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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.

Have you noticed your business evolving over time?  I’m in at least my third incarnation of what I offer and on my second website/business name since starting in January of 2009.  Because a solopreneur business is so deeply connected to the person behind it, I think evolution is common over time.  What you are interested in, what you know and even what people want and need changes over time so you business will too.

As you change what you offer, other things about your business change too.  You might change things like your logo or colors, and your 30-second elevator pitch will most certainly change.  Some of your social media usernames and vanity URL’s might change.  If you can avoid it, try not to change your business name or website.  I had to do that at one point, and it was a big hassle and I lost any SEO value I might have had on the old site.  I had to change all my contact information with all of the hundreds of people who had that email address, a task which often requires multiple requests to some people.

I encourage solopreneurs to choose their website and business name wisely, and to pick something that will grow as the business grows.  That way, you won’t have to go through the hassle of a change.  (BTW – this is one of the topics covered in my comprehensive system for setting up your business “The ABC’s of a Successful Solopreneur Business.  Click here to check it out. )

Aside from a business name and website, many solopreneurs use a tagline – a short sentence that describes what they do.  A tagline is a great place to express your new business or current business focus.  If you’ve chosen a business and website name that can grow with you, you can change your tagline more often and more easily than you can change your business and website name.  A tagline shows up almost as often as your actual business name, so it works well to communicate and reinforce what you can do for people.  It’s also easy to test – just try it out when you are out in public introducing yourself, ask for feedback on your social networks, try it in your newsletter, and get feedback from family and friends.  Just don’t print 3,000 business cards with a new tagline until you are pretty sure you’ll be happy with it long enough to use those cards 😉

That brings me to my own new tagline.  I’ve used something like “Use your unique brilliance to better the world and earn a living” for a while and it’s starting to feel too small.  It’s like the mental equivalent of shoes that are now too tight.  Just like tight shoes, a too-small tagline feels more constricting as time passes.  I’ve become so much more, and I’m so much more committed to helping solopreneurs than I was when I first picked this 3 or so years ago.  So, I’m trying a new tagline out – here goes:

Speaker, Strategist and Champion for Solopreneurs

What do you think?  I’d love to get your feedback before I order those 3,000 business cards!

One of the biggest concerns I hear from solopreneurs or would-be solopreneurs is that there is too much to do outside of working for clients that it can’t be done without working 7 days a week.  One new business owner said something to the effect of: “By the time you do all the other stuff there isn’t enough time to sign up and serve new clients.”  Nothing could be further from the truth, and hearing this misconception makes me sad.  It’s sad that a business may not be born because of this misconception and that the world could miss out on what that business might offer.  It’s sad for the individual who may not realize their dream of a solopreneur business.  It’s really sad because it’s not true!

This time myth seems to be true because so many solopreneurs spend a lot of time doing a lot of things.  It also seems true because a lot of people who want bigger business organizations strongly encourage hiring and having a team, which may mean leaving the solopreneur model behind.  Just for clarity, I do believe you can have some outsourced help and still be a solopreneur.

So why does it seem like there is too much to do aside from working with customers in a solopreneur business?

I believe this problem happens when a business owner doesn’t work with a strategy or plan.  They hear some new technique and add it immediately to their work load without first investigating if it is a good idea for that particular business.  The result is that the task list of the business owner grows and grows, but there is no cohesive plan for how the parts fit together and create sales.  Instead of a logical plan, the business promotion strategy becomes a patchwork of random tasks that are only on the business owner’s radar because he or she heard about them.  This is not the way to build success!

What works better than randomly adding tasks?  Have a strategic plan for your business and evaluate anything new against that plan.  Make sure that any new task is either already in your plan or that it complements your plan.  It needs to have a specific purpose which is either creating sales or completing an intermediate step to a sale (e.g. having a potential client request a sample).  Once you know what the new task is supposed to do for your business, make sure to create some measurable goals for the new tasks.  That’s the only way to know if it is doing anything for your business.  Once you measure, test and revise.  Repeat this for each new thing you are thinking of adding to your business activities.

Your time is one of your most precious resources in your solopreneur business.  Make sure every task you do pulls its weight, and make any new task earn a place in your business before you take it on.

In last week’s post, I talked about the warm bodies trap.  In short, this means in your efforts to build a community of people for your business, don’t focus solely on adding warm bodies.  Instead, focus on building  a community of people who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

I was at a training a few months ago, and we were learning various legitimate ways to build a following of interested people for a Facebook fan page.  In the training there was someone there with a very niched, local business who talked about how he skipped all this work and simply purchased fans through a site that brokers freelance gigs between buyers and sellers.

On the surface, this might seem like a big time saver.  After all, why go through the effort of reaching out to people, creating great content and staying active on your page if you can just pay a few bucks for a whole bunch of fans?

Because those fans probably aren’t interested in your business.  They probably aren’t the kind of fans who will love your content, share it and be happy to hear from you.  There’s no shortcut to getting the right kind of people interested in your business.

I know it’s tempting to focus on just raising those numbers, but will it do you any good?  Will building big numbers of disinterested people actually lead to business for you in the long or short run?  Probably not.  In fact, it may hurt you.  It’s difficult to get a handle on ever-changing behind the scenes rules, but it’s likely that Facebook will see big numbers of fans but little interaction as a sign that you haven’t attracted interested people.  As a consumer, when I see someone with big numbers but no apparent interest from fans/followers/connections/etc, it looks a bit odd to me.  I’ve heard people say that even Google views a big bump in fans/followers/connections/etc.  that comes too fast to be natural as ding in your credibility.

In short, building big numbers of disinterested people probably won’t help your business and probably will hurt it.  There’s no real shortcut to attracting the right people to your business community.  Yes, you can work smarter and follow best practices but you still have to do the work and be worth the attention your community has trusted you with.  It’s an honor and a complement when someone joins your community, and you have to continue to earn that person’s interest.  Treat your community like the valuable people they are and don’t ever treat them like numbers.

How do you grow your community of interested people?  How do you continue to demonstrate that you value your community members?  Share it in the comments.

Far too often, solopreneurs and other small business owners fall into what I call the warm bodies trap.  It means that their marketing and promotion efforts are focused on simply accumulating warm bodies and not actually engaging, educating, building loyalty or encouraging sales.  They spend time and effort focusing on building raw numbers, e.g. more followers, friends, fans, connections, etc without any regard as to whether this is a good idea or not.

Just to be clear, bigger numbers are usually good assuming the activity is a good idea in the first place.  For example, if a Facebook fan page is a good strategy for your business then yes, generally having more fans is good assuming you can keep them happy and interacting.  I’ve seen many examples where a business owner assumes that more fans is good period and doesn’t consider the quality or interest level of those fans.

How does this appear in real life?  Here’s one example: I get many invitations from fan page owners to like their page during various online networking events.  These invitations are often accompanied by the instruction that I should do so as my personal profile and not as my fan page.  When I see this, it’s a clue that the page owner may be focused on raising their total number of likes and not the quality of the fans.  As a page owner, I want you to like my page only if it’s relevant to you, and if it is, I want you to like it from wherever it will provide the most value to you.

Let me explain one thing about how I use Facebook – I try to keep my business and personal use separate.  When I’m relaxing with a cup of coffee on a Sunday morning, I don’t want “work” information in my feed.  I only want to see a few businesses that pertain to my personal interests, which means very few business pages are in my personal feed.  On the other hand, when I have my work hat on I WANT quality business content that helps me and that is valuable to my community so I’ve liked a lot of pages from my business page.  I regularly scan this when I’m in work mode looking for content to share or things that might help me.  This is the kind of fan behavior that most page owners should value.  If I honor that request and like a page relevant to my business from my personal page, the page owner will get a fan in me that pretty much never sees their content when it would be valuable and appreciated.

The warm bodies trap is found elsewhere too.  People who spam every person who ever gave them a business card with a newsletter is one example.  Yes, the total count of warm bodies increases but the open rate will drop and people who don’t want to be subscribed or don’t know they have been are more likely to report the newsletter as spam (and yes, this is spam as defined by spam laws).  On LinkedIn, I get the dreaded connection request from someone who says we are “friends” even though I’ve never met them much less heard of them.  Then there are offers to get you huge numbers of fans, followers, connections, etc for a set (usually small) price.

Don’t treat real, thoughtful people like mere numbers or warm bodies.  It feels really yucky to be treated this way, and it lowers my opinion of people who do it.  Yes it’s good to have big numbers but only when you earn them by treating the people represented by those numbers right.

How do you grow your reach in your business and make sure your community members feel values?  Tell me about it in the comments.

One of the biggest challenges of being a solopreneur is staying on top of everything it takes to run your business.  In addition all the tasks and planning you need to do, you somehow need to stay on top of your industry and relevant trends as well.  What’s a busy solopreneur to do?

One of my solutions is to use Google Alerts.  This is a free service from Google that lets you set up a list of words or phrases that Google will watch for and let you know when they pop up in the news, on blogs or in other media.  Google will then send you an email with a link to the article.  You can specify some parameters for when you get the alert emails so that it’s convenient for you.

What can you use this for?  For starters, you can use it to stay on top of what’s being said about and happening in your industry.  You can watch what people who do similar or complementary work are writing about.  You can stay on top of trends that effect your industry, bigger economic trends or regional trends.  Get alerts about your hometown or current city, past schools or former employers.  Learn about new finds in health and medicine, fashion trends or science discoveries.  Follow the latest exploits of your favorite housewife, bachelor, contestant, celebrity rehab guest or big brother.  Keep up with your favorite sports star, sports team, politician, political party or current event.  In short, use Google Alerts to get notified whenever something is written about something important to you.

I recommend that all solopreneurs have at least a few Google Alerts set up so they can stay on top of what’s important to them.  Start with a few keywords about your business or industry and make sure to have an alert for name (including alternate spellings) as well.  Why have an alert for you name?  Obviously it’s important to know whenever something is written about you.  The alert will give you timely notice so you can respond or thank the author, share it with your community and use it to build your credibility.  I’ve had articles of mine picked up by other websites and I would never have known it had it not been for Google Alerts.

Google Alerts is a huge timesaver that lets you stay on top of what’s important in your industry.  You’ll be able to better serve your clients and be more of an expert with this automated tool doing the finding for you.

Do you use Google Alerts?  What do you have the service look for?  How do you use what you find?  Share it in the comments.