Staying in your Comfort Zone

Summary

The author advocates for the value of maintaining a small-scale, personalized business model focused on organic growth and quality client experience over the pressure to continuously expand and scale up operations.

Abstract

The article discusses the author's recent business venture and the unexpected advice received from friends and ex-colleagues to plan for expansion. The author reflects on the common assumption that a business must grow continuously, often influenced by the success stories of startup unicorns. However, the author questions this notion, suggesting that a business can be successful and fulfilling without scaling up, especially if it provides a personal service at a human scale. The author cites a UK startup as an example of organic growth without external funding, emphasizing the importance of a sustainable business model that prioritizes client experience and personal satisfaction over rapid expansion and the associated administrative complexities.

Opinions

The author believes that bigger is not always better and challenges the default assumption of continuous business expansion.
There is a perceived expectation, fueled by startup culture, for new firms to follow a pattern of funding rounds and rapid scaling.
The author values the idea of a business that grows organically and naturally plateaus when the consultant's availability is maximized, which should ideally correspond with a comfortable income level.
The author expresses admiration for startups that resist external funding to maintain control and avoid the pressures of investor-imposed timelines.
Personal client interaction and the quality of service are deemed more important than the quantity of clients or the size of the business.
The author intends to focus on providing a high-quality, one-to-one service without succumbing to the pressure to prematurely scale the business.

Sometimes that’s where the magic happens

A strange thing happened when I mentioned my latest business venture to a few long-time friends and ex-colleagues. They all had an immediate urge to suggest how I might handle the expansion of my currently non-existent enterprise.

The first person said I could catalog and record every piece of advice that I gave to clients (or was likely to give), build a searchable database and over time market subscriptions to this repository, rather than providing direct access to me.

The second friend suggested a partnership arrangement where we both acted as principals for the purpose of attending pitches and for marketing our services, but then contracted out the actual consulting assignments to more junior and cheaper staff, whose activity we would monitor.

I don’t want to debate the merits of these two business models, both of which I have seen implemented successfully. My concern is with the underlying assumption that bigger is always better and that the first concern of the new entrepreneur should be how to scale the business.

Is Bigger always Better?

What if the whole aim of the business is to provide a personal service at a human scale, to the benefit of both the client and the consultant?

Is there anything inherently wrong with organic growth, which reaches a natural limit when the consultant runs out of availability?

In my experience, by the time that point is reached the consultant should have reached a comfortable level of income. Why is there any need to expand beyond this point? And where does the default assumption of continuous expansion come from?

I am convinced that it is the “founder” stories behind a handful of startup unicorns that condition us to expect this continuous growth. New firms are expected to get on a treadmill of seed funding, expansion, Series A funding, more expansion and so on. Popular startup culture expects no less.

What happened to Organic Growth?

One of my favorite startups in the UK, in the transaction reporting space, was set up by a few ex-colleagues to address a specific gap in the market around testing.

Having taken over a year to build a credible offering, they have had some success in recruiting clients one by one. So far they have not taken a penny in outside funding, even though they have received a number of offers. They are reluctant to dilute the value they have already built and don’t want to put themselves under the stress of keeping to a time-frame agreed with outside investors.

They have my unalloyed respect. How many people do you see adopting this slow and steady approach and recognizing the false promise of the quick win?

In my own case I know the value that my former clients have found in having ready access to personal guidance on a narrow range of technical matters. There are sufficient such clients for this restricted service to support a full-time business. For one person!

From my side, this model also avoids some of the staffing and administrative headaches that have burnt up so much of my time and energy in the past.

So, that’s what I’m going to go for, resisting the siren calls to run before I’m even crawling. And focusing entirely on providing the best client experience at the most human scale possible — the one to one interaction.