Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business

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Life gets busy. Has Company of One by Paul Jarvis been on your reading list? Learn the key insights now.

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Introduction

Have you ever wanted to start a business, but felt like it was a Herculean undertaking without a big financial backer? In his best-selling book, Company of One, Paul Jarvis challenges this notion and more.

Company of One explains how you can achieve the success of a large enterprise without having to grow your business. The book argues that success is not necessarily defined by the volume or pace of growth. By remaining small, you can build your company around your lifestyle needs and preferences through ‘scalable systems’. Ultimately, this focus on developing scalable systems facilitates growth without the need for additional employees, and promotes long-term satisfaction.

“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.”
– Paul Jarvis

About Paul Jarvis

Paul Jarvis is a former Silicon Valley professional turned author. Company of One is his first book, but he also writes for some of the world’s leading publications, including Inc.com, Fast Company, and Huffington Post. Jarvis also wrote a popular, newsletter, Sunday Dispatches, a newsletter he established.

Besides his work as an author, Jarvis hosts classes on how to be a successful freelancer, where he has advocated for the contrarian idea that businesses don’t need growth to be profitable.

Jarvis is also the founder of the website analytics company Fathom Analytics. Fathom is a real-life example of a company of one – that doesn’t need growth to be profitable. Jarvis and his co-founder, Jack Ellis, are the sole employees. They have fully bootstrapped the company through the reinvestment of customer profits.

How did they do it? Join us to find out.

StoryShot #1: Lack of Growth Defines a Company of One

Jarvis uses the first third of Company of One to define what “company of one” means. A company of one isn’t a startup business. Nor is it another word for a freelancer.

What is the difference between a startup and a company of one? Startups have one primary goal: to grow. Companies of one, on the other hand, purposefully remain small.

However, unlike a freelancer, companies of one don’t work to earn. Freelancers make active income. The second they stop working, the money stops flowing in. Meanwhile, companies of one make both active and passive income.

One person doesn’t have to run a company of one. You could start up a company of one with your partner, your closest friends, or your most brilliant colleagues. The only feature that it must have is that it needs to be kept small.

The Benefits of a Company of One

A company of one doesn’t grow progressively larger or require constant work. But this isn’t necessarily on principle. Instead, rejecting traditional growth mechanisms can get you the following benefits:

Resilience
Autonomy
Speed
Simplicity

A company of one is small, which makes these micro-businesses extremely agile. As a result, they can often adapt rapidly to changing realities and have a consistent sense of purpose. Another benefit of this agility is less bureaucracy. For example, you don’t have to run your decisions by a board of executives or shareholders.

As a sole proprietor, you have complete control over the brand vision. That doesn’t just mean you only get autonomy over business decisions. You also get to decide how much of your life you want to spend at work in the first place.

Innately, larger companies are more complex than smaller ones. But for a company of one to be successful, the foundational principle is that it must remain simple. This means a simple customer base, simple product offerings, and a simple business structure.

StoryShot #2: Running a Company of One Requires the Right Mindset

Jarvis spends a lot of time talking about why everyone should aspire to be a company of one. The main idea is this: running a company of one allows you to build your business around your lifestyle.

“If you’re a company of one, your mindset is to build your business around your life, not the other way around.”
– Paul Jarvis

In the modern day, most people do the opposite. Work is the primary driver of daily schedules. As a result, we often plan life events around when we’re working or the project deadlines we need to hit.

Instead, the book inspires us to fund our lifestyles with our passions and reminds us that a busy life isn’t a good life. Working more productively can help reduce the time and energy it takes to earn your living.

Another aspect of the company of one mindset is the difference between passion and purpose. You must have more than passion alone to succeed.

“Although purpose and money are not mutually exclusive, you’re more likely to be resilient when you know that even in awful or stressful situations, you’re working toward a greater and larger good. This sense of purpose comes from values that are unchangeable and central to both individuals and companies as a whole. Companies of one know that they can enjoy their work without always enjoying every aspect of it.”
– Paul Jarvis

Have a clear purpose guiding your business decisions. A key tenet of that purpose is that you must decide you want to remain small, even in the face of an opportunity to grow.

For the owner of a company of one, growth equals decline. Success, on the other hand, means sustaining a particular income level. That income level is something you get to define.

Here’s how: first, you must outline the type of life you want to live. Think about what kind of home you want to live in, the type of car you hope to drive, and the number of vacations you wish to take each year.

Next, you work backward to figure out exactly how much money you need to live your desired lifestyle. Then, you build your business around this figure, and once you reach your goal, you get to take a much-deserved break.

Earning More Isn’t Always Better

What if you hit your income figure but want to keep working? Jarvis warns you to expect tougher times ahead because more profit often equals more problems.

Working more may mean you acquire more customers. At that point, you’ll need to spend more time on tasks like customer service to satisfy this greater customer volume. You’ll have to hire more workers to meet that demand. This will effectively eliminate your company-of-one status.

That type of work environment is the antithesis of a company of one. For this reason, Jarvis recommends saying, “enough is enough” once you hit your pre-designated income figure.

StoryShot #3: Don’t Quit Your Day Job (Yet)

By now, you should understand what a company of one is and what type of mindset you need to run one. But it isn’t time to quit your nine to five just yet. First, you must build up your side hustle.

This point may seem counterintuitive at first. After all, how are you supposed to build an entire business while you’re working?

The book doesn’t encourage building just any business, though. Instead, it enables you to build a successful one. Your business won’t be successful if you need quick cash to fund your lifestyle.

Instead, build your passion project during your free hours. Start by coming up with your business idea. Then try to land your first few customers to gauge traction and interest in your idea.

Once you have determined that there is a clear demand in the market for your product or service, you can finally think about quitting your day job.

A Real-Life Company of One

Company of One offers several instances of the type of business it describes. The first example in the book is cartoonist Tom Fishburne. Fishburne built a cartoon company of one before leaving his corporate job.

Fishburne only left his Vice President role after winning a handful of clients. He wanted to ensure he had a stable income to support his family before making his company-of-one dream a reality.

Fishburne is an obvious success story. He and his wife have run their company of one, Marketoonist, since day one. Today, he reports that he makes more from Marketoonist than in his corporate VP role.

StoryShot #4: Passion Isn’t Enough When Choosing Your Product Idea

So, you quit your job and are on your way to growing your company of one without getting bigger. How do you get started?

Obviously, the first thing you need is an idea for a product or service. Jarvis suggests using a passion project, side hustle, or freelance gig to inspire you. The more passionate you feel about the idea, the better.

However, you should also understand the downfalls of turning a passion into a business. Studies show most people are passionate about arts, music, or sports.

If your passion lies in one of these areas, you may have an uphill battle ahead. After all, everyone who wants to be an athlete won’t be a sporting superstar.

Instead of relying solely on your passions to inform your company-of-one idea, you need to dig deeper. Be realistic about which of your passions people will pay for.

For example, say you’re into making digital art for your Instagram. You can’t create a business out of posting your art on social media. But you may come up with a business idea of transforming your art into NFTs that can be sold on a marketplace such as OpenSea for a profit.

Iterate on Your Product Using Customer Feedback

Once you’ve determined your product or service idea, it’s time for launch. But you may think: shouldn’t you perfect your product before launching it? The answer to this question is no.

Launch a product in its early stages. That way, you can receive valuable feedback from your customers. This feedback can then help you hone your product, figure out the right pricing, and more.

Why should you do this? Because when you launch your product as early as possible, you can start earning money immediately.

“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.” – Paul Jarvis.

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