Book Preface

On February 28, 2010—the final day of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver—I found myself driving a tiny cube-van with my wife, Lisa, heading to a ferry terminal. We had just closed on the sale of our condo, a small glass box in the sky located right in the heart of downtown Vancouver. We had also sold or donated almost all of our possessions, and we were moving to a town in the middle of nowhere, literally at the end of the road on Vancouver Island.

Our new town—Tofino—was proudly billed as “life on the edge.” As in truly the edge of nowhere. This island is the setting for the reality TV show Alone, where the actors grapple with living and surviving in complete isolation; it’s filmed a few hours north of town. Fewer than 2,000 people live in Tofino—mostly surfers, old draft dodgers, and other assorted hippies who are still very happy living in the twentieth century.

At the time—before, after, and even during the move—I was working entirely online as a designer and online business consultant to everyone from Mercedes-Benz to Microsoft to Marie Forleo. My work and life depended on being hyperconnected. But now I was trading all of that for a town with zero other people involved in tech and, even worse, a really awful internet connection.

In short, for someone like myself who was coming from the tech world, this move was going to be a bit of a massive adjustment.

The main reason I was hell-bent on leaving civilization was that I had simply had enough of “business as usual” city life and the constant push from others to grow my successful business into something bigger. My wife, Lisa, too, was sick of her daily career demands. We were both done with the constant stimulus and stress of our urban existence—the lights, sounds, and distractions, the constant and incessant “buzzing.” To save our sanity, we made our escape as quickly as we possibly could. And living on Vancouver Island seemed like the perfect tonic.

Yet we soon learned that living in the woods on an island does something funny—it forces you to go deep within your own thoughts. There’s not a whole lot else you can do, especially if you don’t have a television or even Netflix. And at first, exploring your own thoughts is one of the scariest things in the world. (A study at the University of Virginia by Timothy Wilson found that people would rather get electric shocks than simply be alone with their thoughts.) But then again, if you sit with your thoughts for a while, they can reveal some mind-set-changing ideas.

But scaling down wasn’t just a 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 decluttering my thoughts (creating an “inbox zero” for my brain, if you will), I was able to look at my day-to-day business much more clearly because the distractions were now gone. I hadn’t been able to clearly express my reasons for the way I had been working until that moment.

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. In other words, by scaling down every aspect of my life, I realized this was how I had successfully built my business all along. I had benefited immensely by resisting the typical avenues of growth and business expansion. (Hey, I was able to move to the woods on an island.) And now, for the very first time, I understood why.

I had been building a company of one.

INTRODUCING A COMPANY OF ONE

At first, I felt alone in my assumption that more isn’t always better. But then, during the writing of this book, I found that there is an amassing army of others who feel very much the same, and whose business decisions are backed up with growing research and studies. It turns out that some of the most successful brand-name companies and individuals are companies of one at heart.

Living in Tofino gave me the opportunity to take up a daily ritual of going for a morning surf. One day I was out in the lineup (the place just in front of the breaking waves where surfers wait to catch rides) with my accountant friend. We were sitting out there, waiting for the next decent wave, and he turned to me and said, “I’m stoked! I’ve just about made enough to take the rest of the year off to go rock climbing.” It was August. Puzzled by what he said, I missed the next few waves that rolled by. Once he paddled back to the lineup, where I still was, he explained that he had calculated what he needed to make in profit in order to cover his cost of living and put a decent amount of money into investments. He had figured out the amount of wealth he needed to be comfortable and didn’t feel the need to accumulate more.

Past that, he didn’t need any more money—so he’d stop working when he hit his “enough” amount and travel for the rest of the year. He didn’t want to grow his accounting business into a bigger company with employees and offices in every city. If he did, his “enough” number would also grow, from having to manage more employees and a bigger business. He wouldn’t be able to spend as much time rock climbing (or surfing). His focus in his business was being better, not growing bigger. I quickly began to realize that I had adopted a similar mind-set: I knew what I needed to make to cover my business and my life, so I could decide to slow down when I reached “enough” as well.

It’s assumed that hard work and smart thinking always result in business growth. But the opposite is often true: not all growth is beneficial, and some growth can actually reduce your resilience and your autonomy. Just as I learned new skills in self-sufficiency that were far outside my realm of knowledge, companies of one can do the same. Indeed, they’ll need to in order to stand out and thrive.

In truth, embracing growth appears to be the easier route more often than not, since it’s easier to throw “more” at any problem that might pop up. Want more customers? Hire more employees. Need more revenue? Spend more. Fielding more support requests? Build a bigger support team. But scaling up might not be the best or smartest solution to the basic problem. As a means to generating higher profits, what if you acquired more customers simply by creating more efficiency, so you didn’t have to hire more people? What if you generated more revenue by finding a way to spend less (again, for higher profits)? What if you responded to the growth in support requests by finding a better way to teach your customers how to use what you sell, so they didn’t have to ask questions as often? What if you didn’t have to work more hours to finish a project but just more efficiently, so you could then enjoy more of your life away from work?

Growth, in the typical business sense, isn’t always a smart strategy if it’s followed blindly. Much of the research reported in this book will strongly suggest that blind growth is the main cause of business problems. It can leave you with an unmaintainable number of employees, unsustainable costs, and more work than hours in a day. It can force you to lay off employees, sell your company at a less than optimal price, or, even worse, close up shop completely.

What if you worked instead toward growing smaller, smarter, more efficient, and more resilient?

Staying small doesn’t have to be a stepping-stone to something else, or the result of a business failure—rather, it can be an end goal or a smart long-term strategy. The point of being a company of one is to become better in ways that don’t incur the typical setbacks of growth. You can scale up revenue, enjoyment, raving fans, focus, autonomy, and experiences while resisting the urge to blindly scale up employee payroll, expenses, and stress levels. This approach builds both a profit buffer for your company to weather markets and a personal buffer to help you thrive even in times of hardship.

The “company of one” approach doesn’t apply only to a single-person business—it’s a model for using the power of you to be more self-reliant and more responsible for your own career path. Although a company of one can certainly be a small or single-person business, it’s unlike most small businesses, whose end game is usually expansion or growth to hit peak profitability. A company of one questions growth and stays small on purpose.

A company of one isn’t simply a practicing freelancer either. While freelancing is a perfect first step to becoming a company of one, freelancers are different because they exchange time for money. Whether they’re getting paid by the hour or by deliverables, if they’re not working, they’re not getting paid. All of a freelancer’s relationships are one-to-one, meaning that each time paid work occurs, a freelancer has to do something and use his or her time.

In contrast, a company of one is more in line with the traditional definition of an entrepreneur. If you’re utilizing systems, automations, and processes to build a long-term business, you’re not trading time for money, but instead operating and profiting outside of the time you spend working and beyond your one-to-one relationships. For example, whether you’re creating physical products, selling software, or teaching online courses, customers and users can purchase and consume these products and services without your company of one putting in time for each transaction. While developing products can be time-consuming and iterative, the number of customers can be almost infinite for a company of one, and profit then happens outside of time spent. Where a company of one is concerned, as we’ll see in coming chapters, scaling customers and even profit doesn’t always require scaling employees or resources exponentially.

A company of one is a collective mind-set and model that can be used by anyone, from a small business owner to a corporate leader, to take ownership and responsibility for what they do to become a valuable asset in any marketplace—in terms of both mental practices and business applications. It’s a blueprint for growing a lean and agile business that can survive every type of economic climate, and ultimately it leads to a richer and more meaningful life—no cable-cutting or moving to the woods on an island required.

Just as Michael Pollan’s food ideology is summarized in three simple rules—“eat food, not too much, mostly plants”—the “company of one” model can be laid out in a similar fashion: “start small, define growth, and keep learning.”

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