Page 91 - The Magic of Tiny Business

Part III  Practice Your “How”

Anticipating Growth AND Slowdowns

With the Oprah lift, our Tiny Business needed more
resources. Our pre-Oprah existence was a small home office
with a constellation of freelancers and vendors. That’s how
we kept overhead down and cash easily flowing. Post-
Oprah, we needed to expand rapidly. Confident, we moved
to a large and then larger, more expensive office downtown,
adding Andrew Dyer as our VP of Operations and staff.
Our overhead costs went from low to high. Even with all
this expansion going on, we managed to stay true to our
tiny core; we didn’t waiver personally or professionally.

We committed to maintaining regular work hours (no
working weekends—not even email!) and did not succumb
to pressure to compete with lower-cost and less eco-
friendly options. We knew that would be a race to the bot-
tom and our brand would suffer. From a very practical
business perspective, competing with lower-cost options,
while potentially profitable in the short term, would have
added operational and financial challenges.

But here is where we went wrong: we were moving
fast, restructuring the business based on the new current
demand with future growth in mind. All we could see
ahead was growth. We were not being conservative with
our spending, and we were not yet working with forecasts
or budgets. We weren’t wasting money, but we weren’t
saving it either. We’d grown slowly for years, then had
explosive 3x growth in just a few months.

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