Company of One: Why Staying Small is the Next Big Thing for Business

If you’re a company of one, your mind-set is to build your business around your life, not the other way around.

plan for getting rid of our physical belongings; it was also a plan for achieving mental clarity. In creating a personal life that was bare of all but the essentials, parallels to my work started to become evident — what was truly necessary and what wasn’t. By

Basically, you have to be good at your skill set before you can expect to achieve autonomy from using it.

We don’t need an attitude of world domination and crushing it in our work in order to make a great living or even have a substantial impact. Our work can start and finish small while still being useful — focused on moving toward better instead of more.

When you focus on doing business and serving customers in better and better ways, your company of one can end up profiting more from the same amount of work because you can raise the prices until your demand flattens out to where you can handle it.

Culturally, growth feeds our ego and social standing. The bigger the company you own, with more profits and more employees than the next person, the better you might feel. James Clear figured that 10,000 subscribers to his new blog’s newsletter would be the magic number that would signify his success. But then he hit 10,000 quickly and nothing in h

While it may seem counterintuitive to focus your marketing and trust-building efforts on a small and specific group of people, there are benefits to doing so. The more specific you are with who your products or services are for, the more you can build trust with that particular audience. The paradox of focusing on a niche is that the more specific

Companies of one can truly benefit from word of mouth because it’s easier for a company of one to create these kinds of personal relationships and stay more closely connected with customers. Urban found that smaller businesses thrive on recommendations because they can focus solely on their specific audience and build relationships with them (even

Where companies of one can use their focus on betterment over growth in marketing is by focusing on a specific niche instead of a massive market. Trust is more easily established within a smaller customer base because it’s easier to stand out as an expert or to gather referrals that hold weight from other industry experts in that niche.

Passion and courage are almost impossible to control and can easily leave you feeling bad about yourself. It’s far easier to simply work at getting really good at something in demand, discovering how those skills can be applied to something else, and then testing your idea in a small way to see if it will pay.