Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Do You Know What You Don’t Know?

Sarah LeBlanc, Bridging the Gaap

“All I know is that I know nothing” - Socrates

When the opportunity arose to write for this small business newsletter I was elated, and nervous. I’d been running my own financial education website BTGNow.net for just under six months, providing high quality content for my readers, earning advertising revenue in return. The question facing me now, as I sat down to write this article, was what, if anything, had I learned through the experience? What pearls of wisdom had my experiences unearthed?

While brainstorming about this article, I realized I’d learned a number of things:

- I’d learned the value of time management that week where I was too busy to update because of work, a painful lesson that could have been avoided had I simply planned everything out ahead of time.

- I’d learned the value of quick, polite and timely communication, and how much people appreciate when you respond to emails and phone calls within 24 hours.

- I’d learned that one can’t count on customers to let you know if a product is defective (they just won’t use it anymore!), a lesson I learned when I saw my traffic figures plummet, all because I didn’t check whether or not a change to my site would display properly in a browser that 50% of my readers used (it didn’t).

But when everything was said and done, one simple lesson edged itself out from its competitors: the best lesson I’ve yet learned is that I Don’t Know Everything. I know what I know, but I also know what I don’t know.

And that has made all the difference, measurable in US dollars.

I chose to write about this because I believe that this is a lesson that successful business people have learned, and it’s applicable to any business and every business person. I believe that to be successful, I have to not just learn, but internalize this lesson too, and the earlier the better!

Sure, it seems obvious, perhaps even silly, after all no one can know everything. But think for a minute: how many good businesses fail because they dismiss customer complaints? How many fail because they don’t seek the help they need? How many resources are wasted when a company or business person thinks it can do all things perfectly (but then isn’t capable of doing even one thing particularly well)?

As a content provider in the financial education sector, the realization that I Don’t Know Everything impacted my business practices in a number of positive ways:

- I began to do far more detailed research, looking for better, higher quality sources to improve the quality of my articles. Consequently the quality and scope of my product increased.

- I began focusing on my strengths, which included writing and promoting the content, and interpreting my product statistics. This allowed me to provide a better product, as I began to write articles based upon what my readers were telling me they were interested in.

- I began outsourcing my weaknesses, such as having the website and logo redesign handled by outside sources. Outsourcing my weaknesses allowed me to have more time to focus on creating and promoting my product, which has lead to more traffic and a tripling of my September revenue just three weeks into October.

- I began to realize exactly what I still needed to learn! Business, as in life, is a continual process of learning: when you stop learning, you die.

I’ve learned many things since I started this entrepreneurial journey but I firmly believe that the sooner one realizes the limits of their own abilities and knowledge, then the sooner they can focus on finding people, services, and information that will fill those gaps. Once one realizes that You Don’t Know Everything, that you’re not always right, and that you may not be the best person for the job, it allows you step bank, re-evaluate your situation, focus on your strengths, and outsource your weaknesses. And if a lesson this simple can help me succeed, just an Average Jane trying to make it in the business world, then chances are it can help you too.

About the Author

Sarah Leblanc is an Undergraduate Finance student at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University. Her website, Bridging The Gaap, can be found at BTGNow.net, and offers free financial education articles on the subject of personal finance, money management and economics.

Posted on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Branding, Leadership, Marketing, Sales, Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.