Mantras.

I made mistakes in all these areas. I implemented sound advice, standard business advice, that simply did not suit the business. It is hard to trust your own judgement when someone with experience and confidence is telling you how things should be done.

Get experts in their field to advise you. You do not need to start from scratch or innovate on everything. How to put together a good profit and loss report, for example, is not something I need to reinvent. Learn from people who know how to do it well. Save that effort for the things that make your business different.

But some things are core to your DNA. We had a lot of advice about traditional, hierarchical management structures: “This is how you scale.” In an engineering company, I do not think that is true. Those hierarchies can get in the way of the engineering and the culture. I wanted much more to happen from the bottom up, and following that advice took us away from it.

Always challenge the advice. Someone may have built a successful business and attributed that success to a particular thing they implemented. But did it cause the success, or were they lucky? Have they done it once or several times? Repeated success gives me more confidence, but even then, was it the same type of business, serving the same niche? What worked for them may not work for you. Your business has to be different in some way to succeed.

This is where I think the decision comes back to the founder. You know the team, the culture and the business you are trying to build. Listen carefully, but assess the advice through that lens. Sometimes an advisor will tell you one thing and your gut will tell you another. It takes confidence to make that call, and I did not always get it right.

It is OK to reject advice you have paid for. Paying for it does not make it right for your business, and it does not oblige you to implement it. Psychologically, paying for advice can make you more inclined to believe it is correct. But the real test is the outcome. Consultants can be paid to give advice with absolutely no stake in whether it actually works.

When there were about five of us, advisors from a reputable HR company were essentially telling me I was crazy for not wanting an expense policy. Then I found the Netflix book, and finally I had something to bolster my own gut feeling. “Ah ha! Netflix are doing it this way! So I can’t be that crazy, can I?” Their expense policy: “Act in Netflix’s best interests.”

I had seen how policies in larger companies created rules for people to follow, and then people stopped thinking. If a client takes you out and spends money on you, I want you to be able to reciprocate and buy the round of drinks. The social contract matters more than a rule saying you cannot spend more than X. I wanted people to use their judgement. In the end, not having the policy was not a problem.

The expense policy was just one very simple example. The same tension came up in much bigger decisions about management structures, engineering and the culture we were trying to build.

Oddly, sometimes you need to find advisors who can give you the flavour of advice you want. That comes with the danger, of course, of surrounding yourself with yes people who tell you what you want to hear. But there is a middle ground.

Your advisors and suppliers need to understand your culture and what you are trying to do, without finding you so crazy and strange that they keep telling you, “That’s not how it’s done” or “You’re crazy.”

One saving grace is that if you relentlessly action something, you can relentlessly unwind it. This connects to “Make fast decisions”: try something, see whether it works, and change it back if it does not. Cultural changes are harder to undo, but a wrong decision does not have to become a permanent one.

Find the best advice you can get. Challenge it. Assess it through the founder’s lens. You still have to make the decision.

Related mantra: Make fast decisions →

Netflix culture: People over process ↗