I first came into contact with Jarvis when his editor sent me a copy of his book "Company of One" published in 2019. I was fascinated by the book's bold premise: Don't grow your business.
Increase your fees, but don't expand your business
He believes that if your entrepreneurial action is lucky enough to start to be successful, use that success to gain more freedom, not more income. A simple thought experiment illustrates this situation. Imagine you are a web designer charging fifty dollars an hour. Assuming you work forty hours a week, fifty weeks a year, that equates to an annual salary of $100,000. Now imagine that after a few years of working at this level, you have more skills and there is a greater demand for your services. The standard approach is to scale your business. If you hire multiple designers, you can grow your business to the point where you're bringing in millions of dollars a year, giving you an annual salary of well over $100,000. If you keep growing, you might even end up with a business worth enough to sell for seven figures.
In the book, Jarvis asks you to think about another possibility. What if after you become famous, instead of expanding your business, you increase your hourly rate to a hundred dollars? You can now maintain the same $100,000 annual salary while working only twenty-five weeks a year—creating an extremely free work life. Sure, it would be great to be making a seven-figure fortune in ten years, but given all the stress and hustle and bustle of building a business of that size, it's hard to say whether you'll actually be better off than you were right away. A situation where the work is reduced by half would be ideal.
Jarvis's philosophy was reflected in the decisions he made for his career. He majored in information engineering in college, but also has an instinctive feel for visual design. During the first Internet boom of the 1990s, these two skills proved to be a perfect combination for success in the emerging medium of website design. Jarvis built several high-profile websites of his own and soon had several job offers. Soon after, he became a busy web designer and settled in downtown Vancouver, living in a "glass cube in mid-air."
Are salary increases, promotions, and moving into high-end apartments considered progress?
He felt the usual pressure to make a small company bigger: more revenue meant better apartments and greater prestige. However, although his growing abilities could support him on this common career path, his heart was not here. "My wife and I were fed up with city life," he recalled in a 2016 interview. "We had spent enough of our lives in life-and-death competition and wanted to try something different." Realizing that his freelance design work could be done anywhere with an internet connection, they moved to the Pacific Ocean on Vancouver Island, living in the woods outside Tofino so that their wife, who loves surfing, could enjoy the tranquility. The town's famous surf spot.
As they discovered, living in the forests of Vancouver Island made it easy to be frugal because there weren't many opportunities to spend money. "When you live in a remote area, you don't have anyone to do things for you, so you have to do a lot of things yourself," Jarvis explains. Since he no longer needed to raise revenue to support the city's expenses, Jarvis used his growing skills to maintain flexibility and restraint in his work. In the beginning, he focused on free-form contracts. Because he's in demand, he can keep his hourly rate high and his job count low. Finally, tired of deadlines and dealing with clients, he began to explore how to further apply his renowned abilities and reputation to achieve an even slower life. He began to try to hold online courses to teach various niche topics related to the freelance working community. He has also started hosting two podcasts and has shifted his focus to quietly launching software tools targeting niche markets, including the recent launch of Fathom Analytics, an alternative to Google Analytics that better protects user privacy.
It's difficult to exhaustively list everything Jarvis has done in recent years, as his various ideas seem to come and go, leaving behind a long list of dead URLs and outdated websites. Of course, that's exactly what you'd expect from someone who isn't looking to create the next Microsoft, but is just pursuing just the right kind of work that satisfies curiosity and supports a slow, cheap lifestyle. "I usually get up at sunrise and never use an alarm clock," Jarvis explains. "While I make coffee, I stand in front of the window and watch the rabbits playing, the hummingbirds buzzing by, and the occasional crafty raccoon that visits. Trying to destroy my garden."
Pearl and Paul. Jarvis had similar experiences throughout their careers. The market doesn't care about your personal interest in slowing down. If you want more control over your schedule, you need to give something in exchange. Many times, the best bargaining chip is your own ability. What makes Jarvis's story so inspiring is that he proves that to enjoy the benefits of being "obsessed" with quality, you don't have to spend your life blindfolded in pursuit of superstar status.
Jarvis did not sell fifteen million records; rather, over time he became increasingly adept at certain core skills that were both rare and valuable in his particular field. Properly used, it can make his professional life much simpler. We have become so accustomed to accepting the idea that "the only reward for getting better is a salary increase and promotion" that we have forgotten that the fruits of pursuing quality can also be harvested with a more sustainable lifestyle.
