Please Be Interested In Technical Things
“That’s not my job.” “I’m outsourcing that completely.” “Someone else does that.”
You may not have the skills to write that sales copy, Photoshop those images, or write that code, but avoiding technical work because you think it’s not worth your brainpower is, in my opinion, a big mistake.
If your business does anything technical, then it’s your business to know how it works. Not put in the years to become a pro, but the evening to turn that ‘black box’ at least a hazy grey.
Simple examples include:
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Brainstorming some features/benefits of your product to hand off to the copywriter.
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Sketching out images for your graphic designer to use as guides.
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Reading your developer’s code looking for inputs you can edit without changing any of the structure/syntax you know nothing about.
Here’s why this matters:
1. You Need To Be Able To Plan The Project
If something is a black box, you have no idea what it should cost, or what a ‘good job’ looks like.
Turning that black box grey involved putting in enough up-front thinking to define “What do I need?” and what “What should I expect to see here?”
A perfect example is a simple software project. What data needs to go in? How does it need to be manipulated? What should come out the back end?
If you know absolutely nothing, you’re going to ask for something impossible, or unnecessarily complicated. Hazy requirements are a nightmare for anyone who has ever done client work, as is scope creep because the project manager’s initial (uninformed) idea didn’t work.
2. You Need To Be Able To Audit
You can easily tell the difference between a 3-Michelin-Star restaurant and McDonalds, even if you couldn’t cook either yourself.
But can you tell the difference between good/bad sales copy, images, or software? And… I mean beyond entirely unhelpful comments like “It doesn’t flow” or “It looks bad” or “It doesn’t work.”
From my short experience, the more I know about the job being done, the more helpful and situation-aware I can be when managing the project.
You know roughly how much time your ‘little’ change requests should take, how big the project really is, and the scale-of-magnitude amount of money you should be paying. ($200, $2,000 or $10,000)
Knowledge allows you to avoid getting ripped off.
You’d be surprised how much you learn when you actually focus and analyze someone’s work, even if it’s code you’d never be able to write yourself.
Also, consider the implications on your technical worker’s motivation. How well would you write an English Class if you knew the grader couldn’t read English?
3. You’ll Save Weeks Because You Can Make Small Edits
I don’t know how to code, but if I need to swap out a link in a script, I know to search for ‘http’ and then swap out the link.
Do you remember that day you learned how to add <br> line breaks and <b>bold</b> text to a website?
Now imagine wasting 2 days waiting for your developer to respond to your frantic demands “The link is wrong! Fix it!”
How long have you waited for a graphic designer to ‘remove the background’ on a .jpg image you needed to save as a .png?
If you seriously know nothing… and if you seriously don’t care to learn… you will waste an immense amount of time waiting, stressed out for no reason. (And your freelancer will think you’re a child.)
4. What If The Technical Person Leaves?
Have you ever had someone quit? If you haven’t… what if they did?
Could you write a little copy to get your products online?
Would you know to ask your designer for their .psd files in addition to final .jpgs?
Could you pick up that half-finished negotiation with a Chinese supplier?
Would you know which files do what, and how to log on to your server, so you can hand work to a new developer if your current developer disappears?
It’s only at times like these that you realize who has who by the b**ls, and if you’re not competent enough to at least pick up the pieces… you lose all your past investment of time and money.
There is no worse feeling that being totally dependent on 1 technical person to make/break your business.
5. Continuous Learning Is Best Done Hands-On
This ‘technically skilled’ person is a highly valuable on-call teacher. (Yes, they need to answer your questions.)
In many cases, you’d learn more, and learn something more relevant to your business, with this 1-1 hands-on project than you would listening passively to another high-level ‘Business Podcast’.
You may never plan to write sales copy, work in Photoshop, or write code… but learning even the most basic of basic concepts leaves you exponentially more knowledgeable and in control of your own business.
6. Run Too Far Away, And You’ll Need To Run All The Way Back In
Things will go wrong. Even if you never plan to do any of this work, it’s your business, you care about it more than anyone else, and if something is crashing hard you’ll wish you knew how to stop the bleeding.
Everyone wants passive income, but there’s a difference between this and ‘blind faith’ income, where you close your eyes and hope money keeps coming out.
An engine is a passive energy generator, and there are millions of mechanics who can solve basically any issue, but you should still know how to change the oil and top up your coolant.
Don’t Become A Pro, But Please Be Interested
The ‘technical’ person you’re working with has years of experience you don’t have. It takes too long to reach their level, and too long to do the work yourself.
But a little interest in their work helps in all the ways I’ve mentioned here.