Americans are famous for having something called “the pioneering spirit”. We take a great deal of pleasure in inventing things. And that’s a good thing, even though most of us are not Eli Whitney … or Thomas Edison. Still, a lot of us seem to get a great deal of pleasure building things from scratch. There’s a lot to be learned from building from scratch. But in business, let’s differentiate between building from scratch to learn something and building from scratch to save money.
For this discussion, we’ll assume that you’re building from scratch to save money. The thing you’re building is readily available in the market, but you think you can’t afford it. As I often see in business, this is how “pioneering spirit” can become “reinventing the wheel”. If you’re not going full-tilt to invent something revolutionary, like a car engine that runs on air, the wheel already exists, and you don’t need to reinvent it.
Let me illustrate. Let’s say you need a trailer to haul building materials to your job sites. So, to save money, you start working on Saturdays to build a trailer. You have to work out the dimensions. You have to understand what materials to use and the dynamics of tires, wheels, and an axle. You must consider the weight of the trailer and the weight it should be able to carry. You need to have the skills and the tools to do welding and drilling into metal as well as carpentry. You’ll need to understand what fasteners to use that won’t fail under pressure. How do you title and plate it? How strong must the hitch be? You have to order and wait for delivery of the components you need for this trailer – and on, and on.
After finishing the trailer, your initial test shows that it fishtails so badly that you can’t drive it safely on a city street, much less a highway, so you have to tweak and test, and tweak and test. Three months later, you still don’t have a trailer that you can use to haul building materials.
Now let’s examine the results of you trying to save money by doing it yourself. In my experience, the cost of initially buying the wrong materials, then buying the right ones, buying more than you need because you can’t get just the quantity that is called for, etc., amounts to costing much more than it would have cost to simply buy the right trailer outright. Not to mention that 90% of the time, you’ll end up buying the new trailer anyway.
But the cost of trying to build it doesn’t take into account that you worked on the thing every weekend for three months, ignoring your family, repairs on your home, etc., lying awake at night trying to understand why it fishtails on the road or how to make it pull smoothly. How much is that time worth to you? How much of a distraction is it to your business to be focused on things that aren’t necessary, when you could have been focusing on your business?
And the cost of your time rises dramatically if you’re working on the trailer during the week while trying to run your business, rather than on the weekends.
Having the trailer three months sooner would have made your business much more efficient. How much did it cost in efficiency not to have the trailer for those three months? I have never seen a client pay less for “saving money by doing it themselves” than what it would’ve cost to buy the right tool out of the gate.
And I’m not just talking about physical tools. Software is a tool. Project management software, accounting software, and POS software are examples of software tools that you wouldn’t want to invent, so you buy them. Experienced help is a tool. CPAs, engineers, plumbers, electricians, are essentially tools you can hire so that you don’t have to spend your precious time (and it is precious) learning how to do those things so you can “save money by doing it yourself”. The problem is in finding the right software or the right skill set to do a quality, suitable job.
I can’t draw a stick man. Art is not my talent, but after I wrote my first book back in the ’90s, I wanted to illustrate it. I may not be able to draw, but I have an active imagination, so I had ideas of exactly what I wanted to have illustrated. I thought that most any artist could do what I was asking. I was wrong. I wanted to hire the experience, but I needed to learn WHAT experience to hire. I found an artist who could draw beautiful trees but not people. I found an artist who wanted me to give him a copy of my book so that he could do whatever he thought was appropriate. I found a person who could do caricatures, but not human-looking cartoon people. After a year of concentrated searching, I found a guy who could draw what was in my head, even from phone conversations, and we rarely had to edit one of his drawings.
It took me many years to find an editor worth his salt, and a web guy who could do justice to my project. Over the course of my career, I’ve hired several advertising companies for clients, but only one met my standards for the client. And none of the high-quality solutions I’ve applied have “broken the bank”.
When you are able to find the right tool, the time you save that can be used for something else that needs doing is incredibly valuable – and you save much more money than if you were to try to do it yourself. I like to tell my clients, “Stop changing the oil.” It takes only a few minutes to run the truck through the Quick Lube – much less time than to have you crawling under the truck to drain the oil, discover where you can dispose of it (one Thursday a month at the landfill), buy the oil, fill it up, feel certain that you got the plug in tight enough that it won’t leak, etc. All the while, you’re unavailable to your people who need advice or instruction.
Inexperienced help can also be a tool. I’ve been known to quote my mentor: “We have to do what we can do, so someone else can do what we can’t”. We need to hire the right experience to do what we can’t do. Turn that inside out, and there are things that an inexperienced person can do so that we can do what they can’t. A person with a driver’s license and a modicum of ambition and smarts can run your errands, get the oil changed, pick up that part that your experienced help needs, and so on.
You say you can’t afford it? Hogwash! Business owners who employ the right tools the first time and use their resources efficiently will always be able to find the money for those right tools, either through borrowing or through increased efficiency!
Just remember: Trust but verify. It may take a while to put together a team that consists of the right experience for the job. But as you save time by harnessing the talent you can find, you’re able to do what needs doing, which might be to define, in writing, exactly what kind of experience you need … or shop for that trailer or buy the right software. Once you’ve unburdened yourself from reinventing the wheel, you can continually work toward higher quality and lower costs achieved through efficiency, skill, and your own innovative thinking, which you will now have more time for.