A friend and colleague has a saying: 99% right, 1% wrong.

He regularly uses it in relation to AI and the information it gives us. Most of the answer can be accurate, but one small error can undermine your confidence in all of it.

I think the same principle applies to many other areas of running a consultancy.

The misleading final 20%

When it comes to getting things done, there is plenty of advice about the first 80% and the final 20%.

Getting something meaningfully usable usually sits within the first 80%. Remembering that can help prevent perfectionism from blocking progress.

If you want to publish an idea, start an initiative or put a new process into use, getting it to 80% and learning from what happens will usually serve you better than endlessly refining it.

But there is an important distinction hidden within that final 20%.

Some of it improves the work. A small part of it determines whether the work can deliver at all.

The critical 1%

I was reminded of this recently while helping a client prepare for a webinar.

We got everything ready, and he put a great deal of work into taking the presentation to the next level.

Then we joined the webinar and nobody turned up.

It was strange because a reasonable number of people had registered. He ran the session anyway, as the practice would still be useful, and afterwards we investigated what had happened.

The problem came down to one link on the LinkedIn event page.

It was still pointing to the default location created when the event was first set up, rather than the webinar itself.

Almost everything had been done well. The topic, promotion, registrations, presentation and delivery were all in place.

But one small part of the setup connected the audience to everything else. Once that failed, the other 99% could not do its job.

Not every detail has equal weight

This is the limitation of the 80% principle.

It can encourage us to think of the remaining details as equally optional. But there is a significant difference between something that makes the work better and something that makes the work possible.

A stronger slide design might improve a webinar. The correct joining link enables it to happen.

The same pattern appears throughout a consultancy.

A proposal can be thoughtful and persuasive but never reach the real decision-maker.

A client workshop can be brilliantly designed but fail because nobody has confirmed who needs to attend.

A new service can be almost ready to launch but have no clear way for somebody to buy it.

These are small elements in terms of effort but not in terms of consequence.

Finding the critical path

In project management, the sequence of dependencies that determines whether a project can be completed is known as the critical path.

We rarely map it formally for the smaller activities in our consultancies. Instead, we tend to discover it through experience, usually after something has gone wrong.

The webinar became one of those experiences. It revealed that the important question is not simply:

“What needs to be done?”

It is:

“Which parts must work for everything else to have value?”

That question separates the useful refinements from the critical 1%.

The value of a short checklist

This is why checklists are used in environments such as cockpits and operating theatres.

They are not there because the people involved lack expertise. They exist because expertise does not make somebody immune to missing a small but consequential step.

A short checklist captures the elements that cannot safely be left to memory.

It does not need to become a detailed operating manual or an extensive project plan. It can simply record the few things that must happen for the activity to work.

For the webinar, one of those checks is now obvious:

Open the event as an attendee and test the joining link.

That single line may represent less than 1% of the work. But without it, the value of the other 99% cannot reach the people it was created for.

Getting something to 80% is often enough to move forward. The important part is knowing which 1% must already be inside it.

Finding the critical 1% in your sales system

The same principle applies to winning new business.

You can be publishing useful content, building relationships and holding good sales conversations, but if one critical part of the client journey is missing, the whole system can stall.

Perhaps the right people are not seeing your work. Interested prospects may have no clear next step. Or good opportunities may reach a decision point without enough trust or internal support to move forward.

These gaps can be small in terms of effort, but significant in terms of consequence.

The Ready-to-Buy Playbook helps you map the client journey and identify critical gaps in your own consultancy.

You can get a copy here.