Zitat des Tages von Jason Fried:
Lots of business owners spend their lives trying to land the whale - the single, massive, brand-name account that will fatten the top line and bestow instant credibility. But big customers make me nervous.
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.
Sometimes you get lucky and things are as easy as you had imagined, but that's rarely the case.
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.
The risk of relying on a handful of customers is not just financial. Your product also is at risk when you're at the mercy of a few big spenders. When any one customer pays you significantly more than the others, your product inevitably ends up catering mostly to that customer's specific needs.
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.
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.
Give your employees a shot at showing the company a new way, and provide the room for them to chalk up a few small victories. Once they've proved that their idea can work on a limited basis, they can begin to scale it up.
I casually advise a few young companies, and I'm always surprised when I see them overthinking simple problems, adding too much structure too early, and trying to get formal too soon. Start-ups should embrace their scrappiness, not rush to toss it aside.
When time, money, and results are on the line, it's easy for tension to build.
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.
I used to think that deadlines should be ignored until the product was ready: that they were a nuisance, a hurdle in front of quality, a forced measure to get something out the door for the good of the schedule, not the customer.
I think what really people want is just a few things done really, really well. And if you think about ever day of your life, the things you really appreciate aren't the complicated things. They're the simple things that work just the way you expect them to.
It's incredibly hard to get meaningful work done when your workday has been shredded into work moments.
I live in Chicago but own some property up in Wisconsin.
The owner of a company with supertight margins - say, a restaurant, retailer, or producer of commodity goods - would be a fool not to keep a close eye on the numbers. But when I make big decisions, numbers are seldom, if ever, the tiebreaker.
Statistics rarely drive me. Feelings, intuition, and gut instinct do.
A computer doesn't have a mind of its own - it needs someone else's to function.
Unlike a goldfish, a computer can't really do anything without you telling it exactly what you want it to do.
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.
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.
I'd love to see more businesses take this approach - intentionally rightsizing themselves. Hit a number that feels good and say, 'Let's stick around here.'
When something is working well, it becomes too easy to let things run themselves.
It feels good to be productive.
I believe if you start a business with the intent of making it huge, you're already prioritizing the wrong thing. Size is important, but it's a byproduct of a whole bunch of other things that are worth way more of your mental energy - customers, service, quality.
When it comes to making decisions, I'm not what you'd call a numbers guy.
I'm not sure a lot of companies know their story, or can explain why they exist and who they are, without just spewing just corporate speech.
I'm generally risk averse, and most great entrepreneurs I know are as well.
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.
Respect the work that you've never done before.
We've never much liked the idea of charging a participation tax, a phrase we coined to represent what it feels like when a software company charges you more money for each additional user. Participation taxes discourage usage across a company.
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.
We like to bully deadlines. Pick on them; make fun of them; even spit on them sometimes. But what a terrible thing to do. Deadlines are actually our best friends.
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 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.
Your company is a product. Who are its customers? Your employees, who use it to do their jobs.
