Company of One

by Paul Jarvis

  To manage yourself within a larger team, you have to become adept at articulating your workload to other people. There may be several team members, and even multiple managers, vying for space in your workday. Even when you work for yourself, multiple clients or customers will be simultaneously requiring your attention. If you handle these demands poorly, you’ll become overworked, stressed out, and unable to perform. Handling them well requires constant vigilance and an ability to communicate to others the consequences of taking time away from customers for things like new projects, meetings, conference calls, and reports.

  Glei believes that even though there are no perfect answers here, you have to be relentless in protecting your own schedule and workload. If you don’t have full control over your own schedule — if, for instance, someone is telling you what to do in your job — you have to be able to explain what’s currently filling your schedule and what tasks or responsibilities would need to be removed to make space for other demands. You also need to account for each day’s busywork, which can eat up more time than you think. With hundreds of emails and thousands of Slack messages to answer, as well as five different managers to report to, you can be left with very little time to do your core work. So articulating to people requesting your time what you can and cannot do becomes key. A daily meeting can’t fit into a schedule that’s already full. Making yourself available eight hours a day on a chat leaves you no time to do focused, deep work.

  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.

  Jason Fried, a cofounder of Basecamp and author of the best-seller ReWork, says that it’s a manager’s job to protect the team’s time and attention. Many corporate workers end up putting in sixty- to seventy-hour weeks because so much of the standard forty hours is taken up by interruptions. Fried believes that the norm should be every employee having a full eight hours per day of uninterrupted work to themselves. Companies and managers should demand very little of that time, and when they do, they should be required to ask for it, without the expectation of an immediate response unless it’s a major emergency (for example, the servers for the company software going down).

  By keeping meetings and interruptions to an absolute minimum, Fried has found that his staff enjoy their work more, can be more thoughtful about it, and spend more of their time solving problems that matter to the company. This leads to less churn and less training of new employees (since it’s rarely needed) and even improves his business’s bottom line by raising profits each year.

  Basecamp also doesn’t allow calendar sharing between employees at any level. Shared calendars can easily be abused by those who assume that others have time if there’s nothing on their calendar. In fact, blank time has probably been left on their calendar so they can focus on their work.

  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.

  Creating the image of busyness may be all the rage in startup and corporate culture, but the busier we are, the less space we have to think and be creative in solving the problems that companies of one need to solve. The Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan and the Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir, authors of the book Scarcity, have concluded that we make bad decisions when we are strapped for time, too busy to think, and struggling to manage our obligations. Even if we take only a few hours a week of unplanned time, we can develop a bigger-picture focus or strategies for how our business actually runs.

  Prior to the industrial revolution, work took up all waking hours. Everyone was either sleeping, eating, or working. The automaker Henry Ford instituted eight-hour shifts in his factory in 1914. An early advocate for breaking the day into thirds (work, sleep, family), he did so not so much out of unbridled generosity, but because he realized (so the story goes) that his workers needed free time to go out and buy more consumer goods. After many companies followed suit, we ended up with the traditional idea that work should take forty hours a week. The funny thing, though, is that any task will take up the time we give it. So if we give ourselves eight hours to work each day, our work will take eight hours, and if our tasks take less time than that, we usually fill much of the “extra” time with busywork. If we reframe the question of how we spend our time, however, we can start to figure out how long each of our tasks actually takes. Perhaps we need only four hours a day to get our work done.

  As a company of one that achieves ownership over your schedule and how long you allow yourself to work, you can be overloaded with the sheer number of tasks you need to do to keep your businesses running. Researcher John Pencavel from Stanford University says that if you start to define your productivity in physical terms, you can see that your ability to focus drastically diminishes after fifty-five hours a week. So adding anything more to your schedule that takes longer will not be productive. The social badge of honor for always being busy and always working has no rewards past bragging rights. It also has no place in the company-of-one mind-set. What you should be bragging about is figuring out how to get your work done quicker and more productively.

  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

  6

  Personality Matters

  In high school, I was the kid everyone picked on. Day after day I’d get made fun of or someone would lure me into a fight. I figured my personality was the weakest part of who I was and attempted to hide it as much as I could.

  It wasn’t until years later — when I sent a survey to more than 10,000 customers asking why they bought my products — that I realized that my personality was the number-one factor in their decision to purchase from my business and not from someone else. As much as they wanted to buy the products I was selling, they wanted to buy them from me in particular, even if similar products were offered elsewhere or at a lower price.

  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.

  A personality is required for your company of one, regardless of size. Your human characteristics are the way your brand speaks and behaves. For example, Harley-Davidson is a brand that connotes rebelliousness, while Snapchat is associated with being young and fresh (although calling it “young and fresh” probably means that I’m neither). 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. Marie Forleo, founder of Marie Forleo International, runs an eight-figure business training company with her distinct personality front and center. In the beginning, she worried about being her quirky self in videos and writing because at the time that wasn’t seen as the norm in the business world, or even in the world of other leaders she aspired to connect with, like Oprah. Funnily enough, though, it was specifically her quirky self that her audience related to so strongly, and when her platform grew to reach more than 250,000 subscribers in 193 countries, not only did she appear on Oprah, but Oprah named her a leader for the next generation.

  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.

  Charlie Bickford, founder of Excalibur Screwbolts, a small British manufacturer, has found that keeping his business small makes it easier to show both his staff and customers his commitment to quality and personal service. Charlie still answers customer phone lines at age seventy-four. By keeping his company small, he maintains its integrity and also places his own unique personality in front of his brand; meanwhile, his massive competitors are racing to win market share. Excalibur has endured — even after the entire industry copied his bolt-fixing techniques — by focusing on building a brand personality based on personal contact and great service. These key factors have allowed Charlie to do well at a small size and landed him an impressive range of projects, from the Olympic stadium in Atlanta to the Gottard tunnel in Switzerland.

  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. And don’t confuse the personality of your brand with “acting the part” — instead, the idea is to showcase those aspects of who you naturally are as they relate to building fascination with your intended audience. Charlie, for example, has always been focused on creating products of true quality, so his company works hard to showcase that aspect of its personality.

  THE ATTENTION ECONOMY

  Steve Rubel, a public relations expert in New York City, says that attention is the most important currency anyone can give a business, and that attention is worth more than revenue or possessions. In an age of information — almost every piece of knowledge in the world is immediately available on computers we keep in our pockets — the vastness of what’s available to learn, read, listen to, or watch causes a scarcity of attention. Every business everywhere wants a piece of this attention, both online and off.

  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. For example, when blogger Amber Karnes tweeted that Urban Outfitters stole a design of an independent visual artist, her comment was quickly retweeted by other accounts with a total reach of 1.3 million followers, and then subsequently picked up by the Huffington Post, causing Urban Outfitters to lose 17,000 followers within hours (and no doubt having a lasting negative impact on its brand). As we’ll also see in Chapter 10, attention can be instantly lost when trust is broken.

  Our own minds are not always focused on our current tasks and can wander 46.9 percent of the time, according to research from Daniel Gilbert and Matthew Killingsworth, who studied 5,000 participants across eighty-three countries of ranging ages and socioeconomic status. If we ourselves rarely pay full attention to what we do, how can a business hope to gain attention long enough to convert a person into a customer? Or even have that person simply notice their business?

  In other words, how can companies of one, operating with the idea that less can be better, grab the attention required to profit and thrive?

  According to best-selling business author Sally Hogshead, the answer lies in developing fascination — an intense captivation and focus on a person or business. Her research on this subject, published in fourteen languages, involved more than 125,000 participants over ten years. What Sally has looked at is how businesses and people can leverage attention over others. By measuring how the world sees us, she’s been able to determine how we can be fascinating to our ideal customers.

  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.

  As a result of her research, Sally has compiled a twenty-eight-question personality test that, instead of explaining how you see yourself, explains how the world sees you. When I took the test, for academic curiosity’s sake, the results showed that I’m a “Provocateur.” This seems correct and in line with how I showcase my own brand’s personality: I dislike authority and the status quo and enjoy trying new contrarian business ideas. This personality bleeds through in my writing, my sales pages for products, and even when I’m interviewed for podcasts. So I build fascination in my own audience by leaning on provoking others with ideas.

  In an interview Sally did with Marie Forleo, she spoke about the tendency of large companies to be the vanilla ice cream of their market — they project a personality that’s universally acceptable, but bland. For a company of one, being vanilla isn’t going to allow you or your work to stand out. Companies of one have to be the pistachio ice cream of their market. For better or worse, people either absolutely love pistachio or can’t stand its flavor and weird green color. For its loyal fans, pistachio ice cream stands out, demands attention, and charges a premium. Just like Excalibur Screwbolts does with its products. Just like Marie using her personality to captivate audiences in her videos with lots of chair dancing and funny stories. These are all examples of gaining attention by using and featuring personality, not by shying away from it.

  Fascination is the response when you t
ake 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 for (instead of going with the $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.

  NEUTRALITY CAN BE COSTLY

  It can be scary to draw that line in the sand — especially when it’s your business and livelihood. Doing so immediately alienates certain people or entire groups. But taking a stand is important because you become a beacon for those individuals who are your people, your tribe, and your audience. When you hoist your viewpoint up like a flag, people know where to find you; it becomes a rallying point. Displaying your perspective lets prospective (and current) customers know that you don’t just sell your products or services. You do it for a specific reason.

  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.