Your car breaks down, and the shop gives you an estimate that makes you gulp. But you have no choice, of course, and the shop fixes your car. When you go to pick it up, you expect it to run… better…. You want the car to be shinier or smoother or perhaps you thought that other little noise you felt in the engine would be gone. After all, you paid all that money… shouldn’t it be better?

Nope. The car simply runs again. That’s it. You paid them money to make it run again, and it does. Mission accomplished. You don’t get extra value just because you paid the price they asked for. If you want that other little engine noise to go away, you have to go in and say, “Please take out this particular rattle,” and they will give you a price to do so. And they still won’t wash and shine it for you.

I recently commissioned a complete overhaul of Avenue Z Tool Box, the site of free and low-cost tools that grew out of this one. It’s pretty much finished, and I’ll be launching it this week (probably). I had attached significant importance to the group I hired to do the work. Going back to the car analogy — they’re one of the best mechanics in town. I admire their site, their work and their message, and the new site looks wonderful.

But upon looking back at the hopes I had for the new site, I realized at 3 a.m. that there’s not much different between the new site and the old site. “I want it to look better!” I told them. And it does. “I want to have these gidgets and gadgets!” I said. And it does. They gave me exactly what I told them I wanted, and I have nothing to complain about — it really does look fabulous! And yet I still feel like I’m missing something.

I guess I didn’t want them to simply follow my directions. I guess I wanted them to give me direction… to tell me which gidgets I should use and where. I wanted them to tell me that I was doing this wrong and that right and to offer me the super secret recipe for success that others have figured out. And when the new site finally came to me, I expected there to be some breakthrough idea and format that would make my ideas click and my vision come to life. But the final product is simply a very attractive version of what my original site looks like, with the bells and whistles I asked for. Nothing more.

So this prompts the question… does a magic bullet actually exist? Are there these perfect solutions to our problems that we just need to discover, things we think everyone else knows and we’re left out? I have to turn the mirror to my own business when I ask this question because sometimes I think my clients expect the same thing. They think, “If I hire a professional writer to put together my electronic newsletter, I KNOW the phone will start ringing!” They hire me, spend hundreds developing a newsletter, send out the first version and find out that only 25 percent of the email recipients even opened the newsletter, and a very small percentage bothered to click through to something. And the phone? Dead. Nothing. Not one call. So, was the client’s money wasted by hiring me?

No, I tell them. When you’re creating content, articles, ideas for your potential customers, it takes a while to create momentum, to build trust, to see a return on your investment. The first 3 newsletters might lead to absolutely nothing, but perhaps after the 4th, your potential customer might begin to remember your name. If they can afford to have patience, our strategy will pay off, especially in the long run. If they want a faster way to generate leads, then developing content is probably not going to work for them.

When it comes to my new site, I should stop thinking of THE SITE as the path to getting a return on the investment I’ve made in writing this blog and the other. Sure, the site needs to look good, and it does. But a great-looking site is just one step in a series of steps I need to take to make that part of my business take off. In other words, I need to embrace the site and learn to make the most of it, not sit around and regret that it wasn’t the answer in and of itself.