Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business

Pdf Book Name: Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business
Author: Paul Jarvis
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN-10, 13: 9781328972354,1328972356
Year: 2019
Pages: 272 Pages
Language: English
File size: 1 MB
File format: PDF,EPUB

Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business Pdf Book Description:

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. 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.