More and more people are operating solo, outside of the confines of traditional employment. And thanks to technology and a ton of talented independent contractors, the solopreneur can bring in outsized revenue with a company of one.
Update: Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business is now available!
Paul Jarvis exemplifies the power and potential of the individual creative entrepreneur. He self-publishes books, creates compelling courses, and develops software — all without a single employee.
Perhaps that’s why Paul has landed his first traditional book deal for The Company of One, coming in 2018. But you can tune in today and hear us discuss various aspects of the Unemployable life, including the struggle to let go, the tangled web of small business technology, and the opportunities to teach others how to run their own company of one.
The Show Notes
Transcript
The Power of the Company of One, with Paul Jarvis
Paul Jarvis: I’m Paul Jarvis and I don’t play well with others. And I’m unemployable.
Voiceover: Welcome to Unemployable, the show for people who can get a job, they’re just not inclined to take one — and that’s putting it gently. In addition to this podcast, thousands of freelancers and entrepreneurs get actionable advice and other valuable resources from the weekly Unemployable email newsletter. Join us by registering for our Free Profit Pillars Course, or choose to sign up for the newsletter only at no charge. Simply head over to Unemployable.com, and take your business and lifestyle to the next level. That’s Unemployable.com.
Brian Clark: More and more people are operating solo, outside of the confines of traditional employment. And thanks to technology and a ton of talented independent contractors, the solopreneur can bring in outsized revenue with a company of one.
Paul Jarvis exemplifies the power and potential of the individual creative entrepreneur. He self-publishes books, creates compelling courses, and develops software — all without a single employee.
Perhaps that’s why Paul has landed his first traditional book deal for The Company of One, coming in 2018. But you can tune in today and hear us discuss various aspects of the Unemployable life, including the struggle to let go, the tangled web of small business technology, and the opportunities to teach others how to run their own company of one.
Paul, how are you?
Paul Jarvis: Good.
Brian Clark: You don’t play well with others?
Paul Jarvis: Absolutely not.
Brian Clark: Shocking.
Paul Jarvis: Is my bright and cheerful Twitter no indication of this?
Brian Clark: I love your Twitter. Now that I’ve calmed down, you make me look sane. You need that. Congratulations on Canada turning 150.
Paul Jarvis: Right. It doesn’t look a day over 86.
Brian Clark: Yeah, exactly. Has really aged well. What city do you live in again?
Paul Jarvis: I live in unincorporated land in the middle of the woods on an island.
Brian Clark: Oh yeah, because you don’t play well with others. Right. I got you.
Paul Jarvis: I’ve been banished. I live about an hour from the city of Victoria, which is on Vancouver Island, which is just above Seattle.
Brian Clark: Vancouver’s the only place I’ve been in Canada, I’m ashamed to say. But I’ve just found out Canada is only 150 years old, but Quebec is — I’m probably saying it wrong, French people hate me – 375 years old. I had no idea that the French have been there that long.
Paul Jarvis: Yeah. I think the French were here first and then the English came and then the English beat the French in a war, and then they took everything other than Quebec and then they started… I’m a bad Canadian. Canadians probably hate me now.
Why a Traditional Book?
Brian Clark: Okay, that’s fine. All right, we’ve got some exciting stuff to talk about. One of my favorite topics, the power of the individual in modern business, as you call it — the company of one. You’re actually writing a book, another book, but this time you’re doing it for the man. A traditional publisher, Paul Jarvis, what is going on with you?
Paul Jarvis: Yeah, it’s kind of a weird thing, right? I think I may still even come up on Google on the first page if you look up self-publishing books, because I wrote an article for Forbes that got really popular. And I’ve written for books that are self-published, so it was kind of weird.
But I felt like, I don’t know, for people that know me, I like to figure things out as much as I can. I’m not saying that I figured out self-publishing, that would be dumb of me to say. I’m just saying that I figured out enough of self-publishing to feel like I got what I could out of it.
Now I still like writing. I’m a writer. I guess that’s my job title or something. And I just felt like I wanted to see what the other side was like. I just wanted to learn, because I’ve heard great things about it, I’ve heard awful things about traditional publishing. It just felt like, “All right, let’s see what the fuss is about.
Luckily, I actually did get a book deal, because you can’t just be like, “Oh, I want to see what traditional publishing is like, and then traditionally publish a book. There’s a lot. We can even dig into that if you want. There are a lot of steps that I didn’t even know were steps, because I knew so little about it. So it’s been really interesting. It’s been quite a learning process, I think.
Brian Clark: You mentioned earlier that you really like your editor, which is I think the key. I mean, you don’t really deal with other aspects of the corporate structure. If you get along with your editor, then that’s probably a win.
Paul Jarvis: Yeah, and even before that, I think my agent is phenomenal. She knows so much about publishing and it’s so different, because I’ve been a freelancer.
I think you and I both started freelancing the same year. I think we covered this in the first talk. But because I’ve worked for myself for so long, I’m not in situations where somebody else is going to bat for me.
I’m basically the “talent and somebody else is making sure all the things happen. They’re making sure there are only red skittles in the bowl. She was the one who negotiated the deal. She was the one that worked with me on that book proposal, which took a couple months to write. She was the one who had the contact. So, she made everything happen.
All I had to do was think about writing a good book which is really interesting, because I don’t put myself in situations like that. Usually I own or co-own all the companies that I work for. I’ve worked for myself for so long. It was really interesting to have somebody else in charge of the nitty gritty and making sure things happened. I just had to be yes or no to the deal like, “Do I want to take this deal or do I not want to take this deal?
Brian Clark: Yeah, that’s kind of refreshing. Reflecting on my own situation, I’m in the same boat. As CEO of the company, I pretty much have to take care of everything. And the fact that I used to be an attorney means even when I use outside attorneys, I’m telling them what to do instead of asking for their advice.
It’s a strange situation. I don’t even know if I’d be comfortable letting someone else handle it, but I’d like to try maybe. Maybe I should.
Paul Jarvis: It is weird. It is hard for myself at least. It’s very hard to give up the reins. My agent and the potential editors are having conversations that I’m not even on the phone. What are they talking about? What’s going on? Is this going to work? Obviously, it all works out, because she knows way more about making these deals than I do, because I know zero about it.
I wanted to purposefully put myself in that situation, because it’s really easy to get comfortable with things. It’s really easy, especially when you’ve been doing things as long as we have, to get into a kind of rhythm. I know how to make money working for myself. It’s hard work definitely, but it becomes less and less of an excited risk situation, because I can craft my life and my business around things that I know work and based on experience and all of that.
Whereas with this, it’s like, “I don’t even know if I’m going to get a book. The first step was me telling my mailing list, “I’m looking to get a book deal, so I need to find an agent. Does anybody know one? At that point, it was like, “I may not even get a book deal, and then to my entire list I’m going to look like a newb who thought that he could get a book deal, but then completely couldn’t even find an agent that would want to work with him.
So, it was interesting to put myself into the situation where one, I have no control. And two, honestly, I didn’t know what the outcome was going to be.
How Is the Personal Responsibility Involved in Becoming a Company of One a Barrier to People Succeeding?
Brian Clark: That is a very interesting perspective that we’re sharing here right now. Listen to what we’re saying. We’re so used to doing everything for ourselves that we feel uncomfortable letting other people handle it.
Now look at the flip side of people trying to become their own company of one. I mean, it’s got to be a formidable challenge to someone coming from traditional employment to being the one who is responsible for everything. You do get used to it, and you do get good at it.
But at the beginning, do you think that’s one of the main barriers to people succeeding in this new world?
Paul Jarvis: It’s just from talking to people, because I started this long ago, I don’t even remember. But in the beginning a lot of people are like, “Oh, I need business cards or a website. There are all of these little periphery things that seem like they’re the most important, like registering a business. All of these things are somewhat important to some degree.
But I think what you’re touching on is really the crux of it. It’s going from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation. If you work for somebody else, then they tell you what you need to do, not necessarily the minutiae of it, but they tell you. If you have a manager, they say, “You need to get this done in a certain amount of time, or you report to them and you have to share your progress and results of things that you do.
Whereas when you work for yourself, you are the boss and the worker. If your boss is a jerk, then it’s your fault, because you’re the boss. So, it becomes like this motivation aspect to it.
It becomes really, really difficult and it is a bit shocking. I’ve spent the last couple of months actually talking to the opposite of what I’m writing the book about, talking to very fast-growing startups, especially fast-growing in terms of employees. I’ve been talking to them, because to work for yourself or to be even just an autonomous team inside an organization or to be an entrepreneur, I guess is the word, you need to have certain traits like resilience, autonomy, speed, simplicity.
It’s just like in school. I think one of the most important traits in business, or even in specifically marketing and sales, is understanding and having empathy towards your customers. I think that’s something that not a lot of people talk about. Again, unless you can understand a person, you can’t really sell them anything. It becomes really, really difficult.
I think for working for yourself — and there are not really any classes or schools or things that people learn about autonomy, about finding your own motivation to do work, or dealing with the cognitive load of decisions, because there are so many decisions to be made. A lot of times, you haven’t been in a situation like that.
When you’re growing up, your parents tell you what to do, then you go to school and your teacher tells you what to do. Then you get a job typically like a lower rung job when you’re starting out, like everybody starts at the bottom and works their way up.
So you get a job and the manager tells you what to do. And then if you start to work for yourself, that’s taken away. It’s like, “Now what happens? Because if I’m the one who’s making the decisions, how do I make these decisions? How do I know what is the right decision? What’s the wrong decision?
It adds a cognitive load. And I see people get really, really stressed out about it because it can get really, really stressful. So, it’s just interesting.
Brian Clark: Again, the name of the show is Unemployable, and I take that quite literally for myself. I wanted away from someone telling me what to do so badly that I almost welcomed the shift, while others maybe are thinking in terms of lifestyle or, “Wouldn’t it be great? or “Everyone’s doing it.
Paul Jarvis: But did you know how?
Brian Clark: Oh, no, no, no. I had to figure it all out myself. You mentioned intrinsic motivation. I had it for sure.
The Many Hats of an Entrepreneur
Brian Clark: I wonder sometimes if some people aren’t going off on their own for the wrong reasons. Compared to 20 years ago when you and I got started doing this craziness, it’s become quite fashionable almost. And that may attract people for the wrong reasons. Therefore, maybe they’re not prepared to do that work to figure that out.
Paul Jarvis: Yeah. How many decisions do you have to make with your laptop on a beach? The way that entrepreneurialism is basically sold to people that aren’t entrepreneurs is just like, “It’s easier.
I don’t think that that’s the case. I think that either way it’s challenging. I don’t think there is even a right or wrong way. I don’t think it’s better to work for yourself than it is to work for somebody else in just black and white.
I think some people are built to work within organizations. In doing that, you can hyperfocus on your skill set, because you don’t have to take care of accounting, you don’t have to do client management. Somebody else in that company is doing those things.
The way that look at it is if you want to be a scientist and just do your research, then you need to work within an organization, because there’s somebody else who’s going to be managing the laboratory. There’s somebody else who’s going to be paying the taxes. But if you want to be a control freak like us, then taking on those responsibilities is kind of welcoming, because you want to see what it’s like when you’re in charge of steering the ship. You want to see if you can get it from port to port kind of thing.
But if you just want to be the person hyperfocused on something, then yeah, it doesn’t make sense to be an entrepreneur. Or even if you’re not motivated internally, which may not even be a bad thing. Like maybe that isn’t the best idea, but there’s this idea that like, “It’s better. A blanket statement – “It’s better to be an entrepreneur. And I don’t think that’s the case.
Who Is This Book Written For?
Brian Clark: That’s absolutely true about having to wear many different hats as a company of one. Company of One, is this a book for those who are already out there? Or is it people who are contemplating it? Is it a “how-to book or is it a “why book?
Paul Jarvis: Yeah, it’s more of a “why book than anything else. There is definitely a bit of prescriptive information like, “This is how you can do things better. And a lot of it is, “This is how you can optimize for it. But it does straddle the line intentionally between people that want to.
I will preface it with this. Company of One doesn’t literally mean the book is for people that work at a company without employees. It’s more how can you adopt the mindset, even if you’re at a big company or even if you run a big company, that can help your employees become more autonomous or help you be able to make decisions and iterate on ideas faster, and build more of a long-term resistance as opposed to the start of bubbles of like, “Our burn rate is so high that we have to just keep going after the next round of funding in order to keep our company going. Like how to focus on profits.
So, that’s kind of the audience. It speaks a bit to people who work in companies that maybe want to be entrepreneurs or maybe just want to build up a company of one within an organization, which I think is entirely possible given the right organization. There are actually a lot of examples that I bring up in the book about that that I’ve written part of at this point.
So, I think that it’s kind of a both — where it’s optimizing for starting or optimizing for already existing.
How Overwhelming Has Technology Become?
Brian Clark: Interesting. In the literal sense though, there’s never been a better time for one person to leverage technology, freelancers, platforms, etc. to really make quite a bit of money. That wasn’t really possible. Maybe if you were Beyoncé.
You’re starting to see people leverage technology and business models in a way that you can make some rock star money as a non rock star. Yet, it almost seems that the technology is getting to the point where I think a lot of people are feeling overwhelmed. What do you think about that?
Paul Jarvis: Yeah. Even looking at myself, when I started working for myself, people didn’t get it. If I was at a party and somebody asked what I did, and I said that I worked for myself, they didn’t understand. Now it’s kind of the norm. Everybody to some degree is doing some entrepreneurial thing or has the entrepreneurial spirit.
I think that it’s interesting, because we definitely have the tools. I have over 10,000 customers in my courses and it’s just me. I don’t have a team of people. I hire freelancers when I need them.
The only reason that can happen, that I can have 10,000 plus paying customers, is because of technology. If I had to talk to these people on the phone or even teach them in person, it would take so much more work. Then I would probably need to build a staff. So you’re right. The time we’re in right now makes it really, really easy technically to be able to do that.
But there are also a few other things at play. There’s the cognitive load of choice. If you’re thinking, “Okay, I want to make a course on the Internet. Well, do I want to have a self-hosted platform? Do I want to build it off of a WordPress site that I host myself and buy a plugin? Do I want to use a hosted platform? Do I want to use some kind of hybrid? If I collect money, do I want to collect it through Stripe or do I want to accept Bitcoin? Do I want to have PayPal?
There are just so many decisions that it becomes really, really difficult to deal with, even though everything is technologically possible.
It’s just like asynchronous communication has become a fad. In some instances, it’s really, really useful if you’re collaborating with somebody else. It’s awesome that you and I can talk in different parts of North America in realtime right now. That’s really cool. But to leave Slack on all day, I don’t think you’d be able to be very productive. Your schedule isn’t your own at that point, because you can constantly be interrupted.
I think that there are all of these different things at play. It becomes easier technically to do something, but that’s not always…
There’s not a lack of knowledge right now. Knowledge has become democratized, which I think is amazing and that’s why I love the online learning space, because knowledge is basically democratized.
But there’s still a need for wisdom. I can google anything and find out an answer to something. But is that a valid answer? Is that backed by some peer review data? Is that something I need to know? I may not even know that the question I’m asking is the wrong question that I should be asking.
I think it definitely becomes easier to some degree, but there’s definitely a lot more at play where we have to make a lot of decisions. And that can create a mental load I think, and we burn out.
What Was Your Lightbulb Moment Regarding Your MailChimp course?
Brian Clark: Yeah. This is something that I was preaching back in 2007 — that even though Google has the answer, people still want to be guided by someone who knows what they’re talking about.
It’s been interesting to see, for example, I think one of your more popular courses is Chimp Essentials that teaches you how to use MailChimp. Brennan Dunn now has one for Drip. This technology is getting more and more powerful — email automation. You use automation even for onboarding or at least you did in the past back when you had clients.
But there are opportunities now for people like you to help people unlock all that power within a product such as MailChimp. On one hand, you think, “Well, I bought MailChimp, so therefore, they should teach me how to use it. But this has been going on in tech for a long time. There have been courses on just about every sophisticated — from Photoshop to other Adobe products to whatever.
What was the light bulb moment where you said, “I need to teach this MailChimp course, because this drives my own single person business?
Paul Jarvis: Brett Kelly’s Evernote Essentials.
Brian Clark: See, that’s another example. Like Evernote, you need a course to learn how to use Evernote. And I bought Brett’s, I love it.
Paul Jarvis: He’s made a great living selling an info product, teaching you how to use software that you have to pay for. And it’s brilliant.
I think the disconnect there, which is really important, which is why I teach Chimp Essentials as well, is that I think these tech companies are really good at building… Brian, that’s funny too, because I own a couple of tech companies, and I try to not do this. There’s a skillset in order to make a really great software product, and that skillset doesn’t always overlap with being able to teach really well.
What I’ve learned the hard way pretty much is that there’s a difference between knowing something and being able to teach it. I can know how to design a website. I wouldn’t be able to teach it, because I haven’t really spent a ton of time thinking about it.
If somebody asked me, “Paul, why is that website good? I’ll be like, “I don’t know. It’s either good or it’s not. I know intuitively and I can make a decision in probably a fraction of a second on whether or not I think the design of something is good or it’s going to work. I haven’t spent any time thinking about how that would look in order to like explain that to others. I would be the worst teacher in the world for something like web design.
But I think where these products like Evernote Essential or Chimp Essentials — I’m pretty sure that’s even why I use “Essentials, because I’m like, “Oh, Brett used that. That worked well for him. I’m just going to use ‘Essentials.’
What I noticed, because I spent so much time in the knowledge base and I spent so much time on support, I knew what their software did, but I needed to fit what their software did into how my business worked, or how I wanted my business to work. And it wasn’t cut and dry.
There were so many things that I had to figure out on my own. I spent hours googling or hours talking to support or hours just figuring out and trial. I have so many sample lists where I try things where the emails don’t go to anybody but me. I figured, “Okay, MailChimp is a great software product, but people don’t know how to use it in the context of running a small one-person business, which is really what Chimp Essentials is for.
The way that I teach Chimp Essentials isn’t just, “Here’s how the software works. It’s, “Why you do certain tasks in the software to achieve certain business goals. I think that’s where it really does well, like it sells really well obviously.
Brian Clark: That’s value added education. It’s not just, “How does the software work? It’s “Have you thought about using it in this context? That makes perfect sense to me.
Paul Jarvis: And that specifically is how to save a whole lot of money by not having duplicate subscribers, because the way MailChimp is set up doesn’t make the most sense for running a cost-effective business in some cases.
While I love MailChimp and I think it’s an amazing software platform, there are so many places where there’s room for improvement, and I figured out how to hack that system. That’s really what the course is — teaching people how to do things to save them… because I’m a cheapskate. So I have other people who are cheapskates. Everybody that runs a business needs to be pretty mindful of money.
I was just like, “Okay, well, here’s how I can teach you to save as much money as I do and accomplish the tasks that you need to accomplish.
Brian Clark: The course pays for itself. You just did not miss a thing.
What’s Next?
Brian Clark: You’re halfway through writing this book. It’s traditionally published, so we’re going to have to wait until later next year to see it. What else is in store 2017? Any other big goals? I mean, finishing the book has got to be a big one.
Paul Jarvis: Yeah. Right now, my time is divided basically into thirds for projects. Which is good, because I find that if I have to do the same thing over and over every day, that’s why I don’t want to work for somebody else. That’s not how my brain works.
Right now, I’m redoing my original course Creative Class from scratch, so there’s nothing that is duplicated content. I’m redoing all of the videos, redoing all the slides and redoing the flow of it and redoing the way that the topics were.
I launched that I think at the end of 2013 and that was the first course that I did. While it was a useful course, I guess, to people, because that’s been the course that sold more than anything else, I’ve learned so much about online teaching and courses and how they work that I wanted to give it a refresh.
I felt like it was dumb of me as a business owner to take my bestselling product and just let it run by itself. It’s cool that it’s got a sales funnel that converts, but I wanted to put more time into it, because it paid off. I can definitely afford to put more time into it, because of the money that it’s made me. So, that was one of the things, redoing Creative Class.
The other one’s a book that we’re talking about. The third one is a product.
Funny we should be talking about MailChimp. I’m creating a software product with my cofounder Zack Gilbert called Fixtail, which really is fairly simple in concept. It takes orders from Stripe when you make a sale for whatever you sell, and it puts that as ecommerce data into MailChimp.
It doesn’t just tag the person as purchaser or not purchaser. It saves things like the name of the product, the picture of the product, if a discount was used, the amount of revenue. If you run a SaaS, then it tracks every month, every time the subscription renews.
It’s called Fixtail and it pushes basically Stripe orders to MailChimp subscribers as ecommerce data that they can then use to be better, more effective email marketers with segmenting and targeting.
Brian Clark: Sweet. All right, Paul. Thank you very much for being Unemployable’s first ever repeat guest. I forgot to mention that at the beginning, but I’ll get it in here before we go. Good luck to you. Always great to talk to you. Exciting stuff that you’ve got going on. I can’t wait for the book, but I’m going to have to.
Paul Jarvis: Thank you very much and thanks for having me on a second time.
Brian Clark: All right, Everyone, you can’t read the book yet, but you’re probably living the company of one already. You know what I’m about to say — keep going.