Ep. 29 Paul Jarvis, Author, "Company of One" Making A Case for Staying Small

All of our entrepreneur lives, we've been told "If you don't
grow, you will shrink, and if you shrink you will go out of
business." Or, "Always be closing." Or, 'Always be growing." As a
result, we've battled and fought our way to at least make
ourselves look like what Tom Hanks wanted: TO BE BIG. From paying
high rent for corporate spaces, getting augmented staff for
presentations and meetings, giant websites with pages upon pages
of stuff, and stumbling over our words after we share the volume
of work we complete for clients, and yet people keep asking us in
disbelief, "How many employees do you have?" without
understanding that Entrepreneurs Don't Sleep.


The struggle to fake it until you make it to become a
"real" company is exhausting.


We learned about "The Company of One," by Paul Jarvis, from our
friend and fellow entrepreneur Keila Hill-Trawick, owner of
Little Fish Accounting. She told us about the book on an earlier
podcast, episode 22, that the book changed her life and gave her
the courage to quit and walk away from her comfortable,
government day job. Lucky for us, our podcast mastering engineer
Chris Enns, introduced us to Paul and then that's the beginning
of our story with How We Learned To Love Being Small.


Reading "The Company Of One" written by Paul Jarvis inspired so
much greatness in our thoughts about our agency business Birk
Creative, the book helped us refocus on the type of hard work
that is meaningful and drives real success. We had to find out
more. So, we did what any crazy entrepreneur would do: We took a
flight to British Columbia, Vancouver, then took a ferry to
Victoria Island and hit the road and drove another two hours to
meet our new hero in person to ask him face to face: "How Can
Anyone Win In Business If They Are Only One and Done?"


Our intimate conversation with Paul Jarvis will absolutely
surprise you, and motivate you to rethink *everything* you've
ever been told and believed about the business of getting big.


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The Honest Field Guide is a production of brand strategy and
visual identity agency Birk Creative at
http://www.birkcreative.com. Episode song "Misfits" can be
downloaded on Apple here
https://music.apple.com/us/album/misfits/206188206?i=206188212
and is written by Grant Birkenbeuel and JinJa Davis, from the
band Utah Carol http://www.utahcarol.com. Recorded at Stomping
Ground Studios. Podcast consultant: Chris Enns. Podcast Editing
by Jason Marck. Custom episode artwork designed for this episode
created by American printmaker and textile designer Jen Hewett
https://jenhewett.com.


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