I ticked over 15 years as a marriage celebrant this year and I’ve realised I’d grown complacent.

I’m reminded of wisdom around complacency by a former employee of a formerly massive computer company whose lunch has been eaten by the current first and second biggest companies in the world by market cap. Former Intel CEO, chairman, and employee number three, Andy Grove, in his autobiography Only the Paranoid Survive wrote:

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

This is the curse of the small business operator.

In trying to find that sweet spot somewhere in the unexplored wasteland of business, that demilitarised zone between growth-at-all-costs and death, you also eventually become complacent.

Mine snuck up on me while I was distracted transitioning from Best And Most Awesome Year of Business Ever to a living hell, around March 2020.

The wedding industry is made of two basic elements:

  1. gathering people together,
  2. most if those people are not local.

Gathering non-local people was quite frowned upon from March 2021.

I then got so busy recovering that I didn’t realise that I’d neglected:

  • simple website design decisions which negatively impacted my SEO, like page speed and accessibility,
  • creating helpful, useful, interesting, local blog content,
  • being open-minded about social media’s maturation (which is to say I was quite closed-minded),
  • adapting our business as the market changed,
  • and updating my clients’ customer journey.

How do I recover?

I’ve been learning how to do websites that aren’t Squarespace, WordPress, or Wix again - I’m a big static site generator/Jamstack/Astro boy now. I’m paranoid about getting 100/100 on Google Pagespeed and correcting all website errors on Site Console, and in Moz.

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