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

Metadata

Title: Company Of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business
Author: Paul Jarvis
Book URL: https://amazon.com/dp/B078962RHQ?tag=malvaonlin-20
Open in Kindle: kindle://book/?action=open&asin=B078962RHQ
Last Updated on: Monday, April 15, 2024

Highlights & Notes

There’s no such thing as perpetual growth. Yet that’s what traditional business people crave. But what is growth meant to achieve? If Oxford University is so successful, then why isn’t there a branch in Washington, D.C.? If a symphony is successful with 120 musicians, why not even more so with 600? “To grow bigger” is not much of an effective business strategy at all. —RICARDO SEMLER, CEO OF SEMCO PARTNERS

Yet we soon learned that living in the woods on an island does something funny—it forces you to go deep within your own thoughts. There’s not a whole lot else you can do, especially if you don’t have a television or even Netflix. And at first, exploring your own thoughts is one of the scariest things in the world. (A study at the University of Virginia by Timothy Wilson found that people would rather get electric shocks than simply be alone with their thoughts.)

In other words, by scaling down every aspect of my life, I realized this was how I had successfully built my business all along. I had benefited immensely by resisting the typical avenues of growth and business expansion.

His focus in his business was being better, not growing bigger. I quickly began to realize that I had adopted a similar mind-set: I knew what I needed to make to cover my business and my life, so I could decide to slow down when I reached “enough” as well.

It’s assumed that hard work and smart thinking always result in business growth. But the opposite is often true: not all growth is beneficial, and some growth can actually reduce your resilience and your autonomy. Just as I learned new skills in self-sufficiency that were far outside my realm of knowledge, companies of one can do the same. Indeed, they’ll need to in order to stand out and thrive.

But scaling up might not be the best or smartest solution to the basic problem. As a means to generating higher profits, what if you acquired more customers simply by creating more efficiency, so you didn’t have to hire more people? What if you generated more revenue by finding a way to spend less (again, for higher profits)? What if you responded to the growth in support requests by finding a better way to teach your customers how to use what you sell, so they didn’t have to ask questions as often? What if you didn’t have to work more hours to finish a project but just more efficiently, so you could then enjoy more of your life away from work?

Staying small doesn’t have to be a stepping-stone to something else, or the result of a business failure—rather, it can be an end goal or a smart long-term strategy.

A company of one isn’t simply a practicing freelancer either. While freelancing is a perfect first step to becoming a company of one, freelancers are different because they exchange time for money. Whether they’re getting paid by the hour or by deliverables, if they’re not working, they’re not getting paid. All of a freelancer’s relationships are one-to-one, meaning that each time paid work occurs, a freelancer has to do something and use his or her time.

In contrast, a company of one is more in line with the traditional definition of an entrepreneur. If you’re utilizing systems, automations, and processes to build a long-term business, you’re not trading time for money, but instead operating and profiting outside of the time you spend working and beyond your one-to-one relationships.

Where a company of one is concerned, as we’ll see in coming chapters, scaling customers and even profit doesn’t always require scaling employees or resources exponentially.

the “company of one” model can be laid out in a similar fashion: “start small, define growth, and keep learning.”

Typically, when a company does well, it hires more people, builds more infrastructure, and works at increasing its bottom line. There’s a core assumption that growth is always good, is always unlimited, and is required for success.

Consumer culture says the same thing—that more is always better.

Sometimes “enough” or even less is all we need, since “more” too often equates to more stress, more problems, and more responsibilities in both life and business.

Tom has been able to create a stable, long-term business that’s small enough to handle any economic climate, resilient enough to not have to lean too heavily on a single project or client, and autonomous enough to let him build a life around his work (not the other way around).

A company of one is simply a business that questions growth. A company of one resists and questions some forms of traditional growth, not on principle, but because growth isn’t always the most beneficial or financially viable move. It can be a small business owner or a small group of founders. Employees, executive leaders, board members, and corporate leaders who want to work with more autonomy and self-sufficiency can adopt the principles of a company of one as well. In fact, if big businesses want to keep their brightest minds in their employ, they should look to adopt some of the principles of companies of one.

I’ve personally seen the most success in my life when I’ve figured out solutions to problems without having to do what traditional businesses do to solve problems—hire more people, throw more money at the problem, or build complex infrastructures to support the extra employees. Basically, I’m not interested in addressing problems by throwing “more” at them. Solving with “more” means more complexity, more costs, more responsibilities, and typically more expenses. More is generally the easiest answer, but not the smartest. I’ve found both delight and financial benefits in working out solutions to problems without growing. Instead, I and many others enjoy handling problems with the resources currently available. Although it can require a little more ingenuity, solving problems this way can set a business up for long-term stability, since less is needed to keep it afloat.

No one else cares about you keeping your job as much as you do.

In a recent study, Vijay Govindarajan, a professor at Dartmouth, found that for every 5,000 employees, at least 250 will be true innovators and 25 will be innovators and great intrapreneurs (or companies of one) as well.

If you’re a company of one, your mind-set is to build your business around your life, not the other way around.

As much as I enjoy growing my wealth, I also realize that there’s a point of diminishing returns if I don’t also take care of myself and my well-being.

Society has ingrained in us a very particular idea of what success in business looks like. You work as many hours as possible, and when your business starts to do well, you scale everything up in every direction. To this day, this strategy is considered what it takes to be a success in business—solving problems by adding “more” to the solution. Anyone who stays small, in this line of thinking, hasn’t done well enough to add “more” to the mix. But what if we challenge this way of thinking in business? What if staying small is what a company does when it’s figured out how to solve problems without adding “more” to them?

A company of one questions growth first, and then resists it if there’s a better, smarter way forward. Next, let’s look at the four typical traits of all companies of one: resilience, autonomy, speed, and simplicity.

Being or becoming a company of one has a lot to do with resilience: the capacity and fortitude to recover quickly from difficulties—like a changing job market, or being fired.

the level of resilience a person exhibits determines their success in business, far more than their level of education, training, or experience.

The first trait that resilient people have is an acceptance of reality.

However crass it might sound to an outsider, dark humor helps first responders and firefighters accept their reality and therefore keeps them resilient in doing their essential work.

The second characteristic of resilient people is a sense of purpose—being motivated by a sense of meaning rather than by just money.

Companies of one know that they can enjoy their work without always enjoying every aspect of it. So, even if work is sometimes stressful, as long as it relates to a greater whole or a greater end result, that tough work is worth it in the end.

The last trait of resilient people in a company of one is the ability to adapt when things change—because they invariably do.

Improvising when change happens or when difficulties arise in the market allows you to make do with what’s at hand, without having to add “more” into the mix—as in, more employees, more expenses, or more infrastructure.

Companies of one are becoming more popular because people want more control and autonomy in their lives, especially when it comes to their careers. This is why so many people are choosing this path: being a company of one lets you control your own life and your job.

But to achieve autonomy as a company of one, you have to be a master at your core skill set. Competence and autonomy are tied together because the opposite—having complete control but not a clue what you’re doing—is a recipe for disaster.

you have to have a skill set, or a combination of skills, that’s in demand. With a well-developed skill set, you’ll know what areas will benefit from growth and what potential places for growth don’t make sense.

Basically, you have to be good at your skill set before you can expect to achieve autonomy from using it.

Corporations that excel at creating autonomy for their best employees often empower them to become something like companies of one: these employees work faster and more ingeniously, and they use fewer resources.

Often when you start working for yourself you trade micromanaging bosses for micromanaging clients.

freelancing now accounts for more than one-third of jobs in America.

Freelancing makes up almost half the jobs being done by younger people, who are choosing to freelance in hopes of gaining more control over their career path. As a society, we’re gradually starting to view “work” not as a single place of employment, but as a series of engagements or projects. The millennial generation in particular views the traditional aspiration to a corporate job in an office as something like a satirical sitcom, à la The Office, than something they wish to strive for.

But bear this in mind: achieving control over a company of one requires more than just using the core skill you are hired for. It also requires proficiency at sales, marketing, project management, and client retention. Whereas most normal corporate workers can be hyperfocused on a single skill, companies of one, even within a larger business, need to be generalists who are good at several things—often all at once.

Companies of one work best under constraints—because that’s where creativity and ingenuity thrive.

Companies of one question their systems, processes, and structure to become more efficient and to achieve more with the same number of employees and fewer hours of work.

Speed is not merely about frantically working faster. It’s about figuring out the best way to accomplish a task with new and efficient methods.

So speed works to the advantage of companies of one not only because they’re able to pivot when needed, and far faster, but also because they have less of the corporate mass that often gets in the way.

The fewer staff and less external funding involved, the faster a company can move, whether forward or in a new, more promising direction.

Typically, as companies gain success or traction, they grow by taking on additional complexities. These complexities can often detract from a business’s original or primary focus, resulting in more costs and the investment of more time and money. For a company of one at any size, simple rules, simple processes, and simple solutions typically win.

By contrast, growth for a company of one can mean simplifying rules and processes, which frees up time to take on either more work or more clients, because tasks can be finished faster. With this goal in mind, companies of one routinely question everything they do. Is this process efficient enough? What steps can be removed and the end result will be the same or better? Is this rule helping or hindering our business?

In reality, it’s usually possible to start a business—especially the freelance or startup kind—just by finding and then helping a single paying customer. Then doing it again, and again. And only adding new items or processes to the mix when they’re absolutely required.

Begin to Think About: Whether growth is truly beneficial to your business How you could solve business problems without just adding “more” Whether you really need funding or venture capital for your idea, or are simply thinking too big to start

Sean feels that his job as a business owner is not to endlessly increase profits, or even to defeat the competition, but instead to create better and better products and services that his customers benefit from in their lives and work. Implementation, he’s found, is the key to retaining his customers and persuading them to keep buying—that is, if they’re using what he makes, they see successes in their own business and then keep buying more from him.

Too often businesses forget about their current audience—the people who are already listening, buying, and engaging. These should be the most important people to your business—far more so than anyone you wish you were reaching. Whether your audience is ten people, a hundred people, or even a thousand people, if you’re not doing right by them, right now, nothing you do regarding growth or marketing will make a lick of difference. Make sure you’re listening to, communicating with, and helping the people who are already paying attention to you.

A study done by the Startup Genome Project, which analyzed more than 3,200 high-growth tech startups, found that 74 percent of those businesses failed, not because of competition or bad business plans, but because they scaled up too quickly. Growth, as a primary focus, is not only a bad business strategy, but an entirely harmful one. In failing—as defined in the study—these high-growth startups had massive layoffs, closed shop completely, or sold off their business for pennies on the dollar. Putting growth over profit as a strategy, however trendy as business advice, was their downfall.

The Kauffman Foundation study also illustrated that almost 86 percent of companies that succeeded in the long term did not take VC money. Why? Because a company’s interests may not always align with the interests of its backers.

Graham notes that sudden and large investments tend to turn companies into “armies of employees who sit around having meetings.”

When businesses require endless growth to turn a profit, it can be difficult to keep up with increasingly higher targets. Whereas, if a business turns a good profit at its current size, then growth can be a choice, made when it makes sense to succeed, and not a requirement for success.

For companies of one, the question is always what can I do to make my business better?, instead of what can I do to grow my business larger?

Importante

Often, in the pursuit of growth, companies or founders have to battle what Danielle LaPorte refers to as “the Beast.” A company focused on growth often puts into place complicated systems to handle exponential volume and scale, which require more resources (human and financial) to manage, which then require more complex systems to manage the increased resources, and so on and so on.

Buddhists call the Beast the “hungry ghost”—a pitiable creature with an insatiable appetite. There is never enough for the hungry ghost, so it’s always looking for more. In business, the hungry ghost is the quest for more growth, more profit, more followers, more likes.

Of course, economies of scale can sometimes be required for success in certain markets and for some products, but often they aren’t required and it is ego, not a strong business strategy, that is forcing growth where growth isn’t necessary.

When you feel like you have to start out competing with the largest player in the market, you end up chasing your competitor’s growth instead of bettering your own offering. Sometimes finding and working with a single customer, then adding another, and then another, is a very useful and solid way to begin. And sometimes that can even be the end goal—one where your focus is on the relationship and the paid work at hand. Sometimes the best plan is focused on your current customers’ success, not on chasing leads and growth.

Pat Riley, the Hall of Fame basketball coach who led five teams to the NBA championship, coined the term “the disease of more.” He noticed time and time again that winning players, just like some startups, focused on more instead of better. Once they won, they’d let their own ego get in the way of all the tasks that had helped them win in the first place—like practice and focus—and instead become lured into more endorsements, more accolades, and more media attention. As a result, they ultimately lost to internal forces, not to competitors.

When you focus on doing business and serving customers in better and better ways, your company of one can end up profiting more from the same amount of work because you can raise the prices until your demand flattens out to where you can handle it.

Importante

There’s nothing wrong with finding the right size and then focusing on being better. Small can be a long-term plan, not just a stepping-stone.

Because technology makes it easy to work from anywhere, on any computer, less spending on overhead (like offices and the things that come with offices) is required.

For example, I can run a 30,000-person mailing list that generates the bulk of my income by spending approximately an hour a week on it. I can create a document that’s both editable and shareable around the world for free with Google Documents or share any file, of any size, using a service like Dropbox. I can replace an entire IT department with one on-contract systems administrator in Berlin who works one to two hours a month for me, and I can learn everything I need to know about the visitors to the websites that run my business with free analytics software. Technology has made it easy to do what used to cost thousands or require a team of people. The new reality of business makes it easier than ever to be a company of one and not have massive growth as an end goal.

Just as the traditional way of doing business is changing, the outdated, fear-ridden assumption that entrepreneurialism is a hazardous venture needs to change as well. In today’s world, there is no longer the single track to security of going to school, getting a degree, and finding and keeping a job until retirement. Jobs and career tracks are no longer as secure as they were decades ago. Quite simply, the days of throwing retirement parties for employees of fifty years and sending them off with a gold watch and a great pension are long gone.

The Census Bureau data shows that each year it becomes easier and less risky to work for yourself and still make a decent living. You can outsource or hire freelancers to cover tasks that were traditionally done by an employee. And unlike a corporation, you, as the boss, can’t be downsized or hit a gender-based glass ceiling. As long as you’re doing great work that’s in demand, working for yourself has no limits—or, as we’ll see next, only smart upper limits that you put in place yourself.

What if we set upper limits to our goals instead? For instance, “I want to make at least $1 mi ll i o n t hi s q u a r t er, b u t n o t m ore t han$ 1.4 million,” or, “We need to grow our list by 2,000 people per day, but not more than 2,200”?

But now, in modern society, having goals that grow and grow without limit can often be problematic. Most of us don’t have to worry about food or protection, but we’re still wired to want to collect more and more without end. This mind-set carries over to the businesses we create and run as well.

Envy is hard to manage, as it’s a socially unacceptable emotion, even though it’s something most people feel. Envy also takes the focus off your work, your business, and your customers. When we give in to envious feelings, the best we can hope for is second best, since we’re focused on copying someone else’s path and not forging our own.

In an ancient language from India called Pali, there’s a term, “mudita,” which seems like the opposite of envy, because it means “to delight in the good fortunes or the accomplishments of others.” (Interestingly, it has no counterpart in English.)

Begin to Think About: Whether you are paying attention to your existing customers or to just your potential customers Whether you could make your business better (however you define that) instead of just making it bigger Whether your business really needs scale to succeed Where the upper bound to that scale might be, the place where profit and enjoyment have diminishing returns How you could turn envy of others into enjoying their successes and learning from them

Importante

Another quality that helps is setting extremely high goals—for yourself and for others. Gandhi, in his famous “Quit India” speech, inspired an entire nation to liberate themselves from British rule without using violence. Katsuhiko Machida, the former CEO of Sharp, energized his employees in 1999, when their business faced collapse, by telling them the unthinkable: that all CRT televisions (those massive, clunky, deep boxes that TVs used to be) would have to be replaced by much thinner LCD models by 2005 to meet consumer demands. But setting these almost outrageous goals and expectations was not enough; they had to be accompanied by the confidence that they could be achieved. Gandhi did this through countless examples of peaceful protest, and Machida did it by convincing his engineering team that they could achieve this goal and that he trusted them to do so, and by giving them the resources to realize it.

Importante

Regent University found that a desire to be of service to others and to empower them to grow is a key factor in becoming a leader and retaining leadership. So-called servant leadership, dating back to ancient philosophy and the Tao Te Ching, adheres to the belief that a company’s goals are best achieved by helping workers or customers achieve their goals. Such leaders do not seek attention but rather want to shine a light on others’ wins and achievements. Servant leadership requires humility, but that humility ultimately pays off. Companies of one recognize that elevating others elevates the entire team or business.

Companies of one are sometimes quiet people who are internally motivated to make a difference in the world without shouting.

Importante

Since my practically nonexistent ability to lead could easily be a detriment to my company of one, I only work with freelancers and contractors who don’t require management of any kind. They’re A-players who know exactly how to get their work done. I simply need to provide them with the parameters and let them do their work. I give the people I hire full autonomy to do their jobs so I can do mine, with no need for meetings, or check-ins, or management. I ask them to let me know if a problem comes up; if I don’t hear from them, I assume that their silence means they’re accomplishing their tasks. I let my perceived shortcomings, like being awkward or bad at managing others, work for my business, not against it. My leadership style may require that I spend more when I hire (A-players come at a premium), but their work is always worth it and nets a positive return for my business.

A leader of a company of one has the role of enabling autonomy while providing alignment-setting processes and making sure there are common goals. Achieving this delicate balance can be challenging.

In effect, hiring more people ended up not being the solution; instead, introducing more processes and structure helped fewer people accomplish more—while allowing them the autonomy to solve problems in their own way, using a common tool set.

A leader’s job is to provide clear direction and then get out of the way. Even companies of one require direction and set processes—it’s this common constraint that allows creativity to thrive and goals to be met. This alignment has to be carefully orchestrated, not as binary autonomous/non-autonomous decisions, but as a balance between guidance and trust. Provide too much guidance and a team will start to rely on it and leadership will become a bottleneck for decision-making. Provide too little and things devolve into anarchy. The middle ground is where high-performing teams excel, providing the most benefit to a company and delivering the most innovative and amazing results.

Even a company without employees still requires constraints. In serving clients with very specific deliverable requirements as well as customers who need your product to perform in a precise way, the more you can lean on processes, systems, and reusable building blocks (from code to marketing language to visuals) in your leadership, the better and faster you’ll be with your work and the less you’ll require in terms of hours worked or people hired, even as you gain more in terms of revenue, finished processes, and paid customers.

As a good generalist, you’ll usually start with a specialization and then add auxiliary and complementary skills as needed, until you’re able to understand all or most aspects of the business as a whole, not just one specific job within it. This is especially true when you work for yourself: you’ve got to know the skill you use to get paid or build the products you sell, but you also need to have a thorough understanding of key facets like marketing, bookkeeping, and sales.

In business, conditions are, of course, never perfect. In fact, they’re typically less than ideal, with changing markets, differing trends, and consumer demand often flip-flopping.

Miles Kington, a British journalist, reportedly said that “knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.” We should never assume that having an abundance of knowledge is the same as having an abundance of wisdom.

more isn’t better—better is better.

When hustling turns sleeplessness into a badge of honor and work demands push health, family, and friends to the back burner, it’s definitely time to take a break.

Importante

He believes that companies need to stop hustling and should encourage their employees to focus on accepting that there’s life outside of work, that there’s real usefulness to sleep and recuperation, and that their work habits should be much calmer.

Do we really need to push our workers and ourselves to work longer hours to see better results? Or do we just need to get better at working the same amount or less?

But to stay a company of one and stick to the definition of success you’ve set for yourself and your leadership, you will have to turn down opportunities that aren’t a good fit. Companies of one need to be relentless in what they say no to, since plans, tasks, distractions, meetings, and emails, though they may all seem productive to a team at first, can become counterproductive quickly if not well managed. In saying no to anything that doesn’t fit, you leave room to say yes to those rare opportunities that do fit—opportunities that align with the values and ideas of your business.

Rand’s first insight is that self-awareness is an absolute requirement. By fostering the ability to notice things about yourself—your own depression, for example—you can remove or put into remission the so-called power tumor. The more you get to know yourself, what your triggers are, and what personally drives you outside of external motivation, the more you can optimize a healthy role for yourself as a leader.

The problem is that a leader who stops feeling what is either motivating or demotivating within their team stops being able to lead.

Finally, leaders need to practice gratitude. Adam Grant of Wharton found that when people take the time to thank their contractors, employees, and coworkers, they become much more engaged and productive.

Keltner’s research illustrates that even in professional sports, players who show their appreciation through behavior like bear hugs and fist bumps with other players inspire their teammates to play better and win nearly two more games per season (which is sometimes the difference between making the playoffs or not).

So, by remaining self-aware, being open about our personal successes and failures in equal measure, empathizing with the people we work with, and expressing appreciation for them, we can work toward a cure for the “power tumors” of leadership. The glorification of indefatigable leaders is exactly the source of most problems, because their failures and flaws are ignored instead of debugged and learned from.

Begin to Think About: Where you could strike a balance between autonomy and guidance What areas you could learn more about that would benefit your business and make you a more well-rounded generalist Steps you could take to strike a balance between hustlin’ and recuperation

Most companies grow for four reasons: inflation, investors, churn, and ego. By examining each, we can be ready for the decisions we’ll have to make and better able to prevent social or business pressure from swaying us into doing something we don’t want to do or something that isn’t right for our business.

So inflation always happens, and if a business can’t keep up, its profits will shrink. The simple solution is to raise your rates each year to keep up and then invest any extra profit in those places that pay out higher than inflation (in other words, don’t keep the bulk of your business profits in a bank account that earns 0.001 percent interest).

you’re able to start small—with little to no upfront investments—you can focus on running your business and making it better for the customers you serve instead of being constantly aware of the need to be “paid back” for what you put in.

As discussed briefly earlier, churn is what happens when existing customers decide they don’t want to be customers anymore. So the revenue they generated needs to be replaced with revenue from new customers. If your churn is higher than your user acquisition rate, then you’re in a downward spiral.

adding a new customer costs five times as much as keeping an existing one. So while prioritizing acquisition over retention can aid growth, it’s also extremely expensive. The same study found that companies are still much more likely to put their efforts into finding new customers than keeping existing ones.

As Gary Sutton, author of Corporate Canaries, says, “You can’t sell your way out of an unprofitable business.” So starting your own company of one with a focus on profitability right from the start, when you’re at your leanest, is imperative. Your measuring stick for success doesn’t have to be growth as a one-dimensional metric; it can be something more personal and focused on your specific company of one—like the quality of what you sell, employee happiness, customer happiness and retention, or even some greater purpose.

To start a company of one, you should first figure out the smallest version of your idea and then a way to make it happen quickly. Automation can happen later. Scale, if desired, can happen later. Infrastructure and process can happen later. Focus on where you can test the waters without a massive investment of time or money, and then pay attention to what happens when casual contacts turn into customers, even if it’s only a handful at first. Why did they buy? What motivated them to do so? How can I keep them happy? And most important: How can I help them succeed?

To emphasize that last point, customers really don’t care if you’re profitable. But if what you sell them can help them become profitable, they’ll never want to leave your business. They’ll stay on as customers and then probably tell others to become your customers too.

Importante

Customer success is the cornerstone of a profitable company of one.

People often feel like they have to move away from obscurity in their new business as quickly as possible. While obscurity can equal less exposure to potential customers at the outset, starting out small and without a massive audience is perfect because it enables you to gain experience and play with your business ideas. Not to mention that there aren’t many people watching if you fall flat on your face. Starting out small is the best time to learn what your business truly is and why it serves who it serves. There’s no need to rush to be noticed faster than you can handle.

We often think that we need to have everything in place—all the systems, all the automations, all the processes—to be ready to launch a digital product. We want everything all polished and perfect before we hit “publish.” But most of the time this doesn’t happen. Most of the time, in fact, waiting until everything is totally perfect can only hurt or delay your launch.

In short, start small. Start with just the smallest version of your idea and a way to make it happen. Instead of waiting (sometimes for years) for bigger wins to happen, you can use small wins to propel you. That’s actually a much smarter way to launch. Easing up on the “growth equals success” mentality opens you up to starting and becoming more profitable much sooner.

Even a business that doesn’t want to grow much needs to constantly learn, adapt, and refine.

There’s a real difference between growth as a goal and growth as a direct result of profit from sales of a valuable product. Letting growth as a goal guide your company’s decisions can be shortsighted or result in high churn. Whereas if your decisions are guided by growth resulting from profit, you stay focused on how you can continue to make things better for your customers—with better products, better experiences, better support, and increased success for them. This is growth that stems from doing things correctly, not from making growth your top priority and just hoping you do everything right.

Importante

In many large companies, as your career grows, you’re promoted out of doing work with your core skill set and into managing other people with that same skill set. Since these companies operate as pyramidal hierarchies, advancement brings increasing influence over more and more people. This can only happen if a company continually hires more staff, since there need to be people to manage as others get promoted.

Buffer’s goal in organizing the company this way is to illustrate that there’s no ceiling for rising: employees who don’t want to outgrow their jobs don’t have to. An employee who loves programming for Android can simply acquire more and more Android-related ownership and decision-making abilities. Other employees may choose to grow to manage Android projects, or to become people managers. Buffer employees never have to choose between stagnation and leading people—they can choose to go deeper into their area of expertise or go wider by building a name for themselves outside the company in their area of expertise (which is then rewarded). This is exactly how you grow within a large company of one or how a large organization can operate more like a company of one.

Importante

Begin to Think About: How you could prioritize your existing customers or transform them into repeat customers The smallest version of your business idea that you could start with now, with little to no investment How you want to grow as a business, or as an employee who doesn’t require transitioning into work you don’t actually want to do

How you think about work is important to how work gets done.

Your purpose is the lens through which you filter all your business decisions, from the tiny to the monumental. We’re talking about who you work with, what you offer, where you focus your time and energy, and even how you define your audience.

After all, doing business boils down to serving others in a mutually beneficial way.

Virgin founder Richard Branson summed up purpose nicely: “Success in business is no longer just about making money or moving up the corporate ladder. More and more, one of the biggest indicators of success is purpose.”

John Kotter and James Heskett report in their book Corporate Culture and Performance that purpose-based, values-driven companies outperform their counterparts in stock price by a factor of twelve. They have found that, without a purpose, management has a harder time rallying employees to increase productivity and customers have a harder time connecting to the company. Their decade-long research shows that purpose creates positive outcomes far greater than the sum of its parts.

Whether you’re a Fortune 500 CEO or a freelancer, your purpose is what drives you to succeed and defines what success is. It’s not so much what you do as how and why you do it. Your purpose is your values put into action.

Defining your purpose has more to do with your personal values and ethics than with business plans or marketing strategies. You can’t fake your purpose. Your gut and your customers simply won’t let you. And really, why would you want to? You’ll get so much more enjoyment and satisfaction from running your business in alignment with your purpose. If you don’t feel a deep connection to your purpose, no one else will feel it either.

A well-integrated, shared purpose lets a company of one set its true direction, leading to easier decision-making, higher retention of team members, and greater connection to customers.

While purpose is based on a core set of values held by a company or even a business owner and shared with customers, passion is simply a whim based on what we think we enjoy doing. The tired business advice that we should all “follow our passion” implies that we are entitled to getting paid to do work that is always enjoyable.

“Follow your passion” is irresponsible business advice.

it’s more important to focus on solving problems than on passion.

Engaging work comprises four key components: clearly defined assignments, tasks you excel at, performance feedback, and work autonomy.

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It’s far easier to simply work at getting really good at something in demand, discovering how those skills can be applied to something else, and then testing your idea in a small way to see if it will pay.

The problem is that most of the subjects felt entitled to meaningful and adventurous work, but no obligation to put in the time and effort to master the skill set required. Just as autonomy is achieved through mastery of skills and ownership of an ability to solve problems, so too is passion. Passion doesn’t precede mastery, but follows it.

Entitled business owners and workers have a hard time adapting to challenging situations, which is the opposite of the company-of-one trait of resilience.

Passion isn’t the catalyst that creates success, but more often what develops after success is achieved. Taking action and doing work, as a first step, create momentum, and this momentum happens when you’re caught up in—and enjoying—the process of your work, not its possible outcomes. The gist is this: you can pursue any passion you want, but you shouldn’t feel entitled to make money off it. Passion in work comes from first crafting a valuable skill set and mastering your work. This is great news, because it means you no longer have to beat yourself up for not finding your true, hidden passions. Instead, you can simply get to work.

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Just as growth in revenue and employees should be questioned as to whether or not it will make things better or simply bigger, we must also question the idea that a busier life, with a packed schedule, is a better life.

Opportunities are just obligations wearing an appealing mask. There might be a positive outcome to seizing them, but they always come at a cost—in terms of time, attention, or resources. No matter how hard you try, you can’t scale the amount of time in your day. And since you can’t somehow buy more hours, you need to find ways to use those hours better.

Working on a high-functioning team, you’re naturally playing off other members to accomplish your piece of a project, and that keeps you wanting to move things forward by focusing on your part. When you are a company of one without a team or employees, you have to generate your own momentum and motivation to get work done. It’s up to you to set your schedule, manage obligations, and avoid distractions.

Fewer distractions means speedier work.

To manage yourself within a larger team, you have to become adept at articulating your workload to other people.

Since most of us aren’t even aware of how much time daily job maintenance takes up, Glei suggests doing a productivity audit once or twice a year: for a week or two, record what tasks you’re working on, for how long, and where the big distractions lie. With this record, you can reapportion your time more appropriately or even create a “stop doing” list—such as stay off social media, forgo daily meetings, or be available on a chat for one hour instead of eight.

As a company of one, it’s easy to mentally beat yourself up for not accomplishing enough during a day. But how often do you take into account how rare it is, between doing your core work and managing your business, to have a full day, every day, to sit and work without interruptions? You may be failing to realize how much of your schedule is taken up with maintenance work or communication.

To combat this, I take several months off from interviews, calls, and meetings each year to create new products or write books without interruption. Being engaged in deep and focused work, because I’ve cut myself off from communication and availability to others, creates efficiency. Also, batching similar tasks allows me to do more work in less time. For example, I don’t communicate with others—no meetings, calls, interviews, or social media—on Mondays and Fridays so I can write (words or code); I do most of my calls on Thursdays. In this way, I don’t feel bad if all I do on a Thursday is meetings and interviews, because that’s my singular focus for that day. I also rarely work for more than an hour on weekends, so I can recharge and enjoy a life outside of work.

Just as company growth should be questioned, so too should a busy schedule. How many opportunities do we really need to say yes to? Often, piling on work to get ahead comes at the price of our health, our relationships, and even our productivity. Perhaps we need to determine what “enough” is for our particular schedule and then ruthlessly stick to and defend that.

Begin to Think About: The true purpose of your business and whether it shows up in your actions (not just in your marketing material) What you are skilled at that is already in demand and where else that skill could be leveraged Where you could test your leap into something in a small way first How you could align your day/schedule to be focused on single-tasking

What changed? My personality didn’t. I’m still an awkward and excitable nerd, just like I was in high school. What did change was that I gradually became okay with sharing who I am and using my differences strategically. Once who I am became part of how I marketed and sold, more people started to respond to that. Not everyone, of course, but enough people started paying attention to my work and became customers. They liked that I was an awkward geek. They trusted me because of my personality, since a lot of them were awkward and excitable nerds too.

Personality—the authentic you that traditional business has taught you to suppress under the guise of “professionalism”—can be your biggest edge over the competition when you’re a company of one. What’s even better is that while skills and expertise can be replicated, it’s damn near impossible to replicate someone’s personality and style. Especially in a company of one, where you aren’t the largest player in your niche and probably not the cheapest, using your quirks and standing for something can be exactly how and why you gain customers’ attention.

If you don’t think about the personality of your business, your audience will assign one to you—because people relate to other people, and your audience wants to relate to your brand when they see it.

As a company of one, your brand should very much represent some distinct aspect of yourself, while taking into account whom you’re trying to reach.

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What do you want your brand to exude? Toughness? Sophistication? Excitement? Sincerity? Luxury? Competence?

Rand Fishkin says that newly formed companies tend to inherit the personality of their founders internally, and then externally. So personality even creates and affects company culture.

Brand personality needs to foster a two-sided relationship—one focused on not just how your businesses can benefit or gain something from others, but on how others can benefit from having a relationship with your business.

The new “attention-as-currency” may stem from how the world has changed since the industrial revolution, which had led to sellers making all the rules. Now buyers dictate what they want, how they want it, and when. And if they aren’t happy with one seller, they simply take to the internet and post their dissatisfaction, sometimes with reach greater than the seller’s.

As we’ll also see in Chapter 10, attention can be instantly lost when trust is broken.

Sally contends that the key is to unlearn being boring. That is, you need to learn how to elicit a strong emotional response to your business, and the personality of your brand, because while it’s easy to forget or lose interest in information, it’s much harder to forget strong emotion. You can do this by allowing your business to have some aspect of your own innate personality or quirks. Fascination in a product or service builds an emotional connection, and emotional connections hold attention.

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Fascination is the response when you take what makes you interesting, unique, quirky, and different and communicate it. When you start to understand how the world sees your business, you can amplify that understanding by featuring the specific traits that make you, you. When you own and harness aspects of your personality strategically, you can use them as a competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace—like an artisanal bucket of pistachio ice cream that people will gladly pay $25 f or (in s t e a d o f g o in g w i t h t h e$ 4 tub of vanilla).

Don’t just ask consumers to pay attention to your business. Instead, start doing the kinds of unique and unusual things that attract attention in order to make your business distinct.

The best marketing is never just about selling a product or service, but about taking a stand—showing an audience why they should believe in what you’re marketing enough to want it at any cost, simply because they agree with what you’re doing. Products can be changed or adjusted if they aren’t functioning, but rallying points align with the values and meaning behind what you do. These bold statements are impossible to ignore and make clear that your work is more than the work, that you have a serious reason for doing it in the first place.

Importante marketing

Derek Sivers, the former CEO of CDBaby, says that we should proudly exclude people, because we can’t please everyone.

It’s like creating messaging for pistachio ice cream lovers while poking fun at boring vanilla.

If we try to appeal to everyone, we won’t appeal to anyone in particular, muddying our message. Creating indifference or simply being another boring small company in a crowded marketplace just won’t serve you well as a company of one.

Kawasaki believes, we should create products that make specifically identified groups of people very happy and ignore everyone else. The worst-case scenario is inciting no passionate reactions from anyone—no one caring enough about a product to talk about it at all, either positively or negatively.

To be a polarizing company of one, you can look to three strategies. The first is placation: trying to change the minds of the so-called haters, those individuals who don’t like your product.

The second strategy is prodding: by intentionally antagonizing haters, you may sway neutral customers into becoming supporters if they agree with your polarizing stance.

Finally, the third strategy is amplification: singling out a characteristic and leaning heavily on it.

Memorable stories are often driven by a protagonist fighting against an antagonist, giving the audience someone to root for and to root against. After all, there’s no Star Wars without Darth Vader. The same can occur in business: since our brains are wired for relating to and remembering good stories and epic struggles, a company that isn’t telling a compelling story can devolve into boring and forgettable vanilla ice cream.

As a small business or one that isn’t aiming to grow rapidly, you can use polarization to provide an avenue for reaching your potential audience—without massive advertising spends or paid user acquisition—by getting people talking.

The bottom line is that I’m happy that my audience, in effect, vets itself. That way I can focus more time and energy on my paying and vetted potential customers.

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. Polarization can shorten a sales cycle because it forces customers into a quicker binary choice, to decided yes or no. After all, it’s hard to make money from maybes.

To build and maintain your company of one, the sooner you learn how to distinguish your company’s profile in a positive way, the sooner you will be able to find your precise audience and sustain your business. You need to be more aware of who you are and then strategically highlight the innate and unique aspects of your personality to ensure that your business keeps and holds the attention of your customers.

Begin to Think About: How you could infuse your own distinct and unique personality into your products and company image Where you could lean on what makes your business or product quirky or different to garner attention in the market

It’s a great feeling when an employee or business owner goes out of their way to be helpful. There’s something quite memorable about a personal touch, or a business taking ownership of a problem and going out of its way to fix it.

There’s overwhelming evidence that treating customers well, as if they’re your one and only customer, drives value to your bottom line. In short, helping your customers succeed and providing amazing service are good for business.

acquiring new customers costs far more than renewing customers (6 to 7 percent more, according to the White House study just cited). Making renewals is often a far more important metric to measure, but they won’t happen unless your customers are loyal enough to want to renew.

Being a profit-focused company of one (fewer expenses increase revenue just as much as more profits do), you can forgo vapid user expansion at any price and concentrate instead on retaining, pleasing, and helping your customers. In the long run, this approach costs far less and aids your company far more.

A company of one has one massive asset when it comes to customer service: it can be delivered in a way that doesn’t scale.

Relationships, when the company is smaller, can be built with regular and loyal customers, and those personal relationships can keep them loyal and happy.

Customer service is a huge differentiating factor in why people choose the places where they want to spend their money. If you serve your customers well, they in turn become brand evangelists for your company: basically an unpaid sales force that reduces your need to hire more staff.

This second wave of customer service bets that providing a positive emotional experience for each customer will create more wins and higher profits. If you treat your customers like they’re your one and only customer, they’ll reciprocate that love for your brand by not only continuing to do business with you, but telling their own networks to do so as well. Instead of treating customer service like a cost or expense, you can view it as an investment in retention and acquisition, because you’re essentially building a customer sales force through your support staff.

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If customer happiness is the goal of customer service, your support center can become the main source of referrals. Referrals are a powerful way to gain new customers—research

You don’t get referrals by just meeting the standard expectations of customer service—people rarely find it worth mentioning to others that a company did just enough to help them but nothing more. You have to do much more than that to evangelize customers if you want them to talk about your company favorably.

Referrals work because they build trust by proxy. A referral is credible because someone you trust is telling you that they trust a certain company or product. And since you trust the person telling you, that sense of trust is instant and immediate with the company or product as well.

In other words, when your customers win, you do too. In truth, your customers don’t care if your business is profitable—but if you help them become profitable too, they’ll never leave you.

Helping your customers as individuals requires as much empathy and care as it does to sell whatever it is you’re offering them. You have to be able to understand your customers and their needs to serve them effectively.

The more you understand your customers—their needs, wants, motivations, and desires—the more you can feel with them and the better you can serve them. This kind of customer service is more than just the lip-service corporate speak of “you matter to us.” This is customer service that takes specific actions and puts strategies into place that begin with listening and move toward understanding.

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.

Like the pizza delivery story, this story captivates us because it reminds us that some companies are less interested in “business as usual” and their bottom line than in keeping customers happy and taking care of them as fellow human beings.

In short, customer happiness is the new marketing. If your customers feel that you are taking care of them, then they’ll stick around and they’ll tell others. This is the precise way in which companies of one can compete with behemoths in their market—by outsupporting them. It’s much harder to compete with bigger companies on aspects like volume, low prices, or logistics.

In fact, Customer Success—devoted to providing training, implementation assistance, best-practice recommendations, and ongoing support—is the company’s largest department.

Cindy Carson, the director of Customer Success at UserIQ, believes that the most successful customers are those who start off on the right footing, with tailored onboarding processes. Her team even looks at each customer’s user case for their software to fully understand how UserIQ can benefit them the most; then they provide segmented training that highlights the specifics that will help each customer gain wins.

Focusing on customer success is a mentality and a way of doing business for a company of one that encompasses all aspects of a business. It begins before a product is even created, with planning to make sure everything is done correctly and is of the best quality. This way of doing business includes customer education (which we’ll talk about in Chapter 9) to improve their skill set and foster their success.

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Finally, to be the most helpful to your customers, you sometimes have to look beyond the problems they’re presenting to you. The underlying reason customers are asking for help is often not obvious: sometimes they’re looking for specific answers, but sometimes they’re asking for a certain feature without even being aware that’s what they’re doing.

If your business has been treating customers empathetically, they’ll tend to be more understanding when things go wrong—but only if you immediately work to fix or resolve issues.

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The first step is apologizing like a real, empathetic human, not a corporate PR-sounding robot. Customers don’t expect perfect—they just expect problems to be dealt with fairly, empathetically, and quickly.

Companies of one need to turn complaints into opportunities to do better and use them to attempt to build closer relationships with the customers who stick around.

says that maintaining good business relationships with customers doesn’t require superhuman efforts. Rather, you simply need to do what you say you’ll do and customers will be grateful.

As a company of one, you have to be very careful in what you tell your customers, or even potential customers, because your word is your social contract with them. It doesn’t do you any good to overpromise the effectiveness of your products or pitch false information, even unintentionally. In these days when almost all information is available online, you need to be clear about what your business does and how you do it.

The first strategy is to make fewer and better commitments to customers. A business that believes it should “underpromise and overdeliver” sometimes fails to even simply deliver on par with expectations. Next, a company that isn’t tracking its commitments—for example, through support system software or by noting promises from leadership—can easily forget what the original promise was. Finally, having actual processes in place to meet these commitments is required; assuming that such processes won’t be relevant until sometime in the future will only lead to broken promises. By focusing on these three strategies, companies can learn how to better keep promises to their customers. The best approach is to treat every agreement with a customer (or even an employee) as a legally binding contract because, on a societal level, that’s what it is. If you promise to give someone something at a certain time, then do it, and do it on time. Whether it’s a quote or a deliverable or a customer service response doesn’t matter. If you aren’t sure whether you can deliver, either say that you can’t deliver or negotiate for a longer delivery time so that you can be sure you will.

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.

Begin to Think About: What you could do to ensure that your existing customers feel both happy and acknowledged Where you could exceed expectations with your customer service How you could create opportunities for word of mouth and referrals How you own and then fix mistakes What you could do to ensure that your customers end up with wins

If the point of a company of one is to question growth and challenge scale, the answer might sometimes be that growth is in fact required—when it aligns with your overall purpose. When growth in profit, customers, or reach is needed, however, companies of one can look to simple and repeatable systems to facilitate scale, with no need for more employees or resources.

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.

Using personalization and segmentation in connection channels like email is key. You want to send the right email, to the right person, at the right time. Otherwise, you may be sending out a firehose blast of messages that may not even be relevant—like a sales pitch to a customer who’s already purchased the product.

Newsletter automation can also be used to increase customer education and retention at scale. Automated emails sent to people immediately after purchase can show these customers how to best use the product they purchased or answer common customer questions, greatly reducing customer support requests. Automated updates and notes and even simple check-ins with customers after a set amount of time can also increase the likelihood that customers will keep using the product, as well as the likelihood that they’ll tell others about their purchase (for instance, via social media sharing buttons within the emails).

SaaS is becoming more prevalent, and so too are the tools that allow us to spend less time on the minutiae of operating a company of one and more time on our core work, all while helping us scale our reach or profit with no need to also scale our time, staff, or expenses.

Real-time collaboration can be very useful when a whole team is required to brainstorm or solve a problem together, but it can also be completely distracting if it’s expected most of the time.

Elsewhere in this chapter, I advise scaling up certain aspects of your business, but collaboration is the one area where companies of one should scale down—from an environment of always-on, always-available, slow-drip messaging distractions to a regimen of clearly defined times to work together to accomplish large tasks together. Otherwise, you run the risk of being available for distraction during every hour of every day.

Begin to Think About: Where you could use automation and technology to scale so your business doesn’t have to How you could outsource tasks that require massive scale How you could add personalization and segmentation to your one-to-many communication channels

He learned from Seth Godin that selling to people who truly want to hear from you, because you’ve been sharing with them, is far more effective than interrupting strangers online who don’t even know you.

This “education through content” built the necessary trust to turn into sales.

Sharing content and information is an effective way to begin a sales process because it helps a potential customer see what they need, why they need it, and then how your products can help solve their problem.

To stand out and build an audience as a company of one, you have to out-teach and outshare the competition, not outscale them.

The first is that creating a relationship with an audience that sees you as a teacher sets you up to be perceived as the domain expert on the subject matter.

The second benefit of out-teaching your competition is the chance to show an audience the benefits of what you’re selling.

The third reason teaching works is that by educating new customers on how best to use your product or service and showing them how to get the most out of it or how to be the most successful with it, you also ensure that they’ll become long-term customers and tell others about their positive experience.

The final reason teaching works for a company of one is that, except for certain proprietary information—like your unexecuted ideas, business strategies, or patentable technologies—most ideas or processes don’t need to be kept under lock and key. Being transparent in almost all areas, while running your company aboveboard, can only help build trust with your customers.

But ideas aren’t a valid currency. Execution is the only valid currency in business. To clarify, as this can feel like a fairly controversial point to make, an idea alone is worthless because it stands outside of execution.

Protecting intellectual property is important, but protecting general ideas is not, because if all you have is an idea, you’ve not done the work yet.

At the core of many massive, profitable, global companies is an old idea executed exceptionally well. Facebook is just a better MySpace, and both are essentially digital meeting places. Taxis take people from point A to point B. Uber/Lyft just figured out how to make this service more convenient. None of these are billion-dollar ideas; rather, they’re billion-dollar executions of ideas. That’s why companies of one shouldn’t worry about sharing their ideas, as long as they’re taking care of execution and their ideas are not proprietary.

Customer education—providing an audience with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to become an informed buyer—is one of the most important parts of a sales cycle. Too often we’re so close to what we’re selling that we assume others are also experts on it, or know what we know, but most of the time that’s not the case. Customers don’t always know what they don’t know, or don’t know enough about something to realize how useful or beneficial that information could be to them or their own business.

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So, by sharing information about your product, you can help your customers or clients see why your company, based on all the information you’ve shared, will indeed be their best choice—and you’ll be doing that without pushing that choice onto them.

Clearly, a major driver in all of this is the internet, which has democratized education. Businesses should take notice—customer education is the new form of marketing. Education makes a real difference between a product that people perfunctorily buy for utilitarian reasons and a product they are truly eager to purchase because it adds real purpose to their lives.

When it comes to selling and marketing, consumers are easily tempted to go with a larger company, which seems “safer” simply because it has more people and infrastructure to support it. Authority is the countermeasure to this instinct, as you can assuage any concerns from customers by making them feel that you are an authority on what you’re selling. They’ll trust that you have not only the answers but the right answer, one that will help them in a way that the competition, however big, cannot.

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. The more you teach, the more your audience will see you as an expert. Then, when it comes time to buy something, they’ll find that they want to pay for more of that expertise.

Basecamp has no internal goals or quotas around conversions or customer growth—its only mandate is to outshare and out-teach everyone else by writing books, speaking at conferences, and even hosting workshops at the Chicago office.

The reason these kinds of experts stand out, regardless of which industry they’re in, is because they teach what they know. They share and give away their ideas freely. They don’t worry about whether someone will steal their innovation for a product, a service, or a book—they just work at executing and sharing ideas faster and better than anyone else, in their own unique style and with their own unique personality. And this approach leads to business success.

If you can consistently give your audience useful, relevant, and timely knowledge (through your mailing list, speaking events, website, and so on), they’ll begin to lean on you for more information (which you can then charge for). Teaching also doesn’t require lots of time, resources, or even money—it can be as simple as sharing what you know with the people who are listening. In sum, teach everything you know and don’t be afraid to give away your best ideas.

Begin to Think About: 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

Trust, transparency, and communication are still absolutely required, but your relationships with customers can be scaled in a way that doesn’t require scaling your business scale at the same time.

A trust-based company of one begins with creating something that genuinely solves a problem; then the company rigorously tests the product’s validity before honestly communicating its benefits and outcomes to customers. In this strategy, holding on to customers becomes more important than churning out old ones and constantly acquiring new ones.

In studying how trust is built between companies and consumers, Urban has found that there are three aspects of trust: confidence (“I believe what you say”), competence (“I believe you have the skills to do what you say”), and benevolence (“I believe you’re acting on my behalf”).

Importante confianza

According to Nielsen, 92 percent of consumers trust recommendations from family or friends over any other form of advertising. The Word of Mouth Marketing Association found that a word-of-mouth conversation drives sales five times more than paid online media and is responsible for $6 trillion in annual customer spending. A study done by Verizon and Small Business Trends found that small business owners rated referrals and recommendations as their number-one way to acquire new customers, and that they greatly surpassed acquisition of new subscribers through search engines, social media, or paid ads.

A study at Texas Tech found that while 83 percent of customers are willing to provide referrals, only 29 percent actually do so.

Obviously, you need to have a good product with good customer service in place first; otherwise, no amount of incentives will create advocates for your product. In my own business, I doubled the amount of sharing for one of my products by automatically sending an email a week after purchase asking customers, if pleased with what they purchased, to share their satisfaction with others—using links with prewritten content provided.

A Harris Poll study conducted on behalf of Ambassador Software found that 88 percent of American consumers would like some kind of incentive to share products they like, and that number increases to 95 percent among eighteen- to thirty-five-year-olds. Incentives are another way to evangelize users, but they can be tricky. Sometimes offering cash incentives reduces trust if people find out that profit was the sole reason for promoting a product. Consumers are happy with incentives like small discounts, exclusive “swag,” special offers, and access to premium features. They also like double-sided incentives: this is when both the referrer and the purchaser get a bit of a deal, such as, if I refer you to buy a rainbow widget, we both get $30 off our next order of rainbow widgets. Double-sided incentives have the bonus of increasing the likelihood of not one but two repeat sales.

Rewarding loyalty in your best customers is also a great way to incentivize recommendations.

focusing on existing and loyal customers as brand advocates—instead of trying to build an affiliate program of anyone who wants to make a quick buck referring you—creates a much greater trust, because those promoting your product already have a direct relationship with it. These are the customers who can tell the story of how they benefited from purchasing your product or service.

Marketing is simply building a sense of trust and empathy with a specific group of people by consistently communicating with them. Trust has to be developed before anyone will buy anything. This is why ad-mail and cold-calling have such a tiny success rate and rely on massive volume—and conversely, why highly targeted cross-sell emails have a high success rate at a much smaller scale. For someone to want to buy your product, they have to feel that you understand their needs and have a solution for them. This isn’t done through selling aimed at all people, but through consistent dialogue with a small and specific group of people. No company or product is too good to not have to consider and utilize marketing. No matter how great your product is, if you aren’t reaching the right audience, you won’t sustain your business.

Where companies of one can use their focus on betterment over growth in marketing is by focusing on a specific niche instead of a massive market. Trust is more easily established within a smaller customer base because it’s easier to stand out as an expert or to gather referrals that hold weight from other industry experts in that niche.

Having 100 passionate fans of your business who are eager to buy anything you release is exponentially more effective than having 100,000 followers who simply follow your business to win something like a free iPad.

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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. Your word and your company’s word have to be a contract with your customers. This is how many companies of one stand out in competitive industries: by simply doing the work they say they’ll do and then honoring social contracts with their customers.

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So trust happens first. Only then does the commerce follow.

In trust marketing, a group of people trusts you enough to invest their personal attention, email address, or dollars with your company. This kind of marketing requires that you always keep the promises you make and engage in a consistent dialogue with them.

The more specific you are with who your products or services are for, the more you can build trust with that particular audience. The paradox of focusing on a niche is that the more specific you are, the easier it is to sell to that group and the more likely it is that you can charge a premium for being that focused. With that kind of focus in mind, you can get to know the specifics of your niche better, learn how to serve customers more effectively, and build a reputation for yourself in that smaller niche.

You start with the idea of creating a trust-centric business, build products that customers love, make sure they’re educated and happy with what they’ve purchased from you, and then give them systematic ways to share their success with others.

Proceso impokrtante

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.

If your business becomes a source of information, you’re giving your customers what they need to make their own informed decision (even if they decide not to buy from your business). This type of education, like a free resource page on your website or a small but free mobile app, can be a cost-effective way to promote both your products and customers’ trust in them.

Jason said that he would rather give money to his happy customers to bring in more customers through incentives than buy ads from big businesses like Facebook or Google. It costs them a lot less money as well.

Trust in business is more than a matter of adopting an internal slogan or making up a mantra to apply to products and services when it suits a marketing campaign. Trust has to be totally baked into every aspect of not only what you sell, but how you sell and support it. For a company of one, even at a tiny scale, maintaining a business worthy of customer trust creates a market differentiator and helps you stand out. Such a business focuses on quality over speed, compassion over profit, and honesty over tricks. And since, as a customer, you certainly prefer to buy from trusted businesses, why change that when you’re the one doing the selling?

Begin to Think About: How you embed trust and honesty as a marketing strategy in your company of one The relationships you could foster with your customers to incentivize them to share word of your business with others How to ensure—whether through email, support, or social media—that you’re always honoring social contracts with your customers

Although Ugmonk was profitable from the beginning, Jeff has been careful not to scale too quickly. He moves slowly, iterating in small steps, slowly increasing production, the number of products, and what the company takes

Minimum Viable Profit 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. In determining your minimum viable profit—the point at which your business is operating in the black (we’ll call it MVPr from here on in)—keep in mind that the lower the number, the quicker you can reach it. So it’s important to scale up your timelines and focus on core features only, reduce expenses and overhead, and ensure that your business model works at a small scale first. The assumption at work here is that your MVPr—not the number of your customers, not your measured growth, not even your gross revenue—is the most important determinant of the sustainability of your company of one. If you make a profit right from the beginning, then you can figure out everything else. If your expenses are low, profit happens sooner. Decisions should be made with a focus on realized profit, not based on the expectation that profit may happen. This is such a key and main difference in how growth-focused businesses and companies of one operate. Even when a company of one needs to grow, that can happen only if metrics are based on actual profit, not on hopeful profit projections.

Profit happens when the business is making enough money to cover a salary for the owner(s); this is the “minimum” part of MVPr, as a company of one can be a full-time endeavor only when it’s making enough to support at least one person. Viability is when MVPr either continues to support that one person long-term or increases with time. The more viable your company becomes, the more your profits can truly grow. From there, you can choose to pay yourself more, to focus on scaling systems, to work less and keep paying yourself the same, to invest in the business further, or to grow based on the increased money coming in. In the end, the choice is yours. Becoming a business that earns revenues predictably and consistently is a milestone for a company of one. MVPr is achieved with the least investment and in the shortest amount of time possible.

Importante

With companies of one, exponential profit increases aren’t a core objective because just hitting profitability is usually enough. From there, you have choices—to grow, to stay the same, to take more time off, to scale systems—as well as the space to make those choices because your goal isn’t to make exponential profit, but simply to bring in profits greater than your expenses.

That’s why getting a working version of your product released as quickly as possible is important: your company needs to start generating cash flow and obtaining customer feedback.

In much the same way, companies of one need to continually iterate on their products to keep them useful, fresh, and relevant to the market they serve. So, launch your company quickly, but then immediately start to refine your product and make it better. When you launch a first version of a product, you’re guessing at a lot of things—how it’s positioned in its market, how easy or difficult it will be to reach your target audience and get its attention, and how willing people will be to buy it and at what price. But the good news is that once you launch the first version, data immediately starts to pour in. How are sales going? How are the reviews? How is customer retention? Are they so excited about your product that they are telling others? You can and must use this data to further refine your product to be an even better and more useful solution to the problem you set out to solve.

I can’t emphasize this point enough: finding a simple solution to a big or complicated problem is your strongest asset as a company of one. Your unique ingenuity can’t be outsourced to artificial intelligence or to a massive team. Your ability to problem-solve with simplicity will keep you and your skills relevant in any market. The benefit of starting small is that you can start with only a few customers using your product and you can speak to them directly—for feedback, suggestions, and improvements.

There are three elements to the psychology of simple, according to Harvard professor George Whitesides: predictability, accessibility, and serving as a building block. Being predictable means that simple products are easy to instantly understand. A product that solves a single problem, like a Casper mattress helping you get a good night’s sleep, is simple. Casper doesn’t make 108 styles of mattresses, they make three. Being accessible means being honest: Casper makes no over-the-top claims, but backs its product with solid research and overwhelmingly positive reviews from over 400,000 customers. Finally, to serve as a building block is to build on an existing and understood concept. Casper didn’t invent a soft and rectangular piece of foam to sleep on and call it a mattress. They simply built off an existing industry, an existing product, and made it better. Everyone knows what a mattress is, so Casper doesn’t have to explain that; they just have to explain why their mattress is better. In effect, Casper doesn’t market mattresses but rather better sleep, with their mattresses being a means to that end. They’re consistent in this message across all media (social media, their blog, and any other advertising). The hyperfocused target market for a Casper mattress is younger people who are ready to upgrade their lumpy mattress but hate going to stores and talking to salespeople. These are the customers who’d rather buy online, with a guarantee that if they don’t like the product, they can return it (…

Customers typically don’t ask a business to grow or expand. If growth isn’t what’s best for them, maybe it should be reconsidered. Because when you do focus primarily on your customers and their satisfaction, as we saw in Chapter 7, they’ll tell everyone about you.

a business succeeds only when it’s viewed by your audience as useful. So your first goal, as a company of one just starting out, is to figure out the best way to solve a specific audience’s problems, and then get to work at doing it quickly and cost-effectively.

By starting out small, a company of one can put all of its energy into solving problems for real people rather than into growing large enough to maybe solve problems for people one day. This approach also gives your relationship with customers a strong foundation: by eliminating bureaucracy and the friction of large infrastructures, you can interact with, listen to, and empathize with your customers directly.

For example, if you’d like to sell an online course that teaches people how to run an online business, then it’s faster to offer that advice as a one-on-one consulting service first. That way you don’t need to wait to turn a profit until you’ve filmed all the videos, developed or set up an online course platform, and built the audience required to make money from online courses. Profit can happen as soon as you get your first customer paying you for individual instruction.

Halley Gray, founder of Evolve + Succeed, has found that 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. This is what Danielle LaPorte did with her “Fire Starter Sessions” after she was fired from the company she founded and then went out on her own. By offering services first, she was able to generate income almost immediately, as well as prove that there was a market for her products when her one-on-one service-based work took off. By doing this, she learned a great deal about her audience and determined what they wanted from her, so when her products were launched, they sold very well and her million-dollar-plus business was born.

Only after you’ve first launched can you then start to measure data and collect key insights: what worked, what did not, how was it received, and how could it be positioned differently?

Launching isn’t a onetime, singular event, but a continual process of launch, measure, adjust, repeat. The cofounder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, has said that if you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. It’s ridiculous to believe that every company grows out of a founder’s fully formed and unchanging idea, especially since most wildly successful companies achieved their place only by course-correcting, changing entirely, or iterating their way to greatness.

Companies of one need to continually iterate on their products to keep them useful and relevant to the market they’re intended to serve. So launch quickly, but immediately start to refine and improve your product.

Iterating is an ongoing process, by the way, and should never stop as long as you’re receiving feedback and data from the market, from other businesses in your niche, and even from within your organization (such as requests from the support person or team). Your strategy, then, shouldn’t be rigid and set in stone, but capable of being changed each time new information is collected. In this way, your strategy will never fall out of sync with the customers and market you’re serving.

Without iteration and adjustment based on new data and insights, a company will stagnate and die.

In other words, if you’re at a place where you aren’t sure what to do because things haven’t worked out, do you still think that your initial assumption was correct? And in knowing all you know at this point, would you pursue the project all over again? If the answer is yes, if you still think your original idea was valid, can be profitable in some way, and is worth pursuing, you should carry on. If not, if you’re continuing only because you’ve put so much of your time and energy and heart into the project, then it’s not logical to keep at it. If you’re overvaluing your plan because it’s your plan (known as the “endowment effect”), then you should probably quit.

So if you have refused to change anything because of your misaligned ownership of an idea and because of all that you’ve invested (time, money, resources), then yes, you may be continuing for the wrong reasons. But if your initial vision still seems objectively valid and progress and profit are just coming along slower than you’d like, by all means continue.

So, by working toward MVPr as quickly as possible with a simple solution and then iterating upon it after it’s launched, your company of one can build a resilient business that may change over time in its products or features, but still serves and is totally valuable to its customers.

Begin to Think About: A new business or product you could start right now by executing the smallest version of your idea How to determine your MVPr, the steps that could be taken to achieve it as quickly as possible, and what could be scaled back to reach it faster A product or service that would be the simplest solution to a problem your customers are having Whether you could start your company of one without capital and what that would look like

What he and many others have found, though, is that it’s much easier to sell to people with whom you’ve already built a relationship because they know that you actually care about them personally and their betterment. In this kind of relationship, selling doesn’t have to be pushy. It’s based entirely on a cultivated friendship.

But if you use your platform to teach, empower, and make customers’ lives or businesses better (as we saw in Chapter 9), you are seen as a trusted adviser, not a shady or slick salesperson.

Smaller businesses tend to want to act like larger companies, which is curious, since many large businesses these days are trying to act like smaller ones.

When customers say that they want more personal experiences from a brand, what they really want is a more personal connection or relationship with the company, so as to be understood better by them.

Implied in community ownership is a company’s assumption that it’s okay to use that relationship to sell them more. That kind of mentality can easily turn an audience or community against a company. This is why Chris uses his own mailing list mostly just to connect with his audience, through weekly articles; (very) occasionally, he pitches them products he’s created. For the most part, though, he uses his list to connect with the community he serves with news, information, and valuable content. Building relationships by being helpful first enables an audience to benefit from the relationship, and that experience will lead them to feel a sense of real reciprocity later when you try to sell them something.

You can’t buy your way into real relationships any more than you can force people to buy your products. To create an audience of people who are keen to support your business by purchasing from you, a real relationship is required first—one that includes trust, humanity, and empathy.

Impolrtante

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. Part of being better is better serving an audience who, if served well, will become customers and, if served well as customers, will become advocates. The difference between relationship companies and companies that focus solely on growth is that the former recognize that real relationships are built more slowly, in more meaningful ways, and without massive turnover.

The idea is that in rewarding an audience who’s giving you their attention by giving your attention back to them, through listening and empathy, you’ll be rewarded with a sale (and most of the time several sales over the long term). Measuring profit or customer retention can lead to more sustainability because, as the adage goes, “What gets measured gets done.” So if you’re focusing on growth, growth is what will happen. But if you focus instead on relationships that turn into long-term customers and sales, that’s what will happen instead.

Chris Brogan believes that real connections are built when companies share a simple message, repeatedly, through their actions. Long before they ask for a sale, these companies articulate…

Imagine that your business sells fortune cookies with messages praising employees for their achievements. Your ideal customers would be HR people who are looking to reward employees for their hard work. A simple message that could be used on your website would be something along the lines of: “We’re here to catch you doing something good at work.” This shows the importance of praise at work and validates the product you sell (which is a good vehicle for that praise). It would make sense, as a marketing effort, to start a newsletter that showcases one great employee from your customer pool each week. This would show why praise is important and how it benefits companies that take it seriously, as well as provide an excellent example of what can be rewarded. The newsletter isn’t directly pitching your fortune cookies each week, as no one would want to subscribe to a weekly product pitch. What it does is show the potential benefits of rewarding good work, featuring your product as one specific way that can be accomplished. This message shows that, as a business first and foremost, you want your customers to succeed and thrive, and that secondarily you’ve got a product that can help them do that. By collecting and talking to customers…

Even a company of one whose true north isn’t growth requires three types of capital. The first is financial capital, which we learned in Chapter 11 should be as small as possible to start so that profit—achieving your MVPr—happens quickly. The second is human capital, which is the value that you (or your small team) bring to the business or group: this value takes the form of the skills you’ll need—or your willingness to learn them—to build something and be autonomous in running it. The third type of capital required is social capital. While financial and human capital are important, social…

The premise of social capital as the term is used today is that our social networks indeed have value. The people in those networks do things for each other, such as buying products, sharing articles, and helping each other. Relationships are currency. So companies of one need to think of social capital like a bank account. You can only take out what you put in. If you’re always asking people to buy your products or doing nothing but promoting your business and its products on social media, your balance will hit zero or you may even be quickly overdrawn. People don’t want to buy something from someone who is constantly bothering them on social media with “Buy my stuff!” tweets and posts…

Social capital is built on mutually beneficial relationships, not…

Relationships from social networks—which can be anything where people connect, not just Twitter or LinkedIn—have immense value. That’s why many companies of one have mailing lists (a social network they’re in control of) that drive sales. Or why many companies of one engage in conversations on social…

Sometimes doing something that doesn’t scale but is truly genuine is a great way to form strong connections with your audience.

Sam suggests that one-third of your updates should be about your business or your content, one-third should be sharing content from others, and one-third should be personal interactions that build relationships with your audience.

Having the empathy to learn what a consumer really wants from your company of one besides your product or service—whether it’s knowledge, education, or just help—can go a long way. Empathy takes a relationship from “What can I sell you?” to “How can I truly help you?” This is the way to bank social capital: by starting a long-term and mutually beneficial relationship.

While providing these videos is definitely not a scalable system, it’s an absolutely amazing relationship-builder between the business and its customers. The videos aren’t professionally shot—most are taken from a shaky camera phone, with poor lighting—but they are always well received. So well received, in fact, that they tend to get shared on social media quite a bit, generating a lot of press for HighRise. Something as simple as a thirty-second video welcoming a customer to a product has real capacity to build goodwill, social capital, and genuine connection between a customer and a company.

Large businesses, however, in focusing on making everything quicker, often offer little real human interaction. Obviously, scalable systems are important, but only if human interaction is still at play. Too often, companies put all of their focus on turning their audience into paying customers and don’t spend enough time connecting with people once they become paying customers. For Chris Brogan, and for many other companies of one, the focus stays directly on customers—by properly onboarding them, communicating with them regularly, and making sure they’re getting value and use out of what he’s selling. He doesn’t want to make $100 off someone once; he wants to make thousands of dollars off each customer over the span of many years. This is why he focuses on customer relationships after each sale—to make sure customers are happy enough to come back again and again to buy more from him.

By not first considering the core group and relationship that your business serves, you can run a risk of making them feel like they don’t matter—or worse, making them feel like your company doesn’t care about them. At that point, they can gather their digital pitchforks and take to the streets of the internet with their outrage toward your business. And consumer outrage rarely stops at angry tweets—it causes serious business repercussions too.

Going out of your way to be personal, friendly, and helpful encourages a potential customer or client to like your business more.

Second, respect must be present. Customers have to admire your work, what you offer, and how your company behaves. You build respect by doing things like following up, competently segmenting customers on your list (i.e., not pitching them products they’ve already purchased), and working to be the best at what you offer.

Building connections with customers comes down to happiness: if they’re happy, they’ll keep using your product or service. If they’re happy, they’ll tell others about your business. If they’re happy, they’ll stay loyal to your brand. There’s no need to overthink customer relationships when the main point should always be: what can you do as a company of one to make your customers happy?

Importante

Wakefield Brunswick only partners with other businesses when a project requires it; otherwise, they are free to work on whatever they want. Business at every level is built on who we know and who knows us.

Especially if you’re working for yourself, the tendency can be to believe and then act like your company of one is in this struggle all alone and that your business needs to be just you, with no outside interaction or involvement. But in connecting with peers and fostering relationships with them, as well as with other people in our industry and even similar industries, we gain access to new ideas and a way to build valuable connections that can lead to new customers—or to simply vent. We want to retain our autonomy and independence, sure, but we also need to run with a pack from time to time, as there’s strength in numbers.

Begin to Think About: How you could get to know your customers as real people with specific problems Where the true north of your business lies and what actions you could take to stay aligned with it How you could build relationship wealth by increasing your value and thus your social capital The ways in which you could empathize with your current customer base

The people I know with their own company of one spend approximately half of their time, or less, doing their core skill (writing, designing, programming, etc.). They spend the rest of their time on the business—chasing leads, doing their books, communicating with clients or customers, marketing, and so forth.

The harder—much harder—part is making the dream happen every day. Some days you’re buried in accounting spreadsheets; other days, you’re on the third round of revisions from a client, or dealing with an irate customer. The daily slog is what separates wannabe business owners from those who make it a reality.

If you don’t think it’s possible to do better, or you don’t care if it is, there’s no point doing your own thing. In that case, it’s fine to work for someone else—they’re already established and have people handling the jobs you probably don’t want to be doing anyway.

Basically, I would offer a free consult or a project roadmapping session. In this way, I’d learn the key factors involved when people are thinking about hiring a web designer and gain insight into why and how they end up choosing to hire one.

Being helpful proved to be a great lead-generation funnel.

Importante

I’ve simply used my skills to help others, because I enjoy doing it. And I’ve offered this help for free, in small doses at first, and then later for good money in larger doses.

Importante

In the beginning, can you reduce any of your expenses so that you can do less work to be profitable each month? And how likely is it that you’ll get the number of clients or customers you need each month to be profitable? If acquiring three clients seems doable but having five would stretch you too thin, you’ve got to either reduce your overall costs or raise your rates. Consider how long it takes to find a client, court the client, work with the client, and then finish up each client’s project. Is there enough time in a month to do that five times? Or even three?

All money should go into your business directly, not straight to you, and then you should be paid out, by salary or dividends.

With service-based businesses, this means having contracts between your business and your clients.

For a product-based business, this means having users agree to your terms of service before they pay you for what you’re selling.

I’ve always believed that good accountants should save you more money than they charge. This belief may be misguided—I have no studies or data to back it up—but nevertheless, my own accountants definitely do this.

An accountant is not just a person you talk to at the end of your business year when you file your taxes. You can use an accountant as an adviser on all things related to government requests, on how to stay up to date with financial laws (so you don’t inadvertently break them), on sound ways to pay yourself and pay your expenses, and on how best to structure your business to pay the least amount in taxes.

As I mentioned in the legal section, you need to make sure your business is separated from yourself, and to this end, 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. Since revenue from my work can sometimes be inconsistent, I’ve always figured my base salary as the average I’ve made in profit (not revenue) for the last twelve months, minus 25 to 30 percent (to set aside for taxes). Before raising my salary if my profits increase, I also take into consideration the minimum amount I need each month to live on and be comfortable. With my twelve-month average profit in mind, and not going too far past my minimum living expenses, I can set myself a fairly steady salary. Obviously, you can change this up if you find you need less money—or more—but keep in mind that the more money you take out of your business, the more it’s taxed.

The goal here is to work your money in small steps. First, ensure that your company of one is making enough profit to cover your living expenses. Second, make sure you’ve got enough of a runway buffer built up to work full-time at your company of one, even if things get slow. Third, with your salary and runway buffer covered, you can reinvest money in your company; if things are going well, you should be able to get a better than 3 percent return on such an investment. Alternatively, if you don’t need to invest more in your company—maybe your business costs are covered and you have no reason to grow them—you can invest any extra money in something like index funds.

Importante

The first step is to develop a consistent, healthy monthly revenue to cover costs, your runway buffer, and investments. Once you take care of those considerations, a beautiful thing happens: you’re presented with choices. You can choose to make more money, if that’s what you want, or you can choose to work the same and make the same amount. If you make the latter choice, you can then start to prioritize. Do you want to spend more time with your family? Do you want to explore the world? Do you want to spend more time experimenting with new business ideas and opportunities?

Begin to Think About: Your purpose or reasoning in starting your own company of one, and whether it will hold up over time How you could start your own company of one right now, with some first version of what you want to do What you need to do to set up your company of one correctly and responsibly, both legally and financially

business success does not lie in growing something quickly and massively, but rather in building something that’s both remarkable and resilient over the long term.

With bigger scale come bigger dangers, bigger risks, and much work to become and remain profitable.

Your success can be measured by being profitable quickly as you stay small and build real relationships with your customers—not because you’re an altruistic hippie, but because it pays off over time. Long-term, loyal customers will sometimes hang around for generations, continuing to financially support your business.

Determining what is enough is different for everyone. Enough is the antithesis of growth. Enough is the true north of building a company of one, and the opposite of the current paradigm promoting entrepreneurship, growth-hacking, and a startup culture.

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. There’s a satisfaction in reaching the point of enough in your business, and then knowing that you don’t have to explore every new potential opportunity that comes up. This freedom allows you to run your company of one in your own way—a way that gives you a life you enjoy, fills your days with tasks you actually want to do, and brings you customers you actually want to serve.

By becoming a company of one, or just by adopting the key aspects of this mind-set, you can develop the resilience required to thrive in any job, at any company, or with any project or business you start on your own. By making sure your business works when it’s as small as possible, you can ensure that it will work if and when it grows. There’s a point—and it’s different for everyone—where you realize that having more won’t affect your quality of life. When your “enough” happens, it should be liberating. What’s the difference, really, between having $90 mi ll i o nan d ha v in g$ 900 million? (Honestly, I wouldn’t know.) If you’re not sure you’ve reached that point, question why you want more, or why what you have isn’t enough.

Everything in this book derives from my belief that all companies, of every size, should be “lifestyle” businesses, not trapped in the paradigm of how “real” businesses operate. In fact, every business, theoretically, is a lifestyle business, in that each represents your choice of how you want to live. If you want to work in the fast-paced corporate world, you have to accept that your life will have little room for much else. If you choose the growth-focused venture capital world, you have to accept being beholden to two groups of people: investors and customers (and what each wants could be vastly different). And if you work in a company where enough profit is acceptable, then your lifestyle can be optimized for more than just growing profit. In sum, 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.

There’s only one rule for being a company of one: stay attentive to those opportunities that require growth and question them before taking them. That’s it—one rule. The rest is entirely up to you. But if you ever stop questioning the need for growth, you run the risk that the beast of growth will devour you and your business whole.

The more products, the more markets, the more alliances a company makes, the less money it makes. “Full speed ahead in all directions” seems to be the call from the corporate bridge. When will companies learn that line extension ultimately leads to oblivion. —AL RIES AND JACK TROUT, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

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

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

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