Erring on the Side of Happiness

Not everyone knows, but Common Craft is a two-person, home-based business. We're 100% independent, with zero employees or investors. While we work with specialists by contract, everything that Common Craft does comes from us and impacts only us. This has been our goal since 2006 when Sachi and I started working together and today, we're starting to really understand what it means to be a two person "couple company."

It's not all unicorns and rainbows. Along with our important video-making duties, I am one of two people in the customer support department. Sachi is our head bookkeeper. There's no one else to answer the phone, run errands or follow up on a question. We spend valuable time on things that could easily be done by others, which surely impacts our productivity. But, we are connected directly to our customers.

Work is a constant part of our lives. Business happens over dinner, on walks and off-hours. We don't ever really get away. Instead, we've learned ways to streamline our work, even when we're supposed to be traveling or on vacation. 

Perhaps most importantly, our business is difficult to scale with two people. When headcount is a constraint, fewer business models make sense. So we have to find what works for us. 

These are obviously self-imposed limits and I'm sure most business people would say that we're missing opportunities. It's true, being small means passing on many opportunities and focusing on ones that fit for us. But it also means new perspectives, perspectives that don't make as much sense outside of a couple company.  

Think for a minute about how decisions are made in many businesses. Money is obviously the driving force, which is directly connected to investor and shareholder interests. Business leaders make hard decisions every day, ones focused on increasing the health of the business. Of course, this is responsible and rational behavior.

But what if there is another perspective, one that is unique to companies like Common Craft? What if, along with money and business health, a driving force of every decision is happiness among the founders? This is how we've learned to operate - our happiness as a home-based unit is perhaps the most important thing for our business and something directly connected to long-term financial success. When we look at opportunities, we ask ourselves - will this make us happy? If this opportunity comes to fruition, will we still be able to live the life we want to live? 

Of course, it's not just happiness. This is really a strategy to prevent its evil twin, unhappiness, from rearing its head. Unhappiness, in the context of a married couple's work together, is poison. Business success wouldn't matter if we stopped enjoying our life together.

So we've been very deliberate about how we run Common Craft. We don't have employees because we don't want an HR department. Instead, we've found a business model (video licensing) that scales without employees.  We don't have an office because we love being at home and have made it our best possible workspace. We can be very low-overhead, agile and lightweight with two people. We've never required outside investment, and I think we're better for it. Investors aren't likely to enjoy a return based on our happiness. We are happily independent. 

In the end, we're designing a business that fits with our goals as a married couple. By erring on the side of happiness, we can grow in ways that create a successful business, but also ensure that we don't lose control of our day-to-day lives. And with these things in place, we hopefully have a solid formula for sustainable creativity.

Of course, things change and Common Craft may become something different down the road.  But what will always be in the front of our minds is the idea that we have a choice. Every business is different and just because your "supposed-to" do something doesn't mean you have to do it. We all have a choice, and for us the important question is - will this make us happy?

For more posts like this, see our Being Small category.

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Being Lightweight: Planting the Right Plants

If you don't like yardwork, you have a choice.  You can hire gardeners or you can plant things that don't require much care.  

This is my way of saying that we all have a choice in how we grow. Because we want Common Craft to stay small, we look at new opportunities in terms of yardwork and ask ourselves - is this going to require gardeners in the future? If so, then maybe we should look for opportunities that are more likely to take care of themselves and allow us to focus on what really makes us excited and happy.

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Being Lightweight: Business Design

This is the third in a series of posts about Being Lightweight.  The first two were about Working with Clients and Tools We Use.

We are lucky to have a product that people like. Our challenge is to experiment and find the best ways to build a business around this product. To be successful we need the business to be profitable, but also work within the life we want to live.

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Beachcombers and Making the Lightweight Choice

I suppose some would say it's downright un-American, but we worked on July 4th and 5th.  It was our choice - a choice that enabled us to take the 7th and 8th and go camping without the hordes of people.  It's something we do often - work when others aren't so we can play without crowds.  It's a choice we make.

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Being Lightweight: Tools We Use

This is the second in a series of posts about being lightweight.  Our first was focused on working with clients and this installment is all about tools we use.

Tools, or the the wrong tools, become a risk when they create unnecessary drag in every day work. Often, we've found ourselves wondering if we're using a sledgehammer to drive a nail.  If so, we look for alternatives.  

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Being Lightweight: Working with Clients

It's a question we ask each other all the time - what is the most lightweight way we can do this?

We are a small company who is trying to do big things. In order to be
successful, we need to reduce drag - to remove the processes,
bureaucracies and commitments that slow us down and don't pay off. 

Today we're kicking off a series of posts called "Being Lightweight" that will relate what lightweight means to us and hopefully help you think differently about how you focus your attention.

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Two Quotes on Simplicity

The first is by Antione de Saint Exupéry, author of The Little Prince and a pioneer in aviation:

Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away. 

The second is by William of Occam (1288-1347)  You might know the name from Occam's Razor.

It is vain to do more with what can be done with less.

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Free is the Future

Chris Anderson, the author of The Long Tail and editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine,  has moved his focus to "Free".  His article is the cover story of the latest Wired (Free!

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15 Lessons Learned in 2007

What a year.  I can say with ultimate confidence that we never would have guessed, one year ago, that 2007 would be so transformative for Common Craft. Here are some things we learned:

    OUR WORK 

Video works. Text, graphics, audio, they all have a place.  But video is a different animal.  Nothing engages people like the dynamics of a video.  Ever read about a car chase? It's not as fun.

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Learning The Independent Lifestyle

I always wanted to be independent - I never, not once in my life, had the goal of working for someone else.  It's not in my genes.  In 2003 I founded Common Craft and in January of 2007 Sachi joined the company.  Since then, Sachi has been the real force driving our goal of having a truly independent lifestyle.

And it is ALL about lifestyle.  As I've written before, we make our lifestyle a huge priority.  Why choose to be independent if you can't create a job and schedule that works for you?  We've been trying to figure out what this means and I have a couple of examples.

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