It’s one of my all-time favorite sayings: “The juice isn’t worth the squeeze”.
In case that’s an American or southern thing, all it means is that the reward isn’t worth the effort. Or, in business terms, the ROI isn’t worth the investment.
As nerds about what we do, it’s really easy to get swept up working on things that don’t really provide a whole lot of value. Why? ‘Cause it’s fun and it tickles our brains in just the right spot.
And that’s fine, so long as you know you’re doing it. The danger is when you’ve convinced yourself it’s important, but there’s no good evidence to back that up.
This happens all the time, but I’ll give you one recent example…
This week one of our mastermind groups spent some time talking about optimizing Google Business Profiles (GBP) and dealing with Google randomly taking legitimate reviews down.
If we were all restaurant owners, then yes, pour as much time as you can afford into optimizing your listing, making sure the menu & hours are up to date, and collect as many reviews as humanly possible. That listing is the decision-maker for many families heading out for dinner.
But how many big customers does your agency really get from GBP? I can’t speak for everyone, but from what I could gather from my own data and the people I talked to, it’s very few.
Does that mean we delete our listing? No, of course not. It still has some value. But we also shouldn’t pour all our attention into optimizing it, because that investment is very unlikely to provide the kind of return to justify it.
It’s important to recognize that something can be both great and not worth it for you. It all depends on your circumstance, goals, or constraints.
“Valuable” isn’t a binary thing. The better question is how valuable is it and what kind of investment makes sense. At some point you gotta ask yourself whether continuing to squeeze is going to produce any more juice.
Not just GBP, of course. This goes for everything we put our time into.
Some things are worth obsessing over. Other things just need to be good enough.
As a perfectionist (which many of us tend to be), “good enough” sounds like failure. But sometimes it’s the opposite. It takes guts to look at something that could still be improved and decide it doesn’t need to be.
Not because you don’t care, but because you care enough to put your effort where it matters most.
