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Withers Co.

Only the Paranoid Survive

/ 2 min read

After 15 years as a marriage celebrant and as a solo then family business operator, I’ve come to a sobering realisation: I had grown complacent.

This brings to mind the wisdom of Andy Grove, former Intel CEO, chairman, and employee number three, who wrote in his autobiography Only the Paranoid Survive:

Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.

Only the Paranoid Survive: Audiobook cover

This is the curse of the small business operator. While searching for that elusive sweet spot between aggressive growth and stagnation, complacency inevitably creeps in.

For me, it snuck up during the transition from our most successful year in business to what became a living hell around March 2020.

The wedding industry relies on two fundamental elements:

  1. Bringing people together
  2. Accommodating non-local guests

Both became nearly impossible when gathering non-local people was strongly discouraged from March 2020 onward.

In the rush to recover over the past almost-five years, I failed to modernise or maintain:

  • Website design decisions - this really hurt my SEO and GEO, mainly poor page speed and accessibility, but I also abandoned my blog because ‘everyone’ was going to video.
  • Lack of engaging, fresh, good, and new, locally-focused blog content
  • Resistance to evolving social media strategies - oh how much I hate making Reels and TikToks
  • Failure to adapt our business model to market changes - the world is continually moving, and the prospective wedding client is only getting younger than me.
  • An outdated customer journey - a good customer journey always needs to meet clients and the operator exactly where they both are, it should make the relationships better, not harder

The Road to Recovery

I’m now taking concrete steps to address these issues.

I’ve moved beyond the traditional website platforms like Squarespace, Wix, and WordPress (I’ve used the ‘Press for over 20 years! and started embracing modern static site generators - we’re talking Jamstack,Visual Studio Code, and Astro.

I’ve become almost obsessive about achieving perfect Google Pagespeed scores and resolving all errors in Search Console and Moz.

So, in the spirit of Decemeber, I’m making a list, checking it twice. It’s time to find out if I’m naughty or nice.