Introduction to the Solopreneur Success Cycle

Beginning with this episode, we are actually changing up the format of the show a bit. We’re still going to have our awesome guests once/week but for the other episode of the week, Joe and I (Carly) are going to dive into various series of shorter episodes that will address the biggest pain points that solopreneurs face.

We are going to kick things off with an overview of our first series that addresses what we like to call the Solopreneur Success Cycle (see image above), which is a framework to intelligently design and grow your one-person business.  It is a proven method to help solopreneurs start, run, and grow a business that allows them to be successful and achieve their own goals, whatever those goals may be.

What you'll learn in this episode

• What the Solopreneur Success Cycle is
• Why the Solopreneur Success Cycle is so important
• Why processes are so important for one-person businesses
• How to structure your one-person business to continually improve it

And so much more!

Want to share your experiences and learn from other one-person business? Be sure to join our community! It's free :)

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Full Episode Transcript

Joe Rando (00:00):

Big picture, You just want to make sure that you're spending time thinking about your business, changing it to adjust to your needs and the needs imposed on you by the environment you know that you're working in.

Intro (00:13):

Bigger doesn't always mean better. Welcome to the One-Person business podcast where people who are flying solo in business come for specific tips and advice to find success as a company of one. Here are your hosts, Joe Rando and Carly Ries.

Carly Ries (00:31):

Welcome to the One-Person Business podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Carly Ries.

Joe Rando (00:35):

And I'm Joe Rando.

Carly Ries (00:37):

And starting today, we're actually changing up the format of the show a bit. We're still gonna have our awesome guests once a week, but for the other episodes of the week, Joe and I are going to dive into various series of shorter episodes that will address the biggest pain points that solopreneurs face. So today we're gonna kick things off with an overview of our first series that addresses what we like to call the solopreneur success cycle, which is a framework to intelligently design and grow your one-person business. It is a proven method to help solopreneurs start, run, and grow business that allows them to be successful and achieve their own goals, whatever those goals may be. Joe, do you want to give an overview of this concept and why it's a must for solopreneurs to understand for greater success and share a little preview of what's to come in the weeks ahead?

Joe Rando (01:23):

Absolutely, Carly. I'm really happy to be doing this because this is something that we've been working on for a while now. And the question is, why do you need a solopreneur success cycle? What is it? We're gonna just cover the high level today and then we'll dig deep in future episodes and look at each stage. The concept here is that you need a process whenever you have a business, right? You don't run a business without some kind of process. And one of the things that I've observed in myself as well as in other people, is that when you're a solopreneur, it's a lot easier to avoid getting into a process because it's just you. Do you find this Carly? Tthat when you have other people around you, there's pressure to start a process because people need information from each other, they need to share info. And this idea of coming up with a weekly meeting or quarterly review, this becomes a kind of natural desire in people. But when you're alone, you don't have that pressure. Do you agree with that? Have you seen that?

Carly Ries (02:26):

Yeah, and actually, we interviewed Brooke Thomas Sudi a few weeks ago and she was so strict that on Monday mornings she took time to review her business, to talk to accountability partner, all these things. And I was like, how do you do that? It's so hard to prioritize your own things and make a process for your own things when you're only accountable to yourself. It's weird that our brain works that way and that we can't just hold ourselves to our responsibilities, we do need other people to do that sometimes. And processes help with that.

Joe Rando (02:59):

Absolutely. So the idea here is not to tell you how to run your business, but to give you some structure in the big picture so that you can go through a process of continually improving your business and taking it in the direction that you want it to. So unfortunately for a podcast, there's a picture and there's a picture that we're gonna put in the show notes. I'll try to describe it. I feel like the comedian doing the physical comedy on the cd. But it's a picture and it's basically what I'll call a spiral that starts in the middle and works out and just helps you to get better and better. I'm just gonna talk through kind of the big picture here. So let's start with with saying, why are we doing this?

(03:45):

The idea is it can be used to get started or if you've been in business for a long time, you can still use this. You start off thinking about your goals. You need to think about why are you doing this? What do you want from life? Maybe it's to work 80 hours a week and make millions of dollars, and that's fine. But that's not what most solopreneurs are about really. Everybody we talk to, it's about having control over their life. Doing things, what they want to do, when they want to do then, having time for other things, et cetera. So you have to start there and define these goals and to write them down. What is it that I want to happen with respect to owning a one-person business? You want to keep those front and center all the time as you go through this process.

Carly Ries (04:33):

Joe, I really want to highlight the writing it down? Because for years I was like, but they're in my head. I don't really care if they're written down somewhere. I have them mentally. But it does make such a huge difference. They are in front of you. I don't know what it is psychologically, but it really does help to take that advice to heart

Joe Rando (04:50):

Absolutely. I'm a great example of somebody that has carried lots of goals in their head over the years and they just tend to not morph as much as just get forgotten from the daily decision making process.

Carly Ries (05:04):

And now a quick word from our sponsor

Sponsor (05:06):

You may be going solo in business, but that doesn't mean you're alone. In fact, millions of people are in your shoes running a one-person business and figuring it out as they go. So why not connect with them and learn from each other's successes and failures? Lifestarr has created a One-Person business community where you can go to meet and get advice from other solopreneurs. Be sure to join in on the conversations at community.lifestarr.com

Joe Rando (05:35):

So here we've gotten these goals and now we're gonna start with a new business. This may not apply to everybody, but we'll get there for you. So, envisioning your business. You have to think about what is it you want to do. This needs to be the intersection of your passion and skills and market demand. You don't want to do something that you're bad at, You don't want to do something that you don't like and you don't want to do something that nobody wants to buy. Again, we'll dig into each of these in detail in a later podcast. Do some research here and talk to people. You really want to be able to understand whether you're going in a good direction for you and for the world in terms of wanting what you're selling.

(06:15):

Once you've done that envisioning, now you need to decide the specifics. Exactly what you're gonna do and exactly what you're not gonna do because you're gonna decide what you're gonna do and everything else is a no because you need to focus. Or you might be in a mode where you're not quite sure what you want to do and you want to go exploratory. John Jantsch pointed out that some people get involved and they're not quite sure what it is they want to do. So go out for a while, keep your costs low, and just kind of explore. See what it is that makes sense for you, what you like, what you don't like. Then come back to getting that focus and really, you know, buckling down on what you do and don't do. In the end, you're in a position to uniquely define yourself, to work efficiently, et cetera. Once you've done that, now you gotta set up your business. You need to do it in a way that's gonna make you effective. Carly, I know that you've been a freelancer. Can you talk briefly about the kinds of things that you did to set up as a freelancer or to work efficiently?

Carly Ries (07:14):

Yeah, just what you were saying. I figured out what I was good at and what I was not good at. Marketing is just such a huge, I mean industries isn't right word, but there are so many different silos in it. Sometimes people think when you're a marketer, oh, well you can do all of it. You can figure it out. But that's not true. I'm not very good at paid advertising, I'm not gonna influence their marketing. There are a lot of things that I can do, but others that I've always delegated to other people. So when I went out on my own, I continued to delegate to other people and I just honed in on the skills that I really enjoyed doing and that I knew I was good at. Then went from there and just got rid of the rest.

Joe Rando (07:50):

And you were effectively a writer, correct? I mean that was your talent and passion was writing.

Carly Ries (07:56):

So writing and strategy. I've always been on the account service side of things when I was with my agency. So strategy was a big part of it. But in terms of the actual skill, yes. You don't want me designing anything, but I could sure write the copy for you <laugh>.

Joe Rando (08:11):

Got it. And now, you set up and you're gonna be doing the writing and the strategy. You've got the equipment that you need, which doesn't involve having podcasting equipment like you do now, but in those days you needed good computer and a good workspace and whatever else, way to build people. So that's the part of it that goes into getting set up. Now you're ready to execute. That's the next phase. You know you're gonna have to go in there and give it some time. It's not gonna happen overnight, but you start executing, trying to market yourself, sell and get the work and do the work and collect the money. And we'll talk again in detail later in other podcasts about this. But that's the obvious part.

(08:53):

Then after you're doing this for a while, you've got a schedule in time to refine and reimagine your business. Take step back and look at all aspects of the business from the marketing, the selling, the actual execution and these kinds of things. Also in terms of your goals, is it working? What's going well in terms of getting you where you want to be? What's not going well? What kinds of things you need to adjust. So you start with the goals. What are you spending your time doing? Maybe you want to offload some stuff to a contractor so you can spend more time doing what you're good at or what you like, what's happening in your industry? Is there anything changing? Are there refinements in terms of your product that would improve it or make it more attractive or make it more efficient or enjoyable for you to produce your business model?

(09:44):

How are you billing? How do you make your money? Is there a way to do it differently? Can you go into recurring revenue or something like that? As I mentioned, sales and marketing. Are there things you should be doing differently to be more effective and efficient? Refining and reimagining is something that should be done on a regular basis. I can't tell you that you should do it every quarter or every six months, probably no less frequently than every year. And this is something I think that people don't do. I don't know, Carly, you've probably worked a lot of freelancers. Have you seen people taking this time to kind of sit down and reimagine? And if you have, how did it work out for them?

Carly Ries (10:24):

For the people that do it, it worked out well, but it's actually getting to do it. Sometimes you'll just get stuck in the motions and are just trying to make it day to day, finishing their work, getting things billed, all that stuff. They don't take that time. But people that do take that time, I've seen far greater success than those who don't.

Joe Rando (10:42):

Yeah, it's quadrant two, as Stephen Covey put it. It's the stuff that's not urgent, but is important. We have to force ourselves to make time for those things. It doesn't happen naturally cuz there's always something urgent. Now, you've made a decision, you have to decide what you're doing, then you have to actually make the changes. There's a process of adjustment and at that point the decision typically will be some tweaks your business. But we should mention that there's also the potential to decide that it's time to expand from a one person business into a small business. Where you start hiring employees, or possibly selling. We talked to Zane Tarence and he has sold one person businesses for tens of millions of dollars. So that's another possibility.

(11:29):

As you do this process of refining and reimagining and making a decision, you may move into the adjustment phase of changing your business around and going back to executing. Or, it's possible that you're going in some different direction of, again, expanding into small business or selling. If you're going to the adjust phase of saying, I'm going to make these changes in my business, then you return to executing and now you're looping around. You execute for a while, then you refine, reimagine again. And this is a kind of a virtuous cycle that makes you better and better. Does that make sense?

Carly Ries (12:07):

It makes sense to me because I helped give input on this, but it does make sense. <laugh>

Joe Rando (12:12):

I guess without the picture, maybe it's a little confusing. I strongly encourage you to download the graphic. It'll make a complete sense then. But big picture, you just want to make sure that you're spending time thinking about your business, changing it to adjust to your needs and the needs imposed on you by the environment that you're working in. So that's it, that's the big picture. We're gonna have a lot of fun digging into the details on this and hopefully providing some really helpful stuff to people to get better and better at what you're doing. So looking forward to that and looking forward to doing it with you, Carly. And, that's it for now.

Carly Ries (12:55):

Me too. Just for listeners, that graphic will be in the show notes of this episode. And if you want to listen to all of our other episodes, whether it's just Joe and I or interviewing our guests, you can find us at lifestarr.com/podcast or anywhere you subscribe. We'll see you next time. Thanks so much.

Closing (13:14):

You may be going solo in business, but that doesn't mean you're alone. In fact, millions of people are in your shoes running a One-Person business and figuring it out as they go. So why not connect with them and learn from each other's successes and failures? Lifestarr has created a One-Person business community where you can go to meet and get advice from other solopreneurs. Be sure to join in on the conversations at community.lifestarr.com. Tham.