Company Of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business

by Paul Jarvis

People can copy skills, expertise, and knowledge, which are all replicable with enough time and effort. What’s not replicable is who you truly are—your style, your personality, your sense of activism, and your unique way of finding creative solutions to complicated problems. So lean on that in your work. Sell your way of thinking as much as you would a commodity.

“empathy index”

the more you understand your customers, the more you can tailor and position products that provide real value to them, the more you can help them with support requests, and the more you can learn from them, because customers understand buyers better than you do. After all, they are buyers.

When I changed my sales pitch and began speaking about how good design could help a potential

customer achieve more profit, the number of projects I landed from sales calls more than doubled.

His work suggests that the way to be positively assessed by others is by making promises, and then keeping them. This advice is especially important to companies

Anytime you don’t keep your word you’re not just letting down one person or one business—you’re losing the opportunity to work with every single contact of that person or business, because you can be sure that they won’t ever send business your way. Or worse, they’ll tell everyone they know that you don’t keep your word. A broken promise balloons outward, like our ever-expanding universe: you ruin not just your relationship with one potential client or contact but your chance to work with everyone else they know.

James’s first rule is that his products must take little to no management. The digital courses he sells have no ongoing live webinars or training sessions—customers merely buy the content and then watch the prerecorded videos in their own time. His second rule is to charge a onetime fee for everything he offers; he accepts no retainers and no ongoing consulting work. To give a keynote speech, he’ll fly in, give the talk, answer questions, and then be gone the next morning. These two rules help James keep his business small, his overhead and expenses light, and, most of all, his time freed up to do what he wants to do: researching, writing, and sharing.

Instead of thinking, What product can I create? or What service can I offer, James believes that we should first think: What type of life do I want? and How do I want to spend my days? Then you can work backwards from there into a business model that allows you to create scalable systems to deliver your product to your audience.

collaboration is a double-edged sword: technology allows us to easily connect with each other in real time, but at the expense of focused, deep work.

She couldn’t offer students a great class without teaching it the first time and then learning from their feedback.

you’ve got to demonstrate your actual expertise by sharing what you know and teaching others. You build authority not by propping yourself up, but by teaching your audience and customers—so that they truly learn, understand, and succeed.

Teaching your expertise positions you as an authority simply by virtue of the fact that you’re showing someone else how to do something. People can be guarded if they think they’re being sold to. But more often than not, customers will engage and open up if they feel like they’re learning something useful.

What you could begin to share with or teach your customers or audience How you could focus more on executing ideas than on protecting them What investments you could make in consumer education as a marketing channel What you could share that would position you or your company as an authority in a niche

Making money is often easier than earning trust, because money can be lost and won back without judgment, whereas trust is hard to regain once it’s lost.

trust happens first. Only then does the commerce follow.

Alex Beauchamp, former head of content at Airbnb, said that she never wants any content she works on to “go viral.” She doesn’t want to ever be on the hook for making that happen. Moreover, going viral is often what happens with a business that, not understanding who its intended audience is, tries to appeal to pretty much everyone. If you want a piece of content for your business to generate a billion views, you probably don’t understand the purpose of that content or whom it was really created for. Engagement and connection with your niche are more important and far less costly to generate.

As a company of one, you need to reach profitability as quickly as possible. Since you’re not relying on massive influxes of cash from investors, every minute you spend getting set up and started is a minute when you aren’t making money. So getting your product or service released as soon as possible, even if it’s small, is both financially wise and educational, since a quick release can also serve as a perfect learning experience.

The first version of a product doesn’t need to be huge—it simply needs to solve one problem well and leave your customers feeling better than before they purchased it.

minimum viable pr...

If you make a profit right from the beginning, then you can figure out everything else.

Decisions should be made with a focus on realized profit, not based on the expectation that profit may happen.

finding a simple solution to a big or complicated problem is your strongest asset as a company of one.

Customers typically don’t ask a business to grow or expand.

most people who start a new business by themselves make the mistake of believing the products should always come first. Instead of developing a product, which can take a lot of time (and sometimes cash) to develop, new founders can start almost immediately by offering their product idea as a service first.

Launching isn’t a onetime, singular event, but a continual process of launch, measure, adjust, repeat.

Many companies try to be foxes, doing everything for everyone or launching products full of bells and whistles, but successful companies that thrive over the long term work at a single task and master it. You still need a varied skill set to build a company of one, but your focus on serving customers needs to be singular.

A company of one finds its true north by working toward being better, not bigger, and the way to do that is to build long-term relationships with its audience and customers.

what can you do as a company of one to make your customers happy?

Austin Kleon cleverly puts it, “People want to be the noun without doing the verb.” They want the job title of founder or CEO, or a business card and a fancy website with a new logo, but they forget or overlook the daily rigors of running a business of their own.

This free help I offer wouldn’t be a month of work or a redesign of their whole website, but rather emails and chats, either in person or by phone or Skype.

the first thing you need to do is open a separate bank account for your business and then, from that account, pay yourself either a dividend or a salary.

focus on an “exist strategy”—based on sticking around, profiting, and serving your customers as best you can.

Ricardo Semler, whom I quoted at the start of this book, believes that profit past the minimum isn’t essential for business survival. He likens going for profit at all costs to seeing a jail with empty cells and assuming that not enough prisoners have been rounded up yet. In effect, what’s best for the government that runs the jail isn’t a spike in the crime rate so that more people can be punished, but a greater effort to make sure crime doesn’t happen in the first place, thereby creating more taxpayers and more profit for them.

growth is the main cause of failure in so many startups,

Real freedom is gained when you define upper bounds to your goals and figure out what your own personal sense of enough is. You’ll have the freedom to say no to doing the expected, or to opportunities that don’t serve you.

This freedom allows you to run your company of one in your own way—a way that gives you a life you enjoy,

Even if you lead a team at a business that isn’t yours, or you are an employee at a massive company, no one else truly cares as much about your career as you do. Indeed, it’s your sole responsibility to look out for your own interests, and it’s up to you to define and then achieve whatever success means to you.

all business is a choice about the life we want outside of it. One choice isn’t better than any other; all are simply choices, guided by our own internal and deeply personal factors. This book presents one choice. It may not be the choice you’d make on how to run your life and your business, but if it is, I hope that this book has given you both a bit of insight and a small light to guide you.

Books are team efforts in which one person (the author) gets to take all the credit. So, my thanks go out to all the people whose names wouldn’t fit on the cover with mine: To my wife,

To you, for reading this book. I hope what I’ve shared can inspire or cast a different light on your work.