Company of One

by Paul Jarvis

  Even companies of one that focus on client services, such as consultants or freelancers, can use automation software to reduce the amount of one-to-one contact during interactions, whether it’s onboarding new customers or following up after a project is finished.

  Jamie Leigh Hoogendoorn, a designer and student in my “Creative Class” course, vastly cut down the amount of time she was spending dealing with emails from “tire-kickers.” By automating most of her onboarding process with automated emails that delivered information about her services and prices and setting up a calendar system that let people pick a date and time to speak to her (based on her own calendar’s availability), she cut down the amount of time it took her to take a lead and turn it into a paying project from between eight to sixteen hours to only one hour. Her success rate for winning bids has increased, since her potential clients get information on her services instantly, instead of having to wait for her to reply to their emails. And Jamie’s warm and stylish personality still shines through in all of the automations she uses.

  SaaS is becoming more prevalent, and so too are the tools that allow us to spend less time on the minutiae of operating a company of one and more time on our core work, all while helping us scale our reach or profit with no need to also scale our time, staff, or expenses.

  COLLABORATION AS A SCALABLE SYSTEM

  Working for yourself doesn’t necessarily mean working by yourself. Even if your company of one is just you, there are still times when you’ll need to collaborate with others — from contractors to partners to clients. If your company of one is a small team or exists within an organization, even more layers of collaboration are required. But collaboration is a double-edged sword: technology allows us to easily connect with each other in real time, but at the expense of focused, deep work.

  In the past, internal communication had to be face-to-face, in meetings or on scheduled conference calls, but as workplaces move toward remote workers and flex hours such communication is becoming less and less efficient. Increasingly common corporate messaging tools, like Slack, intranets, and cheap or free VOIP calling, are allowing groups located all over the world to not just work together but truly collaborate.

  With these collaboration tools, however, many companies may unknowingly be filling their employees’ time with always-on distractions, especially if employees are required to keep their status as “available,” share their calendars, and keep up with group messaging all day. Real-time messaging can turn into all-day meetings, every single day, with no set agenda.

  Samuel Hulick, founder of User Onboarding, believes that tools like Slack are “asyncronish”: they’re neither truly real-time (you sometimes have to wait indefinitely for an answer) or asynchronous (meaning no immediate response is expected). While the use of messaging tools can seem like a truly great advance in collaboration, too often they lead to daylong half-conversations, like a slow-drip coffee maker.

  Real-time collaboration can be very useful when a whole team is required to brainstorm or solve a problem together, but it can also be completely distracting if it’s expected most of the time. This is why companies like Basecamp and Buffer tell employees to disconnect from the distractions of collaboration for most of their day. No one at these companies, for example, is expected to be immediately available, unless there is an emergency (which is quite rare). In general, responses are expected at these companies within days, not minutes.

  By allowing collaboration to grow from face-to-face contact to notifications on all our digital devices, even the ones we use outside of work (like phones and tablets), we’ve let it scale beyond what makes for focused and efficient work.

  Scaled collaboration does make sense when a project can’t be advanced without input from several team members. A perfect example is what is known as a “hackathon” — a combination of the words “hack” (exploratory programming, not computer crimes) and “marathon.” In a hackathon, several small teams of developers, designers, and project managers are formed, each group collaborating, with speed and focus, to complete a large project over the course of several hours or a few days. Their work has a specific focus — for example, coming up with a new feature for a piece of a software that a company sells, or designing a new website, as the City of New York did, for local government to use in building relationships with the private sector. At the end of a hackathon, each team presents a series of demonstrations to share its results with the rest of the group.

  Hugely successful innovations have come out of hackathons — for example, Facebook’s “Like” button. Hackathons work because they are focused collaboration, not 24/7 “be available at all times” collaboration. They can be fun, energetic, and highly productive, since everyone is collaborating on a common goal and purpose. And once the hackathon is over, everyone goes back to their regular jobs.

  Elsewhere in this chapter, I advise scaling up certain aspects of your business, but collaboration is the one area where companies of one should scale down — from an environment of always-on, always-available, slow-drip messaging distractions to a regimen of clearly defined times to work together to accomplish large tasks together. Otherwise, you run the risk of being available for distraction during every hour of every day.

  BEGIN TO THINK ABOUT:

  ■ Where you could use automation and technology to scale so your business doesn’t have to

  ■ How you could outsource tasks that require massive scale

  ■ How you could add personalization and segmentation to your one-to-many communication channels

  9

  Teach Everything You Know

  Brian Clark started out in the mid-1990s as a practicing attorney, with a great job at a reputable law firm. The only problem was that he wanted to be a writer — and not just any writer, but a writer with full control over what he wrote and how his writing was published. And he wanted to use this new medium called the internet to do it.

  So he quit his law job and began writing about pop culture, attempting to make money by selling ads and affiliated offers through his website. Unfortunately, these revenue streams didn’t bring in enough money to pay the bills. So Brian began to learn about marketing, mostly through the work of marketing guru Seth Godin, who was writing about building mailing list audiences and selling your own products instead of ads for other people’s products.

  Brian took the next step. Since he still had his law degree and was running out of funds, Brian started a website that combined his love of writing with his experience practicing law. In law school, he had been taught that young lawyers need to get jobs at established firms because it’s the more senior lawyers in these firms who have the clients. Having decided that he wanted to find his own clients instead, Brian decided to do so by teaching people who wanted to learn from lawyers about legal issues. Freely sharing information with them on a weekly basis proved fruitful: because he was writing educational content, people trusted his expertise and then wanted to hire, not just any lawyer, but the person who was sharing the information they needed. Brian quickly built up a huge roster of people eager to hire him to solve their own legal issues.

  However, Brian still didn’t want to practice law. Taking an interim step toward the business he now runs, he decided to focus on an industry that had both the money to pay well and a low starting point of knowledge about the internet: real estate. He took what he had learned about internet content marketing and sharing information with an audience and founded two very focused real estate brokerages. Within a year, he was making more money than he would have if he had become a partner in the first law firm he worked at.

  The problem was that, amid this great success, Brian was burned out. Although he was excellent at marketing and online education, he was a terrible manager for his growing companies. His two brokerages required a lot of work because, having never documented the processes involved in running them, he ended up just doing most of the work himself. Then, in 2005, he had a catastrophic snowboarding accident that left
him unable to work for several months. He used his convalescence as an opportunity to sell both brokerages, but since neither of the new owners knew what was involved in running them (and Brian’s lack of documentation certainly didn’t help), they both went under soon after.

  Brian started CopyBlogger as a side business at first. He hadn’t saved enough money prior to his accident to go full-time with it, so he was doing a lot of consulting work just to pay the bills. But the internet was starting to notice how content, sharing, and education could come together as a legitimate form of marketing for any business. And so CopyBlogger, a business focused on teaching companies how to use content marketing, gradually began to thrive.

  With his previous online real estate businesses, Brian learned that his competitive edge was in his ability to outshare his competition, and that’s what he did with CopyBlogger — he shared everything he knew about content marketing with a quickly growing audience. 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 your growing audience wants 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. Each year this idea was proven correct, as every product CopyBlogger launched was more and more successful. Each product was based on direct intel from interacting with and listening to the audience consuming the content that Brian was sharing. This “education through content” built the necessary trust to turn into sales.

  Of course, the stereotypical model for selling is manipulation: pressuring potential customers until they give in and buy, like the proverbial pushy used-car salesperson. But great salespeople — from car dealers to real estate agents to B2B sellers — know sales increase when you honestly evaluate what someone needs and then teach them the value of what you’re selling. (If your product doesn’t fit their needs, you need to let them know that as well.) Sharing content and information is an effective way to begin a sales process because it helps a potential customer see what they need, why they need it, and then how your products can help solve their problem.

  CopyBlogger, now renamed RainMaker Digital, has capitalized on this “share everything” mentality: it now does more than $12 million in annual revenue and has more than 200,000 customers buying content management software, online courses, and WordPress themes. The company’s success has flowed not from a commitment to achieving higher profits or more sales, but from focusing entirely on what its audience needs to learn and then teaching them that (through free articles and paid digital products). And obviously, the company has been rewarded for correct prioritization.

  To stand out and build an audience as a company of one, you have to out-teach and outshare the competition, not outscale them. This approach has several positive outcomes.

  The first is that creating a relationship with an audience that sees you as a teacher sets you up to be perceived as the domain expert on the subject matter. If you’re teaching an audience about legal issues on the internet each week in a newsletter, they’ll begin to trust your insights, and then, as happened with Brian, you’ll probably be the first person they think of when they need to hire someone to help them with legal issues.

  The second benefit of out-teaching your competition is the chance to show an audience the benefits of what you’re selling. For example, if you’re selling a plug-in electric vehicle, teaching people the benefits of this type of vehicle — how much they’ll save by not buying gas each year, why and how it’s safer than a gas vehicle, the vehicle’s reduced environmental impact, and so on — shows them all the reasons they’d want to buy from you, without overtly selling to them. You’re simply giving them the information they need, in a genuine, compelling, and educational way, and letting them come to their own decision about whether such a purchase is right for them.

  The third reason teaching works is that by educating new customers on how best to use your product or service and showing them how to get the most out of it or how to be the most successful with it, you also ensure that they’ll become long-term customers and tell others about their positive experience.

  The final reason teaching works for a company of one is that, except for certain proprietary information — like your unexecuted ideas, business strategies, or patentable technologies — most ideas or processes don’t need to be kept under lock and key. Being transparent in almost all areas, while running your company aboveboard, can only help build trust with your customers.

  IDEAS ALONE ARE WORTHLESS

  How many people have you heard say something along the lines of “I had the idea for [Amazon, Zappos, Google] long before it existed — I should be rich!” But ideas aren’t a valid currency. Execution is the only valid currency in business.

  To clarify, as this can feel like a fairly controversial point to make, an idea alone is worthless because it stands outside of execution. So, for example, the idea itself, that growth should be questioned, is something I’ve been sharing for years online, in my newsletter and podcasts and with anyone who’ll listen. Sharing the idea in a copyrighted book, however, is different. The purpose of the copyright is not to protect the idea (it’d be great if more people wrote about this subject, and I encourage that), but to protect the execution — the months of research and writing that went into formulating the specific words and flow of this book. Protecting intellectual property is important, but protecting general ideas is not, because if all you have is an idea, you’ve not done the work yet.

  Sharing your ideas far and wide helps build not just a following for what you’re selling but a movement around the core values and thinking that your product stands for. Having even more books, research, and ideas flowing around the idea of questioning growth ultimately helps both this book and others like it.

  The idea for UFC — a mixed martial arts organization — started in 1993, but those attempting to make it a reality almost went bankrupt, owing to rules and government opposition. In other words, the idea was there but the execution was not — so it was unprofitable. It wasn’t until two casino moguls became involved and had rule changes implemented that complied with government standards that UFC turned into a $1 billion business. The idea wasn’t enough on its own to make the UFC business thrive; it needed the right execution (and the right people involved to manage the execution).

  At the core of many massive, profitable, global companies is an old idea executed exceptionally well. Facebook is just a better MySpace, and both are essentially digital meeting places. Taxis take people from point A to point B. Uber/Lyft just figured out how to make this service more convenient. None of these are billion-dollar ideas; rather, they’re billion-dollar executions of ideas. That’s why companies of one shouldn’t worry about sharing their ideas, as long as they’re taking care of execution and their ideas are not proprietary.

  There are also very few completely new ideas. Most ideas just riff off existing companies, plans, ideas, or solutions. By focusing a lot of time and energy on protecting ideas instead of sharing them, you run the risk of not letting them get better through critical feedback from others. Even sharing your business idea with potential customers has its benefits, as they can weigh in early, before you’ve invested a lot of time or resources, and help you shape and position the idea into an even better execution.

  THE DOWNSIDE OF SHARING IS … NOTHING

  Jessica Abel is a comic book artist, writer, and teacher — both online and in the classroom at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where she’s the illustration chair.

  Teaching everything that she knows is baked into who she is as a person. Her very first website in the 1990s was about creating your own comic book, and she has continued to teach others since then. With her current focus on launching creative ideas, she shares all of her expertise. Sharing has helped her own business build trust with her audience, assuring th
em that she’s the person to come to for domain expertise.

  As a classroom teacher, she knows that the first time she teaches a course can be a bit of a dog’s breakfast — she will definitely make the material work and explain concepts to her students, but as questions and misunderstandings arise from this first round of teaching, she gets a very clear idea of what needs to be rewritten or rethought in her syllabus. So by teaching in the classroom, she receives essential feedback to make what she’s teaching even stronger. In other words, she benefits just as much as her students do. She couldn’t offer students a great class without teaching it the first time and then learning from their feedback.

  Customer education — providing an audience with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to become an informed buyer — is one of the most important parts of a sales cycle. Too often we’re so close to what we’re selling that we assume others are also experts on it, or know what we know, but most of the time that’s not the case. Customers don’t always know what they don’t know, or don’t know enough about something to realize how useful or beneficial that information could be to them or their own business.

  Companies in the past have not always been eager to invest in customer education, as they haven’t seen clear or direct economic benefits from it. Conventional (but uninformed) wisdom has been that if you teach customers everything you know or share inside tricks of the trade, your customers will use that knowledge to not buy from you — or even worse, they’ll buy from the competition instead, armed with the knowledge they gained from you. But these fears are just myths. In fact, the opposite tends to happen, according to a study done by Andreas Eisingerich and Simon Bell at the MIT Sloan School of Business.