What Is Your Advice For Scaling Up as a Sole Proprietor?

00:00:00.000 | All right, I think we have time for one more work related question. And this final question

00:00:11.080 | comes from Alicia. Alicia says, Hi, Cal. I'm a longtime fan of yours. I am thrilled to

00:00:17.560 | finally to be finally setting up my own home office for a sole proprietorship. I am one

00:00:23.040 | year into business and wondering about scaling up. I'm looking to collaborate with people

00:00:28.020 | for specific needs instead of hiring employees. What are your thoughts on scaling up for sole

00:00:32.320 | proprietors? Well, Alicia, I have a book recommendation. I think you are at a perfect point to read

00:00:41.440 | Paul Jarvis's book, Company of One. And he interrogates in this book, this question of

00:00:49.260 | scaling up your small business and what he interrogates it to make sure that that's actually

00:00:53.320 | what you want to do. He says this is always the pressure. Companies need to grow, get

00:00:59.800 | more people get more employees or contractors increase the deal flow, increase the revenue,

00:01:05.400 | increase the products that you're offering. But he argues that that does not necessarily

00:01:09.480 | put you in the better position. Yes, that is the necessary steps if you one day want

00:01:14.780 | to have a company worth millions, but most people aren't going to get there anyways.

00:01:19.520 | And what you get along the way is all the stress that comes from the growing, all the

00:01:23.120 | stress from managing all the different contractors or employees, all the stress that comes from

00:01:26.840 | having the additional products, the additional clients. His alternative is to instead focus

00:01:33.620 | on getting better and better at what you do. Instead of leveraging that to get more clients,

00:01:39.880 | you leverage that to get paid more per hour for the clients that you currently work on.

00:01:44.740 | Your revenue grows, your time expenditure doesn't. And you try to find some sort of

00:01:50.640 | sweet spot where you have a lot of autonomy, your time demands are reasonable, but you're

00:01:55.440 | making good money. That's not what everyone wants to do. I think some people say the sole

00:02:00.920 | proprietorship is step one towards an empire. And I think that's absolutely fine. You know

00:02:04.880 | what you feel, I just want to make sure that you're not falling into a scaling mode because

00:02:08.400 | you don't know what else you're supposed to do. Because you think if I have opportunities,

00:02:12.640 | of course I have to go after them. If there's more work I could take on, why would I turn

00:02:17.800 | that down? And I think Paul does a great job in that book of saying, make sure before you

00:02:21.820 | do that, that that's what you really want to do. It reminds me about this quote that

00:02:27.280 | I bring up often on this show that I believe I heard Joe Rogan say once, where someone

00:02:32.980 | was talking to him about assistance. Everyone in Hollywood has assistance. I've been around

00:02:37.640 | Hollywood people who have assistance. He doesn't. And his argument was, if I get to the point

00:02:44.000 | where I feel that I need an assistant just to keep track of everything that's going on,

00:02:48.320 | that's my cue to do less. That's the Paul Jarvis mindset stated pithily. So Alicia,

00:02:55.200 | you're at a great decision point. You're at an exciting decision point. Read Company of

00:02:59.680 | One. I blurbed it so you know it's good. Read that book, do some reflection and figure out,

00:03:04.720 | do I want to scale and only then you can figure out the mechanics of how to find people how

00:03:08.560 | to hire people. A lot of people have written about that. A lot of people have good advice

00:03:11.920 | to offer on that. You probably don't want my advice on that. But ask that big question