Less But Not Cheap – How To Avoid The ‘All-In-One’ Solution Trap
Check this video to learn more practical tips that you can use for your business.
Video Highlights:
00:05 – Using less things without impacting quality
00:53 – Use the good gear that you already have
01:25 – Working with custom-made equipment is usually better
01:56 – High quality stuff gets high quality results
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James Schramko here with a business tip, less but not cheap.
Less but no compromise
Something I’ve seen lately is a strange trend where people have actually peeled back and gone down to have less things but they’ve actually cut out the quality as well, and I think that’s a mistake.
I’ll give you an example, right now I’m filming this on a Canon 60D camera and I’m using a quality microphone. I’ve got it down to two essential items – the camera, and the microphone. Now if I wanted to go really cheap then I could just use an iPhone.
But if I’m used to using this equipment and it’s only two pieces of equipment, it’s less stuff but its good stuff and I don’t want to step down to that value production level of an iPhone. I don’t want to play with toys, clamps, microphones, and stuff. I’ve got the good gear and I’m going to use it.
Go for quality
Another example of this, I use ScreenFlow, Wistia for private, [Edit - also Leadplayer + Youtube for public videos] and WordPress websites. Now I’ve seen in the market a proliferation of simple tools that are kind of all-in-one and they look pretty nifty. You can edit videos, make videos, upload them, and you can play them back with one tool, but I think that is a corner being cut.
If you can have a quality screen recorder, a really high quality rendering and production, and super clean-looking beautiful players like Wistia do, then I would still rather use individual components that are custom made to do what they’re made to do.
I still want the least amount of tools and I really, only do use ScreenFlow to screen record and edit these sorts of videos, but at the same time they get me a higher quality than I can get with an all-in-one tool. So when you’re considering having less things in your business, don’t make the mistake of having cheaper things in your business.
A better way of thinking
My mantra, and this probably comes from Mercedes Benz, is I’d rather have one high quality item than a whole bunch of cheap stuff and if I need a couple of high quality items to get the right result, then I’m going to have them instead of an all-in-one solution, because generally, all-in-one solutions mean you’re compromising on many aspects.
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Please comment below.
James, appreciate your preference for a couple of good quality tools.
How do you consider this in light of Office Auto Pilot / Ontraport?
The scope of that product seems broad — a bit too broad.
I, also, use Nanacast and curious whether you’re message in this video applies to the example of you continuing to use Nanacast even if Ontraport can conceivably do something similar?
Similarly, Ontraport promises to be all things to your customer database, like CRM, but maybe they ought focus on email and if/then triggers and keep high quality execution.
Patrick, I use OAP for emails and lead scoring (CRM) and Nanacast for the cart. Currently Ontraport cannot handle recurring Paypal and since close to 80% of my business is recurring billing and more than one million dollars of that is Paypal per year that is a perfect example of what I am talking about here. I need two tools combined to make it powerful. (Nanacast does not do email).