Free Startup: An Insider's Guide to Launching and Running a Business by Kevin Ready

needed.
Experiment with low-risk feelers into new and untried activities. Set aside some of your capital to dedicate to novel gestures that can connect you to your existing market or altogether new markets in ways that you have not tried before. This is very important. Constant experimentation is the cornerstone strategy for moving beyond survival and becoming a standout success among your peers in any kind of business. You will find business ideas that fail, some that break even, and a few that will really work . The best ones will eventually become core to your operation, while some things that you do today will eventually become obsolete and you will stop doing them altogether. This is fundamental.
    Takeaway: Search for low-cost opportunities to try to connect with your customers. Gather data to improve your business, but do not make the effort to gather data on a process or facet of your business if you know it will not affect your decision-making.
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    Always Get a Contract
    When I look back to when I started my first real company in my early twenties, I was much the same as I am now. I am certainly older now and some would say wiser. Part of that wisdom is that at least some of my boyish naiveté has been replaced by an understanding of how people can be downright unfriendly to one another. I hate to bring this up, but I can’t paint things over when it comes to this topic. It’s something we must discuss.
    From my perspective, it comes down to psychology. Whether or not people are willing to treat each other with respect, honesty, and dignity is dependent to a large extent on whether they feel any personal identification with the other person and whether they have established and maintained a proper psychological contract. Getting along means maintaining an “us” mentality.
    The problem is that even good people can fall out of this “us” paradigm very easily. Things happen, and communication is a very difficult thing to maintain.Especially when money is on the line, relationships and understandings can be stretched or torn apart.
    Take the following scenario as an example. You start a business with a business partner. Later, the business has problems. You think they are his fault and thus feel comfortable telling anybody who will listen that he is not the person he used to be. Your partner meanwhile thinks the problems arose because you are always out of town, traveling with your wife to Rolling Stones concerts. What we have here are people who, through a natural course of events, have come to a place where they no longer see eye to eye. Who is right? It depends on where you are standing, as both appear ‘right’ from their own vantage points. This imaginary scenario is a simple illustration of how one-time friends can come to a cold place where they want to sue the living daylights out of one another.
    In another instance, a good friend of mine earned a share in a company over several years, to be fully vested upon its sale. A great deal of work went into building the business into something worthy of acquisition, which eventually came. When the sale was completed, no mention of the equity vesting was ever offered. When he brought it up, he was told that due to the fact that it was an asset sale and not a sale of the actual company, there would be no payout. The fine print here is that the company was never ‘sold’ per se, but all the assets were—leaving the company only a name on a piece of paper with no residual value. That’s great, isn’t it? No two ways about it, the people who had worked and struggled for the company felt … how should I say this in a polite manner? Well, that they had not been treated fairly. In this case, he did have a contract, which was plain and to the point, but not written in a way that fully protected him in the situation at hand. He had thought that a big contract was unnecessary because the owners were “good folks” that looked him straight in the eye