Books:
- Rework by David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried
- Scarcity by Eldar Shafir
Notes:
His focus in his business was being better, not growing bigger.
What if you didn't have to work more hours to finish a project but just more efficiently, so you could enjoy more of your life away from work?
... builds both a profit buffer for your company to weather markets and a personal buffer to help you thrive even in times of hardship.
While freelancing is a perfect first step to becoming a company of one, freelancers are different because they're getting paid by the hour or by deliverables, if they're not working, they're not getting paid.
His company, Marketoon, is still just he and his wife, along with a few freelancers who work only on isolated projects. Tom and his wife work from home, in a sunny studio in their backyard in Marin County, California, where their two daughters regularly sit and draw cartoons in the afternoon with them.
I've found both delight and financial benefits in working out solutions to problems with the resources currently available.
This movement includes individuals and businesses making six and seven figures and becoming happier than most businesspeople are with the work they do.
Technically, everyone should be a company of one. Even at a large corporation, you're essentially the only person who looks out for your own best interests and continued employment.
As much as I enjoy growing my wealth, I also realize that there's a point of diminishing returns if I don't also take care of myself and my well-being.
Companies of one are becoming more popular because people want more control and autonomy in their lives, especially when it comes to their careers.
Other companies set up ROWEs (Results-Only Work Environment), in which employees don't have set schedules, all meetings are optional, and it's entirely up to employees how they spend their time working.
She herself has created a work life that rewards her for getting her work done quickly. In a typical company, regardless of how quickly you work, you're still required to be there for a set number of hours a day; in other words, there's no reward for productivity or efficiency.
According to a study from Upwork, freelancing now accounts for more than one-third of jobs in America.
As a society, we're gradually starting to view "work" not as a single place of employment, but as a series of engagements or projects.
Then, on June 1, 2017, Pinboard acquired Delicious for just $35,000 and quickly shut it down to new users, offering existing users the option to migrate their accounts to Pinboard instead.
Even the largest and greatest HR software, for instance, probably doesn't need hundreds of screens and drop-down menus.
Start out as simple as possible, and always frequently question adding new layers of complexity.
Sean feels that his job as a business owner is not to endlessly increase profits, or even to defeat the competition, but instead to create better and better products and services that his customers benefit from in their lives and work.
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 waking, cooking, and teaching and tutoring his two young nieces every day.
It's an idyllic life filled with hourlong walks and ample coffee breaks. His work routine revolves mostly around answering questions for his customers in his private message board on his website.
!! Part of Sean's customer retention strategy involves sending his customers a box of chocolates, with a handwritten note and sometimes a small cartoon he draws himself.
Worse, investor interests may not always align with what's best for a business's end customers.
For companies of one, the question is always what can I do to make my business better?, instead of what can I do to grow my business larger.
By automating what he can with existing software he is even able to be off-line for weeks at the time and still have steady revenues.
When you hire employees, you’re responsible for them, you’re their source of income that goes toward paying their mortgages, feeding their families and even sending their children to college. That’s responsibility. But keeping people on contract as freelancers makes you responsible for them only for a specific project and you know that what you’re getting paid includes what you pay them.
!! In an ancient language from India called Pali, there is a term "mudita" which seems like the opposite of envy because it means “to delight in the good fortunes or the accomplishments of others”. It has no counterpart in English.
There are a few leadership qualities of generalisation that the leader of a company of one should either have to begin with or be willing to cultivate. Psychology, communication, resilience, focus, decisiveness.
In saying no to anything that doesn't fit, you leave room to say yes to those rare opportunities that do fit – opportunities that align with the values and ideas of your business.
Rand’s first insight is that self awareness is an absolute requirement.
A lot of "growth hacking" (a Silicon Valley term for the kind of exponential growth that folks salivate over) employs pushy and even sometimes shady tactics to keep growing in spite of the excessive churn that produced. For example by adding a pop-up message offering access to free report on every page of on your website. You might increase the number of subscribers to your companies mailing list but you might also end up with the list that has few email open and more unsubscribe making your net-net growth very low or even negative, a company of one would have a mindset more in line with providing a great newsletter with lots of valuable content of interest to the people it wants to attract its overall subscription rate might be lower but the rate retention would be higher.
They prioritise attracting customers not determining the type of customers they want or the experience they want to give people once they become customers.
Focus on where you can test the waters without a massive investment of time or money and then pay attention to what happens when casual contacts turn into customers even if it’s only a handful at first why did they buy what motivated them to do? So how can I keep them happy and most important? How can I help them succeed.
We want everything all polished and perfect before we hit publish but most of the time this doesn’t happen most of the time in fact waiting until everything is totally perfect and only hurt or delay your lunch.
There is a difference between growth as a goal and growth as a direct result of profit from sales of a valuable product.
Each year Peldi takes out $1 million personally, keeps an 18 month runway in the company in case anything bad happens and pays out the remainder to his 25 employee team which grows by only 2 to 3 people per year.
He likes to make sure he has no business debts and the only deadlines are once that Balsamic self imposes.
He gets to spend his time talking to customers instead of board meetings or investor pitches. I'm Italian, Italian think in generations not quarters.
As their careers continue they’ll be able to own specific projects within their team – and be accountable for the deliverables associated with those projects. Finally as their career advances even further they’ll be given owner of ownership over entire disciplines within the company and all the deliverables that come from that discipline that for instance is in charge of everything wide that relates to technology and programming.
To succeed as a company of one you have to have a real underlying purpose, as an unseen but ever present element that drives your business.
Purpose is based on a core set the values held by a company or even a business owner and shared with customers. Passion is simply a whim based on what we think we enjoy doing. The entire business advice that we should all follow our passion implies that we are entitled to getting paid to do work that is always enjoyable.
A real estate investor and a shark on the popular television show Shark Tank said that she didn’t follow her passion. Instead she discovered it by accident as she worked her ass off.
This might seem like a downer of a message but it’s not. Thankfully you don’t have to waste time trying to figure out what you’re passionate about or hoping that one day you find the courage inside yourself to leave into your passion full-time.
Engaging work, not entitled work, can be anything from collecting garbage to serving coffee to coaching billionaires to becoming a company of one inside the large compressor organisation, that’s it.
If you’re engaged by work – for the independence it allows, for the sense of completion when you’re done, for its contribution to making the world a better place – passion is likely to follow.
Taking action and doing work, as a first step, create momentum, and this momentum happens when you’re caught up in – and enjoying – the process of your work, not its possible outcomes.
Opportunities are just obligations wearing an appealing mask. There might be a positive outcome to sizing them, but they always come at the cost – in terms of time, attention, or resources.
Working on a high functioning team, you're naturally playing off other members to accomplish your piece of a project, and that keeps you wanting to move things forward by focusing on your part. When you are accompanying for one without a team or employees, you have to generate your own momentum and motivation to get work done. It’s up to you to set your schedule, manager applications, and avoid distractions.
In this workplaces, employees no longer feel like they have one singular test to perform in the jobs and they have to self manage many of their responsibilities and their time.
I take several months off from interviews calls and meetings each year to create new products or write books without interruption.
For example 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 my calls and in this way I don’t feel bad if I all do Thursday’s meetings and interviews because that’s my singular focused for that day.
Perhaps we need only four hours a day to get our work done.
How you could align your day/schedule to be focused on single tasking.
Creating indifference or simply being another boring small company in a crowded marketplace just won’t serve you well as a company one.
Memorable stories are often driven by a protagonist fighting against an antagonist giving the audience someone to root for ant to root against after all there is no Star Wars without Darth Vader.
What’s not replicable is who you truly are – your style your personality your sense of activism and your unique way of finding creative solutions to complicated problems.
It’s a great feeling when an employee or business owner goes out of their way be helpful. There’s something quite memorable about a personal touch or a business taking ownership of a problem and going out of its weight fix it
CB focuses on treating customers like friends and friends don’t personal phone number to an automated system that says your call is important to us please continue to hold. Similarly the folks at Basecamp try to answer every support request within 15 minutes – regardless of the time day or night.
The best approach is to treat every agreement with a customer or even an employee as a legally buying contract because on a society level that’s what it is.
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 they’re growing audience once from you and then build it for them he learned from Seth Godin that selling to people who truly want to hear from you because you’ve been sharing with them is far more effective than interrupting strangers online who don’t even know you.
People can be guarded if they think they're being sold to but more often than not customers will engage and open up if they feel like they're learning something useful.
The rise of the Internet making possible not only digital purchases but consumer reviews of the digital purchases has given consumers a great deal of power.
In my own business I double the amount of sharing for one of my products by automatically sending an email a week after purchase asking customers if pleased with what they purchase to share their satisfaction with others – using links with pre-reading content provided
Consumers are happy with incentives like small discounts exclusives “swag” special offers and access to premium features.
The first is being able to collect a testimonial or success story based on the real results the client is seeing.
Marketing is simply building a sense of trust and empathy with a specific group of people by consistently communicating with them.
For someone to want to buy a product they have to feel that you understand their needs and have a solution for them.
Move slowly iterating in small steps slowly increasing production the number of products and what the company takes on
That’s why getting a working version of your product release as quickly as possible important your company needs to start generating cash flow and obtaining customer feedback.
The benefit of starting small is that you can start with only a few customers using your product and you can speak to them directly – for feedback suggestions and improvements.
Your message should be simple in choice simple in messaging and simple in hyper targeting only one audience.
Most people who start in your business by themselves make the mistake of believing the products should always come first.
New founders can start almost immediately by offering their product idea as a service first.
By offering services first she was able to generate income immediately as well as proof that there was a market for her product when her one wants service based work took off.
In other words if you’re at a place where you aren’t sure what to do because things haven’t worked out do you still think that your initial assumption was correct and then knowing all you know at this point would you pursue the project all over again?
If the answer is yes if you still think your original idea was valid can be profitable in someway and this worth pursuing you should carry on if not if you’re continuing only because you put too much of your time and energy and heart into the project that is not logical to keep at it.
Your business is constantly selling and constantly pushing its wears people instinctively start to avoid your business or stop responding to your emails but if you use your platform to teach empower and make customers lives or business is better seen as a trusted advisor not a shady or slick sales person.
So company of one need to think of social capital like the bank account you can only take out what you put in if you’re always asking people to buy your products or do nothing but promoting your business and its products and social media your balance will hit zero or you may even be overdrawn
That’s why companies of mailing list social network there in control of that drive sales.
Personally emailed the first 10,000 people on his main list to thank them for signing up.
Sam suggests that one third of your updates should be about your business or content. One third should be sharing content from others and one third should be personal interactions that build relationships with your audience.
Emily takes a relationship from what can I sell you to? How can I truly help you?
Similarly Ferns – a family of a designers works on agency side project – were remaining a loose group independent workers who all offered different design services from illustration branding to web replication design the team gross and drinks as project demand and individual members also take on their own project as needed.
Connecting with peers and fostering relationships with them as well as with other people in orange industries and the similar industries we can access to new ideas and the way to build valuable connections that can lead to new customers – or to simply vent.
The daily blog is what separates wannabe business owners from those who make it a reality.
Purpose is required that you have to have a north star that will drive you long-term without linking out.
I simply offer help or advice to anyone who wants it.
Alongside a salary and their runway buffer I truly think companies of one should invest as much money as they can save up in passive investments like funds.
I’ve got to consider how I can make the most of the potential and save for the future when that might not be the case.
Your purpose or reasoning in starting your own company of one and whether it will hold up or time.
Better to solve requires real continuity – is how to avoid dealing with everything that comes up by just adding more to mix.
Determining what is different for everyone.
This freedom allows you to run your company in your own way – that gives you a life you enjoy your days with tasks you actually want to do and bring your customers you actually want to serve.
Companies around the world are starting to succeed making substantial profits without rapidly hiring employees and taking capital company like buffer and base camp or thriving and profitable.
Indeed, it’s your soul responsibility to look out for your own interests and it’s up to you to define and then achieve what success means to you.