Solopreneur Life Newsletter: Scale your Business Edition - June 9th

Learn about structure, systems, and processes to allow you to make your company work for you, before you select one direction and box yourself into a corner, or go the wrong way.

I'll talk about my own personal experience, and how I'd do it differently at each stage of the journey. For an average Solopreneur, some sort of platform is table stakes to success.

My First Rodeo - The old conventional way to scale a company

The big lesson from this experience is that sales hustle and hiring the right people at the right time mattered the most.

Against my better judgment, I joined my family business right out of school. It was supposed to be a 1-month engagement but it turned into 6 years.

A competitor had dozens of people going in and out of their service entrance, driving to tradeshows. The owners flew and arrived after everything was set up.

The answer to my question about why we drove?

We had an employee once. Mark didn't work out.

Over the next 6 years, I took it upon myself to become that competitor. I ground myself to the bone, and we displaced that company, becoming the industry leader in our niche.

How?

1) Find a system that worked in the industry and adopt it on our own terms

2) Do all the jobs myself, and then hire people to replace me once I mastered them

3) Don't ask my parents, who don't have the entrepreneurial disease, for permission

4) Relentlessly attack the market without giving in or giving up no matter what happened

5) Let people do the work, which was easy because I didn't like working with customers

I should have hired slower, kept more of the money, and expanded deeper into existing clients rather than always chasing new ones.

Started from scratch - A bootstrapped approach to scale without money

The big lesson here is to figure out how to work with non-traditional employees, hoard rather than spend money, and look far ahead.

After another failed attempt at working for a software startup, it was obviously time to start my own company.

Within a short period of time, we had 30 clients paying from $4K to $8K month retainer. It felt easy, too fast, and led to complacency.

Here's what worked and didn't in the first few years. The later stages and into the present day are very different, so I'll leave that part out for now.

1) Hire somebody to handle account management and operations full-time

2) Work with remote global contractors to deliver all services, except the core account management person, and design a program that fits their needs, lifestyle, and expat status

3) Got myself out of the day-to-day client work as much as possible, but made myself very accessible to clients on regular update calls

4) Don't take it for granted that you have $100K in the business all the time, don't cut checks to yourself for $30K when you feel like it, and don't buy an old house in Evanston.

5) Don't ignore client satisfaction and retention thinking that new customers will keep flooding in the door because it is currently working that way

I struggled with myopic thinking. It would have been a good idea to be more conservative, learn from professionals, and invest in myself rather than buy a house.

Today's approach - Build a company for a group of people and derive meaning from it

Back in April 2011 on a transformation weekend, the facilitator of a process asked me a simple question.

What's at risk?

1) If on the one hand, you keep struggling personally, grinding away, and being miserable you won't succeed

2) And on the other hand, if you give up on yourself and accept the misery of being employed you won't succeed

Then the punchline came. Would you like to find a better way this weekend?

Yes. I'm ready to get started.

I broke down on our weekly Summit Club call on Wednesday. The tears that I choked back were not from pain, but from the joy that I've arrived at this better way.

Here's how it's different and how much the world changed

1) Build the company inside the market, not from the product first. We picked solopreneurs and got to know them in intimate detail. Then realized that my market is people just like me

2) Deliver massive value to people on their own terms, but without compromising on your own personal life, vision, and values and measure this as more important than fast revenue

3) Avoid delivering services if possible. Bring together all the latest delivery modalities like groups, community, retreats, recorded programs, and digital platforms together for one price

4) Be honest about what you are doing, how it's going, and don't worry about competitors. Everybody you like being around can be part of the journey in some shape or form

5) Think in terms of connections and community, not prospects and pipeline. Build your reputation, help people out, and good things will come back to you

There is more of course, but do you notice how different things are today than the way people built and scaled companies in the past?

Here are a few quotes that inspired me this week.

"Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life." Victor Frankl

I've experienced the power of this biological fact.

The surge of energy that I feel knowing that what I'm doing matters changed my life, and gives me a meaning that did not exist before I allowed it to change me.

This is even deeper than a specific purpose or why that we want to manifest.

"High performers imagine a positive version of themselves in the future, and then they actively engage in trying to be that." Brendon Burchard

Getting to this was easy for me with a few simple changes.

1) Write down what I want most and start living those dreams today

2) Know what skills that I need to succeed, and focus my efforts there

Here's my offer to you for the week.

Join Virginie Glaenzer and me as we talk about a new playbook for self-employment.

For those who are not registered for the recurring weekly Soloprenuer Thursday Forum register here.

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