When I worked for someone else, it was easy to move forward with an assigned task because I was often part of a larger effort – just one cog in the machine. My employer paid me and I tried to do a good job but never lost sleep if I didn’t do a perfect job. Then, when I moved into freelancing, I realized that this was my business and I needed to do a great job – a perfect job – if I wanted to present myself well to the public.

At first glance, that makes sense. You want to approach your market with a coherent, high quality offering and a single voice or brand. Any business wants this and if you look at the largest businesses, they do this well: Their branding is unified; it’s spread across their website and marketing content. Their offering has value and probably doesn’t change all that much.

Although businesses should strive for excellence, this pursuit of perfection (whether the perfect website or the perfect marketing piece or the perfect proposal or the perfect product or service) is a problem for freelancers! And it can potentially ruin your freelance business. That’s because, as you well know, perfection is impossible.

So, I advise freelancers to forget perfection and aim for a decent completion that instead can be improved over time. To use a baseball example: Don’t bother trying to hit a homerun every time. Instead, just get to first base and once you’re there, work on getting to second.

Here’s an example from my own life: Recently (yes, this is a lesson I continually have to re-learn) I was looking at the proposal I use to pitch to magazines. It worked well; I’ve used it to get me plenty of magazine work. But I decided that I wanted to revise it a bit and update my bio. So I stopped pitching – “just temporarily”, I told myself – and started reworking my proposal. That led me to do a bit of proposal research and then to obsess over every word in my proposal. I scrapped entire paragraphs and moved stuff around. Then I looked at my publishing schedule and realized that I had no magazine work on the horizon. Why? Because I had just unwittingly spent an entire month working on my “new” proposal, and was nowhere nearer to being finished than when I started a month earlier.

Had I stuck with my original proposal – which WAS a solid performer already – and made a small tweak here or there, I’d actually be farther ahead.

Realizing my error, and being reminded again of the “just do it now” philosophy for freelance success, I pulled out the old proposal and started using it again. BOOM; right away business started coming back again and instead of trying to hit a home run I made a minor tweak here or there without putting my entire marketing system on pause for a month.

Working for someone else makes it much easier to do a “good enough” job and move on. It’s much more tempting to pursue perfection in your own business. Unfortunately, even in the products and services you offer, perfection is a time-consuming, costly endeavor. And, the effort and time and resources required to turn “good enough” into “perfect” is not necessarily worth it.

Now, some of you might be reading that and thinking: “What about your customers? ‘Good enough’ should never be ‘good enough’ for your customers!”

I agree… to a point. When you deliver your services to your client, you want to make sure that you’ve done the best possible job. But this blog is about bigger picture stuff than delivery of services: When you’re DEVELOPING the services that you’ll offer to customers, don’t spend too much time fiddling with things like “should I offer 6 pages of web design or 7 for that price?” Offer 7 and see what happens. Or, offer 6 and see what happens. Your market will help you to shape your offering. Or if you’re creating a brochure, don’t spend your time wondering “should I use the matte finish or the glossy finish?” or “Serif or Sans serif font?” etc. Just pick one and take action and made modifications as you go.

This concept is summed up so nicely in the phrase: “A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow”.