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The 80/20 Rule - Management Tool and Slippery Slope?

The "80/20 Rule", (the Law of the "Vital Few and the Trivial Many"), is applied to managing any activity seeking better quality or improvement in outcomes. It serves as a reminder that, of the things we do each day, only 20% have substantial impact on results.

Most of what you think you should be doing on your website each day is producing little financial returns and squandering your resources. The result is disasterous. Forrester Research says 94% of SMB websites are dramatically underperforming.

Yet, that those same efforts are producing 80% of your site's problems, further depressing outcomes.

A. Overcoming Resource Dilution Inherent in the Rule (The Trivial Many)


As an SMB, the "80/20 Rule" explains your greatest vulnerability. Most of what you are doing on your website is high-cost, high-risk, requires high-skillsets, all of which you have little of, and hence, small outcomes flow from it.

Overcoming this resource dilution is a major SMB web management objective and the single most powerful determinant of success on limited budgets. (See Pareto's Chart)  See Case Study

B. Exploiting High Returns Inherent in the Rule (The Vital Few)


On the other end of the RULE is the low-cost, low-risk, high impact activities where you should be focusing your efforts. On a limited budget, you can only touch a small amount of web development ideas anyway. And that is exactly how you succeed. Your process is a deductive one, not an additive one. There's too many variables.

Experts agree that of the 1,000+ currently catalogued web best practices, only a few dozen account for the vast majority of business results. That's a powerful revelation.
Successfulweb's unique position is identifying what activites lie within the Vital Few, are high impact, achievable on limited budgets, and how to optimize the results that flow from them. You need to get your hands on that information in a way that's affordable and actionable.

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