Company of One Read online

  Paul Jarvis

  * * *

  Company of One

  Why Staying Small is the Next Big Thing for Business

  Contents

  Prologue

  PART I: BEGIN 1. Defining a Company of One

  2. Staying Small as an End Goal

  3. What’s Required to Lead

  4. Growing a Company That Doesn’t Grow

  PART II: DEFINE 5. Determining the Right Mind-Set

  6. Personality Matters

  7. The One Customer

  8. Scalable Systems

  9. Teach Everything You Know

  PART III: MAINTAIN 10. Properly Utilizing Trust and Scale

  11. Launching and Iterating in Tiny Steps

  12. The Hidden Value of Relationships

  13. Starting a Company of One—My Story

  Afterword: Never Grow Up

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Follow Penguin

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Beginning as a corporate web designer and internet consultant, Paul Jarvis first spent years working with top professional athletes like Warren Sapp, Steve Nash and Shaquille O’Neal with their online presence, and with large companies like Yahoo, Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz and Warner Music. He then migrated to working with online entrepreneurs such as Marie Forleo, Danielle LaPorte and Kris Carr to help build their online brands.

  These days, Paul Jarvis spends his time writing, creating software, podcasting and teaching online courses with his own company of one, which is called Mighty Small Ventures. His writing and ideas have been featured around the internet in places like Wired, Fast Company, USA Today, Vice News, and by MailChimp and Adobe.

  When not working, Paul enjoys gardening, driving fast cars, sarcasm and hiking. He lives on an island off the coast of British Columbia with his wife Lisa.

  Paul writes a weekly newsletter called The Sunday Dispatches, where he shares his latest writing and ideas. It’s free and you can sign up at www.pjrvs.com/signup/. You can also find him on Twitter @pjrvs.

  To learn more about how to start your own company of one, join the Co1 community, listen to the Companies of One podcast, and get other free resources related to the book, visit the website: www.ofone.co.

  COMPANY OF ONE

  ‘Growth has been hacked to simply mean “more”. More revenue, more customers, more employees, more products, more, more, more. That’s a tragically myopic view of growth. Paul Jarvis will help you open your eyes to a broader, wiser definition of growth. One of learning, one of betterment, one of contentment. There’s never been a more opportune time to launch or run companies that embrace having and being “enough”. The most important ingredient is a new world view. Company of One can give you just that’ David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and founder of Basecamp

  ‘Your business can thrive with less! Company of One is a riveting, lucidly written guide to run a successful minimalist business’ Joshua Fields Millburn, host of The Minimalists podcast

  ‘The default equation of more = better in business isn’t working any more. If you want to build something that matters, make a difference for your family and the world, and actually enjoy what you do, Company of One offers the inspiration and step-by-step actions that will change the way you do business, and the way you do life’ Courtney Carver, bestselling author of Soulful Simplicity

  ‘Paul Jarvis beautifully illustrates that “Small is the new big”. It’s true. It’s not about how many employees you have (or how many customers you serve). It is about “who” you are working with. This is a revolutionary idea for our times: build your business based on your values. There’s nothing small about that. This book is a treasure’ Mitch Joel, founder, Six Pixels Group, and author of Six Pixels of Separation and Ctrl Alt Delete

  ‘Ever since starting MailChimp eighteen years ago, I’ve always been told that my way was wrong. My way has never been to “be big”. My way was always to “be useful”. My company has become a global brand with millions of customers, over $525 million in annual revenue and almost 1,000 employees united by a single mission to empower companies of one. Go figure. There’s not one, right way. Only your way. Paul’s book can help you find your way’ Ben Chestnut, CEO and founder of MailChimp

  ‘Company of One will give you invaluable insights to focus on the purposeful, interesting and impactful work you actually love doing, right alongside permission to stop blindly chasing growth by defining success on your own terms. This book is great for freelancers, side-hustlers and small-business owners who are looking to bring autonomy, self-reliance and creativity to their work without becoming total workaholics’ Kathleen Shannon and Emily Thompson, authors/hosts of Being Boss ‘Paul Jarvis is the savviest sole proprietor I know. This book is a permission slip to reject tired corporate business advice in favour of a smaller, slower, more personal approach. Amen’ Jocelyn K. Glei, host of Hurry Slowly

  ‘A bright, useful entry in the small-is-beautiful genre’ Kirkus Reviews

  ‘You are not alone with Company of One. If, like so many others, you’re setting out to take on the world by yourself, then welcome to the best company there is, your own’ Sam Conniff Allende, author of Be More Pirate

  ‘Company of One is the next frontier for less is more’ Richard Koch, bestselling author of The 80/20 Principle and Simplify

  For Luna

  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

  Prologue

  On February 28, 2010 — the final day of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver — I found myself driving a tiny cube-van with my wife, Lisa, heading to a ferry terminal. We had just closed on the sale of our condo, a small glass box in the sky located right in the heart of downtown Vancouver. We had also sold or donated almost all of our possessions, and we were moving to a town in the middle of nowhere, literally at the end of the road on Vancouver Island.

  Our new town — Tofino — was proudly billed as “life on the edge.” As in truly the edge of nowhere. This island is the setting for the reality TV show Alone, where the actors grapple with living and surviving in complete isolation; it’s filmed a few hours north of town. Fewer than 2,000 people live in Tofino — mostly surfers, old draft dodgers, and other assorted hippies who are still very happy living in the twentieth century.

  At the time — before, after, and even during the move — I was working entirely online as a designer and online business consultant to everyone from Mercedes-Benz to Microsoft to Marie Forleo. My work and life depended on being hyperconnected. But now I was trading all of that for a town with zero other people involved in tech and, even worse, a really awful internet connection.

  In short, for someone like myself who was coming from the tech world, this move was going to be a bit of a massive adjustment.

  The main reason I was hell-bent on leaving civilization was that I had simply had enough of “business as usual” city life and the constant push from others to grow my successful business into something bigger. My wife, Lisa, too, was sick of her daily career demands. We were both done with the constant stimulus and stress of our urban existence — the lights, sounds, and distractions, the constant and incessant “buzzing.” To save our sanity, we made our escape as quickly as we possibly could. And living on Vancouver Island seemed like the perfect tonic.

  Yet we soon learned that living in the woods on an island does something funny — it forces you to go deep wit
hin 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.) But then again, if you sit with your thoughts for a while, they can reveal some mind-set-changing ideas.

  But scaling down wasn’t just a plan for getting rid of our physical belongings; it was also a plan for achieving mental clarity. In creating a personal life that was bare of all but the essentials, parallels to my work started to become evident — what was truly necessary and what wasn’t. By decluttering my thoughts (creating an “inbox zero” for my brain, if you will), I was able to look at my day-to-day business much more clearly because the distractions were now gone. I hadn’t been able to clearly express my reasons for the way I had been working until that moment.

  This clarity highlighted something I had unconsciously been doing for nearly twenty years, even before going out on my own, and that was building a business full of resilience, driven by a desire for autonomy and, on most days, enjoyment. 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. (Hey, I was able to move to the woods on an island.) And now, for the very first time, I understood why.

  I had been building a company of one.

  INTRODUCING A COMPANY OF ONE

  At first, I felt alone in my assumption that more isn’t always better. But then, during the writing of this book, I found that there is an amassing army of others who feel very much the same, and whose business decisions are backed up with growing research and studies. It turns out that some of the most successful brand-name companies and individuals are companies of one at heart.

  Living in Tofino gave me the opportunity to take up a daily ritual of going for a morning surf. One day I was out in the lineup (the place just in front of the breaking waves where surfers wait to catch rides) with my accountant friend. We were sitting out there, waiting for the next decent wave, and he turned to me and said, “I’m stoked! I’ve just about made enough to take the rest of the year off to go rock climbing.” It was August. Puzzled by what he said, I missed the next few waves that rolled by. Once he paddled back to the lineup, where I still was, he explained that he had calculated what he needed to make in profit in order to cover his cost of living and put a decent amount of money into investments. He had figured out the amount of wealth he needed to be comfortable and didn’t feel the need to accumulate more.

  Past that, he didn’t need any more money — so he’d stop working when he hit his “enough” amount and travel for the rest of the year. He didn’t want to grow his accounting business into a bigger company with employees and offices in every city. If he did, his “enough” number would also grow, from having to manage more employees and a bigger business. He wouldn’t be able to spend as much time rock climbing (or surfing). 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.

  In truth, embracing growth appears to be the easier route more often than not, since it’s easier to throw “more” at any problem that might pop up. Want more customers? Hire more employees. Need more revenue? Spend more. Fielding more support requests? Build a bigger support team. 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?

  Growth, in the typical business sense, isn’t always a smart strategy if it’s followed blindly. Much of the research reported in this book will strongly suggest that blind growth is the main cause of business problems. It can leave you with an unmaintainable number of employees, unsustainable costs, and more work than hours in a day. It can force you to lay off employees, sell your company at a less than optimal price, or, even worse, close up shop completely.

  What if you worked instead toward growing smaller, smarter, more efficient, and more resilient?

  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. The point of being a company of one is to become better in ways that don’t incur the typical setbacks of growth. You can scale up revenue, enjoyment, raving fans, focus, autonomy, and experiences while resisting the urge to blindly scale up employee payroll, expenses, and stress levels. This approach builds both a profit buffer for your company to weather markets and a personal buffer to help you thrive even in times of hardship.

  The “company of one” approach doesn’t apply only to a single-person business — it’s a model for using the power of you to be more self-reliant and more responsible for your own career path. Although a company of one can certainly be a small or single-person business, it’s unlike most small businesses, whose end game is usually expansion or growth to hit peak profitability. A company of one questions growth and stays small on purpose.

  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. For example, whether you’re creating physical products, selling software, or teaching online courses, customers and users can purchase and consume these products and services without your company of one putting in time for each transaction. While developing products can be time-consuming and iterative, the number of customers can be almost infinite for a company of one, and profit then happens outside of time spent. 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.

  A company of one is a collective mind-set and model that can be used by anyone, from a small business owner to a corporate leader, to take ownership and responsibility for what they do to become a valuable asset in any marketplace — in terms of both mental practices and business applications. It’s a blueprint for growing a lean and agile business that can survive every type of economic climate, and ultimately it leads to a richer and more meaningful life — no cable-cutting or moving to the woods on an island required.

  Just as Michael Pollan’s food ideology is summarized in three simple rules — “eat food, not too much, mostly plants” — the “company of on
e” model can be laid out in a similar fashion: “start small, define growth, and keep learning.”

  Part I

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  BEGIN

  1

  Defining a Company of One

  In the fall of 2010, Tom Fishburne quit his seemingly great career as the vice president of marketing at a large consumer foods company. He wanted to draw cartoons. This turned out to be Tom’s best career move — both emotionally and, surprisingly, financially.

  He wasn’t just following his passion on a whim, nor did he become some sort of anti-capitalist hippie. He carefully planned out and executed his decision to ensure, as much as anyone could, that he would thrive.

  As a child, Tom was obsessed with drawing cartoons — so much so that he would take his doctor father’s prescription pad and draw flip-books on the back.

  Then, at Harvard, while working toward his MBA, his friends prompted him to submit cartoons to the campus paper, the Harbus, which he did for the rest of the time he was at school. Still, once finished with school, he took a job in the corporate world, because it seemed like the logical next step after receiving a business degree. Tom was also part of the SITCOM demographic (Single Income Two Children Oppressive Mortgage), so he figured he needed a “stable” job. Cartooning remained a hobby, however, and he would share with coworkers his cartoons poking fun at corporate marketing — the very industry he was now part of.

  As Tom worked his corporate job and his cartoons were shared by his friends, and then by their friends, and then outside their circle, they started to garner attention. He began taking on side jobs to draw during the evenings and weekends for companies that were eager to pay him. It wasn’t until he had a safe runway of such clients lined up, and money saved up, that he pulled the trigger to leave his corporate career and start his own venture.