Let It Go

Let It Go backs two of Tom's lessons. Under each of his lessons, what the book says about it, and on which pages.

• Move the people you have before you hire

  Shirley left day to day running with Suzette Harold because she did the chores better, while she moved to strategy and the public face, matching each person to the work they were strongest at. pp. 135 and 136. In the book: Staged handover to staff ownership.

• Agencies over-index on the founder's journey

  Cropper warned that the company risked being known for who it was rather than what it did, and market research led the company to drop the origin story from its press briefings. p. 174.

Shirley argues that the most powerful move in building anything is to let go of it: of trauma, of control of a company, of money, and of the institutions you create. She built Freelance Programmers from £6 and a dining room table by using a talent pool that conventional firms wasted, paying for work done and trusting people to manage their own time. She then handed ownership and control to her staff, which made far more wealth for everyone than holding on would have done. She applies the same discipline to philanthropy, favouring leveraged, strategic gifts that fund infrastructure and use expertise as well as cash. Her personal story, from Kindertransport refugee to the mother of an autistic son she could not keep at home, shows that survival, resilience and faith in other people are what carry the work.

• Pay for work done, not hours, and trust people to manage their own time as long as the work gets done (p. 87, p. 251).
• Divide every project into phases, check at each phase end, and you can say how far through a job you are and quote a fixed price (p. 80).
• A founder who is the personality holding a firm together makes a fragile organism, so hand day to day running to someone who enjoys it and keep strategy (p. 103, p. 136).
• When work is scarce, network or die: keep contacts, ring existing clients, and show confidence because desperation repels customers (p. 109, p. 114).
• Transfer ownership in one dramatic move if you want staff to think of the company as theirs, because piecemeal gifts leave it feeling like yours (p. 182).
• A written charter of mission, strategy and values is a company's real selling point, and rivals who read it will rarely copy it (p. 157, p. 159).
• Growth can be a survival decision: Cropper's argument that a firm must expand or decline, and that spending more can beat minimum cost (p. 175).
• Be an outsider who commissions the missing literature review or other groundwork, because a generalist can add to specialists (p. 236).
• Choose philanthropic recipients who multiply the gift: her £4m through the WCIT was leveraged at least ten to one (p. 211, p. 212).
• Putting your own oxygen mask on first is how you keep being useful to people who depend on you (p. 133).
• Letting go works best when the people receiving power have been painstakingly selected and nurtured (p. 251).

• What is the smallest team that can produce at the volume I am used to?

  In 1966 the firm served big clients with three managers, a secretary and about 75 freelancers hired only as projects needed them (pp. 82, 85).

• How do you price and sell a tool you built for yourself?

  She priced early work below her old salary, later called the result profitless prosperity, and turned the written standards she built for a client into a selling point (pp. 69, 71, 147).

• How do you build a personal brand that generates inbound rather than requiring outbound?

  A Guardian feature produced a flurry of enquiries from both programmers and clients, though most early work still came from former colleagues and her own relentless outreach (pp. 72, 102, 103).

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