Why You Don’t Always Have To Be Growing

Interview with Paul Jarvis, Author of Company of One

Happy new year! I hope your 2019 is off to a great start :)

If you’re curious what I’ve been up to and what I have in store for 2019, I’ll tell you right off the bat, I do not set goals or resolutions at the start of the year. Instead, I review my progress every quarter to see what I want to keep doing, what experiments I want to run, and what I am going to cut or put on the back burner!

Taking a broad approach has served me well in running my business, balancing it with the ever-growing demands on my time as a new mom, and most importantly, managing overwhelm. So I won’t be sharing my goals for 2019 or if I’ve resolved to exercise more or less. And I certainly won’t be telling you to do more ;)

But I get that there may be other people in your life who are going to be bombarding you with messages around setting resolutions and goals as it relates to your career and personal life.

Don’t get me wrong, resolutions and goals serve as great guardrails, but there’s no need to artificially set them at the start of the year.

So… is it OK to not always be growing personally and in business?

Well, if you’ve been tuning into Build for a while, you know I love to bust myths and misconceptions on it, as they relate to building products, companies, and your career in tech. To kick things off for the show’s fifth year, I thought we’d start with one of the biggest myths around building a company: you need to keep growing and scaling, otherwise you’re not innovating and you’ll soon start to stagnate.

This is a BIG myth that permeates company culture in tech, but, as it turns out, you don’t always need to grow, and continual growth isn’t always desirable.

In today’s Build episode, we’re going to be debunking this myth, and to help us out, I’ve invited Paul Jarvis, writer, entrepreneur, podcaster, designer and online course teacher. Paul is the author of the new book Company of One: Why Staying Small Is The Next Big Thing For Business.

As you tune into today’s episode you’ll learn the following from Paul:

• How you went from being a designer to an entrepreneur
• How he started a service-based business and slowly transitioned to offering products
• Why he decided to not build a BIG business and the concerns he had around his decision
• 4 myths around building a big company as it relates to leadership styles, infrastructure, and competition
• Why it’s OK to stay small and what it means to be a company of one

In next week’s episode, Paul will share some best practices around building a company of one.

Listen to the episode on iTunes!

You can listen to this episode of Build on iTunes.

“A company of one is a business that doesn’t assume success equals growth. They think that success equals freedom. The freedom to choose whether you grow on not. Because sometimes growth makes a ton of sense and sometimes it doesn’t.”

— Paul Jarvis, share the episode!

Build is brought to you by Femgineer an education company dedicated to helping techies build companies, products, and level-up in their careers.

Why You Don’t Always Have To Be Growing was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.