Hi there, Jon here from Small Fish.

Complexity costs money.

I’m encouraging you to avoid it at all costs as much as possible. And let me tell you what I mean.

The more complicated things are, the more complicated the rules are, the more emotional energy it takes for people to think about things. The more time it takes to sort things out. Time, of course, in a business owner’s sense is money. If your people are taking longer to do things because it’s complicated, that’s costing you money because you pay their wages. If your customers are taking longer to think about things, they probably aren’t making many decisions, so you’re costing yourself opportunity there.

I’m going to encourage you to avoid complexity. It’s known in bigger business to be a cause of cost, and in smaller business I think sometimes we allow it to creep in and we shouldn’t. It takes a bit of discipline to avoid it. I’m going to relate this to a trade business of course, where there’s complexity creeping in and where can you stop it.

There’s A Cost In Your Marketing

It creeps in your marketing. If you try and be in too many things to too many people or too many types of customer, that’s complicated. You’re starting to put a complicated message on your website. What do you do? ‘Well, we do this for these people and that for those people who would do that for there and this for there’.

That’s complicated. It’s complicated to write on your website to say when you’re talking to people for your customers to understand

Believe me, there’s a cost.

There’s a cost in:

• The time it takes to write it in an intelligent way so it makes sense
• People coming to your website or your marketing and go, “I can’t be bothered”.

You can’t be everything to everybody. You need to be something reasonably specific to some certain types of people. When your customers are looking at your marketing, what they’re thinking is, “Are these the guys for me?” “Do they do what I want for people like me?”

You need to tell them that quickly and without complexity.

Recommended Reading: How To Spend Your Marketing Money For Your Trades Business

There’s A Cost In Your Sales

The same in your sales.

• Is your pricing overly complex?
• Can you simplify it so it takes less time to produce your pricing quotes, and so it’s less difficult for your customers to understand?

There’s a bit of complexity.

• Is the way you manage jobs and you manage people complex?
• Is the way you pay people complex?

Salary is much easier and simpler and less complex than people checking in and managing their hours and worrying about whether you’ve paid them enough hours and things like that.

That’s an introduction of complexity.

Avoid Complexity

You can avoid it by just paying someone a salary. I want you to think through your business and if you want to talk to me about it, of course, you can.

In my coaching, I try and encourage people to reduce complexity, increase simplicity, avoid that cost, and avoid that emotional and intellectual load on you. You’ve got enough to do without sort of working your way through bullsh*t complexity.

Avoid complexity, increase simplicity. Make your life easier. Make your customers lives easier and make your staffs’ lives easier too.

And of course, if you want a help, I’m over here. Book yourself a 10-minute chat, we’ll talk about how we can reduce the complexity in your business.

See you later.