I am so wiped out. My wife wanted an elliptical machine for Christmas. For various reasons, we didn’t actually acquire it until now. Anyway, bless my wife, she had faith that her handy hubby could easily assemble it and thus save the $160 assembly fee that Sears wanted to charge her.

So fast forward…it’s taken me two days (not two full days mind you, but two evenings) to get it together. What a mess. It’s easily the most complicated thing I’ve ever assembled.

While I was finishing up, I had two thoughts that I wanted to share with you about my experience putting it together…

The curse of knowledge

I really loved the Heath brother’s book Made to Stick. My favorite concept from that book was the curse of knowledge. It has so many uses. The idea is basically this:

Once you really know something, it’s nearly impossible to remember or imagine what it was like to not know it.

Ponder that for a moment….

You know what your service does for your customers. You know how cool your product is. When you approach customers or work on your marketing messages…are you failing to connect with your customer because you aren’t communicating on their level? Are you assuming some knowledge that isn’t there?

Every time I put together some bookshelves, an entertainment center or in this case, a couple-hundred pound excercise machine…I always find serious flaws in the instructions. Inevtiably, it occurs to me that 3 steps ago, the orientation of something made a huge difference, wasn’t terribly obvious and the instructions did nothing to point out the potential issue….

and you end up redoing some parts.

This could so easily be fixed…grab 10 random people off the street and offer them some money to put the thing together as per the directions and videotape it. Offer no assistance at all.

What steps do they stumble on. Does everybody screw up step 7a?

Takeaway: Pay attention to patterns with your customers and remove confusion that’s preventing them from buying.

I can do that!

Good for you!

That doesn’t mean that you should do it, simply because you have the skills to do it.

This has been a terribly difficult lesson for me. In my past, I was a software guy. So, I have a hard time hiring someone to do anything technical because I can’t help thinking I don’t need this guy, I can do this myself.

As small business owners, we often take things on ourselves because we can. This is often (thought not always) a mistake.

Being a good technician in some job does not make a business. Owning and running a business is totally different from performing the service/making the product that your business sells.

Given what my day job charges for my time and I what I charge for my own business…it would have been an easy sell to me to have the elliptical put together for her by a professional. It took me no less than 5.5 hours.

That’s $29/hour.

My time is worth way more than that.

Takeaway: Choose wisely what you take on yourself, simply because you can.

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