Peter Lohmann tells business owners to stop chasing perfection and ship work at 80%. The average office worker makes mistakes at a 3% rate, so successful companies need systems that absorb errors. As you grow, hire people better than you at specific jobs: accounting, sales, estimates.
You gotta get comfortable with 80%, and it's very uncomfortable as a business owner, perfectionist type of personality. It's uncomfortable to know that 80% work is going out the door. Mm-hmm. But you have to get comfortable with it. You have to understand that no one is expecting perfection from every human at all times. The error rate of the average US office worker is 3%. It's 3%. So there's gonna be mistakes and you can't build a multimillion dollar business on no mistakes or on the expectation that there's gonna be no mistakes. You have to build the system to withstand a 3% error rate. And there's a lot of creative and fun ways you can do that. The other fun thing that happens as you get bigger is you get to hire people who are better than you, like legitimately better than you at different functions. And when I was starting out, I didn't know how good other people could be at certain things. 'cause I had never met somebody who was better than me in trust accounting, and I had never met somebody who was better than me at selling a property management owner, and I had never met someone who was better than me, better than me at preparing a scope and estimate on a turn until I did. And then I realized, oh, I'm not even, you know, I'm getting all worked up about 80%, 100%. I'm not even the bar. Like, I'm not even that good.
