Guy Reams (00:01.326)
Today is day 165. Best value is fourth best. So, I find myself oftentimes when I'm trying to figure, you know, trying to improve a business process or improve myself personally, that I need to hire somebody or buy a product. So, my perfectionist nature has this tendency to go want to look for the best. So, I'll spend a lot of time
studying it out and trying to figure out the best person or the best product that I can get. Like buying a car for me is always a miserable experience because I need to go find the absolute best. So I'm like looking, researching, right? But if you think about it, the best is usually not the option that will provide you the most value.
The best is usually the worst option you can select because you're probably paying way more for less value being delivered to you. So I've taken on this concept that I heard a while ago called the fourth is probably the best, which means that...
The better something is and the more market dominance it has, the chances are that it will have a diminishing value proposition. The return will be less and less as it gets more popular. This makes a lot more sense because as their demand increases in the person or the product, they are going to have this cost versus commitment problem. So they'll have this problem where...
Yeah, they want to continue to deliver quality, which is what got them where they're at, or deliver a good value proposition. But now they're in higher demand, so the only real way to solve that problem is raising your price. And the people willing to pay more are the people willing to able to get the value that you're used to delivering. So that's why picking the best is not usually the best option for you. If you want a greater value proposition, then you need to pick somewhat less than the best, because they're on their way up.
Guy Reams (02:20.27)
The fourth best approach gives you advantage because you usually have a cost savings. There's usually an increased effort by that provider or by that product to add more value to your purchase so that you will go with them rather than with the best. So typically when you hire or buy a product that is second, third, fourth, fifth on the rankings, you're going to get more value out of that purchase. I have lots of personal anecdotes about this.
First one is hiring. When you go out into the market to hire people, hire employees, the tendency is to want to find the best. And if you look at job postings, this is a common thing. You see postings that describe the best possible person. Which by the way, nobody's ever going to hire exactly the job description they want. But just...
because they're crafting it, they want to create the perfect vision of who they're going to hire. The odds of you finding the perfect fit are low, zero actually. In fact, by the time you hire them, the job will have changed anyway. So it doesn't really matter. But the point is, is that you're, if you go out there searching for the best, then what's going to happen is you may find somebody that's better than the rest, but you're going to have to pay for it in quite a bit.
And keep this in mind, you're not paying for their current performance or their future performance. You're paying for their past performance. So they may have been a rock star before, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be a rock star today or tomorrow. So if you go out for the absolute best, you're in this, you're rolling the dice because they may end up not being as good as they were yesterday. It's better to hire somebody who's not quite that good.
who's on the up and coming, right? Because then they will become the best while they're working for you, which is the great thing, right? So hiring is a good example where if you focus too much on the best, you might not get the best value proposition.
Guy Reams (04:33.39)
The next obvious one is products. Recently I wanted to buy a new soundboard. I'm doing a lot more with sound and audio quality. So I wanted to buy a really good soundboard so that I could start manipulating inputs and outputs on video and things like that. So I was looking for the best soundboard. And I spent a lot of time looking at them. And there's a lot of options in the market. I mean, probably a thousand.
And there's some good ones and that you could spend ten thousand dollars or you could spend two hundred dollars, right? But as I started researching it there were several of them that kind of went to the top in the area that I was looking for the type of audio I was trying to deal with there was several at the very top and You're spending probably eight hundred to nine hundred dollars Maybe a little bit more and you're getting the best and they're packed full of features lots of functionality and
lots of inputs, you're getting everything you want, a lot of feature set. However, when I really started to evaluate, you know, about the fifth or sixth one down on the list, I realized that, you know what, these have a pretty good feature set too, and they do exactly what I would need it to do, they just don't have all the extras to it. So in my case, fourth best was perfect for me. It wasn't that expensive, it was like $400, it was...
pretty much what I needed. It covered all the bases. You know, and I wasn't overspending my money. And when I bought it, they also threw some other things in there that could make my recording experience much better. So, hey, sometimes fourth best is the best, especially when selecting products. Finally, we are always in a situation where we need to hire services out, professional services, lawyers, accountants, consultants.
Whatever the case may be you're always hiring people to help you in your life or in your business I mean in every aspect you're always they just think of how many people you are hiring to help you right now Plumbers housekeepers, whatever right? There's just all over the place So you got to really think about when you go to hire a professional to help you Do you always need the absolute best and I think about what what demands the absolute best is gonna have?
Guy Reams (07:02.03)
Are they going to give you the time and attention? Probably not. So this is why I think you should go down the stack a little. Maybe not, you don't want to go down to the bottom, but you can go down the stack a little bit and you'll find the hungrier services person that will really help you and probably add a lot of value as well. And you'll get more for your money. So if you are in the position where you're trying to grow and you are trying to improve and trying to get better, you might want to start considering not
looking at the best, but looking at not quite the best, because you'll just get more value for your money. So, anyway, just a thought. Thank you.