This is such a stellar piece from Michael Lopp. With a growing business, pains in process are utterly unavoidable, yet critical to be addressed. A couple of highlights — the first on the “rule of 3 and 10”, which is a vivid way to describe what anyone in a growing company has seen first-hand:

When you go from one person to three people it’s different. When it’s just you, you know what you are doing, and then you have three people, and you have to rethink how you are doing everything. But when there are ten people, it’s all going to change again. And when there are 30 people, it will change again. Same when you reach 100 people.

At every one of those steps everything kind of breaks. Everything. Your communication systems and your payroll and your accounting and customer support. Everything that you put into place needs to change when you put in those three and ten steps.

And on learning from and fixing those inevitable mistakes. Most of us are good at finding problems, but can fall down on the follow-through to fix them. Learning from failure is what builds anti-fragility:

I can’t think of a better inoculation to what ails all rapidly growing companies than building a healthy culture of learning from failure — which means not just identifying the critical fixes, but acting on them. Completely fixing them. You’re thinking I’m talking about bugs in your product, but I am also talking about critical bugs in your company.