The business behind the one-person company

A one-person company can look wonderfully simple on an org chart. The customer may still be depending on a chain of other companies to get one answer.

When I draw one, there's a name in the middle and a tidy set of boxes around it. Software here, a contractor there, another service handling payments. Work that used to look like a department now fits inside a box with a monthly bill.

I like that possibility. I don't want to build a payment system or do a worse job than a specialist just to say the business is mine. Being able to buy that help can make a small business possible in the first place.

But I'm drawing the company from my side.

The customer isn't buying my arrangement of tools and contractors. They're buying something I said I could do for them. If part of it doesn't work, explaining which box caused the problem still leaves them with the problem.

That's where the one-person-company idea gets more interesting to me. Less of the work has to happen inside the business. Which decisions still need to stay there?

Say I'm selling a service and a customer needs the work changed. The contractor has delivered what I asked for, but the customer can't use it. Before I send it back, I need to understand whether the work is wrong, whether I explained the job badly, or whether I offered the customer something the contractor never agreed to deliver.

Those are different problems. Hiring a better contractor won't fix all of them. Neither will another tool if I'm still unclear about what the customer was supposed to get.

I don't have to make every decision myself. Someone else may understand the work better than I do. But I'd want to know who can judge it, what they need from me, and whether they can actually get it changed. A name on an org chart doesn't answer that.

And sometimes a platform or specialist already handles this well. Good. I don't need to recreate that work inside my business. I do need to understand what they're taking care of before I offer the customer more than that arrangement can support.

I don't yet know whether this is what separates the small firms that last from those that don't. That's more than I can claim. But it gives me a more useful starting point than counting employees.

Take something you're offering and separate the work you're buying from the decisions you're still making about it. You might be comfortable paying someone else to produce it while keeping the final review. Or you might find that the promise needs to be smaller until you have the right help.