why most people fail.

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