Jason Fried Quotes
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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.'
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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.
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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.
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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.
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When you're short on sleep, you're short on patience. You're ruder to people, less tolerant, less understanding. It's harder to relate and to pay attention for sustained periods of time.
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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.
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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.
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When it comes to making decisions, I'm not what you'd call a numbers guy.
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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.'
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Practice quality, and you get better at quality. But quality takes time, so by working solely on quality, you end up losing something else that's important - speed.
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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.
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You have to live with your decisions every day. Why live with one you're uneasy with? 'Because it'll make you money' is a common reply. But I don't think that's good enough.
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A computer doesn't have a mind of its own - it needs someone else's to function.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Very, very few people actually have long stretches of uninterrupted time at an office.
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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.
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It's incredibly hard to get meaningful work done when your workday has been shredded into work moments.
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Respect the work that you've never done before.
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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.
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To say that the grocery business is cutthroat would be a major understatement.
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If you tell your story well, it can help attract customers; it can help people understand your business better, and you are more approachable as a business and a company.
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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.