Page 205 - The $100 Startup_ Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love

described throughout the book, many of the members of our group made a
deliberate decision to stay small, creating a “freedom business” for the purpose
of having the freedom. Others chose to grow by carefully recruiting employees
and going all in.

Here’s how three people faced this critical choice, resolving it in different
ways.

Option 1: Stay Small
No one is truly a born entrepreneur, but Cherie Ve Ard probably comes close.
Working on her own since she was twenty, she’s now thirty-eight and has never
looked back. Her father was also an entrepreneur, starting the family software
business that Cherie eventually took over. The company develops custom
software solutions for health-care providers. In 2007 she hit the road with Chris
Dunphy, her partner, and they traveled by RV across America. Being on the road
while running a software company led to an obvious expansion: Cherie and
Chris started a side business making mobile apps.

Business is good, but Cherie has purposely declined to pursue a number of
expansion ideas. Here’s how she puts it: “Without a doubt, the smartest decision
I made was to set a specific intention to not grow the business. Growing up as
the daughter of an entrepreneur, I watched my father’s creativity and inventor
mind-set get sapped as the business grew from just him to over fifty employees.
The stress wore him down and diminished his quality of life.”

When I last spoke to Cherie, she was on the island of Saint John, where she
and Chris had settled in for a stay of a few months (“maybe longer, or as long as
we feel like it”). Cherie earns a good income of at least $50,000 a year but is
insistent that the money isn’t the point. “My feeling of being a successful
business owner is based on the quality of life I lead, not the amount of money I
earn,” she says. “I own my business. The business doesn’t own me.”

Option 2: Go Medium
In the SoDo area of downtown Seattle, a factory hums with the sound of sewing
machines. Chinese-American women, many of whom have worked at the factory
for years, diligently apply patches to backpacks and laptop bags. I tour the
factory with Tom Bihn, the owner, and his business partner, Darcy Gray.

With more than twenty employees and his own factory, Tom isn’t afraid of
growth. But he turned his back on the biggest growth opportunity of all:
distributing his popular bags through big-name retailers, many of which have