One-Person Organizations

My favorite management thinker is Peter Drucker, my favorite pianist is Maurizio Pollini, and my favorite cellist is Yo Yo Ma. If any of them decided to grow by developing an organization that offered me the alternative of having others provide the services of what they do best, I would feel that I was losing twice. I only want to experience the best in these areas, and do not want these people to spend any time on anything other than improving what they deliver to me now so superbly.

Your customers probably feel the same way, but you probably require them to deal with a substantial number of people at your company -- such as those in sales, quality, technical support, accounting, and customer support. This can feel like dealing with eight octopi, each with eight arms waving in a different direction. Some of these employees may also not yet be the best in the world at what they do.

You can greatly improve your success by locating areas of customer interaction where delight and value can be significantly increased by having one terrific person provide all of the service that the customer needs. If you do this where competitors are weak and marketing costs are not high, you can dramatically shift the strategic balance with this initiative.

The person providing the service must be talented, and have good information support in order to create this strategic advantage, and the delivery of the service must be exciting for that one-person service organization. This employee must also like the idea of using customer relationships and superior service as the way for the organization and the employee to succeed.

Taken far enough, you can become so strong that many of the things you do now can be outsourced to allow you to concentrate on getting better at what customers value most. Clients who have used this approach report astonishing success, and great pleasure from the results.

The first time Mitchell and Company considered this question, we raised it as a hypothesis for a discussion among successful entrepreneurs and leading business professors. Imagine our surprise when the first speaker related how he had just started a one-person company, and how successful this approach had been. The business was providing cable television services, and the entrepreneur described how much faster and more profitably he could act by relying on outsourced organizations rather than employees. The new business also produced much less stress than before. His comment was that he could spend the time he used to spend with employees with his family instead, and found that a great improvement. This man had previously been in another cable television business, and had sold the business for a handsome profit. In retrospect, he realized that the way he had built his first business was less than optimal.

If you would like to explore how to achieve the enormous sales improvements, profit expansion, cost reductions, and stress elimination that come from this simplification, please email Don Mitchell at askdonmitchell@yahoo.com. I will provide information about One-Person Organizations for you on behalf of Mitchell and Company.

© 1999 Mitchell and Company