Business Strategist for Solopreneurs
Just a quick note to let you know that the giveaway event I’m participating in is closing tomorrow. There are 13 great gifts for you to download, and they are all designed around the theme of freedom in your business. Make sure to get the gifts you want before the giveaway closes.
Grab your gifts here:
13 Gifts for Business Freedom Giveaway
As I’ve increased the reach of my business, I’ve had an increasing number of people attempt to pitch me something in the guise of a Trojan Horse. It’s usually something like “Can I share your {whatever} with my audience?” or one particularly blatant one “I have a speaking gig for you, let’s talk (turned out to be a long sales pitch for something that was completely inappropriate for me.)
Just to be clear, it’s totally appropriate to pitch and sell when you are in business. Without selling, there would be no business. My objection to the Trojan Horse approach is that it is sneaky and often untargeted. In each case, I didn’t know I was going to be pitched to and the product or service being offered was not something I needed or wanted. The person pitching me occupied my time under false pretenses and I felt burned at the end.
What I want to share with you is to be on the lookout for these sales pitches. They will waste your time and if your experience is like mine, the people that do this don’t even try to target the right potential customers. Here are a few warning signs to look out for:
One of the really vexing parts of the Trojan Horse sales pitch is that it is usually flattering! I admit, the first few times it happened I was thrilled that a stranger recognized my genius. I’ve now gotten pretty good at sniffing out legitimate admiration vs. insincere and generic compliments designed to woo me into a meeting. I’ve also come to recognize just how valuable my time is, so I place a higher bar on any meeting and very low value on ego-boosting.
Another problem with ducking these sales pitches is that if you get too broad with your criteria for declining, you may miss legitimate and valuable opportunities to collaborate and have a sales conversation about something that may actually be useful to you.
It goes without saying that you should not be using this to sell your own products or services. It makes a very bad impression and wastes both your time and your unqualified prospect’s time. The big question is how do you avoid the time-wasting Trojan Horses and accept the right appointments?
Here are a few ideas:
First, don’t jump to schedule an appointment just because someone asks. Check them out by visiting their website, social media sites and doing a Google search.
Second, make sure you understand why you are having a meeting rather than some other form of communication such as exchanging emails. Ask them some questions about why a meeting makes sense. Often, this drives away people who you probably don’t want to meet with and people who are a good fit appreciate your thoughtfulness.
Third, don’t schedule right away. I generally schedule everything a week ahead of time anyway, but a side benefit of this is that it wards off people who don’t have a legitimate purpose for talking to you. They don’t want to work that hard or plan ahead!
Fourth, pay attention to your feelings. If you feel pressured, unsure, weird, etc. it may be because the meeting isn’t right for you.
As a solopreneur, you have to guard your time or you won’t be able to do everything you need to do. Don’t plan a meeting simply because someone asks. Make sure you know the value of the meeting for both you and the person who wants to meet with you.
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It’s the week of Independence Day here in the US, and while it’s become known as “The 4th of July,” I prefer to call the holiday by the formal name in order to acknowledge the meaning of the day. I grew up in Philadelphia where much of the founding of the US took place, so I have a special place in my heart for this holiday.
In honor of Independence Day, I’m participating in a special independence-themed giveaway event. Myself and 12 other business owners have gotten together and created a page where you can download gifts from all of us to help you grow your business, achieve greater visibility, have a bigger impact and yes, make more money. Grab your gifts here: 13 Gifts for Business Freedom Giveaway I encourage you to visit the page as soon as you can – the giveaway only goes until the 9th.
Recently, I was asked if a business license was needed for a person who writes an income producing blog from home. Without knowing where he lived or the rules in his area, I told him that in general the answer would be yes.
Your work-at-home business is in fact a business, and local municipalities generally want you to have a business license to operate within their area. There are several reasons for this. Your local governing body (city, state, town, township, county, etc) wants to know who is operating a business within the borders of their area. They want to make sure all applicable laws and rules are adhered to. They want to make sure no space is used in a way that isn’t allowed. For example, my city has limits on how many customers (if any) may come to your home for your business. Your driveway and garage must remain available for parking. They also have rules to keep you from parking over-size vehicles or having obtrusive signage.
One of the biggest reasons local governments want you to have a business license is so that you can pay tax on your revenues or profits. When I mentioned this in the conversation, several other people immediately balked at the idea of paying taxes and some present felt that it was a waste to have a license if it made you pay more in tax.
I realize that most people hate taxes, but I do believe your home-based business should have all applicable licenses. Having a license legitimizes your business and makes you look more like a real business. Getting the proper license eliminates the risk of getting caught without one. Penalties do vary but if you are caught doing business without a license, at the very least you can expect to have to pay back taxes.
I think it sends a powerful message to your own self as well. Your business is every bit as legitimate as any bricks and mortar business, and as a prosperous community member you are paying your share of taxes.
Getting a business license is usually not a big deal and the payoff is worth it. You’ll never have to worry about accepting a delivery, seeing a client in if they come to your house, and you’ll be free to earn all the money you want with no fear of getting caught! Any potential client can feel free to dig around about you, and they’ll find your business license is current and in good standing (and don’t think people won’t do this!).
If you don’t have a business license, try taking the first step toward getting one. Call your local government offices and see what’s required and if you need one.
I won’t ask you to share in the comments if you don’t have a business license, but if you do, tell me why you got it and how it changed your business.
I find myself saying more and more that our brains have become Google-ized. It’s not meant to pick on Google (which I love) but as a shorthand way of saying overloaded, drowning with input and managing more stuff than ever before. I’m increasingly finding that when I’m out just talking to people casually that I have to alter the way I speak because I can’t count on someone’s attention long enough to express a complex thought in 3 sentences. I’m rushing when I talk and trying to compress everything into the smallest number of words possible. While the change has been slow over the past decade, it seems to have really changed a lot in the last 3 to 5 years. One way I’ve changed is that I often shop for a short article on something I want to learn about rather than read a long one because I don’t know if I want to read a long one yet. In other words, I often won’t read a long article on something unless I know beforehand that the subject is worth it to me.
I haven’t seen this as much in business conversations but I think that makes sense. If we’re together to do business or talk about business, it doesn’t make much sense to rush and speak in simple terms. We’ve both committed time and energy to accomplish something, so we put more effort into being effective with our communication.
The important of this is that when people consume your information or content, they may be in a frame of mind where they are looking for a quick read, a fast conclusion, one simple concept or a two-minute breather. You can’t know what your reader’s current frame of mind is when they encounter your content.
As someone who wants other people to read your content, what do you do?
Where possible, consider making your content accessible by as many people as possible regardless of their frame of mind. This doesn’t mean you have to withhold your brilliance, but it does require some adapting. Keep your articles and blog posts on the short side and make them focused on just one point. People can do a quick read, get the point and move on. If you have a more complex concept to present, consider breaking it into individual pieces and linking them. That allows people to get the information a little bit at a time. Tailor your content to the situation – if it’s an article or blog post, you can’t count on much commitment. If it’s a tweet, there’s even less incentive to read it and be focused on it. If it’s a ebook your reader paid for, they probably have a higher level of commitment to the material.
In short, don’t ever dull your brilliance but when possible present it in a way that make it available to as many people as possible no matter what their frame of mind is at the time.
In the last year, I’ve begun using the concept of an inner circle for my business. It’s been a huge contributor to the success I’ve had this year so I wanted to share the idea with you.
As solopreneurs, we tend to work mostly alone. This is true even if you have outsourced help, partner with others sometimes or attend live events. Couple that with working from home (also mostly alone), and you’ve got a recipe for isolation in your business.
What’s the problem with working alone? Well, nothing if you do it right. I happen to love the solopreneur model and think it can be a good fit for a lot of people. The problem is when you try to work without ever having anyone to run things by before you do them. You might spend way too much time on an unworkable idea that one other pair of eyes could have spotted. The opposite can also happen – you might dismiss a great idea. It’s not necessary to discuss every move you make, but having a sounding board for the big ideas is a big help.
There are lots of ways to make sure you don’t overdo it on working alone, and one of those ways is to create an inner circle for yourself. If you ever had a regular job, you had coworkers. In a startup or non-profit, you might have a board of directors. Your inner circle a close group of advisers you create for yourself to fill the role your coworkers or board might play.
You inner circle should push, challenge, uplift and question you. They help you get unstuck. They are your sounding board. This is the first line of defense a new idea has to get past before too much work goes into it. They know you and your hot buttons and will call you out when you aren’t working up to your potential.
Your inner circle doesn’t take the place of learning and getting help in your business. Your inner circle might be more like your coworkers whereas your coach or teacher might be more like a boss or outside consultant. Both are important to success, but they fill different roles.
I created my inner circle by getting into a peer mastermind. After trying a few different formats, we got settled into a routine and now I plan many of my projects around this group. I get their feedback on big projects at each step of the way and commit to meet my deadlines during our meetings. You better believe I meet those deadlines too!
Do you have an inner circle? Who is in it? Are they the right people? Tell me about it in the comments.
Since most solopreneurs I know work from home, it makes sense to talk about home care even though it’s not strictly business. Your environment plays a huge role in how you feel, how much you get done and the quality of that work. One of the most common plagues of modern living is clutter. Although there are many types of non-physical clutter, I’m specifically talking about physical clutter here.
“Stuff” is relatively cheap now in terms of time, effort and money to acquire it. Relatively cheap postal rates are a boon for junk mailers. Magazines and newspapers take it upon themselves to subscribe you in order to pump up their circulation numbers. Add to that the normal upgrade cycle of all the various electronics devices and it makes for a lot of potential clutter.
Note that I called it potential clutter. All of the stuff that comes into your house has the potential to become clutter if left unchecked. Since the inflow is more or less ongoing, the mitigation needs to be ongoing as well. For years, I’ve cultivated the habit of continually decluttering. It’s something that happens casually throughout the day. If I buy a new pair of pants, I scan my existing pants to see what can be donated. If I’m putting something away and the cabinet or shelf seems crowded, I do a quick sweep to see what can go. I do a big yearly kitchen/pantry decluttering every winter.
Recently, I’ve adopted a slightly more formal approach that has been working great and has helped my business as well. I now declutter 15 minutes a day (props to flylady.net for the idea). One of the helpful things in this approach for me has been to use a wide definition of decluttering. It’s not just the “clean out the closet” tasks, but also putting everything back where it belongs. What’s great about this is that there’s never too much accumulation and there’s a set time to take care of it every day. When you practice 15 minutes a day of decluttering, you’ll find that most of the time you can put away anything left out in the last day or so and still have time to do real decluttering such as cleaning out closets, shelves and storage areas.
So how might this help your business?
It helps by taking something distracting off your plate when you are trying to work. If you go to an office outside of the house, it’s easy to leave home chores undone for the day since they are not right in your face reminding you. When you work from home, those tasks nag at you and may pull you from your work. There’s a certain pressure to feel like your house should always look good because you work from home, and this helps keep things tidy. By doing a little every day, you don’t have to try to find a huge block of time to do it later. If your house is in reasonably good shape, you’ve can’t procrastinate working in order to clean it. Having a clear space may help you concentrate or feel more focused. Knowing there’s a set block of time every day to do this kind of thing takes the pressure off. If I see an area that needs to be addressed, I know I’ll get to it eventually and it doesn’t hang over my head while sitting on my to-do list.
In invite you to join me in this daily practice and see how it improves your business. Many people make a new year’s resolution to get organized, and instead of that I suggest trying 15 minutes a day of decluttering. Tell me how it works for you in the comments.
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One of my clients said the most brilliant thing to me, and I just had to take some time to write about it.
The statement was:
Wow. Can you fit any more wisdom into one sentence?
There are so many things we “have” to be doing to grow a business. Just in marketing alone there’s Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, video, speaking, email, SEO, etc. The list goes on and on. It can feel like a treadmill just to get to what you already know about, and then another marketing “must do” pops up.
The thing is, for all of these areas there’s a minimum level of effort you need to expend to make it worth it. If you’re on some forum just flailing around, randomly posting and hoping business magically comes your way you’re in for a disappointment. You need a plan going in, but you also have to make sure you put in at least the minimum amount of work needed per week to make your effort work.
In other words, if you spend 10 hours per week marketing but split that 10 hours between 20 activities each activity is only getting 30 minutes per week. That might not be enough to make that activity pay off, so you’ve got 10 wasted hours and 20 activities that don’t pay off. You’ve also got a lot of frantic activity and management of those activities.
What if you changed your plan to only focus on the best 5 marketing activities for your business and instead you spent 2 hours each on them? Now you’ve cherry-picked the best activities to be doing and you’re spending more time on them. This makes it more likely that you’ll succeed in any given activity. Many marketing activities are simply not worth doing unless you can put in enough time.
Why do we solopreneurs do this to ourselves? Some of it may boil down to “bright, shiny object syndrome.” We hear something new and it seems like this is IT, the one thing that will propel our business to new heights. As entrepreneurs, we’re drawn to new things so of course we want to take them on. It may be a little bit of intimidation – it’s hard to go against what an expert with much more success than you says. It could be that you love the presence someone else has and are seeking to emulate their success. It might be that a certain tactic has been successful for your competitors. There’s other reasons I’m sure.
Whatever the reason, consider getting off the treadmill of doing lots of things poorly. Think about doing fewer things and doing them better. Maybe there is a new balance that will get you both better results and less stress.
What activities could you do less of but do a better job at? Tell me about it in the comments.
I talk a lot about strategy, and that’s because it’s truly one of the most important foundations to your success. What is strategy and why is it so important? How can it help you?
Strategy is having an idea of how something will help your business before you start doing it. This applies both to big, sweeping changes like adding a new marketing technique and it also applies to one-time things like attending an expo. Having a strategy makes it so much more likely you will succeed, and even if you don’t you’ll know it sooner and not get sidetracked for as long as you would without strategy.
New business owners often have a fire to get started, and as a result they start off running hard and just doing as many things as they can to build their business. The idea of actually asking if something is a good idea to be doing in the first place seems pointless. It’s easy to get into such a frenzy of doing that it’s hard to even find a few minutes to ask if you should be doing something.
Strategy helps you decide what to do and set some goals around what you expect to accomplish. Most business activities have increasing sales as their ultimate goal but there are many intermediate steps. One strategy might be to increase traffic to your website using social media. This would ultimately increase sales (all other things being equal), but it’s an intermediate step. If your strategy is to increase sales by increasing traffic using social media then you know what your social media activity is supposed to accomplish before you even start doing it. Using some traffic measurements, you can tell how well it is working by measuring how much traffic you sent to your site before and after you started using social media.
One of the best things strategy can do is to steer you when you are off course. What if you social media strategy, as you’ve defined it, isn’t paying off? That’s not as good as it working great, but it’s much better that you know and can change course. If your efforts aren’t working, you need to change what you are doing or find something new to do.
Strategy doesn’t have to be a big deal. It doesn’t have to be formal or complex. Just make sure you know why you are doing any business activity and what you hope to get from it. Have a way to measure if your efforts are working, and know when to change course or pull the plug.
How do you use simple strategy in your business? Tell me about it in the comments.
Burnout is a very real risk for solopreneurs. We wear all the hats in the business, and it’s so easy to just get caught up in the treadmill of never ending work. It’s easy to buy into the myth that if you just work harder somehow it will all get done. However, it’s simply not possible to ever get everything done. No matter how much you do, there’s always more you could be doing so the work is never actually done.
What you can do is set limits on how much you work and make good choices about what to leave undone. Otherwise, burnout is a very real possibility. Over the long haul, burnout can sap your enthusiasm for your work and leave you tired, worn down and unable to focus.
The long term effects are tragic, but what about the short term effects? Sure it’s fine to push yourself for a short while but working long hours and not taking time off has a very real risk in the short run. In the short run, not taking time off can cause you to temporarily lose focus. You might find yourself forgetting why you walked into a room, going to the store for 3 things and not being able to remember them, sleeping poorly or feeling lethargic. These minor effects might not seem too serious, but expanded into other areas of your life the lack of focus might mean you don’t pay attention while driving, miss appointments, or skip medications. These effects can be serious or even deadly.
One of the recurring themes I come across in my work is that business owners work too hard for it to be sustainable. As I’ve mentioned, a short push is okay but when you get into months of long weeks there are very real risks. Sometimes when I point this out, I get the impression that the other person thinks I’m patronizing them or trying to butter them up about being such a hard worker. The truth is when I see someone working too hard for their own health and safety I feel like it’s important to point it out. I feel like sometimes I spot it because I’ve done it to myself as well. I’ve never had a serious incident, but have had more than my share of absentmindedness due to burnout. Two people close to me have had car accidents because of burnout.
I talk about burnout and working too hard a lot. Please don’t think I’m patronizing. It’s a very real risk in the long run. If you burn out and leave your business, the world won’t get what you have to offer. You also put yourself and others at risk when you can’t focus. Take regular breaks, take days off and take vacations. Always remember that the work will never be all done.
Have you had burnout? How did it impair you? Share it in the comments, and tell me how you’ll prevent burnout in the future.