I’ll be honest — it’s been a while since I’ve written. My promise was to give weekly advice. Things got busier than I anticipated, and this fell to the back burner. But I’m here now, and this one matters.
The saying “measure twice, cut once” comes from carpentry. Cut a board too short or crooked and you’ve ruined the material. You waste time, money, and momentum. The same thing happens in business — except the materials are more expensive and the mistakes compound faster.
I didn’t measure twice. Not at first.
I can’t count how many times I skipped the second measurement. Rushed the process. Shipped it. Then spent twice the time going back to fix what should have been right the first time.
But that’s what taught me to slow down. To think harder about where things were going wrong and what checks needed to be in place so we’d only have to cut once.
How many times have you had to go back and rebuild something? Re-do work you thought was done? It’s painful. And it costs money you’d rather be spending somewhere else.
I’d rather spend the extra time doing it right than spend time I can’t afford fixing what I already touched.
The unknowns will cost you too.
Sometimes the mistake isn’t carelessness. It’s ignorance. Things you didn’t know or didn’t understand at the time — and you pay for them later.
Here’s a real example from ParkWeb.
Years ago, we built sites that were completely static. Every page built by hand. One at a time. Now imagine doing SEO and building out individual city and locality pages for a niche market. Over a hundred static landing pages — all by hand.
One mistake in how something was designed or written across all of those pages meant going back and fixing each one manually. That’s easily two to three hours of work, pulled away from a new project with a deadline coming up. Push that deadline back and we look bad — because we take keeping our word seriously. That delay could also cost us a referral we’d never even know about.
One mistake becomes a snowball. It rolls downhill and picks up everything in its path.
So we stopped building that way.
Today, most of our builds are completely dynamic and as automated as possible. That shift has saved us thousands of hours, raised our profit margins, and cut our turnaround times to a level that genuinely shocks our clients.
Here’s what that looks like in practice: instead of writing every page’s content section by section and manually building each one, we spend three to four hours writing the content into a spreadsheet. Then we use an import service to auto-create those pages, attached to a single template. Once the writing is done and the template is designed, hundreds of pages go live with minimal effort and maximum accuracy.
The same instinct that pushed us to stack value into our offer is what drove us to fix how we build. The time we spent re-cutting taught us to think about how we could deliver the same results in less time — and nail it for every client.
Your turn.
We’ve created thousands of landing pages and locality pages for clients. That process only got efficient because we got tired of measuring once and cutting three times.
So here’s my question for you:
What are the inefficiencies in your work day? What could be automated so that nothing gets missed, everything is measured twice through your processes, and you only have to cut once?
If you’re not sure where to start, look at the task you’ve re-done the most this month. That’s your answer. Build a system around it. Measure yourself against where you started — and watch the cuts get cleaner.