Recently, a security guard company owner told me that our security guard management software wasn’t perfect because it didn’t have EVERY feature that he wanted, so he didn’t want to use it. In all honesty, the concept of something having to be perfect in business is a little foreign to me and let me explain why.
The idea of everything having to be perfect died after I started my first company. Perfection is proportionate to the number of resources (Time, money, manpower, etc.) that you have to make something perfect. If you want a perfect diamond, expect to pay A LOT more money for it than the one you see at your friendly neighborhood jewelry store. The funny this is, very few of those diamonds are perfect, but there are millions of women who absolutely LOVE their imperfect wedding rings.
Or if you want a 3 piece suit that fits perfectly, you’re not buying it off the rack at Sears (Is Sears still a store?). You’d have to go to a tailor that specializes in making suits and that suit is not going to be cheap. On the other hand, there are men who buy suits off the rack and walk around looking like a million dollars.
If you aren’t someone who has a LOT of resources to throw at a problem, then remember the saying “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.” So what does that mean? To me, it means that trying to make something perfect can actually prevent us from making something that would be good enough to get the job done. And there are a lot of people much smarter than me that agree with me.
Voltaire wrote…
“The best is the enemy of the good.”
Let’s not forget about Confucius…
“Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.”
Last but not least, we have Shakespeare…
“Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well.”
If you’ve been in business a while, you probably have your own “good is better than perfect story”, so let me share one of mine.
As I look back over my time managing my security guard company, there is one example of this idea of good being better than perfect that stands out. When our company had grown to about 100 officers we started having trouble with tracking officer check-in’s when they arrived on duty. The other problem was ensuring that all of our officers were awake and alert, especially overnights. We realized that the perfect solution would have been to open a 24-hour dispatch center at our office with 3 to 4 field supervisors making random spot checks. But at that time we just didn’t have the financial resources to do so. So what did we do? I’ll tell you, we went with an imperfect solution.
We made one of the sites we were providing security at our dispatch center. The site we chose was 128 hours/week. It was relatively low maintenance in the sense that there was little to no contact with the public or our client. Additionally, the officers at the site were only required to do one patrol an hour. So once this site became our dispatch center, the officers there were responsible for their normal duties, in addition to checking in all of our officers at all of our sites and receiving hourly check-in calls. The only thing that that change required, was for us to create new post orders and make some changes to the schedule so that only our best officers worked that site.
Again it wasn’t the perfect solution, but I’ll tell you, the quality of our service improved exponentially. The dispatch site always got our best officers so that customer loved it, and all of our other customers benefitted from having our command center monitoring all of our officers.
When you need to make a change don’t worry about perfection, just make that change and then adapt. There are very few things in this world that are perfect. Your company will never be perfect, your customers will never be perfect, your employees will never be perfect. It’s just a fact of life, so suck it up and embrace the imperfection.
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By Courtney Sparkman
OfficerReports.com is a software company that provides security guard companies with an easy way to monitor their officers, better manage their operations, and win new business. Take a tour of our software to see how we combine Electronic Reporting, Real-Time GPS based Tour Tracking, and GPS based Clock In and Out into one easy to use platform.
