Episode 82: Why You Don't Always Have To Be Growing And Scaling Your Company

Happy new year! I hope your 2019 is off to a great start :) If you’re curious what I’ve been up to and what I have in store for 2019, I’ll tell you right off the bat, I do not set goals or resolutions at the start of the year. Instead, I review my progress every quarter to see what I want to keep doing, what experiments I want to run, and what I am going to cut or put on the back burner! Taking a broad approach has served me well in running my business, balancing it with the ever-growing demands on my time as a new mom, and most importantly, managing overwhelm. So I won’t be sharing my goals for 2019 or if I’ve resolved to exercise more or less. And I certainly won’t be telling you to do more ;) But I get that there may be other people in your life who are going to be bombarding you with messages around setting resolutions and goals as it relates to your career and personal life. Don’t get me wrong, resolutions and goals serve as great guardrails, but there’s no need to artificially set them at the start of the year. So is it OK to not always be growing personally and in business? Well, if you’ve been tuning into Build for a while, you know I love to bust myths and misconceptions on it, as they relate to building products, companies, and your career in tech. To kick things off for the show’s fifth year, I thought we’d start with one of the biggest myths around building a company: you need to keep growing and scaling, otherwise you’re not innovating and you’ll soon start to stagnate. This is a BIG myth that permeates company culture in tech, but, as it turns out, you don’t always need to grow, and continual growth isn’t always desirable. In today’s Build episode, we’re going to be debunking this myth, and to help us out, I’ve invited Paul Jarvis, writer, entrepreneur, podcaster, designer and online course teacher. Paul is the author of the new book Company of One: Why Staying Small Is The Next  Big Thing For Business. As you tune into today’s episode you’ll learn the following from Paul: How you went from being a designer to an entrepreneur How he started a service-based business and slowly transitioned to offering products Why he decided to not build a BIG business and the concerns he had around his decision 4 myths around building a big company Why it’s OK to stay small  In next week’s episode, Paul will share some best practices around building a company of one. -- Build is brought to you by Femgineer (http://femgineer.com/). --  Femgineer's Confident Communicator Course 2019 is coming up! To learn more visit: https://femgineer.com/confident-communicator-course/ --  Enjoyed this episode and want to support the show? To become a patron of the show visit: https://www.patreon.com/build