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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.
Jason Fried -
As businesses grow, all sorts of things that once were done on the fly - including creating new products - have a way of becoming bureaucratized.
Jason Fried
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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.
Jason Fried -
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.
Jason Fried -
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.
Jason Fried -
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.
Jason Fried -
It feels good to be productive.
Jason Fried -
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.
Jason Fried
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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.
Jason Fried -
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.
Jason Fried -
Who you work with is even more important than who you hang out with because you spend a lot more time with your workmates than your friends.
Jason Fried -
When we launched the first version of Basecamp in 2004, we decided to build software for small companies just like us.
Jason Fried -
Bottom line: If you can't spare some time to give your employees the chance to wow you, you'll never get the best from them.
Jason Fried -
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.
Jason Fried
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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.
Jason Fried -
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.
Jason Fried -
A company gets better at the things it practices.
Jason Fried -
I've found that nurturing untapped potential is far more exhilarating than finding someone who has already peaked.
Jason Fried -
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.
Jason Fried -
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.
Jason Fried
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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.
Jason Fried -
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.
Jason Fried -
Success isn't about being the biggest. It's about letting the right size find you.
Jason Fried -
If you could taste words, most corporate websites, brochures, and sales materials would remind you of stale, soggy rice cakes: nearly calorie free, devoid of nutrition, and completely unsatisfying.
Jason Fried