Ten years in business

Ten lessons from a decade of building things, kept useful rather than nostalgic.

What held up

Lessons that survived a decade

• Pick clients for their decision-making speed, not their budget
• Charge for outcomes, because hours reward inefficiency
• Write down what you agreed, including the reasons
• The hardest problem in a project is almost always organisational
• Specialise: reputation compounds, generalists are compared on price
• Say no more often than feels comfortable
• Instrument your own business as rigorously as a client's
• Keep a current list of the things you are deliberately not doing
• A written process survives a bad month; enthusiasm does not
• The best marketing is genuinely useful work published publicly

What did not

Most tactical advice ages within eighteen months. Anything that relies on a platform's specific quirks or a temporary gap in a market is worth learning and not worth building a position on.

If you are starting

Get to revenue before you get to scale, and talk to the people you are selling to far earlier than feels necessary. The rest is a long series of reversible decisions, most of which do not matter as much as they feel like they do at the time.