At Some Point, Slow Down and Stop Breaking Things

May 16, 2013

The breathless mentality that fuels startups is ideal for a company’s early days, but it doesn’t age well. SEOmoz co-founder and CEO Rand Fishkin explains that as companies mature into the growth stage, that fast-paced approach can sometimes do more harm than good.

Slow Down Stop Breaking Things: A Better Motto for Scalable Company Growth
As your company grows, so should your approach to leading it. In a recent interview with OpenView, Fishkin explained that changing his mindset around speed was the first major shift he had to make.
You need speed to get out in front of your competitors, but now that you’re clear of the pack, it’s time to maintain that lead without careening off the road. “Speed of launch” and “speed to market” becomes less important, he says. Instead, you need to slow down, stop breaking things, and concentrate on developing sustainable growth through scalability and processes.

In Order to Achieve Scalable Company Growth, Sometimes Speed Needs to Take a Backseat

“When we move fast and break things, our churn rate goes up.”

randfishkin Rand Fishkin, co-founder and CEO of SEOmoz


As you shift gears to focus more on scalability, growth planning, and paying down your technical debt (link to first post here), you also need a change in discipline. Resist the urge to slam on the accelerator when it comes to launch dates and bringing products to market.
“It’s almost antithetical to many things that you read about in books like The Lean Startupor Facebook’s ‘Move Fast and Break Things’” mantra, Fishkin admits, but now “when we move fast and break things, our churn rate goes up.” Once you’ve established product/market fit and it’s clear your customers like the features you already offer, he says, they are happier if those features and any new ones you launch work properly.
Data doesn’t lie, and Fishkin sees in his own company’s numbers that when features begin breaking down, growth rate drops. In one month, SEOmoz’s growth rate dropped to one sixth of what it had been the month prior after several products broke down at once.
When you reach the expansion stage, your company has breathing room for the first time. Take that time for QA.

Process Makes Perfect

Want to learn more from Rand’s experience growing SEOmoz?

Scalable Company Growth Strategies SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin on Managing the Biggest Challenges of Your Company’s Growth


“Instead of just plugging the holes one-by-one,” Fishkin says, one of the biggest and important transitions gearing up for growth is “getting process-driven.” He stresses that “finding a repeatable, scalable methodology for everything you do inside the company” makes for a smoother transition into the company’s next stage. Whether for recruiting, on-boarding, financial processing, getting monthly closes, moving payroll systems, or anything else, establishing processes ensures better scalability.
Once you begin developing your processes, document what you learn to ensure that no employee is irreplaceable. As Fishkin explains in a recent blog post, making employees redundant is in fact good for both your employees and your company.
“If you document your work, make replicable all your processes, insure that 2-3 other people know your tasks well enough to keep things running smoothly, and have built redundancy across your position, you can be promoted,” he points out. And at the same time your company isn’t tied to one engineer without whom “everything could fall apart.”

How has your company’s mentality shifted when moving from startup to growth stage? Do you agree there’s a time to slow down and stop breaking things?

Wizard of Moz

<strong>Rand Fishkin</strong> served as Moz's CEO from 2007-2014. Today, he is an individual contributor with <a href="https://moz.com/">Moz</a> working primarily on product and marketing, both internally and externally. He co-authored the <em><a href="http://www.artofseobook.com/">Art of SEO</a> </em>from O'Reilly Media, co-founded <a href="http://inbound.org">Inbound.org</a>, and was named on PSBJ's <a href="http://seattle.bizjournals.com/seattle/events/2010/40_under_40/rand_fishkin.html">40 Under 40 List</a> and BusinessWeek's <a href="http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/04/0421_best_young_entrepreneurs/6.htm">30 Best Tech Entrepreneurs Under 30</a>.