The catchphrase 'hire slow, fire fast' is popular in the start-up community, but is it actually good advice? Depends on what you mean by hire slow.

Danny Boice, the co-founder and CTO of Speek, declared the popular axiom 'hire slow, fire fast' to be "a bunch of BS."

Getting rid of subpar performers quickly is indeed a great idea, he acknowledges, but for start-ups, 'hire slow' is unworkable advice. He writes:

No matter how you spin it, as a startup we have between 6 and 12 months to live… For an early-stage startup founder, doing anything slowly is simply not an option… You should, however, identify the key roles you absolutely need filled for successful product iteration and then hire great people to fill them fast. Too much wringing of hands and holding out for the perfect hire for a role is just as devastating as hiring the wrong person--potentially even more so.

Don't bloat your staff, Boice concludes, but don't even dream of being a hiring perfectionist. But is that what 'hire slow' really means? If a recent post by Matthew Stibbe, the founder of Turbine, is any thing to go by, Boice may have missed the essential point some folks are trying to make when they advise founders to 'hire slow'.

In his post, Stibbe lays out eight lessons of project management that he's learned through hard experience. Among them is exactly the expression Boice so dislikes. But when Stibbe lays out what he means by 'hire slow, fire fast,' the idea doesn't sound much like the heel-dragging hiring philosophy that annoys Boice:

My first boss advised me not hire one person until I needed two of them. I ignored that advice at IG and probably hired too many people too quickly. Some were amazing but a few were amazingly awful. My experience was that the handful of underperforming staff took up more time and energy than the vast majority of good people. The big lesson is to spend more time developing the good people than correcting the bad ones. If necessary, this means firing poor performers who can’t or won’t improve.

In my case, after I sold the games company, I kept things small using contractors, freelancers, and outsourcing and only recently have I begun to hire full-time employees again. I’ve made more money, and I’ve been far happier with the new, slow-but-steady approach. My first boss was right.

Rather than suggesting start-up founders wait around twiddling their thumbs for the perfect hire, Stibbe's 'hire slow' sounds more like an exhortation to get creative to avoid dragging down your team with permanent but middling staff. It's less 'hold out for perfection' and more 'work smarter, use independent pros, and develop the people you already have' so you can avoid saddling your company with less than stellar talent.

It's not that Boice's point that perfectionism in hiring is counterproductive is wrong. "Too much wringing of hands and holding out for the perfect hire for a role" does indeed sound "as devastating as hiring the wrong person," just as he writes. But this advice kind of misses the point—at least the point made by Stibbe, who definitely isn't advocating sitting around waiting for perfection.

What's your take – is 'hire slow' good advice, and if so, what exactly do you mean by that?

Before she built a beauty empire, Bobbi Brown gleaned business instincts from her Cadillac-selling grandfather.

Bobbi Brown may be the most famous entrepreneur in her family, but she wasn't the first. Decades before she launched her cosmetics empire in 1991, she spent weekends helping her grandfather Sam Shatten at his car dealership. His favorite lesson: Good things come to those who keep their eyes peeled.

Every business decision I ever made I learned from my grandfather Papa Sam. He moved here from Russia when he was a boy. He worked his way up selling newspapers and ladies' handbags, and eventually, he became Cadillac Sam, one of the biggest car dealers in Chicago. When you come here from another country by yourself, you're naturally entrepreneurial. You're used to figuring it out as you go.

There was one story that always stayed with me. One day, a guy who looked like he lived on the street came into the dealership carrying a big shopping bag. None of Papa Sam's sales guys would go talk to him. But Papa put his arm around the guy and said, "How ya doing, boss?" Turns out the shopping bag was full of cash. The guy bought two cars. My grandfather taught me how important it is to have your eyes open, because you never know what's going to come your way.

When I first proposed my lipsticks to Bergdorf Goodman, they said yes and then changed their minds. I had been working with Saks Fifth Avenue on a catalog shoot. I told Bergdorf's, "It's OK that you're not taking me, because Saks is." They said, "Let me call you back." That's how I launched at Bergdorf's.

It's not bluffing. It's thinking on your feet, and it's helped me a million times. One time, I was doing makeup for the Rachel Roy fashion show, and Rachel said she wanted lipstick the color of Hershey's Kisses and espresso. But when I asked my assistant for my lip palette, she whispered, "I forgot to pack it." I said, "OK, hand me the eye shadow and some lip balm." After the show, Rachel said, "I couldn't have imagined it better." Vogue wrote about it. Now, I have a lipstick named Mahogany, all because I didn't panic.

College major: Theatrical makeup
Total start-up funding: $5,000
Products sold per day worldwide: 60,000

A quick reader’s guide: Release It!, by Michael T. Nygard

There are days when I believe that anyone can develop a web app. But even when I’m willing to go that far, I’m never prepared to say that anyone can deploy reliable software. There are questions of scaling, user-generated errors and a plenty of problems waiting whenever an application has to function in the real world. Release It! is a practical guide to making sure that your software can actually survive in the real world, though, and it will leave you properly paranoid about how you write your applications in the future.

Nygard takes a ground up approach, teaching readers how to design applications to avoid key issues in the first place. The chapters are laid out with case studies of specific errors, paired with solutions. However, don’t expect this book to do the work for you. There are minimal code snippets included and those are only meant as examples.

Development: Forth Warrior
According to the readme, Forth Warrior is “a game of programming, stabbing and low cunning.” It doubles as a fun way to practice using your knowledge of Forth. There are a few similar games out there for other languages, too.

Funding: Think your investors are being difficult? Read this.
The mind of an investor is a mysterious place, but the better you can understand it, the more likely that you can recognize when your interests and an investor’s are very different. After all, investors and entrepreneurs can have very different goals for the same business.

Operations: Decoding the deadpool: How to tell when a startup has failed
Startups grow quickly, but they can also fail quickly. It’s hard to tell just when a startup is done, which in turn makes it easier for accelerators, investors and other folks with stakes in different startups to paint rosier pictures of their own success.

Marketing: The app stores are getting full: Only 2 percent of iPhone top publishers in U.S. are newcomers, 3 percent on Google Play
You can’t just build a mobile app and slap it into the appropriate app store — even if once, very long ago, that was enough to get you a few purchases, it’s not nearly enough now. There is major competition that you have to be aware of and that you must address as you’re planning your marketing efforts.

Beyond Tech: How (and why) to intentionally set yourself up for failure
We learn much more from failures than from successes. Provided you can create a safe environment in which to fail, setting yourself up so that you can’t easily succeed — at least immediately — guarantees that lessons will stick with you.

Our most popular link this week: Checking your security isn’t a once-in-a-while thing

As your company grows you need to think less like an entrepreneur and more like a CEO.

As entrepreneurs, we inherently resist structure and conventionality. Entrepreneurs succeed in many cases because they break the mold and think about things differently. They build a team that can move in many directions at once and can turn on a dime. This typically means that they lack a formal organization structure and almost always implies that they reinvent their model regularly to suit the needs of the customer.

In a recent article, Growing Like Gangbusters, we outlined three changes that growing companies need to make as they transition from an entrepreneurial start-up to a growth-minded company. First, growth companies need to focus their customer targets, as we outlined in Why Fewer Customers Will Help You Grow Faster. Second, they need to change their leadership style, as we outlined in Difference Between Brute Force & Strategic Growth.

The third key element growing companies will need to transform is a structure and supporting processes. For a small entrepreneurial company, the lack of a formal organizational structure actually helps the team break down barriers and move quickly to capture the highest-value activities. But once a company reaches a certain threshold, a lack of structure becomes a hindrance to further growth.

We've seen this in our own business, and we see it time and again in similar growth businesses. An unstructured approach creates the nimbleness that a small growth company needs to gain new customers and maintain a flexible business model. The larger growth company needs structure to define roles, create clear accountability for results, and ensure that it can scale the business beyond a few customers, locations, or products.

What's the threshold that drives this transition? The answer varies from company to company, but from what we've seen the best opportunity to establish a structure and process is when a company has proven its model and is ready to scale. Structured organizations are inherently bad at reinvention but can excel at growth. You don't want to create an overly structured organization, with lots of processes, until you've determined that your business model is right and can withstand the trials of growth.

True sustainable growth is created by an organization with clear accountability and process. The CEO needs to be able to delegate specific elements of growth and monitor progress. Managing growth through the P&L is like driving while looking in the rear view mirror. The growth process must measure activities that lead to growth and enable frequent course corrections to redirect the business toward sustainable growth.

The structure and process required of a growing company is in some ways the opposite of the entrepreneurial organization. But it's essential in creating a sustainable, growing enterprise.

Send us your learnings and challenges on growing your company. We can be reached at karlandbill@avondalestrategicpartners.com.