How much preparation should you do before taking action?
I was talking to a friend about my lack of results on a particular offer I had been working on.
She told me that she wasn’t able to understand what my offer was and we started talking about why that was.
It got me thinking about quite a few things.
Namely how much I prepare before I take action.
How much is too much preparing?
I know that opinions on this go from one end of the scale to the other.
I also think that every perspective on this is just as good as the other, so my opinion is just that, an opinion.
However, I do think that almost everyone will agree that it’s possible to prepare indefinitely and never take action because it’s not perfect yet.
But, where’s the line?
Where is too much preparation?
Is it after 20 hours, 50 hours, 200 hours?
Or maybe, it’s after 1 month, 12 months or 5 years?
One thing is for sure, and that no matter how long you take to prepare, you’ll never be ready to take action.
When should you take action?
The next question is when should you take action?
Once again, I have to give you this warning.
When to take action is a personal choice but what I can say about it, is that there are surprisingly lots of things you can’t master without taking action.
In the social media world, we often talk about going live on camera as one of those elusive actions you must eventually take.
That being said, I’m a firm believer that taking action is the fastest way to get results.
How to find the balance
How about you be the judge.
Say you are going to do a webinar every week.
One suggestion by Russell Brunson in the Perfect Webinar Framework from the Expert Secrets book is to do the same webinar for 52 weeks before automating it.
It might seem exaggerated but I think it makes a lot of sense.
I guess it has a lot to do with the fact that many entrepreneurs are action takers and there’s no way you could possibly have a winning webinar on your first try, or even on your 20th.
This is a great example of something you can prepare for a long time before actually taking action.
There’s still a minimum you need to do, like slides, although some might argue you don’t even need slides to go live.
What if preparation takes 6 months for a sale?
Say for example, you want to do a webinar.
You can prepare for 40 or even 80 hours, making the slides perfect, creating all the emails and landing pages, the registration and thank you pages, your offer, your stack, you SLO (self liquidating offer), your ads and more.
Regardless of how much time you prepare, you’ll still need a while to get used to the tool to do your webinar.
Let’s say your webinar is 2 hours and that it takes you 10 sessions to really get comfortable with the technology and the tool.
That means it will take you 20 hours to get comfortable.
If you spent 80 hours preparing plus your 20 hours, that’s 100 hours before a sale (for example)
Assuming you only have 5 hours a week (like me, with my day job and family), that means it would take 20 weeks., almost 6 months!
Taking action gets you sale in 3 months
Now, let’s assume you have those 5 hours a week and you spend 2 preparing a rough webinar and start doing them right away.
Since the webinars are 2 hours, that leaves you 3 hours a week to finish the preparation as you do your webinars weekly.
This means after 10 weeks you’re comfortable with the technology and you’ve gotten 30 hours into the webinar improvement.
By then, you’re 3 month in and you’ve gotten that sale.
You might still need to spend another 15 weeks improving your webinar but wouldn’t you agree that you’d be further ahead?
The most valuable thing about taking action
What is even more valuable is the fact that by taking action before having everything just right, you’re also going to get feedback from your audience.
This feed back is immensely valuable because with it, you can improve your webinar and offers drastically and it may surprise you what you learn.
So, you tell me, should you prepare until it’s perfect, or take action as soon as possible?
Conclusion
It stands to reason that you need to do some preparation but you need to take action sooner than later.
Most of us are afraid of taking actions when it’s outside of our comfort zone.
It may be scary to go live on camera, or even just record and post but that fear doesn’t need to stop you.
Watch the video as I share more on this topic.
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