A lot of people will tell you that success as a solopreneur requires a lot of hard work. I disagree.
Yes, working for yourself and by yourself can be hard work if you don’t get it right. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Done well, the life of a successful solopreneur can be one of joy and ease. And massively rewarding!
Are you going to have to put in the hours? Yes, of course, nothing works unless you do. But there’s a massive difference between working hard at something you love and doing something that’s just plain hard work.
Solopreneur success tips
Here are my 7 top tips to achieve solopreneur success:
- Remember your big WHY
- Know your genius
- Connect with your tribe
- Love what you do
- Expect to get paid for your work
- Successful Solopreneur or 1-Man band?
- Remember to have fun!
Let’s expand on each of them.
Start with WHY
If you haven’t read Simon Sinek’s book Start with Why, do so now. If your work doesn’t matter to you, you’re not going to have the drive to push through the inevitable challenges in setting up on your own. It’s very hard to motivate yourself to do what’s necessary without a very strong “Why”.
That’s especially true if you aren’t yet desperate for money, as is often the case with solopreneurs. Many of my clients start their business while still working in a job, or supported by a partner, or funded by a nice little pay-off. Without the incentive of needing to pay the bills, lacking meaning in your work is deadly.
So ask yourself, what won’t change in your world if you don’t succeed in your work? It doesn’t matter whether that’s something horrible that will carry on happening, or something wonderful that won’t happen. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s on a global scale or something that only affects you and yours. What matters is that it matters – to you.
Discover your Genius
If you’re on a solopreneur journey and you don’t believe you have a special genius for what you do, please stop! People can hire half-way decent talent from anywhere, they don’t need someone with all the challenges of running their own business on top of that. To have a great business with you as the only employee means claiming your brilliance – stepping up, and owning up, to your genius.
Note that I talk about ‘having’ a genius, not ‘being’ one. You don’t have to claim that you *are* a genius, you just have to admit to *having* one. You don’t even have to think you’re the best in your field, if that freaks you out too much. So long as you can honestly say you’re the perfect provider for your ideal customers. All you have to do is know there’s something you do better than others in your specific niche.
Your ideal customers
Becoming successful as a solopreneur isn’t all about your technical knowledge or skill. You also have to know who you want to work with, and why. Knowing who your perfect type of customers are, you can finesse your brilliance to serve them more beautifully.
You need to align your offering with your perfect customers’ wants and needs. To do that better than anyone else, you have to understand them better than anybody else. And the best way to do that is to connect with them.
Find out where they hang out, and listen to how they describe their big challenges or frustrations. Be aware of the particular words they use, but also attune yourself to the vibe they’re putting out. Are they angry, sad, frustrated, desperate? Do they feel under attack, or just all alone? What products and services are they saying they wish existed?
You’ll need not just to match your offering to their needs and wants (and to your genius, of course). You also have to match their energy to your way of being. There’s no point trying to serve a niche that doesn’t appreciate who you are at your authentic best.
Love what you do, do what you love
There’s a theory, “Enjoyment Performance Theory”, that suggests that we tend to perform better at work that we enjoy. It’s logical – if we enjoy it, we’ll put in the effort to become brilliant at it. So that means your best route to solopreneur success is to do something you love.
But what if you can’t see how to make a living doing that thing that you love? Well, there’s a reason I’ve put it in that particular order. Loving what you can get paid for can be easier than getting paid to do what you love. You might think that’s a bit of a cop-out, and you’d end up pretending to like your work, while secretly wishing you could do something else.
I don’t think that has to be the case at all. For you to get good enough at something to be properly paid for it, you must have liked it at some point. Otherwise, you’d never have put in the hours. So what you need to do is figure out what that was. And find the people who need it for that reason.
The problem is who you do it for. When people don’t appreciate the stuff you’re brilliant at, you can easily fall out of love with it. And the same work, done for people who value it the same way you do, can be a complete joy. Back to finding the right customers!
Get paid for your work, don’t work for pay
There’s a great quote from songwriter Leonard Cohen when asked how he picked what to do when he started out. “I didn’t want to write for pay. I wanted to be paid for what I write.”
There are two important aspects of that: not working (just) for pay, and getting paid for your work. To be a successful solopreneur, the work has to be the main thing. But if you’re not getting paid for it, then you don’t have a business, you have an expensive hobby.
I go into this a bit more in this blog post, but essentially you have to be willing to be paid for what you do. Otherwise, you won’t be able to keep on doing it, and everyone misses out. There is also the fact that people tend to value things according to what they paid for them. So when you give your genius to them for nothing, they won’t get all they could from it.
And the final reason you need to get paid for your work? Your genius was a gift from the universe – it’s downright rude to just give a gift away!
Solopreneur Success or 1-Man Band?
I’ve always had a bit of an issue with the word “solopreneur”. It’s supposed to be a contraction of “solo entrepreneur”, but so many people who use it have no real idea what an entrepreneur is. Not everyone who has a business is an entrepreneur.
At the very least, an entrepreneur creates work for other people, not just for themselves. This is why I believe that most so-called “solopreneurs” are in fact one-man-bands. If you’re generating just enough work for yourself, then you may well be a one-man-band. But you may not be, if you engage other people to do the stuff you hate or are no good at.
The true one-man-band does everything themselves, whether that’s delivering their unique genius or cleaning the office or doing the filing. And that stops their business from succeeding, because it distracts them from where they add the most value. I expand on that thought in this post from 2017.
Speaker and coach Topher Morrison tells the tale of his mentor telling him: “The only thing you should be doing in your business is the thing that only you can do.” Whatever it is that you’re doing in your business that someone else could do, and especially if they would do it better than you, get them to do it. And focus your time, energy, and attention on what you do best.
Are we having fun yet?
This brings us to the essential element of what solopreneur success means to you. Work is such an important part of your life, any idea of work success that doesn’t include fun is meaningless. If work’s not fun, at least a good part of the time, you’re probably not doing it right.
You may be getting paid really well for doing that work that’s grinding you down. But if you end each day feeling mentally and emotionally drained, what sort of a ‘win’ is that? Most people I work with have left a job to set out on their own (or are considering it) because the work wasn’t fun anymore. Imagine going through all that risk and upheaval just to end up just as unhappy!
You might think that you owe it to your family or loved ones to take whatever work someone will pay you for. That it’s selfish and indulgent to focus on work that will bring you joy and fulfillment. But just ask yourself, do you really think they supported you to take that leap so you could end up stressed and miserable like before?
Solopreneur success has to include the element of enjoyment, or it’s no real success at all!
Header photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash
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