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Get the help you need to be a great solopreneur business owner

Solopreneurs should get the help they need

When I first started my business, I didn’t work exactly in my current specialty. I started as a professional organizer who specialized in productivity, systems and time management for entrepreneurs. Like most solopreneurs, my focus has changed and will probably continue to evolve over time.

Like many solopreneurs, I assumed all I had to do was set up an online brochure (aka a website), print some cards and get to it. I knew my stuff and got great results so how could word not spread like wildfire right? Ha, ha. Wrong.

I thought I’d be spending a little time every week on “business,” things like paperwork and an occassional lunch or coffee meeting. Even with my extensive business background I was unprepared for just how important it is to be an excellent business owner and not just an excellent provider of whatever you offer.

Fast forward a few years, and investments of time, money and energy into my own learning and I’m so much wiser. What I finally get now is that as much as we spend time getting the skills we sell up to par, we have to invest in getting business skills up to par as well. You can be the best at what you do, but if you don’t run a solid business you won’t be successful. Like it or not, the day you opened shop you became a business owner.

That brings me to the point of this article – get help with the business part of your business. No matter how great you are at what you do, you still need to run a business that works great for you and there are people and products that can help you with this. Of couse, this is what I do so it would be dishonest to say I wouldn’t be thrilled if you choose me for help. However, I’m hugely committed to the success of solopreneurs everywhere, so if I’m not your pick that’s fine but please pick someone or something.

Getting help with your business should not only be a non-negotiable in your set-up, but it should also be an ongoing activity you are always doing. Now that I see how much this kind of help can shortcut my success, I’m always on the lookout for the next thing to boost me. Start paying attention to what your are having difficulty with so you can be on the lookout for your next solution. Whatever problem you are having, it’s likely someone else has faced it, solved it and now sells the solution to.

One final point – beware of any purchasing more help than you’ve implemented. Try to only buy as much as you can put into practice soon, otherwise you’ll end up with a backlog of “shelf help,” i.e. things you’ve paid for but haven’t implemented and are sitting on the shelf and not helping you. The only time I make an exception to this is when I see something at a really great price that I know I will need soon.

What kind of help do you use in your business? What has it helped you achieve? What do you wish you had gotten help on sooner?

New free resource for you!

I’m really excited to share a brand new tool I’ve created to help you build your solopreneur business faster and with more ease!
I often get into conversations where people ask me what tools I use in my business. It’s one of my favorite things to talk about, and often people are surprised that there are free or paid tools to do the very thing they need to do.

I’ve compiled a list of the tools I use to run my business into a handy document called the Soloprneur Success Rolodex. It has 32 of my tops picks for services and products that are integral to my success.

Grab you copy on this page:

Solopreneur Success Rolodex

To your success!

A simple but effective tool for solopreneur time management

During one part of my career before I was a solopreneur, I worked for a holding company that was a parent company for engineering and architecture firms. My job was to help standardize systems across all the companies. Because of the job-by-job nature of the work, everyone filled out a timesheet – even the administrative staff. I found that knowing I was going to have to slot my time into categories when I did my timesheet helped me to think more proactively about my time and use it more wisely.

For most of us, more freedom is one of the main reasons for being self-employed. We love that we can work whenever it suits us and spend time however we want. If you’re like me, you’ll be thinking “Ugh, I could never go back to something like a timesheet now.” I thought this too, until I saw how it changed my business and my life.

I started using a timesheet 6 months ago when I felt like I wasn’t getting enough done in all the major areas of my life – personal, our fixer upper house and professional. My husband went to school for engineering and now works as a computer programmer and it was his idea to start tracking my time. In the engineering mindset, you can’t optimize a resource until you know how it’s being used now. So, in an effort to diagnose the problem I reluctantly began keeping a timesheet. Boy did I become a convert quickly!

So many great things came out of my using a timesheet it would be hard to list them all here. I became more aware of how long things really take which makes me better able to plan. I could preset how much time to spend on each area so that I invested my time according to my values. Strangely enough, I felt a sense of freedom from being on top of my time. I imagine it’s similar to when someone finally gets on top of their budget and spending. You can’t have unrealistic ideas about your time if how you spent it is right in front of you. My timesheet helped me remove unhelpful blurring of work and personal time, which is a big trap for work-at-home solopreneurs.

If you don’t keep track of how you spend your time, I invite you to do this even for a week or so. It’s a great practice to do every few months or so to make sure you’re spending your time how you think you are.

For my timesheet I used a spreadsheet where each line is a time window, and then I spread out how I spend the time into columns representing the areas I wanted to focus on. You could just write things down on a notepad or use a calendar if that works better for you. Don’t get caught up in finding the perfect tool – just do whatever works and will get you the information you need to make the best decisions about your time.

How solopreneurs can set income goals

A while back, I had a conversation with a coach I was thinking of hiring to help me with my business. Yes, even a business coach needs a coach! No matter how good we are at what we do, I believe everyone needs an outside person to help them.

This coach began our get acquainted session with “How much money do you want to make?” At first I was stymied because I didn’t have an exact figure but had a range instead, and she required one single number for us to even talk. Her plan was to get a number and then work backward to figure out how to make it happen, thus she needed a specific figure from me to even talk about it. Whether or not my figure was realistic given where I was at the time was not a factor for her.

Overall, it’s not a bad idea to start here but there were two big problems with using this approach so rigidly. First, it’s simplistic to just think you can name a figure off the top of your head and make it so. There’s lots of factors that go into building a business at any level and there are no guarantees that you can get to a revenue figure just because you named it. It seems to encourage an almost absurd level of speculation. I would say it’s more realistic to look at how much business you are doing now, how much you can expect to increase based on specific changes you’ve made and then add on some additional due to working smarter.

The second and bigger problem is that it ignores lifestyle choices. There’s loads of ways to make big money, but I’m not willing to do them all. I’m also not willing to work 7 days a week, spend hours a day in LA traffic or neglect my family. How much money you can make is impacted by what you are willing to do to make it. Since some lifestyle choices are not reversable in the short term, I would even say that this is where any income goal has to start. It’s much more realistic to say “I want to make as much money as I can given the following lifestyle conditions……” If you hate your lifestyle lots of money won’t make you satisfied.

Although I caution against using a specific income goal so rigidly, that doesn’t mean it’s always a bad idea. It’s important to know how much you need every month to keep your business open, to cover your own obligations and on top of those two things to have some fun. If you have no idea what those figures are then you’ve got no way to measure if your activities are working and that’s a recipe for business failure.

3 Twitter Strategies for Solopreneurs to Avoid

There’s a few things that are unique to solopreneur businesses, and one of them is that we need to be super-efficient with time, money and energy. Every activity we choose to do has to pull it’s own weight in terms of results. This applies to social media as well, and Twitter is no exception.

Twitter is a great platform for your business and I use it a lot (@themichelec). I would encourage many solopreneur business owners to consider jumping in, but note that it may not be effective for every business. That’s where strategy comes in. Before you start tweeting, you’ll need to know what you hope to accomplish by being on Twitter. When I post this question to people who are new to strategic thinking and social media strategy, the answer is almost always something like “more sales,” “more customers,” “more contracts,” etc, and while of course that’s almost always the end goal of any business strategy there are steps in between that lead from tweet to customer. Twitter strategies for solopreneurs might include things like branding, education, establishing expertise, building the “know-like-trust” factor and enticing people do something like click a link.

Twitter strategy is a huge topic, and there’s no way to cover it in one article. To get you started, here’s a list of 3 strategies to avoid at all cost:

Not having a plan at all. You’ll end up wasting time and not seeing results. Your strategy will evolve as you learn the ropes, but have at least some ideas going in of what you want to accomplish. Make sure your goals can be measured so you know if your efforts are paying off.
Tweet nothing but things for sale. Twitter is a social platform, not a classifieds listing. The only time this might be appropriate is for businesses whose main function is deals, discounts, coupons, etc. It’s fine to offer things for sale in some tweets, but generally most of your tweets should not be just about sales. I’ve heard figures of 10% to 20% as a good target for the percentage of tweets that are just sales related.
Ignore the social aspect of Twitter and just broadcast your messages. Twitter is a platform that lets people interact and that’s an important activity to include to have any degree of success. Make it a point to respond to someone, retweet them, answer a question, mention someone at least a few times a day.

If you see yourself in this list, don’t panic just change course! The Twitterverse is huge, so even if you’ve blown it with your current followers there’s plenty more people to connect with.

If you’re unsure of what your strategy should be or you don’t have one at all, let me help! Click here to schedule a call and let’s get your Tweets up to par.

Measurement basics for solopreneurs

One of the key activities in building a successful business is measuring how well your efforts are working. There’s the obvious measurement of whether profits

Michele Christensen on how solopreneurs can measure their efforts — Measuring your efforts is the only way to make sure they work

are increasing but you don’t earn profit in a vacuum. Your profits are directly related to a myriad of other activities you do and many of these can and should be measured. Most solopreneurs I talk to don’t like numbers, so it’s important to keep any measurement efforts simple, quick and informative. Almost nobody gets things right in their business right out of the gate, so the difference between success and failure is to be always measuring and adjusting to what you do.

The first step to measuring is to be strategic about what you decide to do. It’s not enough to say “I’m going to start Tweeting” or “I want to blog more.” There has to be an objective to your activities and preferably it should be one that can be measured in some way. Ultimately, of course, the objective in a for-profit business is to serve more people and make more profits but it’s likely that many of your activities will have results that are intermediate steps to making profit. For example, you may want to increase the number of people you meet through networking, but adding numbers alone will not result in more business. A more strategic way to think about this would be “I want to meet more people through networking so I can have 10 meetings per month with people who can refer business to me.” Your progress on this goal can be measured – how many people did you meet this month, and how many potential referral partners did you meet up with? It’s also an intermediate step to profit – empowering more people with what they need to know to refer to you can result in more referrals which can result in more business. Once you begin measuring these 2 things – people met and meetings set, you can see how well your efforts are working. Later, when you have some data over time you can see how much business you got from these referrals and have a sense of the dollar value of your networking efforts.

Conversely, if you didn’t measure this but only went to event after event and added to that ever-growing stash of business cards, you’d have no strategic goal, no way to measure and no way to know if the time you invested was paying off. This is why it’s so important to measure your results – continuing to invest time and energy into things that are not working will hurt your business. You do have to do this for yourself – you can’t just do what other businesses do because every business is different. As far as how to track the figures, I use a simple spreadsheet which I fill out every Friday. If a measurement has improved, the number is green so even with a quick glance I can see how I’m doing.

What do you need to start measuring in your business? Leave a comment and tell me about your plan.

What’s the best thing to learn to grow your business?

Michele Christensen on solopreneur business growth — The best thing to learn to grow your business

This is an interesting question. I was participating in a forum discussion on this topic and the answers were varied – marketing, time management, technical skills related to what you sell, sales and a few others popped up. While I agree that all of these are important, my answer was “how to be a business owner.” This is the single most important thing to learn to grow you business. You can be the best at what you do but if you don’t know the skills required to run a business with those skills then it’s improbable you’ll have a business. What does it mean to be a business owner? What are the skills you need to run a business well? How does this apply to solopreneurs?

Being a business owner encompasses everything that is not involved in delivering your product or service. Imagine owning a restaurant – the main activity is serving food to customers. The owner may or may not be involved in food service, but he or she has to do all sorts of things to make sure the staff can serve food. The owner has to make sure all the supplies are in house, proper licenses and inspections are maintained, all applicable laws are followed, inventory is managed in a cost effective way, customers continue to come through the door, profits are adequate, staffing needs are handled and that the customer experience is consistent from visit to visit.

Normally in a restaurant, there are levels of staff such as owner, manager and supervisor to make sure all the tasks get done correctly. As a solopreneur, the challenge becomes being good both at the product or service we sell and being a good business owner. Business ownership actually encompasses many different skills, so aside from having a great product or service there’s a lot to learn. I’ve worked with lots of people who were shocked to find out it wasn’t enough to simply have a great product or service and in fact I learned this myself after first launching my business with a slightly different focus than I have now.

So what should you do to get started on building your business skills? Here’s a list to help you along.

Make sure you have a great product or service and that you are continually adapting to what your market wants. If you don’t have a great product, no amount of business skills will build you a viable business.
Commit to serving people in the highest way you can. Make it your goal that both you and your customer leave every transaction better off than you were before.
Realize that building business skills is like keeping physically fit – you’re never done. Like fitness, you’ll first need to develop a base level of competency and then keep up your efforts forever.
Pick a handful (not too many!) of businesses who you love to purchase from and study what they do. What makes you love them?
Feed your brain a steady diet of information and learning on the topic of business skills. Blogs, newsletters, forums, podcasts, books, etc are all good sources of information.

Teaching solopreneurs business skills is a huge part of my mission so I’d love to help you with this!

Solopreneur Growing Pains

Most solopreneurs I’ve worked with start small and bend the rules to establish themselves. It’s common to start by giving away some free services in exchange

for testimonials or referrals and offer big discounts to hone your craft and gain some momentum. Policies are only loosely enforced if they exist at all in those early days. What almost always happens is that at some point the business is humming along and the business owner still has clients who came on board in the early days and this can create tension for the solopreneur who now has to serve those clients under the old rates or service plan even though it’s no longer appropriate for the business. In those early days, it was fine to get a last minute cancellation since your days were wide-open, but now that means lost income from an empty slot you could have filled with more notice. Maybe some of those early clients are only paying about half of what you charge now.

So what do you do? How do you handle these growing pains?

Start by getting clear on what you want. What rate do you want? How much notice for cancellations do you want? What travel reimbursement do you want? What services do you no longer want to do? Don’t worry if you don’t think you can get all these things right away and still fill your practice – it’s important to know what you want so you can at least begin moving toward that model.

Decide on how much you are committed to the model you want. If you adhere strongly to your model, you may lose some clients off the bat. It may be okay to phase things in over time or give someone a grace period. You may decide to keep some clients even though they don’t line up exactly with your desired business model. When making a change like this, you can do it gradually or all at once depending on your comfort level and your market. If there are services or products you’ve offered that you no longer want to do, consider offering them at a premium price instead of not offering them.

This can be a painful and uncomfortable process but it is necessary to continue your business progress. Your policies, fees, business model and array of services will continue to change and grow with you. At least a few times a year, check in with how you feel about these areas of your business and see if it’s time to grow a little.

Put some PERSONALity in your business communications

Michele Christensen on using your personality in business writing — Put some personality in your business communication

As a solopreneur, you ARE your business and this is the case even if you use outsourced help. When people hire your company, they are placing much more emphasis on the part of your business that is you. When people are thinking of hiring you, it’s likely they don’t want a big, faceless company or they wouldn’t be thinking of you in the first place. Therefore, it’s imperative you give them a peek into who the person behind the business is. A potential client can see if you are qualified on paper by looking at your website, but they can only know if they like you enough to work with you by getting to know you. For some businesses, it’s even important as social proof for your business – you have to show that you live what you teach others.
They key thing to letting business contacts into your personal life is moderation. Tell people some of what you are about, not all of it. You can surely share your personal triumphs and tragedies but do it with tact and decorum and not in a way that makes people feel like a voyeur. Here are some tips for including some personal information in your business communication:

Always keep in mind the purpose of sharing personal information in your business communication. It’s to allow clients to get to know you so that they can make a decision about going further in their work with you and to establish that you practice what you teach.
Don’t use your blog, newsletter or other business communication to vent or process your feelings. When your feelings are still raw, you are too emotional to constructively share the experience.
Leave out the gory details! Last year, I unsubscribed from 2 different newsletters after getting long, drawn out narratives of the authors’ respective break ups with a significant other. They were too gut-wrenching and painful and I felt dumped on and like I was being invasive. In each case, the narrative went on for several issues of the newsletter and included things like descriptions of subterfuges needed to retrieve belongings, arguments in the middle of the night and how many hours were spent crying. Yuck is all I can say.
Always assume that whatever you write will be on the web forever and read by lots of people. Will you feel proud in 100 years if someone reads what you wrote?
The passage of time may change how you share something. It’s much easier to hear a story about someone’s death, divorce, sickness or loss from many years ago than last week. There’s often lessons to be learned from these events that can be used in business but keep your readers’ comfort in mind.

It is important for solopreneurs to share themselves and let potential clients in, but what you share should be tailored to the audience and purpose you are writing for.

Your blog – front page or another page?

There’s no question that blogging is a key factor in running a successful solopreneur business. Blogging give people a chance to get to know you without any commitments. They can see if, over time, you show that you know your stuff. It’s easy to look good in a short interaction, but you can only maintain appearances for so long. Your blog also allows people to see your personality and if they feel like you’re a good fit for them. I know when I’m considering whether to work with someone or buy their product, I often check their blog to get a feel for what they know, what they stand for, how polished their work is and if I get a good feeling that they are someone I’d like to work with.

You know you need a blog, but you also need some other pages such as an about page, a contact page and pages for your products and services. So where does the blog go on your website? Should it be the front page or somewhere else in your website?

Both are good answers, and of course it depends on your business and the purpose of your website. For most solopreneurs who offer services and products though, I think the blog needs to be somewhere other than the front page but easily accessible in the navigation. The best front pages help the reader quickly determine if they are on a site that is relevant to them. Your home page should contain information that speaks directly to your ideal clients in their own language and helps them realize that your site is exactly what they need. You can use questions and bullet points to make it easy to scan.

The problem with putting a blog on the front page is that people are so hugely busy and have so much information to sort through that you may only get a few seconds before they decide to stay or go. If the one day they land on your site and find a front page with a blog post that isn’t applicable to them you’ll probably lose them. For example, if I’m a weight loss coach with a specialty in gluten-free living a person may find me through a Google search and click to my home page. If they find questions and bullet points on gluten-free living and weight loss they’ll know they are in the right place and I have a good chance of keeping them on my site for a while. If the first thing they see is a blog post on low calorie treats I found on vacation in Europe, that might seem irrelevant and uninteresting to my visitor and they’ll probably leave quickly without taking the time to see that I am a good fit for their needs.

You do need a blog, and it needs to be highly visible through your navigation but it isn’t the best use of your front page. Use your front page to help your visitors know without question whether they are in the right place or not.