Why do Plumbers have Leaky Faucets or Why we Suck being an Expert for Ourselves?

Are You Successful At Working For Others, Not For Yourself?

Have you ever experienced that when you are working for your boss or client, your work is always admirable yet when you’re working on the same thing for your business, you suck at it?

Running a specialist design agency and delivering award-winning creative for over 10 years, we had a terrible website both in terms of functionality and design. We were too busy to work on it and when we did work on it, it never reflected our design strength. By the time we got around to fixing it, the technology was obsolete! The only time when our dysfunctional and embarrassingly clunky website got a positive response is when Ron Roda & myself met Jon Selame, CEO of Out of Home America, for dinner in New York City. When I apologized for our website, he said that one of the questions he had for me when he took the meeting is to figure out how does a creative agency with such a terrible website manage to do business with blue-chip clients like Coca-Cola & Unilever across the world?! I wasn’t sure if I should have taken that as a compliment or as a wake-up call to fix our website!

There are many individuals and entrepreneurs who if working for their employer or their customers, may get awarded for it. When they apply the same expertise for their own business or at a personal level, they prove to be failures. This does not mean that you are just falling for failure. It just means that you may be the wrong person to get the job done.

No Need to Question Your Skills

There is no need to feel deprived of or feel inferior to others. Neither does it mean that you are not the best person for the job. There are a few things you need to consider before criticizing your skills. All people have strengths and weaknesses. We are good at some things and bad at others. No one is perfect. No one can do everything perfectly. There will always be flaws. A doctor may be best in operating on patients who he does not know yet is afraid to operate on his loved ones as he might be under pressure and his emotions may get in the way of his skill to operate.

What if You Experience it in Your Career or Business?

It does not mean that you’re not good at it, it simply means that you’re not ready to work on your own as you need more exposure in your career and experience to manage your own work professionally. There is no need to consider that you can never run your own business. You might just have to improve yourself mentally and prepare yourself to take on responsibilities. It might be difficult for you in the beginning, but you will eventually get it.

What to do and Who to Turn to in this Situation?

No need to feel inferior about yourself or your skillset.

First of all, you need to have confidence that you have the expertise to perform the action at an expert level.

Shed the pressure you might be feeling in your head while performing the action.

Expose yourself to tougher situations mentally in professional settings so that you may get the required confidence in performing your work at any given tough or convenient setting.

If that doesn’t work, then find the person who is an expert in your field and trust them to deliver what you cannot. Being a creative agency, we hired another creative agency to build our portfolio. They can be objective about it and deliver it as we want and on time. Simply because we are their client now, and they are committed to us as they would be to any other client. This not only saves you a load of time, but it also gets the job done right!

We still don’t have a website that reflects our passion for what we do, which is making designs that turn heads and make onlookers say ‘WOW’.

So if you are a plumber with a leaky faucet, and you are reading this, don’t try to fix the leak yourself. Hire the best plumber in the city. You won’t have a leaky faucet.

Mukesh Manik is the M-I-C at Encyclomedia Networks , a specialist creative agency that loves to create head-turning, high impact designs for global brands and promising startups across the globe.