A solopreneur is a person that has certain traits that make him most efficient and fulfilled when he has the freedom to work on his own terms. The main difference between a solopreneur and an entrepreneur working alone is that the first isn’t looking for a buyout.
When starting your own business, you will most likely be the only employee in your company. You might have a side-hustle that is slowly becoming the main source of your income so you are thinking of quitting your day job. Or you have just left your job to become your own boss to earn your first million (a magic number for most aspiring entrepreneurs).
Before getting your hopes up too much, you should now that your path to successful business won’t be easy at all. There are many hardships that you must overcome and how you do that differentiates a successful solopreneur from the rest of the pack.
As someone who has been working most of my life as both an employee and a part-time freelancer, running my own one-man marketing agency, I know a thing or two about those obstacles that you might encounter. Because there is no single piece of advice that can be given to every individual, here are the most common struggles that all of us must overcome in order to be a successful solopreneur.
Work Hard, but Sleep Enough
Many solopreneurs have a lot on their plate that might keep them awake even when others are blissfully resting. When everything depends on you and you can’t duplicate yourself, you put in some extra effort to get all the work done by yourself. The simple truth is that the more energy and work you put into your business that better it gets. There is no replacement for hard work and grinding, just like in sports there are no results without frequently working out.
But, in all that hustling, many of you might forget to have enough sleep or more precisely – you sacrifice your sleep in order to get more things done. It is fine to have a few sleepless nights, but more than that can cause long-term negative effects. My advice is to sleep your regular 6-8 hours and focus more on your awake hours. You still have 16-18 hours you can put to good use if you decrease your leisure time like watching Netflix, going out or playing games. Focus on how you spend your time while you are awake and have a good night sleep as well.
Know How Much Your Time Is Worth
As a freelancer, it is hard to decide how much is your time worth. You are always struggling with setting your hourly rate high enough to reach your yearly income goals and setting prices low enough that are competitive so you actually get the job. Finding this balance is a crucial thing to know as a solopreneur. There are several things you need to have in mind before setting your rates.
You need to set your yearly income goal that will be your main guideline when determining your hourly rate and working hours. Setting your hourly rate isn’t as simple as taking a yearly income and dividing it with 2,080 hours (you get this by multiplying 40 hours/week with 52 weeks/year). You need to know how much taxes, utility costs and non-working days (holidays, sick days, etc) you have. In order to be more competitive, check how much your fellow freelancers or competitors are pricing their services and offer something extra just in case.
Adapt Technology to Automate Processes
Being a one-man business, you would need to automate processes as much as possible by integrating technologies into your daily workflow. The more tasks you automate or outsource with technology the more you will be able to focus your efforts on other things, which brings more value in return. You can use Google Drive to store and create documents, reports, etc. If you need to easily move data between different apps, you can use Zapier to connect tools that don’t work together normally. Eg. someone sends you an invoice as a spreadsheet in Gmail, it automatically saves it on GDrive in folder “Invoices”.
Other tools can help you with managing money like Invoices by Wave which can set recurring billing for regular clients and make sure that you never miss a payment. The technology you use doesn’t have to be very high-tech, sometimes simple free invoice template can help as well. In order to extract data from scanned and PDF reports, invoices and others you can use a free online PDF converter to get the job done. These are just some examples of how can you automate your processes and save time with simple tasks. You can’t duplicate yourself but you can rather automate your tasks to get them done nonetheless.
Don’t Ponder Too Much, Act!
Many of us spend too much time watching courses, reading books, strategizing and pondering about our next steps. It is good to spend some time educating and strategizing. But, many of us use that as an excuse not to take action. The perfectionism is the biggest excuse people use to hide their insecurity about something they are doing. You would need to overcome this feeling and be prepared for a little uncertainty. The secret is that nothing is ever perfect, and more time you spend to get something better the harder it gets.
As a solopreneur, you need to take actions that might not be the perfect version of something you had in mind. It is more important that you act and if you fail you can learn from your mistakes. But, when you choose not to act because something is not perfect, you are losing a possibly valuable lesson. You are better trying and succeeding three out of ten times, than being right only once. In the worst case, you might spend too much time and effort on one thing that fails all the same. Later will hurt much more if you spend countless hours perfecting it.
