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.

Sean’s goal of achieving a target profit and not exceeding it comes from shaping his business around an optimal life he wants to lead — complete with taking a three-month vacation each year with his wife and spending hours walking, cooking, and teaching and tutoring his two young nieces each day.

If you can consistently give your audience useful, relevant, and timely knowledge (through your mailing list, speaking events, website, and so on), they’ll begin to lean on you for more information (which you can then charge for).

you end up chasing your competitor’s growth instead of bettering your own offering.

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.

Doing well with business consulting didn’t happen until I had years of experience under my belt — both by working with clients and by running my own companies.

An accountant is not just a person you talk to at the end of your business year when you file your taxes. You can use an accountant as an adviser on all things related to government requests, on how to stay up to date with financial laws (so you don’t inadvertently break them), on sound ways to pay yourself and pay your expenses, and on how best to

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

This clarity highlighted something I had unconsciously been doing for nearly twenty years, even before going out on my own, and that was building a business full of resilience, driven by a desire for autonomy and, on most days, enjoyment.