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Valuing the Mastery of Craft Over Growth
- Focus on relentlessly honing and mastering your core craft rather than chasing endless business growth and scale.
- Grow your impact and income vertically by getting better at what you uniquely do, not expanding your offerings horizontally.
- Stay small and focused intentionally in order to maintain control over your work and brand.
- Growth for its own sake is often counterproductive beyond a certain point of diminishing returns.
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Creating Authentic Individual Connections
Connect with individual customers in an authentic way that builds loyalty and community rather than chasing mass markets and faceless scale.
Marketing should be human-focused first and foremost before technical scale. Nurture real relationships that can outlast fads.
Avoid diluting your brand through excessive bureaucracy and hierarchy. Keep quality high by staying small.
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Pursuing Mastery Within a Niche
Become world-class at one core niche skill rather than diluting your gifts across too many areas. Fame and rapid growth often erode quality, uniqueness and passion.
Depth of expertise beats breadth. Identify the true essence of your craft and polish it repeatedly to perfection. Resist scope creep.
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Structuring Your Business for Maximum Freedom
Design your business model and operations to maximize freedom, flexibility and independence rather than chasing VC funding or high valuations.
- Avoid exponential growth that sacrifices lifestyle, enjoyment or control.
- Remain location independent.
- You set the terms for how, when and where you work.
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Ignoring Conventional Growth-Focused Wisdom
Reject the conventional wisdom that bigger is always better. An endless drive for more customers, data and staff often creates complexity rather than efficiency.
Stay intentionally small and lean to enable agility. Imposing constraints breeds creativity. You likely don't need a huge empire to find success.
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Iterating and Evolving Rather Than Rapidly Scaling
Improve your offering, processes and systems through small but constant iterations versus trying to rapidly scale up overnight.
Listen carefully to customer feedback and let it drive incremental innovations.
Radical growth often stifles innovation and jeopardizes quality. Evolve don't explode.
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Automating Smartly to Augment Human Effort
- Automate tedious administrative or repetitive tasks but not core creative work where the human touch still matters most.
- Excessive automation can damage quality, uniqueness and humanity.
- Use technology thoughtfully - to liberate human efforts on what people do best.
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Savoring the Control From Remaining Small
- Stay small enough to maximize control over your use of time, your personal brand, culture and revenue streams.
- Large hierarchical organizations inevitably face bureaucracy and dilution.
- Fierce independence often fuels innovation and nimbleness. Less can be more.
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IDEAS CURATED BY
CURATOR'S NOTE
In Company of One, Paul Jarvis makes the case for staying small and rejecting growth for growth's sake. He provides strategies for solopreneurs to thrive through focus on perfecting their craft, not endless expansion.
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