Be all you can be. A huge cliché, but very true. It’s amazing what happens when you truly focus on yourself, for the sake of yourself. You find what you’re passionate about and do it. You create habits which make you the person you want to be. You’re able to accomplish goals regardless of any external support or criticism you may or may not receive.

How about your company? Is your company the best it can be, purely because it can be? Are you building a culture of ‘catch-up’ or a culture of leadership? Are you partnering with other companies or customers who feel the same way? Do you sway to the whim of every customer complaint or do you solve the core problem the best way possible? It can be very hard to keep the focus of a company on the idea of being the best it can be. Customers are distracting, revenue is distracting, everything is distracting. Instead of solving problems the best way possible, you find yourself solving problems quickly so you can move onto the next problem. The goals change from being a great company to being what your customers need and that’s it.

Building for yourself can be extremely hard. It sets you up for failure and leaves you no one to blame but yourself. Yet if you’re able to keep that core ideal of being the best you can be, and internalize that mindset across your entire company the results are amazing. You’ll magically solve all your customer driven issues much faster and much more preemptively. You’ll add features and solve problems better than you could have otherwise. And you’ll have a lot more fun and satisfaction doing it.

Live for yourself. Build your company for yourself. And do it because you can, not because of any external reason. If you do, you’ll create something no one else can.

If you look around the business blogosphere you hear a lot about goals. Track everything, know what winning is, quantify every action, etc. It’s all data and finite, quantifiable actions. I have nothing against this, in fact, I agree. I think it’s hugely important to track your actions and have definable goals to know if you’re winning or not. The problem I’ve seen though, is, what happens when you reach your goal? What happens when you figure out if you’ve won or not? How do you keep winning?

The obvious answer is, create another goal. Figure out what worked and repeat. That’s all well and good but let’s call a spade a spade, you’re creating habits. You’re figuring out what’s working then repeating your actions to get the same or better results.

Why not step back from the continual rat race of chasing goals and figure out what habits you, and your company as a whole, exhibit which make you successful? What habits were required to win that big deal? Or revamp your website? Or create an awesome customer experience? And on the flip side, which habits hindered your ability to reach your goal?

Let’s pause for a moment and take a look at another industry, the diet industry. What works and what doesn’t work. Every year there’s a new fad. Don’t eat meat, eat only meat, eat organic, cut calories, whatever, there’s always a fad. And every fad is marketed by the end result, the goal. A guy, 200lbs overweight, then a picture of him with a 6-pack. What an awesome goal, right? Get fit, get healthy, look like him. And a lot of times the fads work, people do get heathy, well at least they get skinny.

The problem is, after they reach their goal they usually bounce right back, they gain back most of their weight pretty quickly. Why is this? Simple, they didn’t create the right habits. They were so focused on the goal they forgot what happens after they reach it. So once they reached it, they had a big sigh of relief and then started eating again.

Back to businesses. Once you reach your goals, what then? Have you created a sustainable process? Have you created internal habits which will not only allow you stay at your goals but to continue building them? Or do you have to go back to the drawing board each time around?

The more I learn about culture, communication, goals, revenue, and just life in general, the more I’ve realized it’s all about the right habits. Do the little things really well and just keep building on them. The best businesses all rely on great habits, even if they don’t say it out loud.

So my question to you is, what habits do you have? How about your company? Are they helping you or hurting you?

In a bootstrapped startup every second counts. Every day worked, every project has a huge impact. With low capital and high risks, it’s imperative that every resource is executing efficiently. A huge problem presents itself when you need to increase your resources. The simple answer, assuming the money exists, is to hire another employee to help with the load. The problem with this is two fold though.

First, the flexibility. When you hire, you will always hire for a specific expertise. The new hire will be passionate about, and an expert in, a specific area. You’ve hired this person because you think increasing resources in this area of the company is where you’ll have the highest ROI. The problem in a startup though, is the areas with the highest ROI change constantly. Your highest priority today will most likely not be your highest priority tomorrow. Yet an employee is a fixed cost, a fixed passion. No matter how willing they are to change, their passion and expertise wont.

Second, a new employee takes time to train. They may be experts, but they’re not experts in your business. They may be passionate but they’re not yet passionate about your business. This takes time. It can easily take 3 to 6 months to have a new employee fully operational. Longer if you don’t yet have solid processes in place. On top of that, it takes another few months for them to execute on a project and see the resulting return on that project. This means, each new hire has a minimum of a 6 to 9 month lead time until you see a return. That’s a life time in a startup!

So how do you get around this problem? Freelancers. Figure out what requirements you have today and outsource. You can increase or decrease time spent on various parts of your company relatively easily. You can repeat actions which work with a very low overhead. And if your business takes a little longer to take off than you had thought, you’re still financially okay as you can easily pair down your freelance spending.

The really cool part is you’re preparing every single one of your freelancers to be a full time employee. You’re talking about your vision with them. They’re understanding what works and what doesn’t to grow the company. You’re figuring out if they fit culturally. And when you start seeing your growth. When you know with 100% certainty what you can replicate to bring in a huge ROI, then you hire your freelancer. The freelancer you’ve already been working with for months. The one who knows your culture, knows you, knows how to be successful from day one. You’ve now cut your ROI on this person from 9 months to tomorrow.

Think back to a really productive time of your life. For me, the more productive and focused I am, the less I know (or care) what’s going on in the world around me. When I’m in the zone kicking ass on a big project, I stop reading Twitter, my RSS, and all other news.

Right now I have no idea what the stock market is doing, no clue what’s happening with the upcoming elections, nor what team won the NCAA championship last month.

But when you really think about it, who cares? Most of the time, all that’s going on is violence and a bunch of political garbage. Or something else you have absolutly no control over. Current events rarely, if ever, have a direct impact on your startup/ life/ goals.

Instead of wasting countless hours following current events, what if everyone stayed focused and productive and didn’t know what was going on in the world? Maybe the world would become a better place worth knowing about.

We used to keep lists. Every feature request, new product request, items we wanted to do internally, we tried writing them all down. The problem is, we never used any of the lists. (I apologize to every customer who was told their suggestion was “on the list”. They were! We just didn’t really use the lists.) Occasionally we’d look at one list or another but we would never do anything with them. What ended up happening is the lists would be come so large they would be overwhelming and become useless.

Instead of keeping lists, especially when you’re a small company, focus on your current needs. If something needs to get done, it’ll come up again and again and again. If it doesn’t, then you probably don’t have to do it. The scary part about not keeping lists, is you feel as you might forget something. You wont. If it’s important you’ll know it. Or someone on your team will know it and advocate for it.

Not only are large, long term lists useless, they’re actually harmful to your company. They’re overwhelming, distracting, confusing, purposeless. It’s nearly impossible to rank items in a large general list and even harder to come to a consensus across the entire company as to what to do on the list. Plus, looking at a list 50, 100, 500+ items long is just plain demoralizing.

Project task lists and daily to-do lists are okay. They help each person accomplish their tasks. But, if you don’t plan on doing an item in the immediate future, then forget about it. You have too much to do right now. Focus on the here and now, not the millions of other things you could be doing. It’s more important to be successful today than to know what you have to do 3 months from now. Only work on and think about, the items which fit into your current focus.

Now of course you have to have a vision to ensure all your daily tasks and projects are moving you in the right direction. But once you have your vision, don’t worry about item number 273 on your task list. In fact, don’t even have an item number 273 on any task list. Figure out the top 5 most important tasks to do, do them, then repeat.

No one likes to tell be the bearer of bad news. It’s not easy to be negative or to just say no. Why do you think so many relationships drag on and on? It’s hard to let someone down, or be completely honest when you know you’ll cause pain.

So the question is, how often do you lie to your customers? I’m not talking shady business practices or manipulation. I’m talking about the simple truth. For instance.

• When a customer asks for a feature you know you’re never going to build, what do you say?
• When a customer outside of your market wants better pricing or has trouble using your service, what do you tell them?
• When you mess up and ship a bad or buggy product, how do you handle it?

Do you make excuses? Do you tell them the feature is “on the list”? Do you try to talk your way out of a mistake? Or help a customer even though you know you’re not the right fit?

One of the questions we used recently when hiring for customer service was, “When should you fire a customer?” It’s a hard question. We got a lot of “Never!” answers. That’s just plain wrong. Of course you’re going to fire a customer, whether you like it or not.  The point was, we were looking for someone who was willing to be honest. Take the blame, take the heat. Tell the customer, “Hey, we’re just not the right fit for you. Try this other great company instead.” Or, “That feature just isn’t going to happen any time soon, or ever.”

It can be harsh but this attitude and honesty creates such a better relationship than dragging someone along. I recently had a call with one of the companies we use and had a very frank conversation with my account rep. Since last year they had grown at an astounding rate and the market they were going after had changed. Although we could still use their service at the same (heavily discounted) price we really just didn’t fit into where they were headed. He was great about the pricing but very honest about their future. This was hard to hear, and caused some additional work on our part, yet we parted ways on great terms and I’ll continue to support and recommend that company. The alternative could have been much worse.

Be really honest with yourself for a minute. When you interact with your customers how honest are you? Do you tell them the truth or do you sugarcoat it? If they’re not a great fit do you say it and help them move on or do you tweak your sales pitch to compensate? In my opinion, life’s way too short to BS. Tell the truth and move forward. Your business will benefit and we’ll all be happier in the end.

It’s so easy to add that one additional feature, read that one extra blog post, figure out that one extra optimization. This also makes it really easy to never actually accomplish anything. You’re not perfect. Neither is your team. And you never will be. Once you accept this you’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish.

When I first started writing these blog posts I had no idea how to do it. No idea what the title should be, how to optimize for SEO or what type of format is best to use. And honestly, I still don’t, at least not very well. So I have three choices. I can really think through how to solve those problems, do some basic learning, or just ignore it and write anyway. You should always ignore  your hurdles to start off with.

Getting stuff out the door is the hardest part of starting a company. It’s very easy to get bogged down because there are so many opportunities and possible improvements. The more you can focus on just doing the basics the better you’ll be. Trust yourself to fix the bugs that come up, or your ability to learn what you need to know, when you need to know it. I’m very confident I’ll figure out how to do SEO or title my posts once it becomes necessary. But for now, it’s just one more excuse not to write them.

It’s easy to fix something that’s broken, very hard to fix something which doesn’t exist.

My co-founder, Casey, wrote a great blog post about why listening to the experts in your industry may not be the best idea. So the next obvious question is, who should you listen to? Listening and learning from someone, anyone, is a great way to jump ahead without having to make every mistake yourself. In fact, it would take a lifetime to learn everything these experts know on your own. The obvious choices would be mentors, friends, fellow employees, etc. Not to mention, listening to an expert in your field isn’t the worst thing ever, every once in a while. But I would suggest there is an alternative which trumps all those a thousand fold.

Listen to experts in every field but your own. And I mean every field. This includes other types of businesses such as a 100+ year old company, or a company which produces a physical product (if you don’t). Or how about that new cutting edge genetics company? Read some medical blogs, marriage counseling blogs (doesn’t matter if you’re married), architect blogs. Read about the arts, space travel, psychology, traveling, a zen lifestyle, etc. The list is really endless. And don’t just find a random medical company or a random traveling blog, find the best blog, the best company. Find the most cutting edge, or the most respected, find the leader in that industry. Then listen, learn and copy them.

Bring what they do best into your company and your industry. Learn how to adapt their practices to your goals. While everybody in your industry is out copying the leader, always one step behind, you’re bringing in something new. You can leapfrog the current trends, build your own path, while still following tried and true methods. You’ll be amazed at how the owner of the leading local coffee shop is already doing all of these supposedly new ways to run a company, preached by your industry. Or how that old geezer running that supposedly outdated company has more insight and understanding of your business than you’ll have for years.

Bottom line, there are a lot of really smart people out there. Don’t constrain yourself to one small industry. You’ll be amazed at what you can learn from the leaders in completely unrelated fields.

Everybody has one. Director of this, manager of that, chief of something else. Every person, in every company has a title. And they all suck. Every single one. I could create a list right now, as could you, of every possible title a company gives to its employees. Aside from a few companies, this list is set. There’s one CEO, a few chiefs, directors, managers, etc. There’s one way to structure a company. Sure you can change around the org structure a bit but once you’ve taken that title, that’s what you do, that’s it. Your only hope of growing in the company is taking on another title.

But what if you don’t fit in a title? What if your skills combine two positions, or three? Or don’t fit into any title, what then? What if you have one title and see an opportunity, yet it falls under someone else’s title, what do you do? Even if you’re an extremely proactive A-type personality, I guarantee you’ll think twice before going outside your title. Or worse yet, you’ll subconsciously limit your thinking to within your title. And if even the best of us fall prey to our title constraints how hard do you think it’ll be for that new hire to break out of his or her title?

Companies hire for titles. They say, “We need a director of marketing”, so they go find themselves a director of marketing. It’s completely ass backwards. Sure the intention is good, we need more marketing resources, but it’s a cop out. It’s the easy answer. We need to do more marketing so let’s hire someone for a set position in marketing. It allows the company to ignore the real reason they’re hiring.

Why not reverse it? Why not focus on the need first, outside of titles or departments. Then hire for that need. The title shouldn’t come up once during the hiring process. Hire someone with a passion for marketing and say, tell me what you’re amazing at and own it. Titles attempt to give ownership but they’re horrible at it. Not to mention, companies are dynamic and fluid, their needs changing constantly, especially the smaller ones. What happens when you need more resources in a different area? Do you hire for a different title each time your needs change?

Forget titles, forget departments, focus on your employees’ passion and let them be amazing without the handcuffs.

There are two main ways companies compete in a market. By price or by value. Either you increase your value and thus, are able to charge the same or more than your competition and win customers. Or you lower your prices, cut  costs, improve inefficiencies and beat your competition by offering the same solution for less.

New markets start on value. A company solves a new problem or solves an old problem a completely new way (think Ford, Apple, Twitter). No one cares if they spend more to use the service or buy the product, the value is so high it really doesn’t matter what the price is. At this point pricing usually comes down to a guess by the company or some perception of the new value, also a guess.

Then the competition starts. Other companies come in, provide the same value as that first company but cheaper. They might provide some new value here or there but the main focus is to copy and cut pricing. This turns the whole market into a pricing war with little to no innovation.

And finally, someone innovates again. The problem is solved yet again, new value is provided, pricing is meaningless. It’s okay to compete at any stage of this cycle. If you can provide a service for cheaper, go for it. If you can add value, do that. The question is, do you know which one you are? They are two very different mentalities and two very different strategies. You can’t do both.

An easy litmus test is to ask yourself, “Do I/ Can I  provide 100 times more value than my competitor?” If you do, then go crazy on value. If not, focus on your pricing as you wont win on value.