Every day you will read another blog post detailing something your business absolutely needs, whether it’s better legal documents, impeccable customer service, more metrics tracking, A/B testing your landing pages, or even a visual dashboard. Taken out of context, every one of these things makes sense. No one would argue that they are bad ideas. But in the context of everything else you must be doing at any one moment, things get a lot murkier.
Plenty of businesses succeed while failing to do required things. In fact, I’d guess that most successful business fail at a good many things. It just comes down to a mixture of choosing the right things to ignore and getting lucky about what problems land in your lap. For example, if you create a website without an ironclad Terms of Service, and you never get sued, then not worrying about it was perhaps the right choice. On the flip side, if you choose to ignore your backups and something goes wrong, you may get burned. In both cases, you make a choice about how you will spend your time, and you take a risk.
There is one thing your business needs to do immediately, and you already know what it is. Maybe you have a client you need to call, a bug you need to fix, or a worrying trend you need to understand. Running a business requires staring at the infinite list of things you must do and selecting those that will maximize impact. No matter what, you will make some bad choices, and someone will climb on a pedestal and flog you for it. But, you have to trust that you know what your business needs better than the blog-post-du-jour.
Oh, and one more thing: Check your backups. You really must do that, immediately. 😉
