Actual Discussion

As stated by other people here, the first rule is simple:

1. Do not accept outside investment. Ever. Plan your business through organic growth, not through investors.

But aside from that, there are other things to consider.

2. Inspect your incentives. Enshittification is the inevitable outcome of perverse incentives. This means don't pay anybody based on share performance in any form, for example: there's too many ways to briefly boost share values in ways that can be gamed. (This is true whether the company is private or public.) Pay by performance, yes, but make sure that you're measuring real performance, not short-term hits that cause long-term pain.

3. Foster a culture of equality. Don't be an arrogant asshole that says "I'm the boss, so I'm smarter than you". The people who do the actual work for you often know far more than you do about the fine details of the company's operations; listen to them with an open mind and set aside your ego. They may save your company. As an example of this, I told my boss back in 2021 that we needed to stop taking American clients. He listened to my (counter-intuitive) advice and did a modified thing of what I'd recommended. We kept the ones we had, but we simply stopped taking new American business and instead branched out into other countries. I think that has made us more competitive in our little niche now that the USA has become a toxic shithole that other companies are joining us in avoiding: we already have relationships in the countries they'd avoided.)

4. Develop a fine touch for management. Some people need close management (usually junior people): make sure you provide it to them. Some people need a light touch in management: back off and let them work independently, just monitor their progress and offer minor course correction here and there. Some people need micromanagement: let them go (humanely) because this is not a fit for their talents. In the end management is a people skill, not a technical one. If you lack people skills, hire a manager who has them; don't try it yourself.

5. In any conflict between your employees and a customer, consider carefully: one customer who is unhappy will badmouth you to a few friends. One employee who is unhappy will generate a dozen or more unhappy customers. If you throw your employee under the bus in such a conflict, you will have an unhappy employee (or more than one!). If the employee is in the right, support them. If the employee is in the wrong, guide them. Don't throw them under the bus.

6. Related: remember that you can (and should!) fire some customers. There are customers who will generate nothing but horrible drama for your company; drop them. Send them to your competition if they're really bad and you hate your competition enough. Personal anecdote time again: we had a customer who felt that by paying us he was entitled to micromanage every step of our process. He was constantly calling in and demanding people drop work to cater to him. Finally our department manager compiled a document that listed each time he'd done that in the past 30 days, estimated the direct cost in time and the indirect cost in lost productivity attributable to his behaviour. It outweighed (by far!) the amount of money he was bringing in. My then-boss called him up on the phone and told him that we would not be continuing in the contract; that he could take his business elsewhere. (Weirdly enough the people who'd been hounded by this asshole were extremely loyal to said boss later when business took a downturn.)

7. Never, ever, drop the "we're a family" line. No business is your family and attempts to make it a family are just plain-old abuse. Your business is a place of employment. The people you hire have their own lives outside that business with their own family, their own friends, and their own time. Do not try to encroach on that space for cynical purposes like getting unpaid labour out of them. It may work in the short term, but it leads to burnout, embitterment, and backlash. As soon as I see "we're a family" in business, these days, I start looking for another job.

8. Related: don't ever demand free labour. Either hire enough people to do the work, or pay the overtime. I did marketing for a software company in Ottawa and watched as they sucked the life out of their developers by not only forcing overtime, but having that overtime be caused by the developers having to do mindless, bureaucratic make-work like scheduling their own meeting spaces and times, making their own copies, etc. (They had developers being paid in high five figures standing in front of seriously intimidating copying machines and trying to figure them out instead of having someone paid in low five figures doing the work for them expertly.) For the cost of a single person paid in low five figures they could have freed the developers to do the work they're actually there to perform all within the span of an ordinary workday. Instead they did the "penny wise, pound foolish" thing of grinding their developers into hamburger, burning them out, and losing them. Pay for your excess labour or, even better, run your business intelligently so that you don't have to!