I like perfection. I have the urge to take things to a level of perfection that other people don’t understand very often. And even if they understand it, most of them don’t practice this themselves. Of course you rarely get to “the full 100%”, and in most cases you shouldn’t because the last couple of percent-points are the most expensive. But working towards an adequate level of perfection is something I would recommend to everybody. An adequate level of perfection has a highly positive impact on the things you do and the bottom-line of your job, company and, may I say, life in general.
Let’s take the napkin in a restaurant for an example. At a fast-food burger joint the customer expects paper napkins in the to-go bag. At a restaurant the customer expects a paper or cloth napkin to be placed on the table. In the higher class restaurants the restaurant staff will place the thick-clothed napkin on your lap for you. Finding the adequate level of perfection usually boils down to: The more you or the customer pays and the more important something is the higher the expected level of perfection.
Let’s apply this to some startup related topics.
Code
The first prototype has to work but the code doesn’t have to be crazy pretty and perfect (and ‘pretty’ can mean many things). The adequate level of perfection is achieved when you can prove that the product you are building can be built and that you can use the prototype as a baseline for the real deal.
When building a high-throughput, highly secure or highly regulated system the adequate level of perfection is a very different one. The code doesn’t only have to work but also has to fulfill all the other requirements that you impose on it.
One important thing: Even though your adequate level of perfection is lower in the prototype-phase this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look and think ahead. Usually your prototype will morph into the real product and you don’t want to rebuild everything but evolve towards your minimum viable product gracefully and with quality.
Raising Money
When pitching your product to angels or VCs the quality of your content and presentation has to meet a certain quality requirement. Adequate perfection is no less than 100% when raising money. The first impression counts and even though many VCs say “Let’s talk in half a year when you have ” – you usually don’t get a second chance. Your final pitch, your deck, the intro and your demo have to be well-groomed and excellent. You start with a lower level of perfection when working on your pitch, try out a couple of different angles and find out what resonates with your audience but once you get to your prime VC candidates you have to nail it with perfection.
Hiring
Once you are past the initial founding team of co-founders and founding engineers you have to establish a hiring process that makes sure you hire adequately perfect people. If your business is a tech-startup you should hire A-players in different forms or fashions to build the A-team. If you are looking to build a repeatable and franchiseable business then you have to define a process to hire people who can do the job and at least fulfill the requirements for the single positions (you still would want to get the real good ones though). The level of perfection here is to define a process that serves you sufficiently to identify, hire and retain the talent you need. You need to do things like engaging with the community: Host meetups, start meetups, be active in forums and user-groups, on LinkedIn go to tech-events and have your in-house recruiter/HR person be one of the first hires. She can then actively call potential employees, write them and really be an in-house head-hunter. The best people are not looking for jobs.
Job Search
The application process has a similar perfection level as raising money. Your resume, background, publicly available information, blog etc have to be well maintained and representative of who you are and what the value is that you can add to a startup. If you are an engineer, product guy/girl, marketer or have any other profession and are looking for a job it is likely that you will send your resume out and want to be invited for interviews. But that is just the last step to get picked up by really a great company. Make sure your profile at LinkedIn is up to date. Write a blog, tweet and show that you are engaging in the community of your interest (assuming that your job will be in your area of interest). Did you present at a user-group recently? Are the video or the slides on your blog or is your last blog-entry from 3 years ago?When you are applying at your dream-company, look through your network to find out who could introduce you. Make sure that your resume is showing who you are, is error-free(!) and you send it in PDF format. Also here the first impression counts.
Working with others
The worst thing to have is a bad co-worker. No matter in which position you are in a startup, doing the best possible work – all the time – does make difference. There are so many mediocre contributors that slow down development of our ideas and companies without even knowing it. One of the patterns I have seen the most is declaring a piece of work as finished but having the wrong level of perfection. When finishing your work always ask yourself if your peers, bosses or reports will perceive your work as a positive impact on the team. Will they appreciate your work? What are you doing to positively contribute to the bottom-line? Are you giving the best you can or are just doing “the job you are asked to do”? Think about where you are in the curve of talent. And most importantly be true to yourself about how much perfection you can and want to deliver. There is only one thing worse than a bad co-worker. A bad co-worker who thinks they are doing a perfect job.
These are just a couple of examples where you can apply an adequate level of perfection. How far you go is ultimately up to you but I rarely saw anybody going the extra mile without being rewarded for it. Of course the most difficult part is to determine what level of perfection is adequate in your specific scenario.
In any case I hope you do things a bit more perfect in the future and even if it is to just raise the bar you had set yourself.
