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

or teaching online courses, customers and users can purchase and consume these products and services without your company of one putting in time for each transaction. While developing products can be time-consuming

Kaitlin has also found that she’s able to get work done with more focus from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM, so she doesn’t schedule meetings or calls during that window of time.

If you’re a company of one, your mind-set is to build your business around your life, not the other way around.

Her work, because she put in the time to become great at it, now revolves around her life. She can focus entirely on the type of work she loves, solving problems with creative solutions online—basically, Kaitlin is the Olivia Pope (of Scandal fame) of the internet. She fixes things that no one else can—and she’s well on her way to becoming her own

Companies of one instead focus on stability, simplicity, independence, and long-term resilience and rely on starting small and becoming as profitable as possible, without the need for outside investment.

it forces you to go deep within your own thoughts. There’s not a whole lot else you can do, especially if you don’t have a television or even Netflix. And at first, exploring your own thoughts is one of the scariest things in the world. (A study at the University of Virginia by Timothy Wilson found that people would rather get electric shocks than

Companies of one work best under constraints—because that’s where creativity and ingenuity thrive. Companies like Basecamp have a four-day workweek during the summer (no work on Fridays) because it helps them prioritize what’s important to work on and what they can let go

Part of Sean’s customer retention strategy involves sending his customers a box of chocolates, with a handwritten note and sometimes a small cartoon he draws himself. The package costs him approximately $20, which includes shipping from New Zealand (where he lives currently), but it’s the one thing his customers talk about. They’ll buy a $2,000 tra

The last trait of resilient people in a company of one is the ability to adapt when things change—because they invariably do.