Scaling your business makes you beholden to it rather than having it work for you.

<ul><li>Stay small enough to maximize control over your use of time, your personal brand, culture and revenue streams. </li><li>Large hierarchical organizations inevitably face bureaucracy and dilution. </li><li>Fierce independence often fuels innovation and nimbleness. Less can be more.</li></ul>

Savoring the Control From Remaining Small

Design your business model and operations to maximize freedom, flexibility and independence rather than chasing VC funding or high valuations. <ul><li>Avoid exponential growth that sacrifices lifestyle, enjoyment or control. </li><li>Remain location independent. </li><li>You set the terms for how, when and where you work.</li></ul>

Structuring Your Business for Maximum Freedom

<ul><li>Automate tedious administrative or repetitive tasks but not core creative work where the human touch still matters most. </li><li>Excessive automation can damage quality, uniqueness and humanity. </li><li>Use technology thoughtfully - to liberate human efforts on what people do best.</li></ul>

Automating Smartly to Augment Human Effort

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.

Iterating and Evolving Rather Than Rapidly Scaling

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.

Creating Authentic Individual Connections 

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.

Ignoring Conventional Growth-Focused Wisdom

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.

Pursuing Mastery Within a Niche

<ul><li>Focus on relentlessly honing and mastering your core craft rather than chasing endless business growth and scale. </li><li>Grow your impact and income vertically by getting better at what you uniquely do, not expanding your offerings horizontally. </li><li>Stay small and focused intentionally in order to maintain control over your work and brand. </li><li>Growth for its own sake is often counterproductive beyond a certain point of diminishing returns.</li></ul>

Valuing the Mastery of Craft Over Growth

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.

What if the real key to a richer and more fulfilling career was not to create and scale a new start-up, but rather, to be able to work for yourself, determine your own hours, and become a (highly profitable) and sustainable company of one? Suppose the better--and smarter--solution is simply to remain small? This book explains how to do just that. Company of One is a refreshingly new approach centered on staying small and avoiding growth, for any size business. Not as a freelancer who only gets paid on a per piece basis, and not as an entrepreneurial start-up that wants to scale as soon as possible, but as a small business that is deliberately committed to staying that way. By staying small, one can have freedom to pursue more meaningful pleasures in life, and avoid the headaches that result from dealing with employees, long meetings, or worrying about expansion. Company of One introduces this unique business strategy and explains how to make it work for you, including how to generate cash flow on an ongoing basis. Paul Jarvis left the corporate world when he realized that working in a high-pressure, high profile world was not his idea of success. Instead, he now works for himself out of his home on a small, lush island off of Vancouver, and lives a much more rewarding and productive life. He no longer has to contend with an environment that constantly demands more productivity, more output, and more growth. In Company of One, Jarvis explains how you can find the right pathway to do the same, including planning how to set up your shop, determining your desired revenues, dealing with unexpected crises, keeping your key clients happy, and of course, doing all of this on your own.

Automating Smartly to Augment Human Effort

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