How To Suffer More as a Solopreneur

Approximately eleventy million books have been written on the subject of entrepreneurship, and rather than rehash the best ideas here, I want to tell you exactly how to suffer more as a solopreneur.

All you have to do is set your business up so that it can’t do anything without your expertise and constant attention.

To illustrate, let’s pick on a slow-learning, glutton-for-punishment entrepreneur named Austin L. Church.

Last year, my friend Nick and I bought a 100-year-old building. You know the type. It has lots of “character” and “charm,” which means that some of the original hardwoods are intact and there isn’t a level surface to be found.

I am not what Carhartt-wearing men with luxurious beards would call “handy” or “being good at fixing much of anything.” What I am good at is not pretending, so I found an electrician, plumber, HVAC technician, cleaner, handyman, locksmith, termite terminator, and retired neighbor named George willing to mow the eight-foot strip of lawn between cigarettes.

In the beginning, I had to do tedious things like bring justice to carpenter bees, buy toilet paper, and set up Hostaway, a property management software dreamed up by ex-TSA agents dismissed for inappropriate conduct.

When my to-do list did finally peter out, I had two realizations:

• I could go days at a time without thinking about the investment property. Bookings came in, five-star reviews came out, and the office tenants downstairs were prompt with rent payments.
• I had acted like a non-stupid entrepreneur for once.

The question is, why hadn’t I done the same with my core business? Why hadn’t I built a team and systems and gradually removed myself from day-to-day operations?

I couldn’t claim ignorance. Though I never took a business class, I had learned quite a bit through trial and error and by reading books like Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth Revisited and Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

Kiyosaki helped me see that, if I ever wanted to stop trading time for money, I needed cash-flowing assets to pay me. A dividend-yielding stock is an asset. An investment property is an asset. A self-operating, owner-independent company is an asset.

A job is not an asset. When I look back at my various business ventures, I see that I have created more jobs than assets.

That distinction might matter less if my main reason for starting any business venture hadn’t been to get back more of my time so that I could spend it writing. Every hour that went to a job couldn’t go to the craft of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry.

That building we bought was a reminder that I have accumulated plenty of business-building acumen and can put it to use, but I still have a tendency to forget the plot: In order for me to waste time on craft, I must think and act like an entrepreneur by setting up a business that doesn’t require my expertise and constant attention.

The only way to wean the business off of my attention is to create systems and processes and get appropriate support (that is, people to run the systems).

And if those systems and people are going to operate independently of me, they cannot depend on my expertise.

Are you still tracking with me?

Good, because this is precisely where freelancers and consultants run headlong into a wall and bloody their teeth.

Why? Because we build businesses whose main product is our expertise.

The easiest and most obvious thing for me to do after I got laid off in April 2009 was to sell my writing skills.

Over time I also gained expertise in project management, marketing, brand development, and strategy, and so I sold those capabilities, too.

And what happens when every project requires my skills, my capabilities, my taste, my decisions?

In an expertise business the expert inevitably becomes the bottleneck. This is as true for a writer as it is for a management consultant or my HVAC guy.

If the HVAC guy builds a team and systems that slowly but surely remove him from day-to-day operations and turn his job into a cash-flowing asset, who is the better entrepreneur, him or the brilliant management consultant?

With the investment property, I had no electrical, HVAC, plumbing, construction or cleaning expertise to rely on, and as long as I had honest experts to call, my lack of expertise became an advantage.

Let me repeat that: My lack of expertise became an advantage.

Once I got operations sorted out, my role was to set priorities, make decisions, and pay for stuff. I acted like a CEO in that respect. CEOs drive vision and strategy, solve big problems, and oversee resource allocation.

Meanwhile, in my expertise-based business, which consists of strategy consulting, one-on-one business coaching, and the Freelance Cake Community, most of the customers, problems, projects, and tasks require my expertise. I still have to touch most everything.

My expertise puts me at a disadvantage. I am the expert and the bottleneck.

I’m not ready to kill the expertise-based business, and I want to spend more time writing. This isn’t a conundrum as much as it is a design constraint and opportunity.

The only way for me to keep growing the business without growing its dependence on me is to only grow the 80% of the core offer that is easier to delegate because it is easier to teach or codify as process.

I’ll keep growing what is scalable, and that means that I must figure out what to do about the remaining 20%. Maybe that last slice of the core offer is what I’m really good at. Maybe it’s where I as the expert really shine. Maybe it is what truly differentiates the offer.

Okay, this is a solvable offer design problem. What can I substitute that will make the offer less dependent on Austin’s taste, experience, or expertise while making it even more valuable to customers?

What they want more than access to my cupboard of goodies is positive outcomes. Am I smart enough to figure out how to give them cookies without having to be the one to bake every batch? I think I am.

I also think I am ready to suffer less, and I’m going to do that by turning a job into a company that can scale without my constant attention. To do that, I’ll codify 80% of my expertise as systems and process, hire more support, and redesign my offers so that I have replaced the 20% of my expertise that can’t be easily taught.

It’s that or keep working a job in an owner-dependent, expertise-impaired business. The choice is mine and yours.