In 2013, I visited a prospect’s home office in Plano, Texas. He put a chart on the overhead projector and asked me to fix it. One line was his traffic, sliding down across about eighteen months. The other was his revenue, running flat. “I need to create more content,” he said, looking at me for agreement. More pages, more links, enough of both to bend the first line back up.
What I wanted to know, before I agreed to any of it, was whether he could assure me that if his traffic went up his revenue would follow.
“No,” he said. “Not necessarily.”
It was the answer I expected, pulled out of him by a question that has seldom failed me in twenty years of marketing work.
When we went back through his own numbers we found stretches where traffic had climbed while revenue fell, and he had been reading two lines as one line for long enough that nobody in his company questioned it anymore. The traffic he wanted me to chase was in structural decline anyway, for reasons that had nothing to do with him, because social platforms were absorbing the attention his category had been getting free for years.
What actually paid him was narrower and a good deal less exciting, which was people spending real time on one of his product pages and then picking up the phone to ask about specific services and pricing. Those calls closed about 40 percent of the time, on deals worth more than $1.6 million, so we built fewer pages and made the ones that mattered better. Instead of the volume strategy he came to me for, he got a smaller site with more valuable pages, and the arrangement suited us both.
What distance from perfect asks
For years I sat in rooms where clients asked for more traffic, more links, better rankings, and at some point I stopped arguing with the request, because arguing turns the meeting into a contest over who knows more. What I asked instead was whether getting everything they wanted would put them closer to what they were building toward, and the answer was usually some version of no. Then the second question did the heavy lifting: why don’t we spend this money on the thing we both agree moves revenue?
Framed that way, the question worked as a hedge for both parties, keeping them from paying well for outcomes that never reached the balance sheet and keeping me from executing a plan I already knew was hollow.
Over enough of those conversations the habit hardened into something I now call distance from perfect, which begins from the premise that perfect is not available to anybody. What is available is direction, and every choice either closes the gap between where you are and where you said you were going or widens it. There is no neutral setting.
A framework that travels
Politics took the framing more cleanly than I expected it to. Residents asked to meet for two different reasons, and one of them was simply to be heard, which is legitimate and requires nothing from me beyond attention. The rest wanted something done, and those conversations went badly whenever they stayed emotional. I would tell them that I am only a politician when I am on the dais, and that off it I can tell them what I support based on what I know today but cannot tell them how I will vote, because I do not yet know what I will hear. I also know things they do not, some of which I am not permitted to share.
Once the emotion came out of it, the usable question surfaced. What movement is possible here? Perfect was never on the table on any night I served, and getting a thing to move in the right direction more slowly than someone wanted still beat watching it sit.
Running the question on myself
Running it on myself cost me more than running it on anyone else, beginning with a long stretch of my career spent working for companies whose names would impress you and which I cannot use. The engagements carrying the biggest logos came with the tightest agreements about what I could say afterward, and while those clients taught me to do the work at a level I could not have reached otherwise, they did nothing for my professional standing, because standing requires that somebody be able to see the work. Several of them also paid worse than smaller clients while asking for more.
Sitting with that accounting eventually changed what I accept. The narrative and positioning work I am best credentialed to sell is the same work that carries me furthest from what I am building now, so I turn it down, which is easy to write in a sentence and considerably harder to do in a month when the invoices are thin.
Politics ran the same test on a worse curve. I spent time being more political than the moment called for, on subjects where nobody needed my position, mostly so people would understand my conservative bona fides, until a friend asked me how any of that was moving me toward what I said I wanted. It was not, and where it did anything at all, it did it at a price I would not have agreed to had someone quoted it to me in advance.
The limits of distance from perfect
The clearest case I have ever been part of is also the one I lost, and it began on a committee I served on before being elected, which produced a plan I agreed with neither in substance nor in presentation. I said so before it went public, while it was public, and after the opprobrium arrived, and none of that mattered to how I was read. I had been in the room, so I was of the plan, and holding office made it worse. There was no way to say I do not support this and also say this will not do what you want it to do without one statement swallowing the other.
So the conversations happened privately instead, dozens of them, with people who supported the plan and could not see what I had seen from inside the drafting. They did not know the flaws in the document, and they did not know the size of the opposition it would have to survive. I asked them what they were trying to accomplish for their kids and whether the plan in front of them was going to get there, and I could not get a single one of them to sit with the question.
What they were dug in on was beating the other side, and once winning the argument replaces getting the outcome the two become indistinguishable from the inside. Every warning about viability sounded like a concession, and concession was the one thing they had decided in advance they would never make.
In the end, they got nothing. The plan they would not amend and would not trade an inch of died entirely, and the people it was meant to serve ended up with less than any compromise would have given them. I have thought about those conversations more than any others from my years in office, because I was right and it did not matter. Being right is not the same as being able to be heard, and distance from perfect requires a person willing to let the answer change what they do next.
So the question I ask now, before I take work or take a position, is the one I asked that man in 2013 while his two lines sat on the screen between us.
If you get everything you are asking for, where does it leave you?
A note on the phrase
My friend Ian Lurie published a post called Distance from perfect on the Moz blog a couple of years after that meeting in Plano, and neither of us had any idea the other was anywhere near it. His piece applies the idea to how search engines evaluate websites. Mine applies it to how people decide. Two people working the same industry landing on the same four words is either a coincidence or a sign the idea was sitting there waiting on somebody to pick it up.