17 Tips To Be A Successful Solopreneur

Would becoming a successful solopreneur answer many of your dreams?  How many of you have spent years knowing deep down that you had a different calling, that your life was worth more to you than the career path you were following?

Maybe you gave up your career to raise children but don’t want to go back to the same job, face the same old office politics and work hard to line someone else’s pockets.  Are you a stay-at-home Mum who wants to earn some money on the side?  Or maybe you’ve found your passion and want to incorporate it into your career path.  Is your pension non-existent and you need to create security for the future?

The thought of becoming a successful solopreneur is exciting.  You set your own timetable, focus on your own passions and work to your own rythms.  According to a US State of Independence workforce study, in 2016 there were 17.9 million solopreneurs.  In the UK solopreneurs account for the fastest growing business sector making up nearly 4.2 million non-employing businesses.  So what does it mean to be a solopreneur?  As a solopreneur, you do it all – the clue is in the title.  You don’t do most of it, you do EVERYTHING.  There’s no delegating, because there’s no-one to delegate to.  You are totally solo.

Benefits of being a solopreneur

• You work for yourself.
• Your passion becomes your career.
• Want to be CEO, Founder, President, Whizz-kid extraordinaire?   You can give yourself whatever job title you like.
• Working hours are set by you.
• You decide when to take holiday.
• All the decisions are made by you.
• You shape your own career path.

Downsides of being a solopreneur

• You work for yourself.  There is no-one there to help you out or throw ideas around with.
• Work tends to seep into every aspect of your life.
• Holidays? What holidays? At the beginning at least ….
• You get to make all the decisions.  Every single decision you make rests on your shoulders.  What’s more, you have only your experience and perceptions to shape your decisions which can restrict your outlook.
• The life of a solopreneur can be an isolatory experience.

To be a successful solopreneur takes guts, patience, superb planning skills, dogged determination, flexibility and tenacious motivation.  What’s more, to be a successful solopreneur you need to become adept at learning new skills virtually instantaneously as you fly somewhat by the seat of your pants.  Preparation is absolutely key to you becoming a successful solopreneur.  Furthermore, without preparation, you risk wasting your energy on badly thought-out plans with no particular destination in mind.

Strategies for becoming a successful solopreneur

The life of a successful solopreneur can be exciting, challenging and enable you to grow on many different levels.  However, it helps if you create a flexible framework to help guide you through the apparent chaos of the multitude of tasks you need to address on a daily basis.

Listed below are 17 strategies to help you become the most successful solopreneur you know.

Make a life plan

You may be tempted with the idea of becoming a successful solopreneur, but how does your solopreneurship fit in with others close to you?  Remember that although you are navigating a solo ship around the turbulent waters of business creation, that alone is not what your life is about.  Work out a plan that will enable you to balance becoming a successful solopreneur with time spent with your love partner, your children and on your health.

There is a tendency to neglect key areas of our lives as we ‘heroically’ work ridiculously long hours while leaving no energy for the relationships that matter most.  What’s the point of being the hardest worker, even the most successful solopreneur you know, if you go home to an empty house because they left you?  Make that life plan a priority.  You will be thankful of it in the long run.

Goal setting

Steven Covey, in his bestselling book: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, states that the one thing “all successful men have in common is putting important things first.”  What one goal, if you were to accomplish it this coming year, would have the greatest positive impact on your other goals and life?  When you work out what that goal is, write it down, draw it, make a collage out of it, do whatever it takes to make it foremost in your mind.

What one goal, if you were to accomplish it this coming year, would have the greatest positive impact on your other goals and life? Click To TweetWhen you set your goal, it will give you clarity as to where you are now, where you are going and what you need to do to get there.  You will be in the driving seat heading towards your goal instead of randomly letting your business drift along without purpose. Ensure that every action you take henceforth is attributable to you achieving that goal.  It’s important to get your goal right so that you know what you’re aiming for.  Furthermore, you’ll know when you’ve got there.

Maintain momentum

As a solopreneur you miss out on the buzz and dynamics of a busy office.  When you have defined your goal and are flagging in creativity or energy, to help maintain momentum, keep asking yourself why you are doing this.  Let every question revert to why.  It will help to recalibrate where you’re at mentally and physically.  Always keep the goal in sight, always keep moving forward to achieve that goal.  If you can’t find a reasonable answer as to why, drop that particular task.  Focus solely on doing what is necessary for you to achieve your ultimate goal.

Time management

Remember that every day will bring a whole host of jobs to tackle.  Make sure you prioritise the ones that NEED your attention otherwise you risk wasting time doing stuff that isn’t relevant.  We will never have enough time to do everything, so prioritise time on the tasks that move you forward towards your goal.  Our most precious resource is time, so ensure you use it wisely.  Make effective choices, choose the right opportunities.

Adopt the 80/20 rule

The 80/20 rule is when 80% of your rewards come from 20% of your efforts.  There is likely to be a handful of things you do each day that result in the greatest amount of return to you. Work out when is the most productive time of your day and keep that free for creative tasks and those that create 80% of your rewards.  Make sure to balance your favourite and priority tasks.  Doing too much of what you enjoy will eventually take the pleasure away.  Work out a system that allows for maximum output of the tasks that give you the greatest return on accomplishing your goal.

Hourly rate

What is your hourly rate?  If you can equate your hourly rate to the tasks you do during your working week, you will know when the time is ripe for freeing up time to focus on the priority tasks.  Once you know your hourly rate exceeds £15 or $20 per hour, get help to clean the house. Likewise, you can find a good virtual assistant for around £20 or $25 per hour.  Make sure you use your most precious resource wisely.

Create effective habits

Once you have decided upon your ultimate goal, create a series of effective habits to help you sustain your motivation.  Habits take approximately 21 days to form.  Once you have nailed a series of effective habits, you will find doing the regular, important jobs a whole lot easier.

If you write, allocate time each day to write a set amount of words.  If you need to learn how to use software, set aside time each day to create a habit for learning.  Just like the habit of brushing your teeth, create habits to make sure you achieve the essential tasks to help you get closer to accomplishing your ultimate goal.  By creating effective habits you are removing the question as to whether you are going to spend time on that particular task each day.  When it becomes a habit, you just do it, regardless of whether your creative mojo is flowing or not.

Create systems

Systems create consistency and free up a whole lot of time.  How many tasks do you implement on a weekly basis that could be systematised?  By creating systems you note down what you need to do to accomplish a specific task, number the sub-tasks in order, rinse and repeat.

Systems free up mental energy as well as opening up opportunities for growth when the time is right.  Imagine if you run your business just by knowing how you do it in your head.  Probably a little slapdash, right?  Now imagine running your business knowing that every task you regularly complete follows a system.

Systems pave the way for the future

A system can be shown to anyone who might need to step in and help you out occasionally or can be given to a new employee if you decide to expand. That new employee can confidently (happy workforce!) maintain the successful system you already set up just by following a few points.  If you decide to sell your brand, having systems in place makes the acquisition more favourable to a new acquirer.

Often when I speak to people about setting up systems (in all walks of life) I generally get a groan and a roll of the eyes as I suggest an ever-so-boring strategy, but systems work.  For instance, I have systems in place for each of the social media platforms I use.  I have systems in place for creating and posting media.  Strategy creation for clients’ issues follows a particular system.  When I create hypnosis downloads I use systems for how I record them, how I create the media for them.  Systems form the backbone of my mental and physical welfare and the list goes on ….  Simply put, systems make working consistently effortless.  Once you’ve sussed out an effective system, use it.

Facilitate learning

As a solopreneur your learning curve is huge.  Whenever you want to use a new piece of software, create a new product, employ a social media strategy, first of all you need to learn how to do it (and then create a system to support it!).

Learn in bitesize chunks and make a habit of allocating a certain amount of time to learning these things on a daily basis.  If your budget allows it, invest in courses that help make the learning process that much quicker.  You don’t need to spend huge amounts of money.  For courses that teach you the essentials of how to use various social media platforms you can expect to pay around £50 to £100 ($60 – $120) per course.

Try out Udemy.com which charges a monthly subscription fee to access all of their professionally created courses.  In the long term you could end up saving a whole heap of time, and after all, time is money.

Use social media wisely

Becoming a successful solopreneur in this digital age requires you not only to have a website, but also visibility across various social media platforms.  Which social media platforms you use to promote you and your brand will be key to growing the tribe that connects with your products or message.  Make sure you understand the demographics of the largest social media platforms so that you can target the right audience.  Remember that quality always beats quantity, so don’t be lured into the trap of thinking you need to have thousands of followers if they are not relevant to you or your industry.  You want to be making connections with quality contacts and other successful solopreneurs who will hopefully share your information with their quality contacts.

Choose two or three social media platforms that offer the most relevant audience to hear your message.  Avoid the temptation to try and be everywhere.  You’ll end up getting sucked into a social media vortex and wasting valuable time.  You need to be strategic with what you post, when you post it and which social media platform to use.  Once you’ve decided upon which social media platforms to use, learn about the general etiquette of each and make sure you use image dimensions which best suit each platform.  Set up an effective system for posting on each social media platform.

Keep a tidy environment

A tidy environment is conducive to a tidy mind.  When information is well organised, it makes finding it a whole lot easier.  Create a system for filing and stick to it.  Excess clutter creates too many distractions and diverts the brain’s awareness away from the key area you need to be focusing on.  When your vision is caught by erroneous clutter, it interrupts your train of thought and negatively impacts your focus and creativity.

What’s more, a tidy desk is a useful way of signalling the end of the working day.  Create a habit of tidying your desk so that each morning you have a well-presented work area for working in.

Successful solopreneurs persevere

Being a successful solopreneur is hard work and takes a lot of effort, courage and persistence, particularly in the first crucial three years while you create, build and promote your brand.  I’ve heard many well-known and incredibly successful solopreneurs say how close they were to giving up the solopreneur gig after 18 months of slogging it while seeing no appreciable gain for all their hard work.

Needless to say, they kept on persevering, and now count among the people I look up to and follow for inspiration and motivation.  If they can do it, then why not you?  Make sure you are ready for the long-haul and remember that there will be tough times ahead.

Appreciate your own talents

I must admit to having the wind blown out of my sails more than a few times as I’ve listened intently to someone being interviewed to find parrallels with the interviewee’s life as I feel my excitement growing and the world of possibility opening up before me, only to discover a few minutes into the interview, that they are the son of some powerful politician, or came top of their class at Harvard, or were born with some secret super power and oh crap, I begin thinking AGAIN that I’m not quite as good them after all.

It’s important to remember that all experts started out knowing absolutely nothing about their area of expertise.  So don’t be put off.

There are those who win and those who lose in life, however, the opportunities each individual is provided with makes no difference at all as to whether they will be a success or a failure. I know people who were born with the proverbial silver spoon in their mouths and have totally ruined their lives.  I also know people who’ve had nothing to begin with, yet have created a life of success and contentment.  What you do with what you’ve got is what will make the difference.  Be resourceful.

Stop the comparison game

We spend our lives comparing ourselves to others – they are more creative, more intelligent, more confident, more this and more that.  We need to begin to appreciate the gems that we contain within us and realise that we have all that it takes, if we really want to achieve our goals.

When you see people’s social media posts, you see only what they choose to share with you.  They’re putting their best foot forward.  There are few people who announce their failures and set-backs.  What you’ll be seeing is the image they want to portray, minus the uglies.  Stay true to who you are, have faith in your own abilities and avoid the temptation of comparing yourself to others.

Believe in yourself

One of the most defining qualities of successful people is that they believe in themselves.  We all have vulnerabilities, moments in our lives we would rather not have happened and failures.  Yes failures!

We live in a society that makes admitting our vulnerabilities and failures a sign of weakness, yet it’s not. It’s humanly natural to fail. That’s how we learn from our mistakes.  So we need to get more comfortable with the risk of failure, otherwise we stay stuck within our ‘safe’ limits and stunt our growth.

When we fail, we need to see it as an opportunity to do something different.  We adjust and fine tune the whole process to increase our chance of success the next time round.

When we fail, we need to see it as an opportunity to do something different. We adjust and fine tune the whole process to increase our chance of success the next time round. Click To Tweet

Take time off

Get away from the job to help spark your creativity.  Whether it’s exercise, meditation, walking in nature or meeting up with friends, make time to do it.  Time away from your desk will help clarity appear.  We can get so involved in the minutiae of our regular work schedules that we forget to look up and take a deep breath sometimes.  Plan regular breaks throughout the day, even if it’s just to get up and move around for 5 minutes every half an hour or so.  You need time away from the grind to allow your creative juices to flow and to keep solopreneurship in perspective.

Remember who you are

Finally, remember who you are and why you are doing what you’re doing.  We are all different and all lead our lives in different ways, have different expectations from life and will run our successful solopreneurships differently.  I’m an early bird and can’t imagine how night owls manage to burn the midnight oil so productively.  Neither option is better, just different.

Be aware of what your version of success is.  What’s driving you to become a successful solopreneur?  There will be times when friends and family may try and steer you away from the path of becoming a successful solopreneur because your success makes them look like failures.  Maintain your integrity and stand up for your principles.  Be courageous and value your own opinion.

Also make sure that you recognise beneficial guidance when it is offered.  We are all on a gargantuan learning curve and will never be able to say we know it all, so welcome constructive criticism and helpful advice, but don’t worry about what other people may think or say about you.

When you are working true to your purpose, you will shine from within.