You don’t know what you don’t know.

– Robert Kruger 30 July 2010

Nobody knows how to do everything. It's better to be good at a few things than to be a hack at many things. A wise person accepts this, while a fool plows ahead into the darkness, acting on things without understanding, making a lot of mistakes along the way.

Here’s a simple example/ This actually happened to one of my friends. His dad was staying at his house for a while and wanted to do something nice as a grateful gesture. He found a bucket and a sponge in the garage and used it to wash my friend’s car. Here’s the problem: his dad doesn’t know anything about laying tile. If he knew how to lay tile, he would have recognized that a bucket that contains a sponge, trowels, a grout float, and a mortar mixer that fits an electric drill are all related items. More importantly he would have assumed that the sponge had been used to clean up grout and mortar. Dad just thought it was a miscellaneous pile of tools. The sponge looked clean, but it actually was embedded with sand. When dad finished washing the car, a circular scrubbing pattern was etched into the paint from bumper to bumper.

The problem with “winging it” is that making mistakes is unavoidable because you have no frame of reference. Even if you look back on past attempts to work outside your expertise in an attempt to learn from your mistakes, you’ll still make mistakes. You probably don’t even recognize many of the mistakes you made.

My advice is simple - you’ve heard this from me before. Do what you do, and don’t do what you don’t do. Applying this advice to business, someone who manufactures widgets for a living shouldn’t assume they know how to do marketing. They should get professional marketing advice. If they decide to sell their widgets online, they should get professional ecommerce advice.

For many businesses, the internet is unknown territory. Get professional advice, and get it before you take your first misstep.

Dialogs Professional Services can help you grow your business. Contact us before you make your next move on the internet.