Misc

A Company of One

This is my notes on the book “Company of One” by Paul Jarvis - one of the best books on how to start and run a 1-person solo agency. If you’re looking for a follow up read, this is it.

Definition

A company of one is simply a business that questions growth. You mind-set is to build your business around your life, not the other way around. Most companies solve problems by hiring more people, throwing more money at it, or build bigger and more complex things. A company one one must simply solve problems BETTER.

Four traits

  • Resilience
    • Have an acceptance of reality.
    • Sense of purpose
    • Ability to adapt when things change
  • Autonomy
    • Master of your skills
    • Competence and autonomy goes together - opposite is disaster
    • Need to be generalists
  • Speed
    • The fewer staff and less external funding involved, the faster a company can move.
  • Simplicity
    • Simplifying rules and processes.

Leadership

  • “Servant leadership” has the desire to be of service to others and to empower them to grow
  • Understand how others think is critically important. The how and why people make decisions about your products or services
    • Communicate clearly and effectively
    • Knowledge is not Wisdom
    • Be an expert at saying no.
    • Make small, digestible decisions.
  • Hustlers don’t outperform non-hustlers.
  • Power paradox: powered gained through leadership causes you to lose capabilities you need to gain it in the first place.
    • Have Self-awareness
    • Recognize we’re all human
    • Have empathy
    • Practice gratitude

Intentional growth

  • Sell to only those who are already interested.
  • Sell to those who are hanging out where your business is hanging out.
  • Instead of scaling, raise prices until demand levels off.
  • OVERHEAD = DEATH
  • Growth as a one dimensional metric for success. It is useless in the absence of real reasons for it.
  • Four reasons why companies want to grow
    • Inflation
    • Investors
    • Churn
    • Ego
  • People tend to focus on the wrong things
  • The most important question to ask is: How can I help my customers succeed?

Mindset

  • Your why matters as an unseen but ever-present element that drives your business
  • Your purpose is the lens that filter all your business decisions
    • Define your audience
    • Serving others in a mutually beneficial way.
  • Purpose is not passion
    • Purpose is core set of values held
    • Important to focus on solving problem than on passion
  • Be very skilled at what you do before you take the leap
  • Test the leap with a small jump
  • Create momentum
  • Opportunities are just obligations wearing an appealing mask.
  • You have to be able to explain what’s currently filling your schedule and what tasks or responsibilities would need to be removed to make spaces for other demands.
  • We make bad decisions when we’re strapped for time, too busy to think, and struggling to manage our obligations.

Personality matters

  • Why customers buy: because personality of the seller
  • “Professionalism” suppresses personality
  • Be authentic, showcase those aspects of who you naturally are as they relate to building fascination with your intended audience.
  • Attention-as-currency:
    • Old: seller making all the rules (productization)
    • Now: buyer want more control - what, when, how it’s delivered. Have choice.
  • How to grab attention required to profit?
    • develop fascination with your intended customers
  • Must UNLEARN how to be boring
  • Elicit a strong emotional response to your business
  • Develop personality of your brand
  • While it’s easy to lose forget or lose interest in information, it’s much harder to forget strong emotion.
  • Good personality for company of one:
    • Provocateur.
    • Dislike authority
    • Contrarian
    • Build fascination by leaning on provoking others with contrarian ideas.
  • Neutrality can be costly.
    • Show perspective and let customers know that you don’t just sell your products or services - You do it for a specific reason.
    • Best marketing is never just about selling a product or service, but about taking a stand.
  • Be a polarizing company of one:
    • Placation: change the minds of the haters
    • Prodding: intentionally antagonize haters
    • amplification: singling out a characteristic and lean heavily on it.
  • Polarization shortens sales cycles, forces customers into binary choice of “yes” or “no”
  • Let customers self-vet and self-select.
    • “unsubscribe” is a good thing.
  • People can copy skills, expertise, and knowledge - all can be replicated with enough time and effort
    • Your style, your personality, your sense of activism, and your unique way of finding creative solutions to complicated problems are NOT replicable

Customer relationships

  • Build personal and professional relationships with your customers.
    • Company of one are in the people-serving business.
  • Standout by exceeding expectations - through personal touches, building reciprocity, and treating customers like they’re very important.
    • Compete with larger companies on personal touches.
  • Customer service
    • Emotion
    • Ease
  • Referrals are important
  • Referrals work because they build trust by proxy.
  • Empathy is important
    • Listening to their needs
  • To be helpful to customers, you have to look beyond the problems they’re presenting to you.
    • What are they not saying?
  • When things go wrong:
    • Own your mistakes - even when those mistakes are not directly your fault.

Creating scalable systems

  • Start with the questions
    • What type of life do I want?
    • How do I want to spend my days?
  • Focus on slower and smaller or on-demand strategies.
    • Establish slower but purposeful connections. Give on-demand information as customers need it
    • Personalization works
  • Collaborate where you can
    • Working for yourself doesn’t necessarily mean working by yourself.
    • Collaboration is the one area where companies of one should scale down - away from always on, always available, to less distractions.

Teach everything you know

  • Trust can be built when you share everything you know
    • Write educational content
    • Establish that you’re an expert that customers want to hire.
    • Be a source of information that customers can rely on.
  • Evaluate what someone needs and then teach them the value of what you’re selling.
  • Create a relationship with an audience that sees you as a teacher.
  • Showcase the benefit of what you’re selling
    • Show them all the reasons they’d want to buy from you
  • Educate the best way to use your product or service
    • ensure they’ll become long-term customers and tell others about their positive experience
  • Most ideas or processes don’t need to be kept a secret - sharing will build trust.
  • Customer education - providing an audience with the knowledge, skills, and ability to become an informed buyer - is one of the most important part of a sales cycle.
  • Too often we’re so close to what we’re selling that we assume others are also experts on it.
  • Customer education is good marketing.
    • Education creates eager buyers because it adds purpose to their lives.
  • Teaching builds authority
    • Build trust that your answer is not the only answer, but the right answer.
    • Respect and value your opinion because you’ve demonstrated consistent competency by educating them.
    • Show, don’t tell

How to use trust

  • Trust highly correlates to a person’s propensity to consider, try, or buy a product.
  • Build trust by standing out as an expert
  • A trust-based company of one begins with creating something that genuinely solves a problem.
    • Rigorously tests the product’s validity
    • honestly communicating its benefits and outcomes
  • Three aspects of trust
    • Confidence - i believe what you say
    • Competence - i believe you have the skills to do what you say
    • Benevolence - i believe you’re acting on my behalf
  • Trust by proxy
    • Word of mouth recommendation
    • 83 percent of customers are willing to provide referrals
    • only 29 percent actually do give referrals
  • Strategy to get customers to share
    • only ask happy customers
    • do it for them - offer links with prewritten content provided
    • 88% of consumers would like some kind of incentive to share products they like
      • 95% among 18-35yos
      • Offer incentives (monetary or non-monetary)
        • Swags, small discounts, special offers, access to premium features
        • Double-sided incentives, ie. group buys
  • 50% of new customers for service-based companies come from word-of-mouth
    • Ask for referral by simply following up.
    • Collect testimonial or success story based on real results
    • Create a schedule for following up
      • Ask if they know other businesses that could benefit from your service.
      • or if they’re interested to do another project
  • Trust doesn’t require a big budget.
  • Make customer happiness your top priority over new customer acquisition, then incentivize them to share the word about your business.
  • Wanting to go viral is often what business do when they don’t know who their intended audience is, tries to appeal to pretty much everyone.
  • If you want virality, you probably don’t understand the purpose of that content or whom it was really created for.
  • Engagement and connection with your niche are more important and far less costly to generate.

Launching and iterating in small steps

  • Minimum Viable Profit (MVPr) is the most important determinant of the sustainability of your company of one.
  • Finding a simple solution to a big or complicated problem is the strongest asset a company of one has.
  • Three elements to the psychology of simple:
    • Predictability
      • Simple product are easy to instantly understand
    • Accessibility
      • Being honest
    • Servicing as a building block
      • Build on an existing and understood concept
  • You don’t always need VC funding
  • Crowd funding works - women excel with it, and are 32% more successful at it than men.

Hidden Value of Relationships

  • Selling doesn’t have to be pushy, it’s based entirely on a cultivated relationship
  • You can’t buy your way into real relationships any more than forcing people to buy your product.
  • Build relationships based on trust, humanity and empathy.
  • Company of one does not growth hack.
  • Company of one finds its tru north by working toward being better, not bigger.
    • Serve an audience well
    • Audience become customers
    • Customers become advocates.
  • Reward audience who’s giving you their attention by giving your attention back to them, through listening and empathy.
  • Actual capital a company of one need:
    • Financial capital: as small as possible (MVPr)
    • Human capital: value that you can deliver
    • Social capital: how market or audience perceives the value you’re offering
  • Relationships are currency.
    • You can only take out what you put in.
    • Relationships are the basis for building the trust required for commerce.
  • Social networks are good ways to build social capital
    • Do things for each other, be valuable, be useful.
    • Strategy:
      • 1/3 about your business or your content
      • 1/3 sharing content from others
      • 1/3 personal interactions that builds relationships with your audience
  • Key points to building a long term relationship with customers
    • Customers must LIKE your business.
    • Respect must be present: customers must admire your work
    • Customer admire your “whole person”
    • Maintain relationship over time

Starting a company of one

  • Working for yourself requires ego and purpose in equal measure.
  • Ego is not all bad: “I know I can do this better.”
  • Purpose is essential — have a north star that drives you long‑term.
    • For me, freedom of choice is my north star.
    • The freedom to work however, whenever, and with whomever I want.
  1. Pick something you know how to do well (a skill).
  2. Listen to people who are looking to hire.
  3. Offer to help with their questions.
  4. Offer help for free — not as a contract or monthly engagement, but as quick advice over email or chat.
    1. This gives you a chance to share tips and tricks openly.
    2. Learn what your future audience is looking for.
    3. They receive your help in exchange for insight into what they want.
  5. Do this fact‑finding/mini‑consulting while working somewhere else (FT job).
  6. Write publicly about what you’ve learned — and compile everything into a book.
    • Being helpful is a great lead‑generation funnel.
  7. Help others first. Money will come.