Author
Paul Jarvis
The designer who ran a one-person business for twenty years and wrote the case for staying small on purpose.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Paul Jarvis worked as a web designer for corporate clients from the late 1990s, first at an agency and then alone, and spent two decades as a one-person business rather than building an agency of his own. He taught online courses on design and freelancing and wrote several short books before Company of One.
Company of One, published in 2019, turned his choice to stay small into an argument: that a business should question every increase in size and optimise for resilience, autonomy and enough. In 2018 he had co-founded Fathom Analytics, a privacy-focused analytics company that the two founders ran without outside investors and with a very small team; he has since retired from it.
The signature
Jarvis writes plainly and from his own ledger, with the costs of growth he watched other freelancers pay and the numbers of his own business, and treats enough as a figure to be written down rather than a mood.