I've seen small businesses turn into terrible midsize or big ones because they let their desire to achieve some arbitrary metric get the best of them. Whatever is compromised as a result doesn't matter anymore, as long as the company is growing.
— Jason Fried
Selling to small businesses and selling to enterprises take two very different approaches with two very different kinds of people.
Remind yourself that other people's jobs aren't so simple.
In my mind, declaring that an unfamiliar task will yield low-hanging fruit is almost always an admission that you have little insight about what you're setting out to do.
Entrepreneurs love to view risk as binary. The more you put on the line, the greater the potential for reward.
Since your company is the product that makes all of your other products, it should be the best product of all. When you begin to think of your company this way, you evaluate it differently. You ask different questions about it. You look at improving it constantly, rather than just accepting what it's become.
When meetings are the norm - the first resort, the go-to tool to discuss, debate, and solve every problem - they no longer work.
If yesterday was a good day's work, chances are you'll stay on a roll. And if you can stay on a roll, everything else will probably take care of itself - including not working from the moment you get up in the morning until you nod off to sleep.
It may be irrational, but if you're local, the client often feels that, if worse comes to worst, they can knock on your door. They 'know where you live.' But when you're remote, they're going to be more suspicious when phone calls go unreturned or emails keep getting 'lost.' Stay on top of communications, and you'll reap the benefits.
One of the secret benefits of using remote workers is that the work itself becomes the yardstick to judge someone's performance.
If working remotely is such a great idea, why isn't everyone doing it? I think it's because we've been bred on the idea that work happens from 9 to 5, in offices and cubicles. It's no wonder that most who are employed inside that model haven't considered other options, or resist the idea that it could be any different. But it can.
If you ask people where they go when they really need to get work done, very few will respond 'the office.' If they do say the office, they'll include a qualifier such as 'super-early in the morning before anyone gets in,' or 'I stay late at night after everyone's left,' or 'I sneak in on the weekend.'
Your employees have lots of opinions about everything - your strategy and vision; the state of the competition; the quality of your products; the vibe in the workplace. There are tons of things you can learn from them.
Being a salesperson prepares you for just about everything in business: how to listen, empathize, and persuade; when to back off and when to step in; and, of course, how to close.
Fix a few things here, improve a few things there, launch a new feature every so often. That's coasting. And I don't want Basecamp to coast.
Very, very few people actually have long stretches of uninterrupted time at an office.
Like many entrepreneurs, I started out in sales. I began at 14, when I got a job selling shoes and tennis rackets at a pro shop, and I've been selling one thing or another ever since.
We don't want to bank all our risk on a small collection of big companies. We don't want to lose 20 percent of our business if one big account goes away.
When we launched the first version of Basecamp in 2004, we decided to build software for small companies just like us.
Respect the work that you've never done before.
I'm generally risk averse, and most great entrepreneurs I know are as well.
Whenever you need something from someone else before you can move forward, it's a dependency. We believe dependencies slow people down. We want people to be more independent, because that will keep them moving forward.
Your company is a product. Who are its customers? Your employees, who use it to do their jobs.
Meetings should be great - they're opportunities for a group of people sitting together around a table to directly communicate. That should be a good thing. And it is, but only if treated as a rare delicacy.
It feels good to be productive.
When it's all about the work, it's clear who in the company is pulling their weight and who isn't.
By rationing in-person meetings, their stature is elevated to that of a rare treat. They become something to be savored, something special.
It's incredibly hard to get meaningful work done when your workday has been shredded into work moments.
I like to think of myself as a leader whose door is always open. But I recently learned that an open door isn't enough.
Nearly every boss has said it. And just about every employee has heard it. Yet it's one of the most meaningless lines ever spoken in the office: 'My door is always open.'
Customers buy Basecamp without ever having to interact with us. If they do have a question, we handle everything via email. We've been in the business of automation. We've never really valued full service.
When something is working well, it becomes too easy to let things run themselves.
You cannot ask somebody to be creative in 15 minutes and really think about a problem. You might have a quick idea, but to be in deep thought about a problem and really consider a problem carefully, you need long stretches of uninterrupted time.
A diverse customer base helps insulate you; a few large accounts can leave you vulnerable to their whims.
I've found that nurturing untapped potential is far more exhilarating than finding someone who has already peaked.
Sometimes you get lucky and things are as easy as you had imagined, but that's rarely the case.
The reality is, risk is variable. Those in the financial world know it.
As the number of people who work at Basecamp has grown, I've noticed places where we could use more features, like management, structure, and guidelines. I've also noticed places where we've overengineered ourselves and should pull back.
Meetings should be like salt - a spice sprinkled carefully to enhance a dish, not poured recklessly over every forkful. Too much salt destroys a dish. Too many meetings destroy morale and motivation.
These two staples of work life - meetings and managers - are actually the greatest causes of work not getting done at the office. In fact, the further away you are from both meetings and managers, the more work gets done.
That's the great irony of allowing passionate people to work from home. A manager's natural instinct is to worry that her workers aren't getting enough work done. But the real threat is that they will wind up working too hard. And because the manager isn't sitting across from her worker anymore, she can't look in the person's eyes and see burnout.
When you can't see someone all day long, the only thing you have to evaluate is the work. A lot of the petty evaluation stats just melt away.
Most work is not coming up with The Next Big Thing. Rather, it's improving the thing you already thought of six months - or six years - ago. It's the work of work.
The office during the day has become the last place people want to be when they really want to get work done. In fact, offices have become interruption factories.
The reality is that companies are full of things that are left unspoken. And even when they are out in the open, the CEO is almost always the last to know.
When you spend time with potential customers, you get to hear about their struggles firsthand. You see their eyes light up with excitement or darken with confusion. You learn things you would never find in a survey, database, or questionnaire. You learn why people buy.
To say that the grocery business is cutthroat would be a major understatement.
I think that sleep and work are very closely related - not because you can work while you're sleeping and sleep while you're working. That's not really what I mean. I'm talking specifically about the fact that sleep and work are phase-based, or stage-based, events.
It's like, the front door of the office is like a Cuisinart, and you walk in, and your day is shredded to bits because you have 15 minutes here, 30 minutes there, and something else happens, you're pulled off your work, then you have 20 minutes, then it's lunch, then you have something else to do.
