All right, I think we have time for one more work related question. And this final question comes from Alicia. Alicia says, Hi, Cal. I'm a longtime fan of yours. I am thrilled to finally to be finally setting up my own home office for a sole proprietorship. I am one year into business and wondering about scaling up.

I'm looking to collaborate with people for specific needs instead of hiring employees. What are your thoughts on scaling up for sole proprietors? Well, Alicia, I have a book recommendation. I think you are at a perfect point to read Paul Jarvis's book, Company of One. And he interrogates in this book, this question of scaling up your small business and what he interrogates it to make sure that that's actually what you want to do.

He says this is always the pressure. Companies need to grow, get more people get more employees or contractors increase the deal flow, increase the revenue, increase the products that you're offering. But he argues that that does not necessarily put you in the better position. Yes, that is the necessary steps if you one day want to have a company worth millions, but most people aren't going to get there anyways.

And what you get along the way is all the stress that comes from the growing, all the stress from managing all the different contractors or employees, all the stress that comes from having the additional products, the additional clients. His alternative is to instead focus on getting better and better at what you do.

Instead of leveraging that to get more clients, you leverage that to get paid more per hour for the clients that you currently work on. Your revenue grows, your time expenditure doesn't. And you try to find some sort of sweet spot where you have a lot of autonomy, your time demands are reasonable, but you're making good money.

That's not what everyone wants to do. I think some people say the sole proprietorship is step one towards an empire. And I think that's absolutely fine. You know what you feel, I just want to make sure that you're not falling into a scaling mode because you don't know what else you're supposed to do.

Because you think if I have opportunities, of course I have to go after them. If there's more work I could take on, why would I turn that down? And I think Paul does a great job in that book of saying, make sure before you do that, that that's what you really want to do.

It reminds me about this quote that I bring up often on this show that I believe I heard Joe Rogan say once, where someone was talking to him about assistance. Everyone in Hollywood has assistance. I've been around Hollywood people who have assistance. He doesn't. And his argument was, if I get to the point where I feel that I need an assistant just to keep track of everything that's going on, that's my cue to do less.

That's the Paul Jarvis mindset stated pithily. So Alicia, you're at a great decision point. You're at an exciting decision point. Read Company of One. I blurbed it so you know it's good. Read that book, do some reflection and figure out, do I want to scale and only then you can figure out the mechanics of how to find people how to hire people.

A lot of people have written about that. A lot of people have good advice to offer on that. You probably don't want my advice on that. But ask that big question first.