Simple Success

Filed in archive Philosophy on January 11, 2010

© h.koppdelaney

One lesson that is hard to learn for many small business owners, particularly those with grand visions of future success, is that complexity kills, while simplicity succeeds. Entrepreneurs don't usually get into business to be small. When they look at their business, they don't see what it is so much as what it can be.

Unfortunately, running a business as if it were already something it is not can be one of the things that keeps it from getting there. Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to constructing internal systems. I see businesses brought to their knees all the time by bringing in processes and products that are overly expensive and overly complex for their current needs. Coming from the IT industry, this is particularly obvious to me, since most small business owners aren't particularly sophisticated information technology buyers. A recent whitepaper puts the cost of overly complex, failed IT projects alone at $500 billion a month. Imagine what it adds up to if you include non-technology processes and projects?

The answer to all these problems is simplicity: don't do more than you need to do. Excess isn't preparation, or laying the groundwork for your massive expansion: it's waste. You can't forecast when you'll hit it big or how big it is you're going to be, and you usually can't determine exactly how it is that you will need to handle things when that happens anyway. Complexity drags you down in the now, and will probably need to be replaced with something different in the future anyway.

Foresight is important, but the most important insight you can have about planning is that simplicity equates to flexibility. Simple things are inexpensive, easy to replace, easy to change. And easy is something you can use all you can get of when you're bootstrapping!