Words matter. These are the best Jason Fried Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
A company gets better at the things it practices.
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.
It feels good to be productive.
It’s easy to forget, as a leader, that when employees don’t get the wide view, not only does the point of their work escape them, but it can also lead to real frustration. It’s hard to feel pride and ownership when you don’t understand where things are going.
Success isn’t about being the biggest. It’s about letting the right size find you.
If an employee can demonstrate results produced in a way that the company didn’t think possible, then a new way forward can begin to take shape.
I’m generally risk averse, and most great entrepreneurs I know are as well.
When we launched the first version of Basecamp in 2004, we decided to build software for small companies just like us.
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.
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.
When you write like everyone else and sound like everyone else and act like everyone else, you’re saying, ‘Our products are like everyone else’s, too.’
To say that the grocery business is cutthroat would be a major understatement.
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.
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 think the story is important in every business. Why do you exist, why are you here, why is your product different, why should I pay attention, why should I care?
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.
When time, money, and results are on the line, it’s easy for tension to build.
Unlike a goldfish, a computer can’t really do anything without you telling it exactly what you want it to do.
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.
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.
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.’
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.
We think of computers as smart and powerful machines. But your goldfish is smarter.
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.
Many of the things we do at Basecamp would be considered unusual at most companies: paying for employees’ hobbies, allowing our team to work from anywhere, even footing the bill for fresh fruits and veggies in our staff members’ homes.
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.
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.
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’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.’
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.
Whenever I speak at a conference, I try to catch a few of the other presentations. I tend to stand in the back and listen, observe, and get a general sense of the room.
Sometimes you get lucky and things are as easy as you had imagined, but that’s rarely the case.
As businesses grow, all sorts of things that once were done on the fly – including creating new products – have a way of becoming bureaucratized.
I’ve found that nurturing untapped potential is far more exhilarating than finding someone who has already peaked.
When meetings are the norm – the first resort, the go-to tool to discuss, debate, and solve every problem – they no longer work.
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.
Deadlines are great for customers because having one means they get a product, not just a promise that someday they’ll get a product.
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.
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.
A lot of people relate leadership to formalities. They believe that leadership is about being professional and strong and always right and being a booming voice. I just don’t buy that. I think that leadership is a soft skill; it’s a people skill.
Sustained exhaustion is not a rite of passage. It’s a mark of stupidity.
The reality is, risk is variable. Those in the financial world know it.
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.
