What just became possible
For twenty years, staying small meant accepting a ceiling. That stopped being true faster than most owners noticed.
It is Labor Day, so here is a thought about work that I find genuinely encouraging.
For most of my career, "one person company" meant limited. It meant you did good work for a small number of people and that was your ceiling, because the things a bigger company had were things you could not have. A designer. Somebody answering the phone. Somebody watching the numbers. A person who wrote the emails.
That gap has closed further in the last eighteen months than in the twenty years before it.
What I actually mean
Not hype. Specifically this: a single operator can now run a marketing function that would have taken four people in 2019. Ad accounts that optimize themselves. Design produced in minutes instead of days. Customer emails written in your own voice at volume. A phone that gets answered at nine at night. Reports that build themselves overnight and are waiting when you get up.
What I find most interesting is what this does to the shape of good businesses.
Growth used to come bundled with a headache
For a long time, the way to grow was to add people, which meant adding management, which meant the founder stopped doing the work they were good at and started running a company instead. Plenty of excellent tradespeople have been quietly miserable since the day they hired their fifth employee.
That is no longer the only path. You can stay small on purpose and still compete on the things customers actually notice, which are responsiveness, quality and follow through.
The franchise down the street is not beating you on craft. It is beating you on infrastructure. Infrastructure is exactly what got cheap.
I do not think everyone should stay a one person shop. Plenty of people want to build something bigger and should. But it should be a choice now, and for most of the time I have been doing this, it was not.
If you have been holding off on growth because you did not want the headache of managing people, this is a good year to look again. The headache and the growth stopped being a package deal.
You can look like a franchise now for about a hundred bucks
The whole playbook, free
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The marketing playbook I actually run, written for home services at $2M to $20M.
Read the Field GuideBen In Denver · Englewood, CO · The engine is running
