How Hard Could It Be?: The Four Pillars of Organic Growth
Revenue, head count, PR, and quality--if one gets ahead of the others, you're screwed.
Published January 2008
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COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLEWhen you build a company, you have to choose between two very different ways of growing. When my co-founder, Michael Pryor, and I started Fog Creek Software, we made a conscious decision to bootstrap. Our goal has always been to grow slowly, organically, steadily, and profitably. By contrast, a lot of the flashy companies you read about in magazines, especially high-tech companies, believe in the "big bang" model, with very fast growth fueled by lots and lots of outside investment.
Bootstrapped companies start on somebody's credit card. And in their early months and years, they do whatever it takes to break even, even if it means they have to take a few diversions along the way. It might be nice to build a giant ice cream company that will someday have millions in sales, but for now you're going to have to settle for opening a little shop in Vermont, hope that it's profitable, and, if it is, reinvest the profits to expand steadily.
When you bootstrap, things move very slowly and in sync. Your revenue grows only about as fast as you can hire skilled workers. The degree to which customers are aware of your business never outstrips the quality of the goods or services you are able to provide to them. The highly scientific charts on this page show the rate at which these four variables progress in the typical bootstrapped company.
In our case, we always wanted to be a software company, selling off-the-shelf software to thousands of customers at a low price. But that kind of company takes a while to get going--it takes years to write code and build a large customer base. So in the early months, to pay the bills, we took consulting engagements that brought in a quick and regular supply of cash. Those gigs bought us the time we needed to establish the off-the-shelf business.
One of the benefits of this model is that it's pretty cheap. According to the company history published on the website of Ben and Jerry's, the partners started with a $12,000 investment, in 1978. By 2000, when Michael and I started Fog Creek, the cost of getting a company off the ground was a little higher. I put $62,000 of my own money into the business so we could pay a couple of salaries while we waited for our first consulting checks to arrive.
Compare our humble way of doing business with the approach of big-bang, high-burn-rate companies that raise money almost as quickly as anyone on their staffs can spend it. They are in a terrible rush. If they are in a new field with no competitors, they feel as if they are in a land grab and that they have to get big superfast. Every minute matters. And there are lots of fun ways to spend money to try to speed things up. Having trouble hiring quickly? Offer BMWs as starting bonuses.
Can't wait for a landlord to build out office space? For between five and 10 times the market rate for empty space, you can be in fully furnished offices tomorrow!
But in the rush to win a land grab, one thing that usually gets left behind is a company's culture. And I believe building the right culture is one of the raisons d'être of any company. Ben and Jerry's exists because of the socially conscious values of its founders. Fog Creek Software exists because we believe in treating programmers well and developing friendly software using highly reliable engineering practices.
Our corporate culture includes all kinds of techniques for writing great software. These techniques are not trivial; they must be learned over a period of time. As a new programmer is learning our way of doing things, he or she needs to be mentored and coached by someone more experienced. We can't add programmers too fast; otherwise that mentoring can't happen, and we'll wind up with a bunch of programmers who are no better than the industry average. Our entire competitive advantage would be lost.
If you run a bootstrapped company, you should be able to regulate growth so that revenue, head count, PR, and quality increase at roughly the same rate. Unless you raise infusions of cash from outsiders, you can't hire any faster than your revenue will support. And your revenue won't grow any faster than the natural growth of your marketplace, because you have no money to pay for a big national advertising campaign. You're lucky if you have time to call on a few prospects each week. Besides which, the first version of your product is probably rather limited in capability, so the potential market is going to be small until you get a chance to build version 2.0.
