They say mistakes are our best teachers. If so, we had a really big teacher recently…

Ok, that sounded a bit weird. But all the same, we made a mistake that I realized actually points out a very important truth about business.

The Mistake Itself

While working on the Growcation recently, we accidentally made the exact mistake that Robbie raved about in DBA Episode 5. (And here you thought we were just pulling situations out of mid air for that show!)

The Growcation is our most lavish event of the year. We rent out a mansion/villa/castle, bring in a celebrity entrepreneur, and put on a luxury working vacation for business owners. Everything from a private chef to a customized agenda (and occasionally, massage therapists) is part of this event, and something that big needs a great marketing plan. So we put together one that looks like a web: it has multiple facets and strategies, but is marketed to a very small demographic of people.

One of those strategies is an experience booklet.

The booklet walks the reader through every facet of the experience, from start to finish, with pictures of the exact villa, meal plan, and cars booked. It’s essentially a visual and literary version of the event.

This booklet took roughly a month and a half to finish, and it was sent out to a very select list of people. I loved it, and eventually ended up going back through it myself to just admire the 1.5 months of work my team had done bringing it to life. It was then that I noticed our mistake…

At the top of one of the meal pages, it was written as follows:

Yep, you read that correctly. We had four sets of eyes working on this booklet and somehow it escaped us that we wrote “breakfast” under our Lunch listing.

At this level of event, it’s not the kind of typo you want. The marketing MUST match the event.

Here’s why I’m sharing this..

Ultimately, I decided to do what we normally do with mistakes that don’t affect our delivery of service to a client: laugh it off. And we did! I showed it to the team on a call and we all laughed at how we somehow managed to miss that one word misplacement.

Because done is better than perfect.

The reality is, it was still a beautiful handbook. The pictures were gorgeous, the paper was high-end, the design was nearly flawless, and it actually went out. The most perfect productions in the world often never see the light of day, and therefore don’t turn the response and profit that they should. But we did send it out, and we actually did end up getting a couple of sales off of it!

We could have sat here crying and beating ourselves up over it, but we didn’t pin everything on that one piece of marketing so it wasn’t the end of the world when it wasn’t perfect. (and let’s be honest, a small word-exchange is a lot less important than a typo or the wrong image printed)

Stop beating yourself up.

As an entrepreneur, I know that you do the same thing I do. It’s tempting and easy to beat yourself up for the smallest mistakes. But if you do that you’ll never move forward and keep pressing on, and ultimately you’ll stop yourself from creating the massive impact that you have the potential to create!

Additionally, don’t bank everything on one piece of marketing.

If you do, it’ll make it all the easier to stick yourself into the self-beating cycle.

Instead, take some time to sit down as your marketing director and build out a multi-pronged strategy. Break out the strategy into tasks, and then hand them to different team members. If you stop focusing on your mistakes and just keep going forward, you’ll be amazed at how things change around you! You’re doing a phenomenal job, and remember…

Done is better than perfect!