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When you run a one-person, solopreneur business, there’s a lot to do.  Even if you have outsourced help, there’s still a lot to manage so prioritizing is key.  

One thing that makes it hard is that there are just so many choices in how to gain clients and grow your business.  In both the online and offline worlds, there is more that you could do than you could ever actually do.  So, how to you decide?  Where is the first place to go or what is the first strategy you should implement to start getting clients?

One simple answer is the most likely place.  Don’t go with the most fun, the most popular, or even necessarily what the experts are saying – instead, go with the one client-winning strategy that is most likely to work.  I’ll give you an example of a mistake I made.  Once I had my business up and running for about a year, I did what “everyone” said to do – I joined a local chamber of commerce.  I thought it would give me authority and credibility, and that the contacts I would make would turn into mutually beneficial relationships.  Boy was that a bomb for me!  It turns out, “my” type of people usually don’t hang out at chambers of commerce.  They are great for certain types of business, and I saw lots of people thriving there, but I met almost no referral partners, potential collaborators or potential clients. Solopreneurs just usually don’t join the chamber in my area.  I later became friends with a few other solopreneur business owners who had the same impression of our local chambers.  To be completely fair, I did really enjoy going to this local chamber and others as well and I did meet a few really great people who I’m still in touch with today.

Now had I had this idea of working from most likely to least likely ways to get clients before I joined the chamber, I would have taken a look at the roster and seen who was a member and that very few of them were a match for the type of people I wanted to meet.  It’s easy to see things in hindsight, but I did have to learn it at the time.

Now that I know a little better what do I do?  I go to groups that draw the people I want to meet.  I look for groups of creative, solo business owners and people looking to start home-based businesses.  I use Meetup.com a lot, and I’m on a lot of local mailing lists.

So, what client getting activities are you working on that aren’t the most likely to bring you success?  What can you stop doing so you can make room for something more likely to bring you new clients?

I admit, I thought I was a pretty good collaborator but now I know I can do a lot better.  I’ve been reading the book The Secret Collaborative Economy by Marsha Wright, and although I’m only a little ways into the book it’s already changed me.

Some people may think that solopreneurs don’t collaborate.  After all, the very nature of a solopreneur business is that we work primarily by ourselves.  However, this is a false belief and one that greatly limits the potential of a solopreneur business.  I’ve used joint ventures a lot over the years, and it’s a great way to bring someone else’s strengths to your audience.

I’ve also done a lot of networking, and the results have been less than stellar.  I thought I was doing a good job of building relationships because I was doing more than pretty much everyone I ever met.  I now know what I can do better and how I can better use my time and the time of the people I meet.

Here are 3 things I’ve learned about collaborating so far:

1. Not everyone is a collaborator.  That’s neither bad nor good, nor is it meant to be an insult to anyone.  Some people just don’t work that way or they haven’t found it valuable.  I realized that over the years, I’ve put way too much time and effort into trying to build collaborative relationships with people who didn’t have any interest.  Now, I’m much quicker to recognize collaborators and let go of people who aren’t interested in working that way right now.
2. Always ask what you can do for the other person first.  I’ve had conversations with both Marsha and her business partner/husband Simon, and they both started their conversations this way.  It floored me and I have to say, as a smaller player it made me feel awesome!
3. When someone asks how they can help you, make sure you have an answer!  Don’t assume people know what kinds of help or introductions you need right now.  Here are some examples: referrals for outsourced help you need, introductions to people that can promote you, connections to a group you want to present to and referral of prospects.  Make sure you are specific enough so that the other person recognizes the the opportunity you are seeking.

You may already know these things, but take a look at your networking and connection activities and make sure you are acting on them.  They are all simple tips to act on, but will make a big difference in your outcomes and how you feel.  Grab The Secret Collaborative Economy, and leave me a comment with something you learned.

As a solopreneur, a schedule is a must-have in order to stay on track and get all the essentials done.  You may be thinking “What?  The whole reason I went into business for myself was to be free of having a schedule.”  Yes, freedom is a wonderful thing but it is important to have structure in you days, weeks, months and even years if you are going to be successful.

Here’s a few kinds of schedule-free time management tactics that don’t work:

• Squeaky wheel, as in “The squeaky wheel gets the oil,” or what is screaming at you the most.  This doesn’t work because some things done make any sound at all.  A lucrative book can sit unwritten in your head for your entire life and never make a peep.  Other things don’t make any noise until they are problematic – for example, renewing your business license is just one of a blur of many tasks until it’s late and you get a hefty fine.  Then it squeaks, but that’s not a good way to decide when to work on it.
• Whatever’s in front of you.  This doesn’t work because it is too haphazard.  You often have no control over what ends up in front of you.   Pesky alerts on your phone or desktop can beckon you to address low priority tasks like a siren song.
• Whatever you feel like doing.  This doesn’t work because there are tasks you may have to do that you never feel like doing more than the alternatives.  If filing is your least favorite task, you’ll never “feel like” filing and yet it has to be done at some point.  There will always be something you can do and would rather do than file.  Under this method, you would never do those tasks you don’t particularly enjoy.  Most of us would probably spend the day on social media!

So what does work?

You need some kind of schedule.  The right way to schedule probably varies as much as people do, but there has to be some basic plan for your days and weeks.  If you can plan into months and years, that’s good to but at the very minimum you day and week needs some structure.

Here are some scheduling tips for solopreneurs:

• Start with the fixed items in your day such as family obligations, classes, appointments, etc.
• It may be helpful to look at your week as a whole.  You may not get a lot of time on your current project on Monday and Tuesday, but then you know you need to put some time into it on Wednesday.
• Schedule time for your health and make it your number one priority.  Without your health, you may not have a business and won’t be able to enjoy your life to the greatest extent possible.
• Learn to make use of smaller blocks of time.  It’s likely they will account for much more of your time than big blocks.
• Make use of your own personal rhythm.  Are you a morning person, a night owl or fan of afternoon siestas?  Whatever your personal daily rhythm is, plan you schedule around it.
• Specify what you are going to be doing during each block of time.  Whether it’s digging into your to-do list, working on a big current project, clearing your email inbox or something else, make sure you know what to be doing during each segment of your day.  It will save you a lot of time not having to weed through everything on your plate and decide what to do.
• If you have a project that’s in “crunch” mode, meaning you just have to crank through it until it’s done, try to set a limit on how long it can take you.  Many projects tend to follow Parkinson’s Law, e.g “work expands to fill the time available.”

There’s many right ways to schedule your time, just make sure you do it!  What are your scheduling tips for solopreneurs?  Share them in the comments.

A huge part of being a successful solopreneur is knowing what your niche is.  People use the words niche, ideal client, and target market interchangeably and so for this post when I use the word niche it means the clients you are best suited to serve, who love and for whom you can do your best work.  It’s also the people who have a problem you can solve, know they have it and are willing to pay you to solve it.

It’s important to know your niche so you can speak to them in everything you do.  An older adult trying to improve their mobility after hip surgery is looking for something very different in a personal trainer than a young marathon runner is.  A Manhatten condo owner with contemporary taste wants something different in an interior designer than someone with a 200-year old country mansion.  If people don’t feel like you are talking to them, they won’t take the time to find out if you can help them.  They’ll only read further if they think you get what they want and need.

Here are some examples of things that are not adequate descriptions of a business niche:

• “In transition.”  This isn’t a niche because almost everyone is in transition most the time.  You transition from birth to toddlerhood to preschool to kindergarten…… to college to your first job…..from job to job, career to career, in and out of various relationships, etc.  I can’t think of any period in my adulthood where I wasn’t in transition that lasted more than a few months.
• “Anyone who wants more energy.”  This also includes “more money, longer life, more love,” etc.  Who doesn’t want all of these all the time?  Sure, maybe there are a few people who feel they have all the energy they could possibly make use of but they are rare.  This description is too broad because it refers to most people most of the time.
• “Everyone,” and this includes variations such as “everyone with skin, everyone with a brain, etc”  People will immediately tune this out because it’s so broad.  Nobody is holding their breath for the magic solution for people with skin.
• “Small business.”  This is too broad for anyone to feel that you are speaking to them.  Small business includes everyone from a teenager who mows lawns for spending money all the way up to a company with a few million in revenue and a few dozen employees.  This isn’t a bad start for targeting, but it needs to be narrower in order for people to feel heard.
• “Women” or “Women over 50.”  Women is just too broad a category.  There are so many variables that not all women can be grouped into one homogeneous group.  Even with the age bracket, it’s still too broad.  Consider a 51 year-old woman with young children still at home who works full-time and helps her parents with their medical needs, and compare her to a 90 year-old great grandmother who has been retired for decades.  What do they have in common?  How can one message reach them both?

Your niche and how you speak to them has to be much narrower than any of the above examples.  Ideally, your copy is so on target that people you are good fit for will get a chill up their spine and think “How does he/she know that about me?”  Yes, you may turn some people off but those are not the people you are a good fit for.  There is a risk narrowing your focus in that some people may not be interested.  However, the risk of not narrowing is much bigger because you run the risk of reaching nobody.

How do you define your niche?  Share it in the comments along with a link to your site so we can see your targeting in action.

Overwhelm is a huge and common problem for solopreneurs.  Many people falsely think you can build a solopreneur business because there’s just too much to do.  Hiring outsourced help may be a good option for you at some point, but even before that it’s important to think and work strategically.  It’s one of the best ways to decrease feelings of overwhelm in your business.

First, let me establish why overwhelm is so common for solopreneurs.  A person who operates as a solopreneur wears a lot of hats.  It’s hard to juggle them all.  There’s a constant switching between roles such as sales, marketing, customer service, product creation, administration, and just plain doing what you get paid to do.  Prioritizing a big to-do list is almost always a challenge, but when you are prioritizing tasks not only within your various roles but between them as well it can get very complicated.  This alone accounts for a lot of solopreneur overwhelm.  As a business owner, you need to wrestle with such questions as “Is working on my new product more important than marketing my existing product?” or “Is updating an informational page on my site more important than filming a sales video?”

A second reason is that you get a lot of messages about things you “must” be doing.  The list of musts can get really long!  If you were to listen to every expert in every business discipline you wouldn’t have a business so much as a never-ending to-do list.

Strategy can help with both sources of overwhelm.  If you have a solid business strategy, you can prioritize (and let go of) tasks more easily.  You’ll know which new things you really must be doing.  You’ll feel more comfortable with what you decide to leave undone.

One way to get started easily with strategy is to start with your end goal and work backward to figure out how to make it happen.  For example, if you want to sell your ebook, you need two things: people visiting the sales page and for some of those visitors to buy.  That means you need strategies to get people to view the page.  This might include free events (teleseminars, webinars, etc), speaking, keyword optimization, advertising and social media.  For each of these activities, you have a specific goal – encourage people to visit the sales page for your ebook.  For conversions, you want to aim to improve the percentage of people who buy.  One strategy might be to start with the best sales page you can build, and then test and improve it.  Change just one thing at a time, test the results and make changes accordingly.

You can apply the same thinking to other goals too.  Whatever it is you want to sell, work backwards to figure out what needs to happen and how you can make it happen.

What overwhelms you in your business?  How have you made improved the situation?  Tell me about it in the comments.

If you’re called to the path of entrepreneurship, you probably are a go-getter.  You probably have more ideas in a day than you could implement in a year.  You get a lot done but there’s always more to do.  You think of something you want to do and want it done NOW.

These tendencies are some of your greatest assets and some of your greatest weaknesses.  Harnessed and used well, these tendencies can make you a success.  Allowed to run the show, these tendencies will sink you fast.  This is one of the biggest challenges of entrepreneurship – walking the line between controlling your nature too much or not enough.

One thing that I find that helps is to focus on changing or implementing just one thing at a time.  One reason is that it’s a good way to test and gather data.  If you’ve changed 8 things in your business and you start doing much better or much worse, you won’t which of those 8 things are responsible for the change.  That makes it hard to duplicate and expand.  Another reason is that those things may have interactions which you can’t predict.  You may foul up something in your technology or lose customers because they are confused.  You may cannibalize your own sales in a negative way.  In the event of a big failure, it’s hard to go back and undo 8 different things.

There’s also the mental cost of juggling all those projects and switching between them.  If you have several projects open at once, you have to keep track of a lot of different critical paths, next actions and things you are waiting on.  Each time you switch your focus from project to project, you lose time because you have to close up the first project (physically and mentally) and open the next one (both physically and mentally).

Ideally, I would have just one new project at a time and everything else would be in maintenance mode.  Realistically though, that’s not a good use of my time because when that one project stalls while I’m waiting on something then my business isn’t moving forward.  So even though I’d love to have just one new project at a time, I usually have 2-4 but that’s it!  Everything else gets put on hold until a slot opens up in my current projects.

I realize it’s hard, but do your best to focus and only have a few new projects going on.  You are more likely to get projects into the money-making stage sooner if you have fewer of them.

How many new projects do you typically work on?  How do you keep a lid on it?  Tell me about it in the comments.

One of my least favorite things to hear when someone tells their story is how their success is due to a random event.  A lot of speakers and teachers do this and I always scratch my head and think “Do you really think this builds your credibility?  You owe your entire success to a random event and I’m supposed to follow what you teach?”

Yes, of course random events play a big role in everyone’s life and in their business.  Since we can’t control them or make them happen though, there’s little to be learned from them for business success.  That’s the rub – if someone is claiming their success is based on a random event then they have nothing to teach me about becoming successful because I can’t make that same random event happen for me.

What is a much better success strategy is to focus on being prepared for, and taking action after random events.

Consider a networking or training event as an example – you pretty much never know who will be there so there’s a lot of chances for random meetings.  Knowing this, you can show up prepared.  Have the materials you need.  Make your appearance convey what you want it to.  Learn good networking skills.  Have your calendar with you so you can schedule and confirm a meeting on the spot.  Have an idea ahead of time of how you respond to the different types of people you might meet (a referral source, a potential customer, someone you can refer to, etc).  Have good answers for what people often ask you.  This is how you prepare to make the most of random events.  If that one person that can make your business soar to new heights happens to show up, make sure you are ready for them.

The other key is to take action after your random event happens.  If you meet that one fabulous referral source  and wow them because you are so prepared, chances are nothing will happen unless you take action after you meet them.  The follow up action will look different depending on what the random event was, but there’s almost always something else to be done.  It’s not realistic to think that success will just drop into your lap with no action needed from you.

There’s really two points to make here.  One is that random events do play a role in the success of your business, but much more important is what you do before and after those random events.  The second is that when you are telling your story, make sure to focus on your role in preparing for and responding to a random event when describing your success.  Your actions will impress me, not what random events happened to you.

How has your preparation and response helped you benefit from random events?  Share it in the comments.

Most of the time, I focus strictly on business strategy.  Sometimes though, I like to write about topics that are not strictly business but are related to having a solopreneur business.  Here’s one topic I feel strongly about: Staying safe when I’m out and about as a solopreneur.  Some of this article is targeted to women.

By definition, solopreneurs work alone a lot of the time.  Many of us work a lot from home, but if you go to events such as training or networking you probably travel some by yourself and it’s important to keep yourself safe when you do so.

I feel particularly strong about this because I see too many women who don’t take the safety precautions they should.  Sometimes it’s because they don’t know any better, but a lot of times it’s because they don’t want to be perceived as weak or fearful.  I get that it’s not good to be perceived as weak or fearful when you are asking people to be your customer, but this is not a sound reason to risk your safety.  Staying safe in your surroundings is a totally separate issue from being a competent and trustworthy business owner.  Anyone who wouldn’t patronize my business because I take my safety seriously is not someone I want as a customer.

I’m pretty assertive naturally, and being raised as the only girl with 3 boys didn’t make me any more timid.  I’ve also been a weightlifter since high school, and I’m strong for my size.  People are often surprised when I’m the first to speak up and the most cautious in questionable situations.  However, I think my assertiveness and physical strength give me the freedom to do whatever I need to do to be safe without fear of looking weak or fragile.

I’m not an expert on safety, but here’s a few things I do as much as possible when I’m out alone, especially at night.

• Always stay alert.  Watch who and what is going on around you.  Pay attention if you are using your cell phone – everyone knows you are distracted and would make an easier target.  
• Don’t ever be afraid to offend someone if you get a bad feeling about them.  I’ve opted not to board an elevator when I would have been riding alone with someone I felt weird about.  Yes, it may have offended the other person but that’s okay.
• Lock you car door right after you get in.  It’s common to get into the car and stow your belongings, adjust your seat, etc. before locking up and leaving.
• Find someone trustworthy to walk to a deserted parking lot with.  I’ve asked for this lots of times and people are more than happy to help.  If there’s nobody official around, I make it a point to leave with a group.
• Make it harder to steal your purse, wallet, laptop, etc.  Carry a bag that closes completely (no open-top tote bags or purses), keep a hand on your bag while out in a crowd, and be conscious of how you carry these things.

Don’t ever apologize for taking your safety seriously.  What do you do to keep yourself safe when you are out?

This seems like an easy question right?  You could probably answer it easily and without thinking.  Here’s something to think about though – do you sell what you think you sell?  Another way to ask this question is what do people think they are getting when they buy what you sell?

In a lot of cases, the answer is easy.  If you sell a physical product, the customer often knows what they are getting.  If you sell cookies it’s pretty easy to figure out that the customer wants cookies when they buy.

For many solopreneurs, the answer is not so simple.  They sell a product or service that is hard to describe either because they invented the business themselves or have a unique take on  an existing product or service.  Sometimes a business owner may know that their product or service is great, and customers agree once they have purchased but getting the customer to understand why they would want to buy is a challenge.

Take for example a massage therapist.  When people buy this service, they actually want many things other than just the massage.  They want physical and mental health benefits, comfort, enjoyment, stress reduction, improvement of injury and illness, relaxation and perhaps even more.

My own business could be an example as well.  People don’t actually buy my services because they want to talk on the phone, Skype or email with me.  They are buying the results I deliver using those ways of communicating.  They usually want more success in their business, more free time and less overwhelm.

Why does understanding what you sell (and what people buy) matter?

1. It will help you talk about what you do in a way that matters to people.  If a relationship coach said to you “Hey, you can talk on the phone to me 3 times a month, want to buy?” most people would say no.  If that same coach used language such as “I can help you get more from your relationship, have a more equal partnership, have more harmonious disagreements, etc” many more people would be interested.
2. It will help you tailor what you offers so that people actually want what you are selling.  Instead of selling a product or service, you can be on the lookout for unsolved problems that you can help with.
3. It will help you deliver what you sell in a way that meets the customer’s expectation.  If the customer thinks they are getting help with relationship problems but you think you are selling phone calls, there’s a lot of room for the customer to be unhappy.  Put yourself in the customer’s place and focus on delivering what he or she thinks they purchased.

What do you sell in your business?  Is it what it appears to be on the surface?  How do you explain it to potential customers?  Tell me about it in the comments.