Try to optimize for time instead of for money
Summary
- Optimize for time instead of scaling of money
Details
- If your business does well leverage this for more time instead of money.
- Dont scale size wise, but increase charges as demand increases and work less, while maintaining the same income.
References
Quotes
I first encountered Jarvis when his editor sent me a copy of his 2019 book, Company of One. I was taken by the boldness of its premise: don’t scale your business. If you’re fortunate enough for your entrepreneurial endeavors to begin to succeed, he argues, leverage this success to gain more freedom instead of more revenue. This dynamic is captured well by a simplified thought experiment. Imagine that you charge $50 an hour as a web designer. Assuming forty hours of work a week, fifty weeks a year, this works out to a $100,000 annual salary. Now imagine that after a few years at this level, your skills expand and the demand for your services increases. The standard move would be to scale your business. If you hired multiple designers, you could grow it to the point where it was bringing in millions in annual revenue and yielding you a salary that was well above $100,000 a year. If you continued this growth, you might even end up one day with an enterprise valuable enough to sell for a healthy seven-figure payday.
In his book, Jarvis asks that you consider an alternative. What if after your reputation spread, instead of growing the business, you increased your hourly rate to $100? You could now maintain your same $100,000 a year salary while working only twenty-five weeks a year—creating a working life with a head-turning amount of freedom. It would of course be nice to earn a seven-figure payday ten years from now, but given all the stress and hustle required to build a business of the necessary size, it’s not clear that you would really end up in a more remarkable place than the scenario in which you’re right away able to reduce your work by half.