Concept
A company of one
A company of one is Paul Jarvis's term for a business that questions growth and chooses its size deliberately, optimising for resilience, autonomy and enough rather than for scale. It can have staff; what defines it is that size is a choice, not an assumption.
Jarvis ran a design business for twenty years by turning down the growth every other business book assumes. The default that more is better hides costs: management, payroll, obligation, the loss of the reason you started. A company of one asks at every decision whether an increase in size makes it more resilient, more autonomous and better at serving the customers it has, and declines the growth that only makes it bigger. It grows by improving instead: higher prices, better customers, fewer of them, systems that make the owner replaceable for a week, service so good that customers refer. It is the opposite of the technician trap, not the same thing: the trapped owner is small because everything depends on them, the company of one is small because it has built the systems that make its size a choice.
A real-life example
A translator with more demand than she can meet declines to become an agency, raises her price by a third, takes only legal work and refers the rest to two freelancers for a fee. Revenue is unchanged; her weeks are her own.
How to use it
- 1At every growth decision, ask: better, or just bigger?
- 2Improve before you expand: price, customers, systems, service.
- 3Build the systems that would let you hand the business over for a week, even if you never do.