ONE Is The Loneliest Number

One Is The Loneliest Number

You are a solopreneur. You start your business doing what you love and you figure out how to get people to pay you for your talent. For a while it is a blissful and rewarding experience. You get up every day with a passion in your heart and a quickness in your step.


Then the days get longer and longer as you figure out how to look after your books and do your taxes. You try to get your own social media marketing done. You hire someone to make your website but you don’t like it so you try to do it yourself. You look after customer service and it takes so much time, you don’t have time to get your marketing done. You are the chef, cook and the bottle washer in your business. You are doing it all. You are all alone. You are going to get tired, eventually.


This is a critical place for you. Do you stay here all alone? That depends, is it working? Are you profitable and happy with that profit? If you are, and you are saving and investing, then maybe this is where you want to be. Maybe you make a choice to stay solo if you are doing well. What if you want more though? What if you want to reach a higher goal? What if you want to take it to a whole new level? Can you do this by yourself? Who is the first person that you should hire?


One of the simplest things that you can do at this point is sit down and do an analysis of your time. Take a small wired booklet around with you for the next two weeks and write down everything that you do all day long. Don’t make any judgements, just write. Find out where you are spending your time. After two weeks, then get out a highlighter pen and highlight the items in your list where you make the most money. There is a good chance that those things take up about 20% of your time and they are producing 80% of your income. 


Look at the other items on your list. If you hired one person to take even half of the mundane tasks off your daily to-do lists could that give you the time that you need to double your activity that is bringing in the most money? If that is true, then this is a good time to hire someone at least part-time to help you do the menial tasks on your list. This will double the money you are bringing in. Then you won’t be all alone anymore. You will have a helper and a helper is a good thing. You will have a reason to get up again every day.


This person helps you with administration and it goes well for a while, but still you want more. Over time the two of you are getting stretched for time. You know you should hire someone else and you are thinking about it being a salesperson, but is that the best answer? Do you have enough work for a salesperson? Are you ready to train a salesperson? Have you created a sales manual?


We all get to this place where we struggle to get new business in the door, while we are looking after existing customers. Is a salesperson the next step though?

When Do You Hire a Salesperson?

First, you need to figure out how to automate some things. You need to create a few systems. Make marketing programs that work because you need to bring in leads to support a salesperson or a sales team. Where will you get these leads if not from marketing? 


The first person to hire in this scenario is not a salesperson. Bring on someone to help bring in leads first. Think about how you currently get leads. It is hard to train a salesperson first, think about the lead generation. You are likely doing that yourself right now. What are you doing? Can you train someone to do just that? Is that easier than training a salesperson? Start there. When you have too many leads to follow up with yourself, that is when you start looking at a salesperson or a team. Once you have a steady stream of leads and you know where to get more by scaling up the process, you can safely bring on a salesperson or possibly even a team.

How Will You Train Salespeople?

Everything must have processes. We need things like operational manuals, training manuals, training videos, and steps that can be managed and repeated. 


It takes time to train a salesperson. Then they quit. Every minute you are training, you are not selling. Therefore, you need money in the bank before you start, or some way to get a quick win, to keep yourself afloat as you go from zero to hero. This requires thought and planning before you dive right in there.

Make a plan. Get as much as you can on video to train these people. If you have videos for them to watch, then you can continue to sell while they are training. If you are doing all the training, then all income stops while you train people and that will become painful.

Is It Worth It?

To build a business that you can walk away from during a four week vacation, you will need to get to a place where you don’t have to be there anymore. It means you do need to duplicate yourself. To have a business that you can sell, there must be products or services being purchased, whether you go to work or not that day. If your retirement is based on selling your business, then you will need to build employees or some kind of team into the plan. 


If you don’t want to be a lonely ONE, then eventually you will need to go to TWO, and then THREE and so on. It is not easy, but it is doable, and YES it is worth it, in the long run. It takes a team to build an empire. You can't do that alone.

Start with baby steps, but get started...