Move with the cheese

One of the best conversations I've had lately revolved around business opportunities and adapting to constant change.

Move with the cheese
Photo by Nick Fewings / Unsplash

One of the best conversations I've had lately revolved around business opportunities and adapting to constant change.

I sat down with Gordon Cardiff, CEO @ ClearPeaks, one of our former clients at MarsBased, to catch up after three years, and I learnt a few things.

Long story short, ClearPeaks is a tech consultancy from Barcelona specialising in business intelligence. They were acquired two years ago, and now they're 200 people.

They have been doing business since 1996, so they've had to endure more than one crisis, and in previous conversations with Gordon, he always told me that tough economic times are good for companies like ours, provided you knew your place in the market*. Which is, quite possibily, the reason why his company and, to a lesser extent, mine have been successfully growing even during economic downturns and uncertain times.

*Except that this place isn't always the same.

This time around, he used the expression "you have to move with the cheese", which I thought it was another English idiom I didn't know about, but it turns out it's more recent than that.

"Move with the cheese" is a phrase that comes from the popular business fable Who Moved My Cheese? by Dr. Spencer Johnson. It’s a metaphor for adapting to change in life or business. In the story, cheese represents something valuable that people want (success, wealth, fame or happiness), and the maze represents the environment where people search for it (work, life, or society). The concept encourages embracing change instead of resisting it.

Most companies are built around an idea, a product or a service, and they spent too much time refining their craft (in the cave) instead of taking the pulse of the market (going out of the cave). Essentially, this is called "talking to customers", but it's a bit more complex than that (predicting derivates of events, understanding macroeconomics, geopolitical scenario changes, studying new technologies, adapting to black swans...).

Put simply: companies with their heads up their asses don't go very far.

As a founder, I have never reflected on the importance of balancing between mantaining your initial vision and adapting to new scenarios.

On the one hand, we're always told to focus, keep your craft pure, stick to your idea, ignore distractions, say no to nice-to-haves, polish your product/service and resist whimsical market changes, but at the same time, we have to adapt to customer needs, to anticipate market changes and be flexible enough to resist headwinds and scarcity.

We know the theory, but how do we apply it?

I don't know. I have been running a company for over ten years without having realised this nor focusing on it, but it dawned on me that we have been moving with the cheese along the years, unbeknownst to us.

Here are some things that might have helped:

The cheese will always move - I have always known that people change their minds and desires pretty often. If companies are made of people, by the transitive property, companies will also change what they want.

If you build a product that only does one thing and does it perfectly, you might have a very sound business, until that becomes extra-regulated, outlawed or replaced entirely by a change of paradigm or costs.

Don't lose sight of the cheese. The cheese will progressively and slowly move further away from you because of all the aforementioned events. Recalculate with certain cadence your distance to the cheese and reduce distance every now and then lest you stray too far from your goal.

Those who "move with the cheese" (i.e., adapt quickly and positively) will find success faster than those who resist and cling to the past. Once a new trend, technology or paradigm change has settled, the former will have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours working on it while the latter will have lots to catch up on.

On the other hand, you don't want to leave everything behind. What if the market change turned out to be a fad? Can you still go back to what you did before? Or, even better: did you continue doing it in any capacity so there were less costs of change or reactivation?

The cheese is always better on the other plate - which is a rather poor adaptation of the "the grass is always greener on the other side" idiom.

While we will always hear of examples of businesses that thrived by embracing change, like Netflix adapting from DVDs to streaming, or Slack pivoting from an online video game to a work chat, we have to look at them without the survivorship bias. We won't hear about failed projects most of the time, so we feel like we're the only ones fucking up.

Most likely, you never heard of Rosetta, Cookin.me or Woliva. Those are three products we have tried to develop internally at MarsBased that haven't seen the light of day.

If we ever release a product publicly, most people will think that we nailed it the first time around. In actuality, it will have been our fourth product, if we're lucky.

I have started countless side projects in the last years, like Winning Capital, Stonksoverflow, open source documentation translations, a couple of music bands and more. But I will be remembered for my most successful surviving project.

Cheese will help you to grow as a person, not only as a business. Generally speaking, being proactive is a much better strategy than being reactive in most aspects of life. If you apply embracing constant change in your personal growth strategy, you will benefit greatly from it.

Look, I wanted to study philosophy because it's one of my passions, but I somehow predicted that computer science would turn out to be a better investment of my time and efforts. If I had kept pursuing my true passion without getting my head out of my ass, I would've never seen where the market was going, or society altogether. And, to be honest, I don't know if I would have been any happier.

We are not good at re-evaluating our truths. Once we take something for true, we don't re-evaluate it. Ever. Even if it was wrong in the first place.

Adam Grant, in Think Again, shares the example of the boiling frog myth. Frogs will leap out of exceedingly warm water, but most people think they complacently boil themselves to death. Because we think that's true, we never put it in doubt.

Therefore, we must make a conscious effort of thinking "Is my cheese moving? Am I prepared to move with it?" every X months or years. In other words: is my business model still valid? Is B2C enough or should I also do B2B? Will this pricing scheme still hold up with the subscription economy or will I be the first to go when my user has subscription burnout? Do my clients still value my service or do they want it cheaper, faster or different?

How often do you question the fundamentals of your businesses' existence?

How often do you question the fundamentals of your existence?

Misc

  • Apologies for the braindump but I thought it'd be interesting to try a longer format. As always, feedback is welcome.
  • I'm trying https://creatify.ai/features/dyoa to create virtual avatars. Fad? Whim? Maybe I can use it to have a virtual co-host for our podcast?
  • More useful, MailBrew brings RSS to your email.
  • Interesting read: OpenAI is a weird company. We give Musk a lot of shit for becoming the cringiest Marvel villain of all time, but Sam Altman is proving to be a rather shady person, too.
  • We still have to give Musk shit for standing up for free speech - albeit only for his friends.
  • Interestingly enough, Musk raised 6B for xAI and Alman wanted to out-alpha-male him by raising 6.6B for OpenAI. Toxic masculinity much.

Asks

  • We're hiring 2-3 devs for MarsBased (React, Ruby and/or Node.js).
  • A former client of ours is looking for a great QA/Product tester to help them with a product launch (2-3 months contract).
  • Need recommendations regarding video podcast recording tools.
  • Any recommendations on where to find a great marketing intern?