Company Of One

Highlighted Quotes

• Location Page 27: Growth, as a primary focus, is not only a bad business strategy, but an entirely harmful one.
• Location Page 28: they grew based on venture capital injections of funds, not on where revenues were actually at.
• Location Page 28: VCs don’t invest millions in companies because that’s what those companies might need; rather, they invest the amount that their own VC business requires to see growth in their own portfolios, coming from the few companies that actually give them a positive return.
• Location Page 28: sudden and large investments tend to turn companies into “armies of employees who sit around having meetings.”
• Location Page 28: They expend money and resources in the anticipation that revenue will catch up to spending. Most startups fail because that doesn’t happen often.
• Location Page 29: Companies of one instead focus on stability, simplicity, independence, and long-term resilience
• Location Page 31: stop trying to reach infinitely more people through paid channels to feeding only those people who show up for dinner—the
• Location Page 33: chasing your competitor’s growth instead of bettering your own offering.
• Location Page 33: your focus is on the relationship and the paid work at hand. Sometimes the best plan is focused on your current customers’ success, not on chasing leads and growth.
• Location Page 33: “the disease of more.”
• Location Page 34: There’s nothing wrong with finding the right size and then focusing on being better. Small can be a long-term plan, not just a stepping-stone.
• Location Page 43: When we give in to envious feelings, the best we can hope for is second best, since we’re focused on copying someone else’s path and not forging our own.
• Location Page 53: become an expert at deftly saying no.
• Location Page 55: hustlers don’t outperform nonhustlers;
• Location Page 55: His research found no relationship between workaholism and greater financial reward or self-efficacy.
• Location Page 56: power is a tumor that ends up killing its victims’ sympathies.
• Location Page 56: the qualities that lead to the leadership roles we achieve are the exact qualities that diminish once leadership roles are attained.
• Location Page 56: Entrepreneurialism idolizes workaholism and sacrifice
• Location Page 57: no external definition of success can prevent mental illness.
• Location Page 57: As leaders, our job is to be self-aware and to check in on ourselves regularly.
• Location Page 58: “If therapy is good enough for Tony Soprano, it’s good enough for you.”
• Location Page 58: leaders need to practice gratitude.
• Location Page 58: The glorification of indefatigable leaders is exactly the source of most problems, because their failures and flaws are ignored instead of debugged and learned from.
• Location Page 61: She has found that growth as a one-dimensional metric for success is useless in the absence of real reasons for it or ways to support customers once they’re acquired.
• Location Page 61: changed its home-page messaging in order to speak to existing customers,
• Location Page 62: Most companies grow for four reasons: inflation, investors, churn, and ego.
• Location Page 62: Investors, even if they own the company, are the biggest reason businesses want to grow.
• Location Page 64: “You can’t sell your way out of an unprofitable business.”
• Location Page 65: figure out the smallest version of your idea and then a way to make it happen quickly.
• Location Page 65: customers really don’t care if you’re profitable. But if what you sell them can help them become profitable, they’ll never want to leave your business.
• Location Page 65: treat new customers as real relationships
• Location Page 65: Customer success is the cornerstone of a profitable company of one.
• Location Page 66: at the start you’re the smallest and most agile you’ll ever be.
• Location Page 67: the focus on helping people immediately with what you have available right now and are resourceful enough to provide,
• Location Page 69: Each year Peldi takes out $1 million personally, keeps an eighteen-month runway in the company (in case anything bad happens), and pays out the remainder to his twenty-five-employee team
• Location Page 69: he has no business debts, and the only deadlines are ones that Balsamiq self-imposes.
• Location Page 77: To succeed as a company of one, you have to have a real underlying purpose.
• Location Page 79: Your purpose is the lens through which you filter all your business decisions,
• Location Page 79: your business is fully aligned with your purpose, you’ll be more motivated to keep at it, even during the tough moments;
• Location Page 79: But the more we busy ourselves with work and fail to consider why we’re doing it in the first place, the more likely we are to realize (often far too late) that we’re not enjoying what we’ve worked so hard to build.
• Location Page 80: purpose-based, values-driven companies outperform their counterparts in stock price by a factor of twelve.
• Location Page 80: Defining your purpose has more to do with your personal values and ethics than with business plans or marketing strategies.
• Location Page 80: If you don’t feel a deep connection to your purpose, no one else will feel it either.
• Location Page 81: Purpose and passion are quite different.
• Location Page 81: The tired business advice that we should all “follow our passion” implies that we are entitled to getting paid to do work that is always enjoyable.
• Location Page 82: “Follow your passion” is irresponsible business advice.
• Location Page 82: passion is the side effect of mastery.
• Location Page 82: following your passion is fundamentally flawed as a career strategy because it fails to describe how most successful people ended up with compelling careers
• Location Page 82: we need to be craftspeople, focused on getting better and better at how we use our skills, in order to be valuable to our company and its customers.
• Location Page 82: engaging work helps you develop passion, not the other way around.
• Location Page 86: Passion doesn’t precede mastery, but follows it.
• Location Page 86: Passion isn’t the catalyst that creates success,
• Location Page 87: Opportunities are just obligations wearing an appealing mask.
• Location Page 88: the main difference is motivation and momentum.
• Location Page 90: Basecamp also doesn’t allow calendar sharing between employees at any level.
• Location Page 92: The social badge of honor for always being busy and always working has no rewards past bragging rights.
• Location Page 94: my personality was the number-one factor in their decision to purchase from my business and not from someone else.
• Location Page 94: I gradually became okay with sharing who I am and using my differences strategically.
• Location Page 96: building fascination with your intended audience.
• Location Page 96: attention is the most important currency anyone can give a business, and that attention is worth more than revenue or possessions.
• Location Page 97: developing fascination—an intense captivation and focus on a person or business.
• Location Page 98: the key is to unlearn being boring.
• Location Page 98: elicit a strong emotional response to your business, and the personality of your brand,
• Location Page 98: Fascination in a product or service builds an emotional connection, and emotional connections hold attention.
• Location Page 99: taking a stand is important
• Location Page 99: The best marketing is never just about selling a product or service, but about taking a stand—showing
• Location Page 100: we should proudly exclude people, because we can’t please everyone.
• Location Page 100: there’s power in polarization.
• Location Page 100: Creating indifference or simply being another boring small company in a crowded marketplace just won’t serve you well
• Location Page 100: The “poster child” for polarization is Marmite,
• Location Page 100: we should create products that make specifically identified groups of people very happy and ignore everyone else.
• Location Page 103: The bottom line is that I’m happy that my audience, in effect, vets itself.
• Location Page 104: you’re drawing your own niche market closer by showing them your understanding and sympathy for how they see the world.
• Location Page 104: Sell your way of thinking as much as you would a commodity.
• Location Page 104: it’s hard to make money from maybes.
• Location Page 104: You need to be more aware of who you are and then strategically highlight the innate and unique aspects of your personality to ensure that your business keeps and holds the attention of your customers.
• Location Page 106: only 4 percent of customers actually voice their dissatisfaction to a business:
• Location Page 106: 91 percent of dissatisfied customers simply don’t ever return.
• Location Page 106: cost of rapid user acquisition is incredibly high—so much so that it usually results in less overall profit.
• Location Page 107: A company of one has one massive asset when it comes to customer service: it can be delivered in a way that doesn’t scale.
• Location Page 107: Relationships, when the company is smaller, can be built with regular and loyal customers, and those personal relationships can keep them loyal and happy.
• Location Page 108: focuses on emotion and ease.
• Location Page 108: 70 percent of buying experiences are based more on how customers feel they are treated
• Location Page 109: Instead of treating customer service like a cost or expense, you can view it as an investment in retention and acquisition, because you’re essentially building a customer sales force through your support staff.
• Location Page 110: Referrals work because they build trust by proxy.
• Location Page 112: creating some new products based on information from “lead users.”
• Location Page 114: customer happiness is the new marketing.
• Location Page 114: companies of one can compete with behemoths in their market—by outsupporting them.
• Location Page 119: Acknowledgment of fault is powerful. It shows empathy, a willingness to own the problem, and a desire to then fix it.
• Location Page 120: people tend to evaluate each other based on two general dimensions: how interpersonally warm we appear to be, and how competent we seem to be.
• Location Page 120: the way to be positively assessed by others is by making promises, and then keeping them.
• Location Page 121: make fewer and better commitments to customers.
• Location Page 125: they hire only when it’s too painful or time-consuming not to, or when the salary for a hire could easily be justified by the return on investment.
• Location Page 126: Opposite of what sred and irap programs push. They push hire when you cant afford
• Location Page 126: growth based on realized profit, not growth based on potential profit
• Location Page 127: he’s optimized his profitable business for the life he wants.
• Location Page 127: People tend to start with a business model and then become unhappy when their days are filled with tasks they don’t enjoy.
• Location Page 132: Working for yourself doesn’t necessarily mean working by yourself.
• Location Page 132: too often they lead to daylong half-conversations,
• Location Page 135: not just any writer, but a writer with full control over what he wrote and how his writing was published.
• Location Page 137: his ability to outshare his competition,
• Location Page 137: 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.
• Location Page 137: “education through content”
• Location Page 137: CopyBlogger, now renamed RainMaker Digital,
• Location Page 138: you have to out-teach and outshare the competition, not outscale them.
• Location Page 139: most ideas or processes don’t need to be kept under lock and key.
• Location Page 139: ideas aren’t a valid currency. Execution is the only valid currency in business.
• Location Page 142: Eisingerich and Bell surveyed 1,200 clients of an investment firm and found that the more those clients were educated on the pros and cons of the financial products the investment firm offered, the more they trusted that firm,
• Location Page 142: Find study rwdi
• Location Page 143: internet, which has democratized education.
• Location Page 143: customer education is the new form of marketing.
• Location Page 144: creating an environment where customers respect and value your opinions because you’ve demonstrated consistent competency by educating them.
• Location Page 144: it’s not enough to just tell people you’re an authority—you’ve got to demonstrate your actual expertise by sharing what you know and teaching others. You build authority not by propping yourself up, but by teaching your audience and customers—so
• Location Page 145: A study done in 2009 by neuroscientist Greg Berns at Emory University found that the decision-making centers of our brain slow down or shut off when we are receiving wanted advice
• Location Page 146: teach everything you know and don’t be afraid to give away your best ideas.
• Location Page 149: trust highly correlates to a person’s propensity to consider, try, or buy a product.
• Location Page 150: Consumer trust increases when the ulterior motive of selling a product just to make a commission is removed from the transaction.
• Location Page 152: there are three aspects of trust: confidence (“I believe what you say”), competence (“I believe you have the skills to do what you say”), and benevolence (“I believe you’re acting on my behalf”).
• Location Page 152: the power of recommendation—or word of mouth—lies in its ability to create trust by proxy.
• Location Page 152: a word-of-mouth conversation drives sales five times more than paid online media and is responsible for $6 trillion in annual customer spending.
• Location Page 154: Sometimes offering cash incentives reduces trust
• Location Page 154: Consumers are happy with incentives like small discounts, exclusive “swag,” special offers, and access to premium features.
• Location Page 155: 50 percent of new customers for service-based companies came from word of mouth.
• Location Page 156: focusing on existing and loyal customers as brand advocates—instead of trying to build an affiliate program of anyone who wants to make a quick buck referring you—creates a much greater trust, because those promoting your product already have a direct relationship with it.
• Location Page 156: Marketing is simply building a sense of trust and empathy with a specific group of people by consistently communicating with them.
• Location Page 157: Making money is often easier than earning trust,
• Location Page 158: trust happens first. Only then does the commerce follow.
• Location Page 159: she never wants any content she works on to “go viral.”
• Location Page 159: If you want a piece of content for your business to generate a billion views, you probably don’t understand the purpose of that content or whom it was really created for.
• Location Page 164: letting him figure out how to make money at a small scale first, then grow iteratively, based on customer demand.
• Location Page 174: start almost immediately by offering their product idea as a service first.
• Location Page 178: The idea that winners never quit is both overly simplistic and completely false. Most successful founders of companies have quit several times.
• Location Page 180: doesn’t believe in hustling. Instead, he’d rather build long-term relationships with people based on mutually shared interests.
• Location Page 180: smaller business owners (and companies of one) are sometimes embarrassed about selling, and have an aversion to it, because they believe that selling means pushing your products on others.
• Location Page 183: Building a genuine audience around your business, product, or brand is not the same as growth-hacking.
• Location Page 183: This “churn and burn” mentality can lead to faster short-term profits (or at least short-term audience growth), but it has nothing to do with relationship building—and it mostly involves paid acquisition. “Churn and burn” doesn’t create or foster personal connections,
• Location Page 184: startups that focus aggressively on exponential growth above all else will expedite their path to failure, exponentially.
• Location Page 188: Relationships are the basis for building the trust required for commerce.
• Location Page 189: doing something that doesn’t scale but is truly genuine is a great way to form strong connections
• Location Page 189: The more you share, provide real value and help, and connect with others, the more they’ll want to help you.
• Location Page 190: by starting a long-term and mutually beneficial relationship.
• Location Page 193: Customers admire businesses that feel and act similarly to them.
• Location Page 193: Consistency and longevity are key. Dougherty has found that this is where most businesses fail with relationships—that
• Location Page 194: Good relationships are the foundation to a successful business,
• Location Page 194: deeper customer relationships as the most important dimension of their business.
• Location Page 197: How you could build relationship wealth
• Location Page 198: build something that’s too small and resilient to fail.
• Location Page 201: “People want to be the noun without doing the verb.”
• Location Page 204: Most important, I’d do this fact-finding/mini-consulting while I was working somewhere else, probably at a full-time job. I
• Location Page 205: Being helpful proved to be a great lead-generation funnel.
• Location Page 205: profit happens faster. You don’t need investors, or investment on your part, or investments from venture capitalists.
• Location Page 215: There’s a hotel nestled in the picturesque countryside of Japan’s Yamanashi prefecture, the Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, which is the oldest continuously run hotel in the world.
• Location Page 216: Debt was like a popular drug—everyone was doing it and every business seemed to have access to
• Location Page 216: Their downfall was putting growth above stability and profit.
• Location Page 216: shinise is the word for a long-lasting company.
• Location Page 216: Interestingly, about 90 percent of all businesses worldwide that are more than 100 years old are Japanese. They all have fewer than 300 employees, and the ones that still exist never grow quickly or without great reason.
• Location Page 217: growth isn’t required for long-term success.
• Location Page 218: you can focus on building something that, in effect, is too small to fail.
• Location Page 218: you can focus on an “exist strategy”—based on sticking around, profiting, and serving your customers as best you can.
• Location Page 219: two studies showing that growth is the main cause of failure in so many startups, and even many top corporations.
• Location Page 219: Growth, as we’ve seen from the studies and stories presented in this book, is not an unalterable law of business.
• Location Page 224: Everything in this book derives from my belief that all companies, of every size, should be “lifestyle” businesses, not trapped in the paradigm of how “real” businesses operate.
• Location Page 226: The more products, the more markets, the more alliances a company makes, the less money it makes.