Jarvis

If you’re a company of one, your mind-set is to build your business around your life, not the other way around. For me, being a company of one means not having to bother with infinite growth, since that was never the purpose of my working. Instead, I just focus on maximizing work in a way that works for me, which can sometimes mean doing less.

Next, let’s look at the four typical traits of all companies of one: resilience, autonomy, speed, and simplicity.

Dean Becker, the CEO of Adaptiv Learning Systems, has been researching and developing programs around the idea of resilience since 1997. His company found that the level of resilience a person exhibits determines their success in business, far more than their level of education, training, or experience. Contrary to popular belief, resilience isn’t something that only a select few are born with. It can most definitely be learned.

However, what’s difficult to automate is exactly what makes a company of one great: the ability to creatively solve problems in new and unique ways without throwing “more” at the problem.

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.

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.

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.

Not everything needs to scale to succeed—as Leah Andrews, founder of Queen of Snow Globes, discovered almost by accident. She runs an extremely unscalable business: creating intricate and unique snow globes, one at a time, for her customers. From the start, she was inundated with requests for these custom pieces of art, from big names like Quentin Tarantino and Channing Tatum and even from Netflix’s corporate offices. Instead of scaling production, she focused on raising her prices higher and higher until the demand leveled off to where she could handle orders. She focused on creating an amazing product that was better than the competition —mass-produced snow globes—and was able to charge a huge premium for her work. Because she focused on making the best product, not the most scalable product, she grew her profits quickly without scaling production, which would have also scaled complexity and expenses.

Pieter runs his online service, Nomad List—a community list of cities around the world ranked by how easy and fun it is to work from them—and earns $400,000 a year without employees or even an office. With the New York Times, Wired, CNN, and Forbes having all reported on Nomad List, Pieter needs no PR or marketing team, just a focus on a great and always improving service.

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.) Outside of altruism, mudita is useful in business: we can be pleased that people like Musk or Oprah exist and thrive, while at the same time not letting their prolifically growing empires affect what we do or how we see our own businesses.

This research from Adam Grant, Francesca Gino, and David Hofmann suggests that introverts can make better bosses—and that extroverted leaders, who sometimes speak first and think later, can actually lose the respect of their team, leading to poorer results. However, any leaders who listen carefully and are receptive to smart and useful suggestions from their team, whether they’re introverted or extroverted, can build the trust required to earn cooperation.

Henrik Kniberg, a management coach who’s worked with LEGO and Spotify, believes that assuming an organization can have either full autonomy or full alignment (where tasks for employees strictly align to the goals and directives of their managers) amounts to a false dichotomy. A bit of each is required, both for starting a business and maintaining it. 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.

A leader’s job is to provide clear direction and then get out of the way.

Seventh Generation is another business that’s built around purpose—so much so that the purpose is part of their name: they consider the impact every product they create will have on the next seven generations. This purpose has guided them to create plant-based, nontoxic cleaning supplies and to become a B-corporation (B-corps are certified through rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency).

Figuring out your purpose requires actual reflection on both your own desires and the audience you want to serve. After all, doing business boils down to serving others in a mutually beneficial way. Customers give you money, gratitude, and a shared passion, and you address their problems by applying your unique skills and knowledge to what you sell them.

The craftsperson mind-set keeps you focused on what you can offer the world; the passion mind-set focuses instead on what the world can offer you.

Research from William MacAskill of Oxford University has shown that engaging work helps you develop passion, not the other way around. This kind of work draws you in, holds your attention, and gives you a sense of flow (being absorbed in the work and losing track of time).

A Microsoft Research study found that attempting to focus on more than one priority at a time reduces productivity by as much as 40 percent, which is the cognitive equivalent of pulling an all-nighter.

Companies of one need to become adept at “single-tasking”—doing one thing for an extended period of time without distraction. This capacity helps you focus on the right tasks, do them faster, and do them with less stress. Gloria Mark, a professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, found that for every interruption, it takes an average of twenty-three minutes and fifteen seconds to fully get back to the task. Fewer distractions means speedier work.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A study done by the White House Office of Consumer Affairs found that loyal customers, on average, were worth up to ten times as much as their first purchase.

But what most business owners or even team leaders often fail to consider is their customers’ success. After all, your successful customer has the financial means to continue to support your business, which in turn increases your profit. So your customers’ success leads to your business succeeding as well.

Marshall Haas, cofounder of Need/Want, used to think that a company needs to scale in proportion to the revenue it generates. Thus, a $100 million business needs to have at least hundreds of employees and several layers of bureaucratic managerial hierarchy. What he’s found in practice, though, is that, with fewer than ten employees, his company can grow very slowly and still increase revenue—which is currently at nearly $10 million.

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.

But collaboration is a double-edged sword: technology allows us to easily connect with each other in real time, but at the expense of focused, deep work.

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. This is why companies like Basecamp and Buffer tell employees to disconnect from the distractions of collaboration for most of their day. No one at these companies, for example, is expected to be immediately available, unless there is an emergency (which is quite rare).  In general, responses are expected at these companies within days, not minutes.

His two brokerages required a lot of work because, having never documented the processes involved in running them, he ended up just doing most of the work himself. Then, in 2005, he had a catastrophic snowboarding accident that left him unable to work for several months. He used his convalescence as an opportunity to sell both brokerages, but since neither of the new owners knew what was involved in running them (and Brian’s lack of documentation certainly didn’t help), they both went under soon after.

Brian believes that building an audience by sharing content with a growing mailing list is a solid business model, in that you can find out exactly what your growing audience wants from you and then build it for them.

How many people have you heard say something along the lines of “I had the idea for [Amazon, Zappos, Google] long before it existed—I should be rich!” But ideas aren’t a valid currency. Execution is the only valid currency in business.

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.

In other words, what we’re talking about is creating an environment where customers respect and value your opinions because you’ve demonstrated consistent competency by educating them.

In recent years, large corporate business has focused its marketing and promotion efforts on collecting “vanity metrics”—like social media followers, subscribers, or clicks. But those metrics don’t always correlate with sales, profit, or reputation. That is, they don’t measure engagement or trust—they simply show how many people took some form of marketing bait. By considering “collecting” over “connecting” (with customers), these companies are becoming too caught up in collecting page likers and followers and have forgotten to build relationships with those individual customers who are already listening, following, or buying. 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.

By making customer happiness your top priority over new customer acquisition and then incentivizing customers to share the word about your business, less of your money needs to be spent on promotion. With a company of one, which can be profitable at any size, such slow but sustainable growth makes sense. 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.

The Pointe Restaurant in Tofino is an award-winning, high-end dining experience (and my favorite place to eat). They greet you with a glass of champagne, and the waitstaff then gets to know you a bit as they bring you five to seven immaculately prepared courses over several hours. The chef tends to make an appearance to see how the night is going. When the bill arrives, the maître d’ asks if you’d like your car brought around to the front. While the food obviously backs up the restaurant’s top-of-the-line status, the personal touches are what set it apart and make it a luxury brand that people talk about. The personal touches may not cost much more to implement (for example, hiring waitstaff who make the effort to get to know people), but surprising and delighting customers can go a long way toward building trust. And with service like this, they can charge a huge premium.

Crowdfunding is also a little more meritocratic than traditional ways of raising capital. Research from Harvard Business School shows that investors—who are predominantly white males—prefer ventures pitched and run by people like themselves, i.e., other white men. By contrast, women excel with crowdfunding, according to research from PwC and the Crowdfunding Center: they are actually 32 percent more successful at hitting their fundraising goals than men.

When they launched another product, Unsplash (royalty-free stock photographs), they did so in a similar manner: they bought a $19 Tumblr theme and uploaded ten high-resolution images taken by a local photographer. Within three hours, the first low-fi version was launched. They did the work manually until a scalable system was absolutely required, then invested in it with their profits. Now, a few years later, more than 1 billion photos are viewed per month through Unsplash (and it’s now a profitable business, although it is VC-backed at this point).

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.

Chris Brogan, the New York Times best-selling author and CEO of Owner Media Group, doesn’t believe in hustling. Instead, he’d rather build long-term relationships with people based on mutually shared interests.

Chris believes that smaller business owners (and companies of one) are sometimes embarrassed about selling, and have an aversion to it, because they believe that selling means pushing your products on others. 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.

Over time, as Lindiwe makes a profit, she repays the loan. The current rate of repayment on Kiva is 97 percent. Their network of 1.6 million lenders and 2.5 million borrowers brings together hundreds of thousands of people who would probably never meet in real life. Connecting them on the Kiva platform has generated more than $1 billion in loans so far. The magic of Kiva is that it helps build relationships and connections that lead to these microloans by showcasing the stories and lives of people who need tiny loans to build something for themselves in a place that wouldn’t typically offer them loans to do so.

Chris Guillebeau, best-selling author and creator of the World Domination Summit, personally emailed the first 10,000 people on his mailing list to thank them for signing up. Sometimes doing something that doesn’t scale but is truly genuine is a great way to form strong connections with your audience. Through his authenticity and personal touch, Chris has sold more than 300,000 books and continues to sell out the WDS event each year.

There’s a hotel nestled in the picturesque countryside of Japan’s Yamanashi prefecture, the Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, which is the oldest continuously run hotel in the world. It has been in existence for about 1,300 years (it opened its doors in AD 705) and managed by fifty-two generations of the same family.

Empires have risen and fallen around Onsen Keiunkan, great wars have ravaged it, and massive economic booms and busts have come and gone. Still, the hotel has endured and remained profitable enough to stay open for business. The hotel has thirty-five rooms and access to six natural hot spring baths, which are open 24/7 to better serve their guests. The water of the baths is pure, alkaline, and neither artificially heated nor treated. The hotel serves simple, seasonal food, locally sourced from the surrounding mountains and rivers. Besides the baths, there are no other attractions in the nearby area, and there’s definitely no wi-fi or ride-sharing. Still, it’s been a popular destination for far longer than any of us (or our great-grandparents) have been alive. Guests have included emperors, politicians, samurai, and military commanders.

The hotel’s focus, since the beginning, has been on customer service, not on growth or expansion. It’s stayed small because the top priority has always been making guests comfortable.

In Japanese, shinise is the word for a long-lasting company. Interestingly, about 90 percent of all businesses worldwide that are more than 100 years old are Japanese. They all have fewer than 300 employees, and the ones that still exist never grow quickly or without great reason.