After 12 years I gave myself a promotion

I’ve been building a business for a decade - or at least that’s what I thought I’ve been doing. But it wasn’t until this past month that I felt like I finally was (almost!) the owner of a business, and not just a freelancer with decent branding.

And the difference really does make a difference. But before I tell you what I did to make things better, here’s where (I think) I’ve gone wrong (so far).

Observations about how sole proprietor service businesses fail to thrive:

Services businesses usually start with a single founder or small partnerships based on individual skills, expertise and reputation.

When you first decide to go freelance, go out on your own, and start a services business - whether that’s consulting or research or design or what-have-you - you are the thing that people are buying. It’s your skills, your experience, your expertise, and your time they want. It’s your presence they want. They want to talk to you, and they want you to do the work, and they want you to present your recommendations, and they want you to hold their hand. That, at least, is what it feels like. And sometimes it genuinely is like this - I’ve been hired on plenty of projects where the client absolutely does not want to hear about or from anybody else but me. And too often, I’ve taken on projects only I can execute, because I don’t have a deep enough bench to staff out every kind of engagement we’ve done over the past 12 years, but also because...

Founder-based - especially solo practitioner - services businesses are especially susceptible to a scarcity mindset.

If I don’t take this project that was offered to me, I have no idea when the next project will come. I can’t afford to staff out this project because I won’t make enough on the project.

These two thoughts are meant to protect you, financially. But I’ve recently realized that over the last dozen years these two thoughts have been holding me back. They’ve definitely led me to take at least one project per year that is a terrible fit, and often a time consuming disaster. They’ve led me to resist focusing on core offerings, and do too many kinds of things. They’ve made the first problem worse - saying yes to projects that my team can’t do for me because they require a me-shaped person, and there's only one of those hanging around.?

It’s also meant that I’ve not had a single vacation where I was 100% on vacation and not 80% working in a dozen years. I’ve worked on my birthday, I’ve worked between the December holidays and all through Thanksgiving. I’ve worked when I should have been spending time with family. Why? Because I had to say yes to this project to make a revenue goal, and only I could execute on it.

You can probably see these ideas compounding and making things worse, right?

When you are the founder, owner, and executor of all the projects, you simply do not have time to grow the business.?

I have been extremely lucky to have run this business for a dozen years mainly on relationships, introductions and reputation. Our client base has been largely in-bound. I’m grateful for that. But because I’ve seen the work as being centered on my skills, and all those generous inbound offers as opportunities we had to take, I have done almost nothing in the way of outbound marketing of the business. Early on, from time to time, I’d send an email to a few dozen people I knew saying hello and announcing I had time if they needed help, and that always drummed up a project or two. But that’s as far as it went. I’ve discovered a local maxima of revenue that I can bring in based on this 100% inbound business model. It's not a bad living, but it’s simply not big enough to make a full time hire for another senior person or a business development person - so we don’t grow. While some people are happy with that, I'm not.

This is the result of the scarcity mindset - you create a scarcity of time. And then you believe you shouldn’t reinvest “profit” (aka your earnings) into marketing efforts. So you redesign your creds deck every few years even though hardly anyone asks for it, and redesign your website every few years even though it’s rare for a client to come through the website.

Over the years, we’ve had a very occasional blog, and an equally occasional newsletter. We’ve had tons of good ideas for content we could put out in the world to demonstrate our expertise, and we’ve even funded our own research initiatives only to have them sit on a shelf while we executed on projects and reacted to client requests.

Under these conditions, even if you have help, you’re probably not using them well - and not investing in them either.

Early on I had a wonderful employee who was great at her job, but my scarcity mindset led me to take projects she wasn’t trained up to do. We didn’t have time to train her (I thought), so for several months we had nothing meaningful for her to do. It made her nervous, it made me nervous, and eventually I let her go. That wasn’t fair to her, and it didn’t create room for her to grow, just as it didn’t create room for the business to grow.

I’ve used freelancers over the years but only recently become more disciplined about asking them to perform specific scopes of work that free me up to work on other parts of the project or on other projects. It’s still a work in progress, but I’m sure I’ve both underutilized talented people and occasionally overpaid for work because I agreed to a project fee and then didn’t delegate enough.

This can feed the mindset that you should just do everything yourself, since I am so skilled and experienced and I can do it faster than I can explain it, or whatever dumb thoughts so many of us are programmed to have. They’re dumb, counterproductive, self-destructive thoughts, even if, to be honest, they're true.

Years ago, a former boss of mine gave me the advice that my first hire - or business partner - should be someone who could double the output or double the deal flow. I’ve had a few false starts at bringing on a business partner, so for a variety of reasons I’m now more interested in eventually finding a great senior hire to perform one of those two roles. But I’ve also started to focus on up-skilling the amazing help I do have at my disposal, and doing a better job of delegating work to skilled freelancers.

If you are the only one who can execute the work, and you are not taking responsibility for growth, you’re an individual contributor, not the leader.

Which is fine! You can make a tidy living as a freelancer in this way. But I want to grow the business to have colleagues and volume - and to be big enough that I can go on vacation and I know my clients will be in good hands without me dialing in from hotel rooms and resort restaurants and my mom's house. I want to be big enough that I don’t have to be on that call while power-walking from a doctor’s appointment to a WeWork for the next meeting. I want to sit in the waiting room of a dentist’s office and just read a magazine instead of catching up on Slack. That should be, frankly, the reward for twenty years of developing this reputation, these skills, and this expertise. And it should create opportunities for other people to develop skills, too.?

Being the leader just hits different

A couple of weeks ago, I took my first true vacation - not visiting family & friends, just getting away - since before the pandemic began. I took only an iPad. I joined three short calls related to a live client project. And the rest of the time, I relaxed, I ate, I slept, I drank, I swam, I did some yoga, I read a little. I also had time to think, and time to stare at the ocean. And on the third day I said to my husband, "I feel like I got my first promotion in 10 years. I feel like I’m almost the big boss."

Next vacation, the goal is to join no calls, to put everything in out of office mode, and to actually read a whole book.

What made this time different?

First, I should say that I got lucky - the project I had going on is with an amazing client partner who sets her own boundaries and respects ours, and is incredibly transparent and clear about what she needs. And we’d managed to plan the project with enough wiggle room to roll with a few punches but still allow me to go away at the time that I did. So - timing and the right client are probably threshold requirements here.

The first thing I had to do was decide that my time was just as valuable as the client's time. I can't lead if I'm also executing. My client deserves my leadership even more than my excellent interview moderating skills.

That decision doesn't come for free. I was going to take a haircut on the project - pay myself a little less. So I needed to figure out how to right-size the project so it's still valuable to me financially, and compensates me for my time, but I spend less of my time on project management and execution and more time on leadership, design and crafting the story of the research.

Here's what we did to make that happen:

1. We planned the project well - we understood up front that I was going away, and we planned the schedule accordingly. We also understood that some things were going to take longer to do, and fought to protect that time. Then we mapped out what tasks needed to get done, and developed a plan for how to get them done.
2. That's why we hired an excellent qualitative research partner who could ably handle observing digital diaries and conducting remote interviews, and doing analysis - and who could?write a top-line summary and propose an outline for the final deliverable, and then take on a section of the deck writing.
3. Because I couldn't help myself I managed the schedule to allow me to do a few interviews and one ethnography just to get a feel for the sample, before I left on vacation.
4. I trained my junior researcher on how to conduct ethnographies by having her ride along on the one I did, and then helping refine her shot list and activity guide - and then I got her all the equipment she’d need to fly solo with plenty of redundancies.
5. I was honest with the client about being away, and also honest about some other scheduling issues to manage expectations about how the deck would come together.

All this comes at a cost. I am “keeping” a bit less of the revenue than I was. I plan to keep even less in the future to enable the growth plans I have. Eventually, this will be made up in volume of work - in expanding our capacity. We can staff to meet the deal flow - especially if it’s the right deals.

My advice is to figure out what your minimum take is - and then use this to establish your minimum project budget. You’ll say no to projects that you might have said yes to before - and that will feel scary. But you can use that time for marketing, for product development, for training, for finding great prospective partners, for reaching out to past clients that were a good fit. Your time is also worth something and if your goal is to grow your services business, you’ll have to make sacrifices at some point to spend your time as wisely as you spend your money.

Because we managed the schedule well, we were also able to set aside time for some marketing and growth planning. We mapped out a plan for executing some of our marketing initiatives over the next 12 months. We set deadlines, and delegated tasks, and now we have an executable plan. I also decided to throw some (more, incremental) money at the problem - I'll be hiring a content strategist, seeking some lead generation assistance, and I'm now also considering hiring a copywriter to help with promoting our various content plays, and our business.?It's early days, but it's good to have a plan.

(One other note: I can not recommend enough getting a coach. Mine has been very patient for at least 4 years. It took me a minute to get to this place that she's been leading me, but I got there.)

My only regret, I suppose, is that it’s taken me this long to come to grips with all of this. I have to let go of a variety of ideas - that only I can do the work, that I’ll miss doing all the fieldwork, that it’s uncomfortable to do outbound, that anything that isn't asked for by a client is extraneous. But by giving myself this promotion - trusting others to do the work, doing a little less and "keeping" a little less - I took off unnecessary pressure and can now focus on being the leader it says I am in my bio. Let's see what happens.