Episode Summary

In this episode of the Make Space for More podcast, Melissa Swink discusses the challenges of perfectionism as a business owner and how it can hinder your growth. She shares insights on recognizing perfectionism, its hidden costs, and practical strategies to overcome it. Tune in to learn how collaborating with a virtual assisting team can help you let go of control and focus on progress over perfection!

Key Highlights:

• Discover how perfectionism creates hidden bottlenecks that slow your business growth and impact your bottom line.
• Learn to embrace “strategic delegation” - a powerful approach to maintaining high standards while empowering your team to drive results.
• Uncover practical strategies for transforming perfectionist tendencies into productive leadership habits.
• Explore how implementing strategic checkpoints can replace micromanagement, leading to enhanced team performance and innovation.
• Master the art of leveraging a VA team to create scalable systems that prioritize progress over perfection.

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

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Hi everyone, welcome to the Make Space for More podcast, where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink, and in today's episode, we're gonna talk about perfectionism versus progress and how a VA team can help you let go and why you wanna let go, right? That sounds really scary, but I promise you, we're gonna dive into the details of perfectionism. We're gonna talk about how to get unstuck.

and be able to collaborate with a team and overall just continue to grow and scale your business without pulling your hair out. So with all of that being said, I wanna start off with a question for you and you can take a little bit to reflect on it, but is perfection your standard? Like is the standard way up here? Like we need to hit every mark, we need to have every little detail, not a thing out of place.

Is that your standard? Is that just, this is the way that things are done at our company? And I hate to tell you this, don't get mad at me. I promise we'll make this all better by the end. But if that is your standard, if perfect is your standard, the bad news is you will always be the bottleneck, okay?

So I wanna share a little bit of a client story with you, but then of course we're gonna talk about like what to do about this. If you're like, okay, I'm raising my hand here. I have very high standards. No, it's okay to have high standards, but there crosses that line of having impossible standards and that's when you start to drive yourself crazy. You might even be driving your team crazy as well, but don't worry. We're going to talk about how to get past this and what to do about this if you're finding yourself.

having perfectionism as your standard and then trying to figure out how do I continue to lead a team and grow my company and doing all the things myself. One of the things that I was thinking about is exactly how does perfectionism show up because I feel like we put kind of a blanket statement on it where we want to dive deeper into how does this show up in business and then of course again I keep wanting to reiterate what are we going to do about it because that's the most important thing.

We want to identify it, see where this might be showing up for us. Now, maybe I would even say your standard isn't so impossibly high on everything, but there are areas this is showing up. Don't worry, this is all going to apply. When I started thinking about how does perfectionism show up often, I was thinking about a client's story recently where she had invested a significant amount of money in a brand new, beautiful website.

She hired the best team, the best developers, the best designers, and this was a process, I don't know how many months long that the process ran. But every time I would meet with her, because we do growth mapping sessions on our clients half and full year anniversaries with us, where we talk about what are their goals for the next six to 12 months. And we do more strategy related work rather than task oriented work on those calls. And every time I had followed up with that client,

and had a conversation with her, she was like, I would ask how is the new website? And she would be like, it's almost there, just making a few more tweaks or it's almost there. just think I'm going to swap out some photos or I'm not sure about this text over here. You guys eventually the web design company ended up dropping her as a client because they just could not continue to tweak and tweak and tweak and not go live on this website anymore.

Now, certainly she had full rights and access to the website and she was able to find another team to ultimately pick up where the work was left off and eventually bring that website to go live. But I will tell you that it took many more months than it should have. And the website is incredible. It's amazing. But this beautiful website stayed under wraps for so long. And this client was just agonizing over every little detail on this website.

I don't want to say for no reason because this project was her baby, but I think it was held back to the point where it was unnecessary to do so to the extent that it was. We meet people all the time who have a course that's on their heart and they want to create an online course for their clients or people that they meet out in the community that serve them.

and the course is like 80, 90 % there and they never quite launch it and make it go live so that others can actually go through the course. You may be thinking of some ideas in your own life where you're like, yep, I have these projects, they're 75, 80 % and I just can't quite get them to a point where they're ready to see the light of day. You know what I mean? So this is one way that perfectionism.

can hold us back or is showing up in our businesses. And the truth is, is that by having these impossibly high standards that are not sustainable for you or your team to attain consistently, that is quietly stalling your growth. Because think about the website that doesn't get launched, the course that never goes live, all these different offers, and ultimately solutions to

Help solve problems for clients and you people all around the world These things don't come to fruition and don't actually happen because of perfectionism just holding it back But I will tell you this that not only are we going to talk about where? Perfectionism is showing up in addition to some of the examples. We've already talked about We are going to talk about what to do about it how to shift your mindset around this But then also most importantly how to leverage a VA team

to shift out of control and into clarity and get that momentum back. So we wanna talk about, first of all, understanding perfectionism in business. And here's often what it looks like. It's that endless tweaking, right, with the website where it's like, I'm not sure about that sentence there, and I'm not sure about that picture over here. It's that tweaking and tweaking and tweaking and tweaking. It is that reluctance to hand things off like,

I'm the only one who can do this and I'm not sure that I can hand this off to somebody. If a mistake happens, that's gonna be really, really bad. You that thing that you just, you know that you need a hand off, you need to get it off your plate, but it's just so scary or it just feels so monumental to hand that off. I can give you an example in my own life, right? Because we have levels of this showing up. I feel like everybody's got some level of this somewhere in their lives or their businesses.

For me, it's client, or excuse me, it's team payments. So for me, it is, we're taking this in steps, but we're simplifying our process a little bit. I'm working with my senior VA team on that. But ultimately, my goal is to hand off team payments to my bookkeeper so that she can run the direct deposit payments twice a month when our team gets paid out. But that feels like something initially is like, she's gotta get access to,

our banking system and then what if somebody sends an invoice and it's wrong and then she pays it and then our cash flow gets screwed up, all these things, right? So it's that reluctance to hand things off. Fear of making mistakes or losing control. That definitely falls into the line of perfectionism. Now certainly, mistakes, nobody likes to make mistakes. You don't like to make mistakes. Your clients don't like to make mistakes.

Your team doesn't like to make mistakes, but we're human beings and they do happen. But when we have this extreme fear, like no mistakes can be made, that's when we start stumping our own growth a little bit. You know, it's interesting because there are a couple of people that I can think of off the top of my head where they are the extreme opposite of having the fear of mistakes. We're like, experiment, try new things.

mess it up, break the system, break the process. We can put it back together again. That's how creativity happens. That's how innovation happens. And I will tell you that they are the minority compared to the majority that I work with on a daily basis. But there are definitely times where I spend time listening to them and I just think, my gosh, I think maybe I'm just holding on too tight, where maybe we do just need to experiment. And you know what? The sky's not going to fall.

The other thing that I think about sometimes when I'm holding on too tight personally is the reality that we do, my team and I do administrative marketing support. Now these are things that are important for a business in order for it to function and grow. But the reality is that this is not an emergency room. There is no one who is going to lose their life because an invoice got paid late or because

this social media post went out at the wrong time. Now granted, again, these are mistakes that we don't want to make, but will someone lose their life because of it? Probably not. This is not an emergency room. We are not brain surgeons. We are not curing cancer. And so sometimes I think about that and I think about, I'm going to go ahead and call like my daredevil leaders who are like, break the system, innovate, be creative. And I just think, okay, I just need to chill out a little bit.

So I'm talking to myself here just as much as I'm talking to all of you. But the thing is, that perfectionism ultimately can disguise itself as having high standards. But the problem is when it starts to cross over into procrastination and ultimately self-sabotage. Maybe you have a great course that just, you just need to hit publish. You just need to hit send on that email. There's probably something that is

just waiting in the wings and ready to be revealed for all to see. And when we hold back on doing that, we are self-sabotaging our own growth and our own expansion. And also, I would say, even being a blessing to those who would be receiving that information. So the last thing that I want to talk about here, where perfectionism is showing up and how it may be holding you back, is that it comes with a lot of hidden costs as well. Certainly time.

Again, bringing up that client whose website sat 98 % done for months and months and months. That's a whole lot of time, but that website could have been live and making her more money, right? SEO optimized, beautiful, very, very modern and fresh and up to date. That didn't see the light of day for months. That certainly can cost her a lot of time, cost her a lot of money. That energy.

of holding onto something for too long. When I think about, you I hate having open loops and I notice that my stress level increases when there are too many open loops. And so when I think about, you know, perfectionism and, you know, just the energy of that fear of control and having all these mostly finished projects or being afraid to hand something off, all that energy just really is costly in times of

how you could be feeling instead. And certainly missed momentum. If you are building something and creating something and then you start holding back because it's not quite where you want it to be, you lose that momentum. And certainly if you're working with a team, they can feel that loss of momentum as well because we've been talking about this and we wanna put this out there and now things are just kind of sitting like we're just kind of keeping this new program on ice sort of the thing.

Think about the hidden costs that come with perfectionism as well. So moving on from really understanding how this is showing up and what the costs are, here are some examples where perfectionism is creating bottlenecks in your business. So on the marketing side of things, this could look like not having social media posts go live. This can look like email newsletters not going out or promotional emails not going out. This can look like

launches that just continue to be delayed. This can also look like in terms of client deliverals, editing and reviewing everything just over and over and over again. Are they going to like it? Are they going to like it? Are they going to like it? And really stressing out where the clock is ticking and where this even teeters to the point of maybe a potential problem with a client is if you said you were going to have their

new logo design options to them on Thursday, and Thursday has come and gone, and it's Tuesday of the following week, well, you promised the client that they would have that on Thursday, and you're still tweaking and editing and reviewing, and you're just stressing out over this, and they're thinking, is this person actually doing the work? What's going on here? Creating that bottleneck where client deliverables are not going out on time as promised,

because we keep wanting to edit and review and tweak and tweak and tweak. The other thing is internal operations. I know I'm talking a lot about particularly on the marketing side with launches and new offers and things, but internal operations, you can also become the bottleneck here very easily as well. When you think about all the different admin tasks that need to happen in your business and throughout the course of a given day or week or month, like just even thinking about email and all the things that go into that.

coordinating meetings, just all the internal stuff where if you can't let go of control and get some help in those aspects of the company, you're not able to do the bigger and better work that you're meant to do as the CEO of your company. Ultimately, if you're holding onto these types of tasks too tight, that habit is going to keep you stuck working in the business rather than on it. So what do we do about all this, right?

I think we have a good idea by now of where's this showing up in my life? Where's this showing up in my business? What is this costing me all the time, money, energy, and all the angst that goes with it? What do we do about this? And ultimately, we need to get comfortable with good enough and we need to overcome perfection. Now, if you have a significant fear of making mistake, I will say this, I am not a

I'm not a life coach, I'm not a business coach. The advice that I give tends to be very practical and actionable. I'm certainly not a therapist. I would say if you feel significant anxiety or fear around collaborating with a team or making a mistake or having an upset client to the point where it is affecting your clarity of mind and your decision making.

I would say this is probably something that you want to explore a little bit further. I'm not going to dive deep into the mindset and psychological aspects of perfectionism and how that shows up. For those of us who I think deal with this in elements in our business or lives or certain areas, getting comfortable with good enough is probably going to be helpful in order to overcome this. I do want to just, again,

reiterate that for some, there might be more below the surface that we're not going to touch on during our conversation today. When I talk about getting to a point where good enough, done is better than perfect is another way that people talk about this. First things first, we want to get clear on expectations and set them and then allow your team to meet them.

Another example, this is what done looks like. And you can even walk through and give examples of when an email is ready to go out, it should have this, it should have this, it should have this. And we need to make sure that we send a test email to ourselves and we click every link in that email to make sure that they go where they need to go and they're not broken. Maybe you have that very, very clear expectation. This is what an email looks like before it goes out.

and we have done these things on this checklist to make sure that it is in fact ready to go. So setting that clear expectation and then handing that off to your team and giving them full ownership of that work. Now, certainly if a mistake happens or if you're finding that the process isn't working so well, you can absolutely revisit it.

we need to set those expectations. That's the first step with getting to a point of good enough. Here are my expectations before an email newsletter goes out, for example. Another example of getting comfortable with good enough can look like having checkpoints throughout a project where your review comes into play because that will keep you away from, first of all, doing the whole project yourself or micromanaging the project where you are reviewing everything at every stage.

throughout the whole process, maybe there's a point where when we have all of these drafted, maybe we have all of these social media posts drafted and all these communications drafted, and before it goes out to the client and after our team has done their internal reviews, maybe like me, I'm going to review it before it goes off to the client for their approval. I'm purely making this up as a hypothetical example, but you can determine along with your team, what are the checkpoints that I'm going to go in

check on the status of this project, or I'm going to review where this is at before it continues on to the next project. That way also when you have those established checkpoints, you don't have it where the team has kind of gone off in a creative direction. And then all of a sudden, you're about to present it to your client and you're like, whoa, wait a minute, where do we get off track here? This was the scope. And now we kind of like ran off in another direction. That is a true story. I do have a client who has a full

marketing team and they work with some pretty high level clientele and sometimes you know she has a vision for what the project is going to look like or what the scope is going to look like and then she has very talented people on her team and they might have a completely different vision and then pretty soon like if my client doesn't check in at certain stages all of a sudden finished product is completely different than what she had in her mind. So

Having those checkpoints established rather than micromanaging the entire process or worse yet doing the whole thing yourself is a great happy medium to put into place. And also think about it this way, small improvements are better than delayed execution. Again, staying in momentum. So for the example with my client who was scared to death of launching her new website,

she very easily could have launched that website. And then, you know, after a couple of weeks that it was live, maybe she's like, you know what, I think I want to swap out this photo here or, you know what, I think we want to reword that sentence over here. It's easy to make those kinds of changes and have them go live and just keep updating the website. I don't know very many people whose websites are set it and forget it, right? My website's being updated all the time. We have, you know, certainly new podcast episodes and blog posts going up there.

but we're adding team members or we're modifying our service offerings. There's always more to be done. Why don't we just continue to work and refine with a living, breathing website rather than something that just is staying hush, hush behind the scenes? Again, those small tweaks, but not letting those small tweaks hold anything back is the differentiator there. Lastly, we talked about

understanding perfectionism, where it's creating bottlenecks, what this is costing you, and some of the things that we can do to start to step away from that perfectionism mindset and those behaviors is also how a VA team can help you let go. Because a good VA team is going to bring structure, they're going to bring consistency, and they're going to bring accountability to your business, the project.

to your working relationship with your client in so many different aspects. So one of the things that I want to have you think about is get your team involved with implementation. Here's the project or here's the task. I need them to take action on it. I need them to implement this. And you can continue to refine and implement and refine. This is a repeatable process. Again, I use that example of launch the website.

It is 98 % there. It looks great. There are no glaring errors. There are no link issues. The forms are all working properly. Let's launch it. Okay? And then we can continue to improve upon it and make an update. The same thing goes for working with a team. You can launch your course that has been on your heart and in the works for years for some people. You can launch that.

And then maybe you're like, you know what, I'm finding that the people going through this course have a lot of questions on this module over here. I'm gonna have my team help me improve that module, and then we're going to make some changes to it, and then we can move on, right? We wanna just continue to improve upon what we're doing in real time and with the help of a team, and repeat that process over and over over again. The other thing is, is that a VA team,

can help you set standards for quality control first and foremost. So I know for our team, we have multiple sets of eyes on tasks and projects that we are doing on a day-to-day basis. And that's mainly because of the way that our team is structured, and I won't go deep into that, but it does help to have some extra sets of eyes on things as they're going out. And you can also define, again, setting those expectations when we send out an email.

These are the things that must be true. We need to have this, we need to have that, and we need to have the other thing. And then we need to send, the next step is to send a test email, and we are going to make sure it looks good in the inbox, and we're going to check every link to make sure it goes through where it needs to go through. Having that checklist of every time X needs to be done, here are the steps that we follow. And a VA can help you establish what those things are.

I know I've shared this story many, many times on the podcast. I share it in a lot of the workshops that I do, but I talk about a tale of two business coaches. So there was a business coach that I worked with the summer before my daughter was born, and he encouraged me to create basically a manual of all the client work that I was doing and all the work that needed to happen in the business while I was about to go on maternity leave. And it was like a documented

Step one, open this program. Step two, go to this item on the menu. It was just so tedious and time consuming. And so when I thought about hiring a team, I went, I cannot go through that process again. But then when I worked with another coach four years later, she had said, no, no, you don't need to do all that. What you need to do is you need to get a person who has experience doing the type of work that you're looking for help with.

have them sit with you or in the virtual world, remote world, could be going on a Zoom call, sharing your screen and going through the steps to complete this task, record it, have them document it, and then have you review that document to make sure that nothing needs to be changed or updated and make sure it's good to go. So having a VA team can help you set the standards for how things are done at your company. This is how we do.

this type of a project for a client. So they can help you set those standards. They can help you document those processes. They can even help you create templates so that, you know, the same types of things are going out consistently across the board. And that just makes the handing off and the letting go of control so much easier because you have those standards in place. It also makes for a lot less decision-making on your team's part and also your part. So there's just a couple of ways that

a VA team can help you let go of perfection and also get back into momentum. So all of that being said today, I would love to hear from you. What is one thing that you're struggling to let go of in your business? Like maybe you're, okay, I hired a team to do my social media. I hired a bookkeeper to invoice my clients and make sure my books are up to date and work with my tax accountant at the end of every year.

I have a VA who is helping me do X, and Z, but there's this one thing that I can't seem to let go of. I would love to know what that is. I would love to gather up a list and see if there are some commonalities as to what are the hardest things that you guys are struggling to hand off. Email me at hello at melissaswing.com. And if I can help lend some advice and identify some commonalities in some of these tasks.

I would love to do a follow-up episode to this one because this is just so critically important. Thank you so much for tuning in today. I really appreciate your support and I will be back next week with another episode of Make Space for More. Have a wonderful day, everyone.