Your company is an organism; its cells need to divide to multiply, they need to differentiate to become something new. Don’t worry about what you’re going to lose—think about what you’re going to become.

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.

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.

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.

He was searching for a way to meld them together. He emerged from the fog clear in his mind to define the core purpose of the company in terms of ideals he learned studying Plato and other philosophers. He rejected conventional business school dogma that the purpose of a company is to maximize shareholder wealth, replacing it with the purpose to provide a place for people to flourish and to enhance the community. To be clear, the company would also seek to grow profits and generate robust cash flow, but mainly as a necessary means to fuel the core purpose.