Company of One

by Paul Jarvis

  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.

  These traits for resilience are absolutely learnable, not just inherent. In fact, they must be learned, and then fostered, if you are creating a company of one.

  Autonomy and Control

  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. So just as Tom commanded a knowledge of marketing from his Harvard MBA education and subsequent corporate marketing job, as well as a talent for drawing that he had fostered since childhood and worked at weekly, 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.

  Typically, you can’t acquire this mastery without putting in some time at the beginning of your career in a job that’s less autonomous, offers less control, and requires less resilience, since you’re managed by the whims of someone higher up. Companies of one know how to break standard rules for the greater good. Doing so is tricky, however, as it involves learning the rules first. In the beginning, a pre–company of one adopts the mind-set of a sponge — basically, you learn everything you can about your profession, your industry, and your customers, and you work at collecting valuable skills of your trade.

  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. For example, Google gives its engineers “20 percent time”: they can work on whatever project they want for 20 percent of their time. More than half of the products and projects Google releases were created during this 20 percent time.

  Other companies set up ROWEs (Results-Only Work Environments), in which employees don’t have set schedules, all meetings are optional, and it’s entirely up to employees how they spend their time working. They can choose to work from home, they can work from 2:00 AM to 6:00 AM if it suits them, and they can sculpt their job however they want, as long as the results benefit the company as a whole. Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson have defined and then studied ROWE implementations for over a decade, and they find that in these kinds of autonomous environments, productivity goes up, employee satisfaction goes up, and turnover goes down.

  For entrepreneurs or those working for themselves, autonomy may seem easier to achieve but can come with several pitfalls. Often when you start working for yourself you trade micromanaging bosses for micromanaging clients. The solution to finding better clients and better projects has a lot to do with your skill and experience, just as I mentioned at the start of this section. When you’re starting out and your skills aren’t as developed, you won’t be able to lead projects or be too picky about the type of work you do. But as your expertise increases and your network grows, you can land better clients — the kind who listen more carefully to how you would do what they’re paying you to do — and you can be more selective about the types of customers and projects you want to take on.

  Kaitlin Maud, a digital strategist and currently a freelancer, put in her time developing her skills at an agency for five years. She spent that time learning the ropes of her industry as well as building a solid network of contacts, with whom she actively kept in touch. Just like Tom the cartoonist, she didn’t venture out on her own until she had enough freelance projects to bring in a relatively stable side income.

  Kaitlin thinks that a sense of autonomy looks different on everyone. She herself has created a work life that rewards her for getting her work done quickly. In a typical company, regardless of how quickly you work, you’re still required to be there for a set number of hours a day; in other words, there’s no reward for productivity or efficiency. Kaitlin has also found that she’s able to get work done with more focus from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM, so she doesn’t schedule meetings or calls during that window of time.

  According to a study from Upwork, freelancing now accounts for more than one-third of jobs in America. Like Kaitlin, people are increasingly choosing to go freelance — that is, they’re not using freelance work as a fallback because their job disappeared. 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.

  With a stable of side project clients and a vast network of contacts in hand, Kaitlin left her agency job and started to freelance full-time. When she started, she first worked at leveling up her skill set before focusing on becoming more autonomous. Since going solo, she’s had a steady waiting list, regularly has to turn down projects that are a fit for her values, and has worked with some large companies like Beats by Dre, Taco Bell, Adobe, and Toms. Her work, because she put in the time to become great at it, now revolves around her life. She can focus entirely on the type of work she loves, solving problems with creative solutions online — basically, Kaitlin is the Olivia Pope (of Scandal fame) of the internet. She fixes things that no one else can — and she’s well on her way to becoming her own company of one.

  Sol Orwell, a fellow Canadian, has refused venture capital for his very profitable business, Examine.com, because he doesn’t see an upside in relinquishing control to venture capitalists. He doesn’t need cash — his company makes seven figures per year. He isn’t looking for a quick out or trying to sell — he enjoys his work a great deal. As a majority owner, he doesn’t have to answer to anyone except his paying customers. Sol would rather have ownership of his work and the freedom to not have to fill every minute of every day with his job. Success to him means making a great living, but not at the expense of being able to take long midday breaks to walk his dog or attend hourlong dance classes on a Wednesday afternoon.

  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.

  Speed

  Companies of one work best under constraints — because that’s where creativity and ingenuity thrive. Companies like Basecamp have a four-day workweek during the summer (no work on Fridays) because it helps them prioritize what’s important to work on and what they can let go of. The key for their employees is to figure out how to work smarter to accomplish tasks with the time they’ve got, not just harder. 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.

  On the company intranet, Basecamp has a “weekend check-in” where employees can post photos of what they did on their three days off from work. This helps this remote-based company build connections between its employees, who are spread all over the globe.

  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. This is the concept at work in the ROWE method: employees no longer have to work a set amount of time, but are rewarded when they finish their tasks faster. By being smarter at getting more work done faster when you work for yourself, you can create a more flexible schedule that fits work into your life in better ways.

  Tasks that used to take Kaitlin days to accomplish in the open-office environment of the agency she worked at now take her only a few hours, because she’s figured out what needs to be in place to maximize her productivity. This gives her the space in her workday, when she’s not at peak productivity, to head to the gym or spend time with her newborn daughter. She’s able to accomplish eight hours of agency work in four hours of freelance work, freeing up half her day. She still works hard and sometimes has to work much longer as project deadlines loom, but she enjoys the reality that most of the time on her schedule is her own.

  Another aspect of speed in a company of one is the ability to pivot quickly when a customer base or market changes. As a solo worker or small company, a company of one finds this much easier to do, because it has less infrastructure to cut through.

  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. Stewart Butterfield started out developing online games, like Game Neverending and Glitch. Both games failed to gain enough of an audience to become profitable, but both times Stewart was able to pivot his (then) small teams, pluck key features from the games, and spin them off into their own products — the photo-sharing site Flickr and Slack, an internal chat system that is now worth over $1 billion. Facing the limitations of both time and money running out, Stewart’s teams managed to hyperfocus on a single solution and bring it to market. By keeping his company small and by paying attention to what was working and what wasn’t, he was able to quickly move to spin-offs that ultimately netted great gains.

  When I asked Danielle LaPorte if she’d take funding again for a new business idea, she said no. She’d learned that not accepting outside funding allowed her to move faster. Instead, she said, she would quickly release a first version of a new product that would fund iterations on it, keeping her costs and expenses as low as possible in order to move toward profitability as quickly as possible. The fewer staff and less external funding involved, the faster a company can move, whether forward or in a new, more promising direction.

  Simplicity

  The best example of the power of simplicity comes from two rival social bookmarking services, Pinboard and Delicious. Delicious grew quickly, adding lots of features, and its founder, Joshua Schachter, made investments early on and grew Delicious into a company with approximately 5.3 million users. The company was sold to Yahoo for somewhere between $15 million and $30 million. Unable to make it profitable, Yahoo sold it to Avos Systems, which removed the popular support forums that Delicious users had come to love. A few years later, Avos sold Delicious to Science, Inc., where Delicious users were continually leaving and using other services.

  While Delicious was rapidly changing hands, Pinboard was started by web developer Maciej Ceglowski. He offered his simple service to users at $3 per year, a fee that increased over time to $11 per year. Since the beginning, Pinboard has been a one-person company with a limited feature-set and with no investors. Ceglowski operated it as a side business for the first few months, until it was generating enough income for him to move to working on Pinboard full-time.

  Then, on June 1, 2017, Pinboard acquired Delicious for just $35,000 and quickly shut it down to new users, offering existing users the option to migrate their accounts to Pinboard instead.

  After rapid growth and increased complexity in its offerings and internal structure, Delicious, in which millions of dollars had been invested, was ultimately consumed by a company of one for a tiny price. Pinboard had kept things simple, played the long game, and ended up winning.

  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. Complexity is often well intentioned, especially at large corporations, where, as complicated processes are added to other complicated processes and systems, accomplishing any task requires more and more work on the job and not toward finishing the task. It can be a slippery slope: one step is added to a process without increasing its complexity too much, but then, after a few years of adding steps here and there, a task that once took a handful of steps now requires sign-off by six department heads, a legal review, and a dozen or more meetings with stakeholders.

  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?

  For a company of one to succeed, a strategy for simplifying isn’t just a desirable goal but an absolute requirement. Having too many products or services, too many layers of management, and/or too many rules and processes for completing tasks leads to atrophy. Simplicity has to be a mandate.

  When Mike Zafirovski became the CEO of Nortel, he implemented an unambiguous theme of “business made simple” across the entire company. From reducing costs to speeding up product development, to making it easier for customers to get the latest technology, he wove the idea of “simple” into every aspect of their large company.

  Often, complexity can creep in right from the beginning — when you’re just thinking about starting a new business. You begin to assume that your business requires “essentials” like office space, websites, business cards, computers, fax machines (just kidding), and custom software solutions. 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.

  If you have an idea for starting a business that requires a lot of money, time, or resources, you’re most likely thinking too big. Your idea can be scaled down to the basics — do it now, do it on the cheap, and do it quickly — and then iterated upon. Start without automation or infrastructure or overhead. Start by helping one customer. Then another. This puts your focus on helping people immediately with what you’ve got available to you right now. Work on things like sales funnels and automation when it no longer makes sense to personalize your interactions with your customers in surprising and delightful ways.

  We’ve become enamored with new technologies, new software, and new devices, and too often large companies and even solo companies try to incorporate them into their existing structures in an effort to “keep up.” The problem here is mistaking “simple” for “easy.” Often we try to be simpler and end up more complicated. We add more tools, more software, more devices to the mix to make things easier, without testing or questioning how easy they’ll be to use on a daily basis.

  Even the latest and greatest HR software, for instance, probably doesn’t need hundreds of screens and drop-down menus. A business selling thousands of products can probably cut most of them if the bulk of their sales comes from just 5 percent of their offerings. There may be no need for thirteen company-wide initiatives if three will do.

  Start out as simple as possible, and always fervently question adding new layers of complexity. Set yourself up as a company of one that’s run to maximize your ability to solve existing problems and to adapt as new problems arise. And then, who knows, perhaps you’ll end up acqu
iring a massive competitor that couldn’t keep up with your radical simplicity.

  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

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  Staying Small as an End Goal

  Sean D’Souza doesn’t want to grow his company. He decided that $500,000 a year of profit was all he wanted to earn and that his business shouldn’t exceed it. So that’s what Psychotactics — his consultancy that teaches other businesses the psychology of why their customers buy (or don’t buy) — earns through its website and in-person training workshops.

  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.