Tiny Tweaks Can Make a Big Difference
I’ve been a mountain biker for a couple of decades. For much of that time, my bikes have had a seatpost that you manually adjust on the fly.
Changing your seat height when you’re riding a trail is important for stability and energy.
When you’re dropping, you want your seat lower to lower your center of gravity and keep you stable. When you’re climbing, you want your seat high for better leverage against your pedals.
With a manually adjustable seat post, I could raise or lower the seat height as I need it—but I had to get off my bike to do so.
Hop off the bike, flip open the post clasp, push/pull the seat to the desired height, close the post clasp, hop back on the bike, and start pedaling at a zero start. It all took less than a minute but doing so killed the flow of my rides.
Then one day I got a hydraulic seat adjuster (called a dropper post).
Now I can adjust my seat height while I’m still on my bike. With a push of a button, I can shift it up or down and keep pedaling.
Wow! This one change to my bike has made a BIG improvement in my ride experience.
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When something’s not working well in our business, it’s easy to think the thing is broken and needs to be fixed.
Perhaps that’s true; something needs adjusted so it will work or work better.
But does it mean the change has to be a big one? Time consuming? Expensive?
If the cost of the thing not working well feels big, does it mean that the investment to make it better has to be equally big?
There are three things to consider:
1) We often erroneously equate the cost of something being broken with the cost of the fix.
Let’s say you’re spending $500/week running ads plus paying someone to help you set up the ads and manage them.
If the ads are barely bringing in any leads and therefore no clients, that’s going to feel like an expensive problem, even more so if it's jeopardizing your cash flow.
But it doesn’t mean that the fix is going to be big and/or expensive.
You might need to change up the headline, update the copy, or reformat the webpage the ad is sending people to.
These changes are not terribly expensive—in time or money—to make.
If something needs to be fixed or optimized in your business, have you sat down to work out the cost of the current state vs. the cost of repair?
2. Fixing broken or optimizing for better is more expensive when you don’t know what needs to change.
To improve my ride efficiency and enjoyment, I could have gotten a better mountain bike. In case you’re not a biker, you may not realize that a good bike costs thousands of dollars.
(Where I live many people spend more on their bikes than their cars!)
A new bike with all the bells and whistles would absolutely make for a better ride. But not necessary.
For a few hundred bucks a dropper post is a meaningful upgrade.
A woman came to me one day super frustrated by the lack of sales on her website.
She’d been trying to solve the issue with ads, with social media, by going to events to drum up business.
She didn’t understand what the problem was, in part because she didn’t know where to look or if she did, how to interpret what she was looking at.
As soon as I had a chance to look “under the hood” at her website traffic and other data, the root of her problems showed up crystal clear. She had decent traffic hitting her website but near to zero purchases.
She could have spent $1m on traffic, but until the issues with her website content and functionality were addressed (which to me were glaring) that desired conversion wasn’t going to happen.
(She was also not sending enough emails to her list—but that’s a topic for another day.)
Consider the things you’re working on right now to fix or make better.
Are you working on the right things?
Is the fix you’re spending on overkill for what you actually need?
How do you know?
3. Tiny tweaks can make all the difference.
A client has been doing cold/lukewarm outreach in LinkedIn with good success but she saw room for improvement.
We made some slight adjustments to her messaging and within 24 hours of rolling it out she saw an increase to 50% acceptance rate on her connection requests with 80% agreeing to join her newsletter.
During the last promo for my Art of the Offer masterclass, my early attempts to have registrants schedule their bonus calls had netted only 2 call bookings. How to get people to take action sooner?
I ran my registration confirmation page in front of my messaging-marketing coach who suggested a wording change and a small graphic update all of which took me about 15 minutes to implement.
After the next email that went out about the masterclass, new registrants resulted in 8 call bookings.
What would a little adjustment do for your business?
Bonus food for thought: Some changes take courage to make.
You might know exactly what needs to be changed to make things in your business work better.
You might have the time and money necessary to make them.
Are you taking action?
If not, there’s usually something else at the heart of the matter that needs to be looked at.
Even tiny tweaks can mean the difference between staying inside your comfort zone and stepping out of it.
Recognize that any time you make a change, our wonderful friend the Imposter Monster loves to make an appearance.
“Change” and “new” are to the Imposter Monster what cookies are to Cookie Monster.
Is the Monster holding up your show, or is something else?
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If you have a sneaking suspicion that things need to be tweaked with your messaging and marketing for better performance…
Or if NOT WORKING has been staring you dead in the face…
Let's talk.
You can book a time to chat with Lisa.
