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Comment by Turukawa | Hacker News Reader

There was a great piece of advice I was given about 20 years ago by the South African guru of franchising, Eric Parker:

"Run your small business as if it was a large business", or, "Start as you mean to go on".

There is a great deal of bullshit in the tech industry; that chaos is somehow normal and that planning and the principles of good management can wait "till we're big". It should be painfully obvious that once chaos has set in, then that is the business environment and it cannot change.

If that environment includes hiring in panic and treating people badly, and the organisation survives anyway, then that organisation becomes one in which toxic relationships are rewarded indefinitely. It will be unsurprising that people like the OP will find it horrifying and be forced out.

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"Run your small business as if it were a large business" is a quote that I would disagree with for startups, for two reasons:

- it encourages premature scaling

- many large businesses have lost the ability to innovate and lost the ability to respond quickly to market changes.

Both of those consequences can be fatal for a startup.

Nope, small companies that don't think about growth while they have the time, cement bad practice.

"Run your small business as if it were a large business" is more about conscious decision-making and awareness of consequence. Do your admin, make sure payroll is documented and people are paid on time, make sure that managers pay attention to work-load and communication, develop work practices that support people rather than assuming everyone is committed to 24-hour days ... sweat the small stuff so that your employees can get on with the thing you hired them for without concern.

It's all those assumptions that get small businesses as they scale. And then - if they survive - they become horrible, impersonal large businesses.

A small business is like a small child. All the potential is there, but surround that child with all the clutter of a poor environment and it will become an adult that perpetuates the system it was raised in.

"Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man," said the Jesuits. They knew what they were talking about ;)

>>"Run your small business as if it was a large business"

So basically, several layers of approvals for every $10 expense report? :)

Nope, small companies with bad processes grow up to be big companies with terrible processes. Precisely because you hope to be a big company (or mature into a profitable one), get your processes right from the beginning. I'm definitely not saying "run your small company like the big companies you hate" ... I am saying, start as you mean to go on.

>>Nope, small companies with bad processes grow up to be big companies with terrible processes.

Yes, but it's not just small companies with bad processes that grow up to be big companies with terrible processes.

Sometimes, small companies with good processes turn those processes into terrible ones because they think that's what it takes to become a big company. In other words, they observe the terrible processes at big companies and emulate them.

Expense reports are a classic example. Small companies have informal procedures that are built on trust (good). Large companies have formal procedures that are built on pages and pages of policies that dictate what kinds of things can be expensed and under what conditions (terrible). It's very common for the former to turn into the latter as companies grow.

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