Let’s face it: You own your own business to enhance your own life’s precious resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people by providing clients with your goods and services. You don’t do it just to employ people and pay your landlord, suppliers, and other vendors.
If you’ve ever worked in a large enterprise, you know you can leisurely diddle away at your particular discrete responsibilities, because everyone else is doing their specialized parts of developing leads, inking deals, producing deliverables, and administrating whatever it is that needs administrating. Solopreneurs, however, have to write the music and conduct and play all the instruments in the orchestra to make their businesses go “cha-ching.”
People who own and run their very small businesses according to the P10 Principle (Proaction, perception, planning, preparation, practice, and persistence promote practically perfect performance!) know that hitting all those P’s requires continuously spinning a bunch of plates while still juggling multiple snakes. Of course, it is hard. If it was easy, then everyone would be doing it.
How do successful solopreneurs excel?
- They strategically prioritize their time, which is their most precious resource, for developing and executing their highest level of work.
- They focus on effectiveness, efficiency, and continuous quality improvement.
- They optimize themselves; preferably with technology and virtual support staff, but also, when necessary, with living, breathing, well-trained human staff.
- They use a turnkey quality management system comprised of concise, clear, consistently applied policies, procedures, and work instructions.
Prioritize high level work
Entrepreneurism requires:
- Perceiving people’s needs;
- Planning how to fill those needs as well as or, preferably, better than others do;
- Actually fulfilling the needs; and
- Repeating that cycle over and over again, better and better each time.
Perceiving people’s needs and planning how to fill those needs comprise the most creative parts of the entrepreneurial process. Actually fulfilling the needs should require much less creativity. That is why the most successful entrepreneurs focus on seeing new needs and building and using systems to fill those needs.
If solopreneurs have to actually do the dirty work in the beginning until they build some sales volumes, then they can initially do it all, like most new business owners do starting out. But, as soon as they can, the more successful owners start using technology and staff to more effectively and efficiently produce deliverables, while the owners work on more strategic business developments.
Focus on effectiveness, efficiency, and continuous quality improvememt
A solopreneur’s business could be seen as a machine that takes a variety of inputs (including clients’ wants, needs, desires, and payments and raw goods), runs those inputs through a variety of pieces of the machine, processes them, and effectively and efficiently delivers a product or service to a client. The solopreneur, however, cannot and should not be “all the parts of the machine” all alone. Rather, they should get and stay engaged optimally in the creative processes that move the business forward and capture their own personal highest and best value.
Focusing on effectiveness and efficiency requires solopreneurs to strategically invest the rest of their life’s precious resources of effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people in duplicating themselves to do more and more of the detailed work of designing and producing deliverables better and better and in bigger volumes as time goes on.
Optimize with technology and virtual support staff, and also, when necessary, with living, breathing, well-trained human staff
Smart entrepreneurs launch new ventures as leanly as they can. Most service-oriented solopreneurs work from home or public workspaces and use virtual offices and mail boxes or meet prospects and clients in 50-to-100 square feet executive office suites instead of signing three-year leases for a minimum of 500 square feet of office space.
Rather than owning and operating servers and software, many new businesses keep everything digital in the cloud using webhosts, server farms, and software-as-a-service. They use virtual receptionists to answer their phones and virtual assistants to market and handle new client intakes.
Instead of buying pages in the telephone book, billboards on highways, broadcast advertising, new entrepreneurs target ads on social media much more economically efficiently. Then they begin and continue relating with new prospects and customers using email marketing programs.
Once a new customer “bites,” the solopreneurs manage those customers using SAAS customer management systems. Many solopreneurs sell products or services directly from their websites or using online stores that can be accessed directly from their websites using desktop computers, notebooks, tablets, or cell phones.
Finally, many professionals, lawyers for example, may even produce documents for clients using SAAS document automation systems. Those who ship physical product often do so from logistics warehouses that store, pull, and ship hundreds of thousands of stock-keeping units for thousands of customers all under one roof or many regional roofs.
As their businesses get bigger, a solopreneur may see some need to rent or buy physical space or employee full-time dedicated personnel. And that’s when they most assuredly need a quality manual.
Use a turnkey quality management system comprised of concise, clear, consistently applied policies, procedures, and work instructions
As solopreneurs grow into small business owners, adoption of a quality management system becomes a strategic requirement to help improve the business’s overall performance and provide a sound basis for sustainable development initiatives.
The potential benefits of implementing a quality management system include:
- the ability to consistently provide products and services that meet customer and applicable statutory and regulatory requirements;
- facilitating opportunities to enhance customer satisfaction;
- addressing risks and opportunities associated with the business’s context and objectives;
- the ability to demonstrate conformity to specified quality management system requirements.
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All of these things that make solopreneurs successful come under our scope of services of business Lifecycle planning. In the same way we help people plan and perfect their personal lives, we help our clients plan and perfect their work lives as well. Plus, we help them integrate their personal, work, and legal spheres together.