Question growth for your company of one
The objective of a business is to be obsessively driven by the willingness to satisfy customers' needs and make the highest quality products to achieve customer satisfaction. Product and customers are the focus. Profit is a by-product of such a state of mind. Growth can be a choice.
As Paul Jarvis argues in his book "Company of One", you don't need to constantly seek growth to be a valid business. Staying small is a great choice, especially if you don't intend to take on the administrative and managerial burdens that come with growing a business.
Growth is not always the answer, although it is a somewhat implicit common belief if you do business in the Western world. There is the commonly circulating knowledge that scaling a business is almost the end goal itself--especially if you are a startup.
Growth is not always the answer because you--the founder of the company--can choose what to optimize for. Optimizing for business growth is ok, as long as you understand the consequences of that and consciously lean into them. When you are a company of one, as Jarvis points out, you ask "what can I do to make my business better"? instead of "what can I do to grow my business larger"?
Making your business better, if you reason from first principles, means:
- Crafting your product/service to be outstanding and meeting real customers' needs
- Being relentlessly in service of your existing customers and optimizing their experience instead of always seeking new customers to onboard.
Eventually, you do business to provide the most suitable product/service to meet your customers' true needs and improve their existence and produce as a humanly significant impact as possible. Impact can be in breadth or depth.
You can aim to scale to serve as many customers as possible, but with limited resources and flaws. Or you can stay small and maximize your impact in depth by serving your relatively small audience, but doing so with your whole self. The choice is within yourself.