Ten Quotes for Bootstrappers From July 2014

1. “It is not the employer who pays wages. He only handles the money. It is the product that pays the wages and it is the management that arranges production so that the product may pay the wages.”
   Henry Ford in “My Life and Work”
   I think successful bootstrappers understand that hiring employees is only sustainable if customers are willing to pay for their labor either directly or embedded in product or service delivery chain.
2. “There will always be a shortage of talented, self-motivated creative professionals who will unquestioningly follow orders.” James Halliday (@substack)
   We get folks at the breakfast from time to time who are looking for talented self-motivated technical co-founders who will implement the founder’s vision exactly and work for a small slice of equity. I have yet to have someone come who just wanted to follow orders in an equity-only relationship.
3. “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” Hunter S. Thompson
   It’s OK to be different, find out where you can be a pro in your own way.
4. “In my experience, most people don’t schedule their work.
   They schedule the interruptions that prevent their work from happening.”
   Mike Monteiro in “The Chokehold of Calendars”
   This is a fantastic insight. We now schedule intermediate working sessions in addition to putting due dates on the calendar: we will spend 30 minutes (or an hour or two hours) making progress on this project at 2pm next Tuesday if it’s due in three weeks.
5. “You have to roll up your sleeves and be a stonecutter before you can become a sculptor–command of craft always precedes art: apprentice, journeyman, master.” Philip Gerard
   This is true for all aspects of your business.
6. “Scaling your business is all about having more people solve more problems for you.” Hugh MacLeod
   I paired these the next one because together they neatly capture a key growth principle and the sensation of having it happen<
7. “Existential: Walking around the office, hearing other people having conversations that used to only be in my head.” Matt Wensing in “On Making the Transition to Growth”
   If you want to scale up your business you have to share information and context and allow other members of your team to be able to have an informed discussion with you about risks and issues. And ultimately to have some of those discussions without your participation.
8. “Every time I’ve seen someone create a business, with the ultimate intention of getting away from that business and its customers as quickly as possible, instead of moving towards that business and its customers, it fails.” Bryan Franklin in “Four Reasons Why Passive Income is a Destructive Fantasy”
   I think the Four Hour Work Week has offered a mirage that has lured more bootstrappers onto the rocks than “build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” The belief that you don’t need to care about your customers and manage your business to succeed is at least as destructive as “my product is so good I don’t need to learn how to market and sell it.”
9. “I’m just preparing my impromptu remarks.” Winston Churchill
   The key to a good 30 second introduction is not just to practice but to deliver it in a way that seems fresh to everyone that you meet. OK, that’s probably not as important as keeping it to 30 seconds but it’s one of the keys to mastering the start of a good conversation.
10. “The first hour of the morning is the rudder of the day.” Henry Ward Beecher

If you haven’t been to a Bootstrapper Breakfast in a while drop in and reconnect with “entrepreneurs who like to eat problems for breakfast.”®

Quotes take from “Quotes for Entrepreneurs–July 2014“