Slow and Steady
By: Morgan J. Lopes
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Atlanta, Entrepreneur, Growth, Startup

TJ: I’ve had this button sitting on my desk for the last 2 or 3 years. It’s pretty simple; it just says “Slow & Steady”. No graphics. No colors. Just black font on white background. It’s from our friends at Edgar Allan, a design studio in ATL. I love the button because in the frenetic world of startups, the emphasis is, and always has been “move fast and break shit”.

Since I look at this lovely button every day, I had this idea for turning it into a patch. I love buttons / pins / etc but I’m so hard on my backpack that anything that isn’t glued or sewn onto it will inevitably come off. So I reached out to one my software company brethren, Morgan Lopes, to see if he wanted to collaborate on a patch. Morgan helps run Polar Notion and while I could try and describe what they do, I decided to turn this blog entry into something more collaborative. Think of it as a podcast but with WORDS instead of SOUNDS (I’m super retro).

Hi Morgan! Tell us dear friend what does Polar Notion do?

We help businesses get better before bigger. Clients hire us to improve the brand experiences for their customers and to engineer thoughtful software solutions to improve efficiency or performance.

When customers have a better experience or employees can work more efficiently, the whole business improves. From strategy to execution, we focus on increased effectiveness.

What about the Slow & Steady mantra spoke to you?

Morgan: Growing up, I ran cross country. I witnessed first hand the impact of consistent, deliberate progress over long periods of time. In the summer, we would run hundreds of miles to prepare for the season. Trying to run 100 miles in one day would have been fraught with issues, but slow and steady improvements compound over time. One Saturday, late in the season, I remember running 21 miles for training. I had struggled to run 3 miles only months early.

From childhood, the fable of the tortoise and the hair comes to mind. When the race is long, the speed at which you start matters very little. As humans, short term thinking is baked into the chemical composition of our brains. It’s natural to over indulge today at the cost of tomorrow. The disciplined mind can recognize that tension, and choose to craft another way.

To me, ‘slow and steady’ celebrates long term outcomes at a pace that benefits each participant along the way. It is about finding delight in the journey, not the elusive destination.

TJ: I really dig the fact that you ran cross country. The idea of running terrifies me. Either way, for us it means balancing work and life. We love what we do but we also wanted to give our team the flexibility to work where they wanted and when they wanted. This doesn’t mean we’re a company full of slackers. Au contraire! It just means we think family is a critical component of what we do. Both our personal families, our husbands and wives and kids. But also our company family. I see everyone we work with as an extended part of my family. Someone I want to not only lean on when we have a fire to put out but also someone I can grab a beer with on a company trip. People I enjoy being around.

How has your team applied it to how you run your company?

Morgan: Beyond the quality of work we produce, we are most pleased with the way we work. We bring humanity back to business and put people front and center. Whether our team members, our clients, or their customers, most of life is at a job. We want to make it time well spent.

Slow and steady means we put a lot of effort into how our team members feel about the work. In service based work, burnout is common. We push to create a sustainable work environment that keeps people engaged for the long term. Yes, we want great compensation and benefits, but there are day to day rewards as well.

Are they working reasonable hours? It’s rare for anyone to exceed 8 hours per day.

Are they provided flexibility to suit their lifestyle? Team members choose their work window.

Are their schedules clear to do their best work? Most team members have 1 project at a time.

Are they being challenged? We have mentorship structure that promotes continual learning.

With clients, it means we spend more time onboarding, communicating, and setting expectations. Many business owners snub their nose at the idea of referral-based growth. For us, it has forced us to be laser focused on serving each client who trusts us with their project. It’s unlikely our business will triple or quadruple in a given year, but so what. We don’t need that. We’ve been profitable since Day 1 and have already outlast most of the business that started with us in 2012. As we plan for the future, our reputation is our greatest tool and are not willing to jeopardize that for quick, high-risk opportunities.

I was recently presented a riddle: “Would you choose 1 million dollars today or 1 penny, double daily for 30 days?”

Spoiler, if you chose the penny and cashed out on Day 27 you’d have $671,088.64. Bad deal. However, if you stuck with it until Day 30, you would have over $5 million dollars. Most real impact is measured in years or decades, but it’s no less meaningful. It’s just slow and steady. (TJ’s note: Ask Morgan for money advice sometime)

TJ: At SC it has really shaped the kind of client we work with and the product we build. We don’t really see our company as a financial instrument — something to quickly build and then sell off. We’re in this for the long haul. That means really getting to know our clients. Understanding their needs. And building a product that reflects that. I realize everyone says that but in the VC world, once you find product market fit, the goal is to SCALE SCALE SCALE! Hire a sales team and pummel the market with your product. We don’t really see the world that way. We like growing organically w/ our clients. It means we’ve grown slower than our VC backed friends but it also means we are embedded with our clients. We know them.