MISTAKE #23: You’re too damn complicated
Why does it seem to be the nature of a business to overcomplicate things? Why don’t we like to approach problems believing that the simplest solution is potentially the best?
“Something is elegant if it is two things at once: unusually simple and surprisingly powerful.”
“Rube Goldberg was not elegant.”
It is great to be alive in the age of big data and an era where social media execution feels like playing the wack-a-mole game or choose-your-own-adventure storybook. But many of the third-party solutions surfacing these days are anything but unusually simple due to the confusingly complicated and convoluted approach they take to supposedly uncover new insight or spur action among shoppers.
It is easy to have a simple solution that doesn’t solve the problem. And it is possible to have programs of Rube Goldberg complexity that consume too many resources in pursuit of the solution.
Over-analysis or excessively complex plans are not only exponentially more expensive and difficult to execute well, but they are even more dependent on the basics already having been done well.
Don’t try to do localized executions when you don’t really understand who is already buying your product and why.
Don’t play around with complex pricing schemes until your production and fulfillment costs are under control.
Don’t develop a bunch of content until you know what message will cause shoppers to buy.
To be sure, over-simplification comes with its own risks. But it is a lot easier to refine and improve upon a simple system than it is to learn from a complex machine you were never able to get started to begin with.
Has your approach to business gotten unnecessarily complicated? Or are too many of your programs one-size-fits-all based on averages and assumptions?
Are you trying to play grand master-level chess when your business would be better off consistently winning at checkers?
Or have you brought a knife to a gunfight and your odds of survival aren’t looking too good?