productivity – Page 8 – Michele Christensen

Realigning my solopreneur business priorities

Solopreneur priorities will evolve over time — Your priorities as a solopreneur will change over time

Over the long haul, your solopreneur business will change. You’ll go through phases, changing interests and maybe even a change of focus. Instead of being surprised, try to expect this and know that it’s normal.

On of my ongoing evolutions is how I prioritize my time. I’ve spent many, many hours learning in the last two years. I absolutely love to learn new things, and as a coach and consultant it’s vital to my business that I keep my knowledge current. I’ve sampled the work of dozens of coaches and mentors with both paid and free information. Something has shifted for me in the last few months though. I’ve become impatient and felt a tug to be doing more. When I looked at how I spend my time, I realized that I was spending too much time learning and not enough time implementing. Sound familiar?

Many solopreneurs fall into this trap. Sometimes it’s fear of moving ahead because we think we don’t yet know enough. Sometimes learning can be a procrastination tool – it’s easy to sit and listen to a webinar or recording but actually creating something can be hard and tedious. For me, I think learning is just so exciting and inspiring that I want to do a lot of it because I love it.

When I first started to prioritize learning about 2 years ago, it was the right choice. I did need to up my skill set and knowledge both for my own business and for my clients. There came a point in the last few months though, where I would get impatient during my daily study sessions. It was almost a feeling of “enough already, go do something!”

It wasn’t until I set aside some quiet time and took a look at my time and priorities and did some realigning. The main thing I shifted was to change the balance between learning and doing. Up until now, it’s been mostly learn with a little doing. Now I’m aiming for mostly doing with some learning.

The reality is that you’ll never know everything about running a solopreneur business. There will always be lots more to learn. There will come a point though, when more learning needs to be balanced out with more doing. Continuing to study without using what you are learning will not help your business. I think sometimes the sheer volume of information available to us plays on our insecurities. It seems like since we know such a small portion of what we could know that we couldn’t possibly know enough to run a business. Don’t believe it though!

Have you been learning without doing? Is it time for a shift? Tell me about it in the comments.

Solopreneurs, study up before you hire out

Solopreneurs will benefit from being informed before outsourcing — Solopreneurs should gather some knowledge before hiring outsourced help

Being a solopreneur doesn’t mean you can’t ever have help. Many people who run their own solopreneur business have outside help for things like bookkeeping, web management, social media, etc. I’ve seen more than a few people get burned though, so I want to encourage you to do some research before you hire anyone for any task. You don’t need to be an expert – one of the reasons to hire help is so you don’t have to become an expert. However, knowing enough to ask good questions and to assess whether your potential new hire knows their stuff is invaluable.

For example, if you are going to hire out a social media marketing consultant it pays to know something about the subject. One thing this consultant may do is discuss whether to link your accounts and post the same content across various sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. Not only should they be able to make a firm recommendation as to whether you should do this, they should be able to tell you why they are making that suggestion. By delving into this subject and understanding the pros and cons of linking, you’ll be able to ask probing questions, understand their answers and see if they can support their reasoning. It’s not enough just to suggest a practice, they should be able to give you reasons for their recommendation. If you haven’t gotten informed on the subject, you might be in a position where you just accept what they say and don’t even know that you should be asking any questions.

Another benefit of being informed is that you’ll have a good idea of how long something should take. If the estimate you get is way beyond what you think it should be, you’ll be in a position to ask why. There may be a good reason, but if not then the person under consideration probably isn’t a good fit for you.

Getting informed before you hire out also allows you to see what level of person you need. I’m getting ready to hire out some very simple tasks that can be done from checklists I’ve prepared. Because I’ve taken the time to see exactly what goes into these tasks, I know I don’t need a highly experienced person with a wide skill set. If I was getting ready to add a big web store, I would need a much more skilled person with experience in shopping carts, payment systems, online stores, programming, WordPress, etc. I would only know this though, if I took the time to research and see what goes into building a store.

One trap to avoid – don’t rely on the person you are considering hiring to school you on what you need. Any information that person gives comes from their knowledge and you have no way of assessing if there is any bias or gaps in that knowledge. It’s up to you to learn enough to spot those gaps yourself and make sure you get good advice and make a good hire.

Have you ever made a bad hire? What went wrong? What would you do differently next time? Do you get informed before you interview people? Post a comment and let me know.

Solopreneurs, is your focus in the right place?

As I go through life, sometimes I get reminders of things I already know but maybe got a little rusty on. Recently, I was reminded of the power of focus, as in what

Solopreneurs can have better growth by having proper focus — Solopreneurs must make sure their focus is in the right place

you focus on tends to become more prevalent in your life. To be clear, I don’t believe in any sort of magic behind this, it’s more like having a clear focus drives you to make decisions that support that focus. For example, if you get clear and focused on losing 10 pounds you will make different choices than if you weren’t focused and make the weight loss more likely to occur. If you constantly talk about how bad the economy is, you’ll see signs of that everywhere. It’s like when a friend buys a new car in a model you’ve never heard of or seen and suddenly you see it everywhere.

Last week, an acquaintance pointed several people to someone’s blog saying it was a “must read” and “really funny.” The blog in question was written by a 27-year old single woman in search of love and marriage, but the topic and title was all about the bad dates and low-quality men she had met. I was immediately struck by how out of line with her stated goal publishing such a blog is. To be certain, seeking love and marriage is a worthy goal and even something to be blogged about. My concern with this particular blog is that she is putting time, energy and focus into remembering, chronicling and preserving the bad dates she had been on. Talk about putting your focus in the wrong place!

I have my own version of this mistake. As I talk about often, my husband and I are about 6 years into renovating our house, which looked like an abandoned drug den when we bought it. In the course of our renovations, I’ve had the misfortune to deal with a lot of bad contractors and very few good ones. For some reason, many people seem to want to hear the horror stories. I often find myself being goaded into regaling a crowd with my awful contractor stories. It took me a few years to realize it, but every time I allowed myself to be the entertainment, I would feel sucked right back into the bad emotional place those experiences put me in the first time around. As a result, I spent many more hours being upset by these bad experiences than was necessary. It took a few years, but I eventually got clear that entertaining other people was not as important as my well-being so now I have a full stash of ways to share that experience without being harmful to myself.

How can you apply this in your business? Do you focus too much on all the things you haven’t done instead of celebrating your accomplishments? Do you talk too much about how you have too few clients instead of what a delight your existing clients are? It’s important to acknowledge the gap between where you are and where you want to be, but watch your focus at the same time.

Have you fixed a focus mistake in the past? Tell me about it in the comments.

Solopreneurs, what’s your theme for 2012?

Solopreneur business owners can focus on one theme for the year — What's your theme for your solopreneur business in 2012?

What is next year about for your solopreneur business?

Like many successful solopreneurs I know, I choose a theme for each year. Some people pick an inspiring word like growth, action, or fearlessness. I’ve been choosing one big, overarching area that needs improvement for my big project of the year. In 2011, my theme was “expand my online business.” Before this effort, I had a website that functioned as more of an online brochure and newsletter sign up. I was getting one-on-one clients and group gigs mainly via personal connections. Beginning in 2010, I began to learn how to use the internet to promote my business. By the time 2011 rolled around, I was ready to get to work.

It’s been a great year and I’m really happy with the results. I’ve got a full website that functions well, my online presence is fleshed out and ready for more, and I’m finishing my first information product that will be sold from my website. Mission accomplished!

Even though I help others improve their business, I regularly get help too! Nobody can be as successful by themselves as they can with the guidance of a coach or mentor. Expanding my online presence was something I definitely wanted help with and I used two main sources for that help.

The first person I got help from was Kathleen Gage in the form of her 1-year Street Smarts Marketing VIP Club. You get one lesson a week covering just about everything you need to know about online marketing, and the lessons build on each other. At $27 per month, it’s very affordable and the value is great. If you’re interested, here is the link: Street Smarts VIP Club.

The other person I got help from is Alicia Forest. I first purchased her “21 Easy and Essential Steps to Online Success” in the spring. This is like a handbook for setting up the online part of your business. I had so much success with that program that I attended her live event the “Online Business Breakthrough Workshop.” This was an inspiring, motivating, action-oriented 3-day workshop where we learned in-depth strategies to building an online business. By the way, I’m an affiliate for both Kathleen and Alicia since I love their work so much.

2012 is the year of my signature system. I first sketched out my unique signature system at the Online Business Breakthrough Workshop in the fall. Since then, I’ve added lots of details as they come to me, but this year the goal will be to write all the text and have it for sale. Once that happens, I’ll probably add some more products and programs that use my signature system. If you’re curious, my signature system lays out the steps to set up a successful solopreneur business, i.e. to take what you know and make a profitable business with it.

If you’re not familiar with the idea of a signature system, it’s a way to package the knowledge you use with every client. Some of what you do is unique to each individual, but if you give it some thought, you’ll probably find that you say and do some of the same things with each person you work with. It was really enlightening to discover those steps in my work. Now when I’m working with someone, I can often see more clearly what they are missing in their business.

If you haven’t already done it, why not pick a them for 2012? I’d love to help you with this – click here to schedule a Quickcall with me. If you have a them for 2012, share it in the comments.

Internal deadlines help with solopreneur time management

Internal deadlines can help solopreneurs get more done — When working alone, solopreneurs can create their own deadlines

I was working on a sales page for a product I’ll be introducing soon, and was reminded again of how important it is to use internal deadlines for projects that tend to creep. You see, I took an amazing copy writing and marketing course last year and wanted to apply all the elements of the thorough process I learned. But that would have required 1 or 2 days of work and this is a very low-priced product. I though about slapping up a quick few paragraphs but that didn’t feel right either. I decided on a deadline of 1 hour for an initial draft and committed to using just some of the techniques I learned not the entire process, and low and behold I finished it.

What is great about internal deadlines, whether they are a date or a length of time, is that they force you to access how important a project is and how much income potential it has. In my case, I realized that I would have to sell a lot of copies of my product to make those extra hours spent writing copy to pay off. Sure, my less-polished copy probably won’t sell as much as really great copy but I’m betting that I’ll come out ahead with my approach.

When I started this project, I quickly saw myself slipping into a quagmire of continuous improvement but never getting done. With some projects, you have a clear idea of “done” but with something like this the temptation is to keep investing time because it keeps getting better. At some point, you have to look at the trade-off of quality and time and see if it’s really worth it. Will 5 more hours spent generate enough additional sales to make it worth it? Often, the answer is no.

This is valuable for almost any project. Start with a clear idea of what you hope to accomplish by doing the project and then decide how much time is appropriate to invest in it. Make sure the time is proportionate to the benefit, then stick to your limit. You can always go back and put more time into something and make it better, but once time is spent it’s gone. Don’t overestimate how much impact something will have and invest too much time in it. At the same time, don’t do a half-baked job on something critical. In this example, I spent a lot of time on the actual product because people are paying for it and I want them absolutely wowed. But the sales letter? That needs to be good enough to communicate the value of the product to the people for whom it’s right. It doesn’t need to win awards or be the best ever.

What do you spend too much time on? Come on, be honest and tell me about it in the comments.

The biggest asset in your solopreneur business

Sometimes I post about things that aren’t strictly business. It may seem that this post is one of those times, but I can assure you it is related to your business even if it’s not “strictly business.” As a solopreneur, you ARE the business even if you have help. As a result, your biggest business asset is you. As a business coach and consultant, I’d be remiss if I didn’t advise you to care for your biggest asset. So, today’s post is about self-care or insuring your biggest business asset continues to create prosperity for you.

2011 was a turning point in my own self-care. I got much clearer on what I need to do to feel great, and made strides toward accepting that I’m a little “high maintenance.” By high-maintenance, I mean all the things I need to do in order to stay healthy, active, sharp and productive, which is a lot! The details of my self-care regimen are not that interesting, nor are the relevant to what you need but the basics include sleeping, eating, physical activity, relaxation, socializing, fun and maybe a few more.

For most of my adult life, I tried to skimp on these things. After all, you can get yourself an extra hour or two a day by skimping on sleep. Grab a convenient, processed something in a wrapper, eat it in your car and save some meal time. Even the gym, which I love, was a place to cut corners. I spent years trying to get by on less self-care, and what I did do I resented as a “waste” of “valuable” time.

This year, just for an experiment, I decided to practice radical self-care because what I was doing wasn’t working well. To me, that means striving for what will make me my best, not just what will enable to drag myself through the next day. Some examples of this include planning to be in bed early, taking breaks during the day, not missing my workouts, and taking more time off than I used to.

It hasn’t been easy. Like most people, I have more on to-do list than I’ll ever get done so every day I’m making decisions about what to leave undone so I can take care of my well-being. Of couse I want to stay up later than I should (2 year olds everywhere, I sympathize!). I want to spend less time preparing and eating food. I wish I didn’t have to stretch every day to feel good. This is where the acceptance comes in – what you need to do to be at your peak is not disputable. Whether you accept this and act on it is up to you. It’s also about priorities – is what you are doing instead more important than making sure you live long and well?

Caring for yourself isn’t self-indulgent or a luxury if you’re a solopreneur. Caring for yourself fills your tank so you can do the work the world needs of you. You can’t fill someone’s cup if your pitcher is empty.

In what ways can you take better care of yourself? Leave a comment with something you want to do.

Make the most of a slow holiday season

Solopreneurs can use the slow holiday time to get ahead — How to use the slow holiday season in your solopreneur business

Now that December is officially here, a lot of us will see a slow down in business. Events aren’t happening as much, clients aren’t as available and it takes longer to get a response from someone. So what’s a solopreneur to do? Believe it or not, lots! There are some specific things you can tackle right now to set the stage for a great next year. Imagine waking up on that first day back to work after the new year begins and being ready to jump right in!

Last year, I wrote a series on just what to do at this time of year to prepare for next year. Click here to read part one of the series, and then follow the links to parts 2 and 3.

Click here for part 1 of the series “How to make the most of holiday slow time.”

In the comments, tell me some of the things you do at this time of year to prepare for a great next year. I just may try your ideas out!

Maintenance vs. Expansion tasks for Solopreneur Businesses

Solopreneurs have to both grow and maintain their business — Maintenance vs. expansion tasks for solopreneurs

As a solopreneur, there are a lot of tasks that need to be done just to keep the business running. These include things like answering emails, filling orders, posting to social media, blogging, etc. There are also tasks that build or expand your business to the next level of sales. Expansion projects need to be carefully nurtured and kept in the forefront of your awareness so they keep moving ahead.

The problem with expansion projects is that we humans have a strong tendency to want everything NOW! We see other people with much fuller business structures than our own, and know we could thrill all the new customers we’d get if only we had all those things in place. Add to this the almost addictive pull we entrepreneurs feel toward new ideas and we have a recipe for getting nothing done. We may have many grand, beautiful projects in the works but nothing is actually done and making money. An expansion project is done once it’s part of your maintenance routine. For example, if you decide to add video to your marketing, you’ll need to do the initial set up on various sites, get familiar with your camera and the upload procedure, craft a strategy, etc. Once you are in the groove of shooting and uploading video, it’s just another maintenance task.

I often work with solopreneurs who are in the midst of several big expansion projects. I have done this to myself before. The key thing is realistic limits on what you can do. Ideally, take on just one expansion project at a time. Complete it, tweak it, optimize it and then put it neatly to bed by adding it to your maintenance routine. If the projects are small or are prone to stopping and starting because of other people, then you may need more than one expansion project going on all the time just to keep moving ahead. You may also want more than one if you get bored easily or if the project has a lot of boring parts. It may help keep you motivated if you only have to work on the boring parts for a short burst of time every day.

The thing to avoid at all costs is to take on more expansion projects than you can handle. If your business isn’t project management, then managing and juggling many projects should not be a huge part of your day. Take it easy on yourself and build your business in a healthy, sustainable manner. Think marathon, not sprint.

Have you ever bitten off more than you could chew in new projects for your business? How did it work out? How did you handle it? Leave a comment and tell me about it.

Managing your time and focus

Time management is a hugely popular subject for small and solopreneur business owners. Not only do we have to manage time well, but we have to manage our

Time management and focus are critical for solopreneurs — Time management is the beginning of being a great solopreneur

tasks as well. A concept I find helpful is what I call “bandwidth,” or how many different balls I can have in the air at a time. Good time/task/project management lets you take advantage of moments when one project stalls to get to work on another or when you just need a change of pace. But how many simultaneous projects is too many?

Like most business owners, I always have a lot of things happening and lots more in the wings waiting to happen. In my case, those additional project stay queued up until I’m ready to take one out of “waiting” mode and into “active” mode. I usually pick the next project to add to my active list when I’ve finished something or simply feel like I’ve got enough spare bandwidth for another project.

I’m pretty on top of my tasks and projects and have a robust system for tracking them. Even so, I find I can only stay on top of a few projects at a time. If I stack too many current projects up, I start to lose track of details, things start to slip and the switching time to go from project to project becomes to great. If I’ve got too many projects, each time I switch to a new one I need to re-immerse myself in it and that wastes a lot of time. Bandwidth isn’t just about time, it’s also effort, attention and focus, all of which are valuable, finite resources for a solopreneur.

Can you increase your bandwidth? Absolutely! Start with some organization and basic good habits for managing your time and tasks. Study what’s been written on the subject and try what appeals to you. Make sure to note what works and what doesn’t work so you can continue to improve. Be open to changing you system as your life changes or just when you need a change.

As a solopreneur, it’s important to use all of your resources wisely but how you allocate your bandwidth dictates what gets done and what doesn’t as well as how well things get done. It impacts how much time you waste vs. use wisely. It effects how much peace of mind vs. stress you feel. If you can strike the right balance between not enough and too much, you may find your creativity and drive increases.

Always ask “Why?” before doing anything

Solopreneurs must know why they are doing every activity in their business — Solopreneurs have to know why they are doing each activity

One of my favorite things to teach and coach on is strategic thinking for business owners. Entire books and degrees can be had on this, but one of the core ideas of strategic thinking is asking “Why?” before doing anything or expending any resources. There are so many moving parts to a successful business that it’s imperative to know what function each part serves and how it will contribute to the bottom line.

So often, I hear people tell me they are going to start doing something new to build their business and when I ask them how this will improve their bottom line they have no idea. When I ask what made them consider starting this new activity, it’s usually “fill-in-the-name told me to” or “everyone is doing it” or “I saw it on a forum for my industry.” There’s lots of right reasons to take on a new activity, but none of these are good reasons to add something. Your time, creativity, energy and mental bandwidth are some of your most important finite resources, and being a successful business owner has as much to do with managing these as it does anything else. So, no matter who said it, don’t ever just add more activity to your business without understanding why it will increase your profits.

This idea applies to general activities such as blogging, Twitter or email marketing but also to specific blog entries, Tweets and emails. In other words, you should have goals for the activity as a whole as well as goals for each individual entry in that activity. Take your blog for example. One entry might be to introduce a new product, while another might be to educate your market on a product or service you provide that they may need but not know is available. Still another might be to share some personal information to build a connection with your audience. You might have entries that are rants against practices you don’t like. Some entries might be geared toward enticing people to sign up for your list. These are just a few examples of purposes you might have in mind for specific blog posts.

As entrepreneurs, we are drawn to ideas like moths to a light. It’s a blessing and a curse – our fire for new ideas drives our business but can sidetrack us down unproductive but fun paths. Make sure you have a clear purpose for anything you take on.