Kia ora,

I am DEEP in the throes of renovation. My kitchen is a shell and my food is sitting in old drawers on the floor.

When choosing suppliers for my kitchen, I went to a few different studios. One had great service and a very “glossy” experience, but their quote came in at double the price of the less polished, but still with hundreds of excellent reviews, provider.

This experience reminded me of the times in business and in life I’ve gone with the snazziest looking product or service provider, only to realise I could have spent way less and gotten the same outcome.

Anyone else have experiences like this?

Estimated Read time: 4 minutes 46 seconds

The Deep Dive: Why the Best in the Business isn’t always the Best for your Business (or for you)

My first accountant wasn't right for my first small business.

They were a big name accounting firm, and undoubtedly great at what they do for their clients.

The problem was: as a startup agency of two people making $0, we weren't really their typical customer. 🙅‍♀️

They were used to dealing with clients making tens of millions of dollars. 💵

As goldfish in their ocean, we weren't a priority...

The result?

We got some poor recommendations as a result of our account getting looked after by junior team members, and we were charged a premium for it. 👀

On top of that, we got charged nearly $3k for them to file an annual return for a period where we had only been trading for two months and had made under $1k in revenue.

This is no shade to the accounting firm. I'm sure they do excellent work for their usual clients. We just weren't the right fit for each other.

So we moved to a smaller accountant who was more familiar with small businesses. The accountant had fewer bells and whistles, but we got better service at a better price. ✅

We learnt this lesson again a few years later when we were trying to find a way to make client reporting more efficient.

We tasked a junior team member with researching various connectors which essentially allow the data from a range of social media and digital platforms to connect into one tidy dashboard.

The team member came back with a recommendation of the most well-known connector provider in the industry with the biggest brand presence.

Dazzled by the marketing, the promise of seamless reporting and convenience, we signed up to a two-year contract with the provider…to the tune of $2k per month. This is hugely expensive for a tool which only performs the job of getting two separate pieces of software to talk to one another.

A month into the contract, we realised that the connectors worked okay, but the technology was still very limited and didn't share all the data we had hoped for. It dawned on us that this particular software was useful at a large scale or enterprise level, but for us, a less glamorous software could have done the same job for a fraction of the price. 💡

We did things better when selecting a social media scheduling tool. We'd heard great things about Sprout as it offers epic insights, but it came at a premium when handling multiple accounts. This cost would have had to have been passed on to our clients. After a bit of research, we found the less sleek but more cost-effective and still highly functional tool, Loomly, which our clients loved.

Although the examples I've used are very business-focussed, the same lesson can be applied to personal expenditure too.

For instance, in New Zealand, Les Mills is an adored gym chain known for its lovely facilities, sauna and ever-popular classes. I've been tempted more than once to join, but each time have not due to these factors: 1) I'm not much of a class girl. I prefer doing my own weights workouts and will go to dedicated yoga studios if I want to do yoga; 2) I really value the convenience of a gym with lots of locations, whereas LM has fewer gyms and you need to pay a premium for multi-club membership; 3) my local leisure centre lets you access its sauna for $7. Therefore, I'm personally better off paying less for a chain gym that meets my needs, and spend additional on yoga studios and the local pool sauna when I want them. 🏋️‍♀️

Another classic example is technology such as smartphones. After all, who else is guilty of picking the fanciest model because the camera has 0.2 megapixels more?

Action of the Week:

What are you overpaying for?

Got some boujee bills you definitely don’t need?

Have a squiz through your bank accounts this weekend to see what bells and whistles you’re currently paying for that you could do without.

Examples could include:

• A service provider (e.g. professional services or utilities which cost more than makes sense for you or your business)

• A subscription (e.g. do you really need all the Adobe apps? Or 3x streaming services? or that facial subscription?)

• A software that provides a service which is already supplied by another service you already pay for (e.g. using Microsoft Suite, but then paying extra for Zoom)

Inspo & Recommendations:

LinkedIn post: “How ChatGPT is changing how people interact with our website” by Beth Owens

Learning: Minto Pyramid Principle. A great way for structuring arguments! The linked article explains it well, but the book is excellent if you feel like nerding out.

Money: Search up gift cards on Facebook Marketplace. People get given vouchers to places they don’t like, so will sell them for $100 less or so. Next time you’re needing something from Noel Leeming/Lululemon etc., have a look to see if there are vouchers available first!

Love from your business-minded friend,

Elise

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