| > they have failed over years to really provide a quality service. Not only that but they over bill me and I frequently catch it. Why don’t I switch forms - well, I’m scared I’ll have a worse experience with another firm You could be making the classic mistake of throwing good money after bad money. If you try a new firm, you still have a chance of things going wrong. But if things are going wrong with your existing firm and you can't pinpoint/address the root cause, you can be a lot more certain things won't change. > Big difference in big companies and small ones. If you’re not micro managing as a small startup, you will fail. Success is a better teacher than failure, so are you sure you should be speculating about what kinds of management styles succeed or fail when by your own admission, your micro-management leaves you burnt out and without results? Based on my experience, it's almost always the case that startups only succeed in scaling by avoiding it. It has to do with delegation. Micro-managing is tacit acceptance of an inability to delegate. A team which fails to master delegation will fail to scale past the team lead's individual communication bandwidth capacity. That happens really quickly if you hit hypergrowth. You basically guarantee failure in a way that will make it really difficult for you to learn how to run a team any more effectively. It looks like that's your experience. Could you consider the possibility that an alternate approach could get you mileage? Why not find a trusted advisor to help you select a better firm? Perhaps you might have difficulty selecting a good firm, but it's possible that someone you know who has more experience with software could help you. After all, by your admission, you spend a lot of money on this purchase. Why not experiment with different approaches and see if you can get more ROI out of it? I'd bet money that if you found a good engineering leader and delegated delivery to them, you'd save money, time and headaches. Of course, you'd need to be willing to take the risk to invest in that, which is something you could fail at. But running a business these days is all about figuring out how to take risks successfully and improve your ability to do so. |