Solopreneurs, what’s your theme for 2013?

This is the third year for which I’ve picked a theme. It’s been a great way to push ahead on one big, bold area of my business that I want to work on. My theme for 2012 was my signature system, which is written in being finalized as we speak. I seem to get my theme project done every year but it usually takes all year. I recall finishing something relating to my 2011 theme last year on the day of New Year’s Eve!

My signature system is a comprehensive guide to setting up a home based, solopreneur business based on packaging and selling your knowledge. I’ve finished the first draft and need to polish the writing and get some feedback from my inner circle before launching a beta version sometime early next year. (If you are interested in being the first to know when it’s ready, be sure to sign up for my newsletter in the red box in the sidebar. I’ll be offering it there first.)

My theme for 2013 is speaking. I enjoy public speaking and seem to have been spared the fear of speaking that so many people suffer from, so I’ve decided that this will be the next big push in my business. This is an example of one of the most important principles I live by – use your gifts to serve others and improve the world. By luck of the draw, I have a gift of being able to speak publicly without big fears, and so my belief is that I should use this to help other people. Speaking is a great way to reach a lot of people in a short amount of time, so even small speaking gigs are really effective.

I’ll be crafting my signature talk after I finalize my signature system so I don’t have the specifics yet, but my talk will cover some of the same things in my signature system. I’m committed to the idea that people will benefit from the talk whether they go further with me or not, so you can be sure there will be loads of great information you can take action on right away.

So, I’ve shared my theme for 2013, and now I have a big, burning question for you.

What’s your theme for 2013?

What’s the single most important thing you could focus on in 2013 so you end the year with a grander business that moves your mission in the world further along? Share it in the comments.

If you’re not sure, let’s schedule a time to talk and figure it out together. Click here.

If you’d like to read last year’s post where I share my theme for 2012, click here.

How to build structure when you don’t like structure

Your business needs some structure even if you don’t like structure. I’ve never seen someone have a successful business without at least some structure. If you have no structure at all, you run the risk of constantly firestomping whatever the latest crisis is.

What structure does is give you a way to prioritize and plan what you want to get done, and it helps allocate your time in a way that is consistent with your goals. Structure means that you don’t reinvent the wheel every time you do the same task over and over. It means you think about and plan your projects before tearing into them.

The problem many solopreneurs face is that they don’t like structure! Some, like me, may have had bad experiences in overly-rigid corporate organizations. Some may be more artistic or creative and structure feels too constricting. Still others may resent the idea of having any structure in a solopreneur business – after all, why go solo if you have to have rules and constraints?

The answer is to make structures you can live with. Make them fluid, flexible and adaptable. In a solopreneur business, you make the rules and you can break them. There’s nothing to say you have to follow them to the letter every time. Leave some space in both your structures and your mind to do things a little differently or not as rigorously.

Here’s an example from my own business:

I have a daily list I do most days just to clear the air and keep things tidy. It’s kind of like the business equivalent of cleaning up after a meal – do the dishes, put the food away, wipe up and give the floor a quick sweep. My daily list has things like clearing my email in box, posting on social media, blogging and whittling away at all the “to be read” emails. Here’s where the flexibility comes in – I don’t do all of those things every day. I do most of them on most days, and all of them on other days but it’s just a general guideline for me to follow. Nobody cares if they all get done or not (including me). If I’m particularly pressed for time I have the “must do” items highlighted. If I’m on the road, I use the guide to pre-schedule some social media updates and blog entries and then just focus on keeping urgent items caught up. I know I’ll get to the rest when I get back and start using my process again.

What ideas do you have about structure that keeps you from implementing it in your business? Does it feel too stuffy and creativity-killing? How could you create structures that leave room for flexibility? Tell me about it in the comments.

Focus your effort to get more results

One of my clients said the most brilliant thing to me, and I just had to take some time to write about it.

The statement was:

“I want to do less but do it better.”

Wow. Can you fit any more wisdom into one sentence?

There are so many things we “have” to be doing to grow a business. Just in marketing alone there’s Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, video, speaking, email, SEO, etc. The list goes on and on. It can feel like a treadmill just to get to what you already know about, and then another marketing “must do” pops up.

The thing is, for all of these areas there’s a minimum level of effort you need to expend to make it worth it. If you’re on some forum just flailing around, randomly posting and hoping business magically comes your way you’re in for a disappointment. You need a plan going in, but you also have to make sure you put in at least the minimum amount of work needed per week to make your effort work.

In other words, if you spend 10 hours per week marketing but split that 10 hours between 20 activities each activity is only getting 30 minutes per week. That might not be enough to make that activity pay off, so you’ve got 10 wasted hours and 20 activities that don’t pay off. You’ve also got a lot of frantic activity and management of those activities.

What if you changed your plan to only focus on the best 5 marketing activities for your business and instead you spent 2 hours each on them? Now you’ve cherry-picked the best activities to be doing and you’re spending more time on them. This makes it more likely that you’ll succeed in any given activity. Many marketing activities are simply not worth doing unless you can put in enough time.

Why do we solopreneurs do this to ourselves? Some of it may boil down to “bright, shiny object syndrome.” We hear something new and it seems like this is IT, the one thing that will propel our business to new heights. As entrepreneurs, we’re drawn to new things so of course we want to take them on. It may be a little bit of intimidation – it’s hard to go against what an expert with much more success than you says. It could be that you love the presence someone else has and are seeking to emulate their success. It might be that a certain tactic has been successful for your competitors. There’s other reasons I’m sure.

Whatever the reason, consider getting off the treadmill of doing lots of things poorly. Think about doing fewer things and doing them better. Maybe there is a new balance that will get you both better results and less stress.

What activities could you do less of but do a better job at? Tell me about it in the comments.

Strategy and growing your business

I talk a lot about strategy, and that’s because it’s truly one of the most important foundations to your success. What is strategy and why is it so important? How can it help you?

Strategy is having an idea of how something will help your business before you start doing it. This applies both to big, sweeping changes like adding a new marketing technique and it also applies to one-time things like attending an expo. Having a strategy makes it so much more likely you will succeed, and even if you don’t you’ll know it sooner and not get sidetracked for as long as you would without strategy.

New business owners often have a fire to get started, and as a result they start off running hard and just doing as many things as they can to build their business. The idea of actually asking if something is a good idea to be doing in the first place seems pointless. It’s easy to get into such a frenzy of doing that it’s hard to even find a few minutes to ask if you should be doing something.

Strategy helps you decide what to do and set some goals around what you expect to accomplish. Most business activities have increasing sales as their ultimate goal but there are many intermediate steps. One strategy might be to increase traffic to your website using social media. This would ultimately increase sales (all other things being equal), but it’s an intermediate step. If your strategy is to increase sales by increasing traffic using social media then you know what your social media activity is supposed to accomplish before you even start doing it. Using some traffic measurements, you can tell how well it is working by measuring how much traffic you sent to your site before and after you started using social media.

One of the best things strategy can do is to steer you when you are off course. What if you social media strategy, as you’ve defined it, isn’t paying off? That’s not as good as it working great, but it’s much better that you know and can change course. If your efforts aren’t working, you need to change what you are doing or find something new to do.

Strategy doesn’t have to be a big deal. It doesn’t have to be formal or complex. Just make sure you know why you are doing any business activity and what you hope to get from it. Have a way to measure if your efforts are working, and know when to change course or pull the plug.

How do you use simple strategy in your business? Tell me about it in the comments.

Solopreneurs and burnout

Burnout is a very real risk for solopreneurs. We wear all the hats in the business, and it’s so easy to just get caught up in the treadmill of never ending work. It’s easy to buy into the myth that if you just work harder somehow it will all get done. However, it’s simply not possible to ever get everything done. No matter how much you do, there’s always more you could be doing so the work is never actually done.

What you can do is set limits on how much you work and make good choices about what to leave undone. Otherwise, burnout is a very real possibility. Over the long haul, burnout can sap your enthusiasm for your work and leave you tired, worn down and unable to focus.

The long term effects are tragic, but what about the short term effects? Sure it’s fine to push yourself for a short while but working long hours and not taking time off has a very real risk in the short run. In the short run, not taking time off can cause you to temporarily lose focus. You might find yourself forgetting why you walked into a room, going to the store for 3 things and not being able to remember them, sleeping poorly or feeling lethargic. These minor effects might not seem too serious, but expanded into other areas of your life the lack of focus might mean you don’t pay attention while driving, miss appointments, or skip medications. These effects can be serious or even deadly.

One of the recurring themes I come across in my work is that business owners work too hard for it to be sustainable. As I’ve mentioned, a short push is okay but when you get into months of long weeks there are very real risks. Sometimes when I point this out, I get the impression that the other person thinks I’m patronizing them or trying to butter them up about being such a hard worker. The truth is when I see someone working too hard for their own health and safety I feel like it’s important to point it out. I feel like sometimes I spot it because I’ve done it to myself as well. I’ve never had a serious incident, but have had more than my share of absentmindedness due to burnout. Two people close to me have had car accidents because of burnout.

I talk about burnout and working too hard a lot. Please don’t think I’m patronizing. It’s a very real risk in the long run. If you burn out and leave your business, the world won’t get what you have to offer. You also put yourself and others at risk when you can’t focus. Take regular breaks, take days off and take vacations. Always remember that the work will never be all done.

Have you had burnout? How did it impair you? Share it in the comments, and tell me how you’ll prevent burnout in the future.

Step 1, Set a Deadline

I’ve recently made a significant change in the way I manage projects and it has helped my productivity greatly! In this article, I’ll share the change with you and how it’s helping me.

First, some background…

I used to decide on a project to complete for my business, figure out the scope of it, outline the steps to complete it and then set a target completion date. I based the estimated completion date on how long I thought the project would take and how much time I could put in daily or weekly. This worked pretty well, but I found that it didn’t always lead to spending the right amount of time on a project. How much time you spend on something should be proportional to the importance of it, and not necessarily proportional to how long it could take if done perfectly. Deciding what to do and how to do and THEN setting a time target meant that I could easily decide to spend weeks making a small website tweak that didn’t increase sales, profit or customer satisfaction. I didn’t really put this together at the time I was doing it. In the years I was a corporate project manager, this is more or less how we did it and it worked great.

The impetus for change…

I’ve had a big project I’ve wanted to complete since last fall. When I say big, I mean big both in terms of scope and in terms of how it will change my business. (Stay tuned, details coming soon!) It just dragged on and on, and in the meantime it isn’t available for people to buy so nobody is benefiting from it. It kept growing in scope as I worked on it (sound familiar? : ) ). I kept finding more and more to include in it. Finally, the exasperation got too great and I took a hard look at the project and decided to make some changes and get it done.

What I changed…

I picked a day on which to complete it and then downsized the scope so that I could meet that deadline. I realized that this project was something that could grow without any natural limit, so I had to place a limit on it myself. Once I picked the day it would be done, I worked backward to put some milestones in place. I’m just a few days away from that first milestone, and it looks like I’ll make it but only barely.

The Result…

The results of this one very small change (picking a deadline and adjusting the project to meet it) have been amazing. I feel so much more energized on this project because I know it will be out in the world soon rather than at some distant date in the future. It’s easier to get to work on it knowing my time on it is finite. Somehow, just knowing I’ll get the satisfaction of having it done in a short time makes it so much more enjoyable to work on.

Conclusion…

Even though I had years of experience as a project manager, this was a big shift for me. If you aren’t managing your projects at all, I invite you to try setting deadlines and milestones to help you get some big things done.

What do you have lagging that you need a boost to complete? Share it in the comments and tell me if setting a deadline helped you get it done.

Deciding what to work on and how much time to spend on it is one of my favorite things to coach on! Click here to set up some time for us to sort through everything that’s on your plate.

What are you saying no to?

I see a lot of attention being paid to the idea of saying yes to opportunities that come you way. A lot of people see this as a path to success with ease – watch for opportunities to come you way and then take them. I agree with this to a point – jump right in when the opportunity is right! What about when the opportunity isn’t a good fit? Should you still accept a chance to do something simply because it showed up without you working for it?

Business opportunities are everywhere, and some show up because you worked for them and some show up without any effort by you. There’s more to do in your business than you could ever possibly get done, so by necessity you will have to turn down some projects you may want to do. Given the imbalance of the how much discretionary time a business owner has and how many things they could be doing, they will have to turn down a lot in the course of their business life.

In these discarded opportunities lies one of the keys to success – choose very carefully what you will and will not do. It’s really important to say yes and jump into the right projects, but it’s equally important to say no and move on from the wrong projects.

Your time and energy are finite, and you can only get to a finite number of projects in your business. Starting too many or having too many going at once is a surefire way to get none of them done, have them take too long or have the quality suffer. You’d be better off picking a few and completing them at a level of quality that your customers will appreciate. Partially done, poorly done or abandoned projects never made anyone’s bottom line grow!

Throughout your business life, you’ll be bombarded with things you want to create, products you want to sell, content you want to write and more. If you’re like many entrepreneurs, you can think of more ideas in a day than you can do in a year. That means that you’ll only ever be able to actually complete a very small portion of all those projects. The bad news is that those numbers can feel really disappointing. The good news is that you can cherry pick only the best ones to implement. Keep an inventory of all those great ideas and things you want to do and when it comes time to add something new to your work, pick the best and leave the mediocrity behind.

Don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know”

Why are we so hesitant to say these 3 words – “I don’t know?” I see this all the time. People often express an opinion after saying they know nothing about the subject. One of the contractors we used on our fixer upper house created a huge problem because he didn’t know something and advised me on it as if he did. I myself have been pressured to offer an opinion on subjects which I simply had no knowledge of or not enough information on.

This topic is on my mind now because weeks later, I’m still cleaning up the mess the contractor caused. His credibility is shot in my mind. I can no longer trust anything he says because now I know whether he knows something or not that his answer will sound the same. If I make decisions based on his input, those decisions can be made on faulty data. Had he simply said he didn’t know I would have been able to ask someone who did and there would have been no problem.

I’ve been pretty careful up until now to qualify how well I know something before I give advice to a client. I might know something really well, and I’ll tell them so. Or, I might only have read a bit and never done something in my own business and I’ll tell them that too. Sometimes my clients have done things that I haven’t and I’ll tell them that I can’t add much to their experience at this time.

When I hear someone say “I don’t know,” it raises their trustworthiness in my eyes. I now know that they will admit when they don’t know something rather than snow me. It also points to a level of discernment in their learning – nobody can know about everything, so it’s important to decide what you do want to know about. It indicates a precision in speech and thought I find admirable.

One thing “I don’t know” rarely does is lower my opinion of someone. I’ve had mentors who have said it, and I appreciate their honesty. I’ve heard people in social settings say it and it just means they can’t offer an opinion or assessment on the subject at this time. I say it regularly myself.

The only time it does lower my opinion of someone is when the thing they don’t know falls squarely into what they claim as their expertise. Sorry to pick on contractors again, but there was a plumber who wanted me to tell him what size pipe to use under the house to make the plumbing up to code. I had specified in his contract that the work had to pass a code inspection so this was a big gaffe by him and I obviously never hired him again.

How do you handle it when someone asks you something you don’t know? If you’ve tried to cover up or change the subject, I invite you to say “I don’t know” without reservation.

Will you really remember it?

Lately, I’ve heard from a few successful business people that they don’t keep much of a to-do list because “If it’s important, I’ll remember it.” Is this really true? Is it a good way to run your business?

In both cases, the logic was something along the lines of running your business (and life) more intuitively and trusting your mind to call up the important items and leave the rest behind. It sounds nice, and who doesn’t want to have that kind of freedom?

My first concern with this type of task management is that it’s an inefficient use of your best resource, your mind. Lists can easily be kept on paper or in a tech resource, and both of these are very well suited to keeping large amounts of data. Your brain isn’t. Humans have good retention for just a handful of things at a time, and then it gets hazy. How much more creative and productive are you when the slate is cleared, your mind free and you are calm?

The second problem with this approach is that it can cause stress if you don’t have absolute faith in your mind’s ability to choose and call up the best thing to be working on. Maybe some people’s minds can do this and they are absolutely comfortable with that trust, but if you have any doubt at all you run the risk of using valuable brain power to keep track of things that could easily be stored elsewhere. I don’t doubt that most people’s minds can call up some tasks to work on, but I know what I go through to pick the best thing to do right now and it’s not a simple decision. I’m not sure anyone’s mind can be trusted to do long-term planning and to weigh all the factors in deciding what to work on.

My third and biggest concern with this is the waste of brilliant ideas! How often does an idea come to you at an odd time when you would never expect genius to strike? It happens to me a lot. I often tell my clients to let me stew on something and I’ll answer them in a few days. Later, while I’m folding laundry, doing dishes or driving I’ll get great idea out of nowhere and the problem is solved. If you don’t record them somewhere, you run the risk of losing them forever and that’s pretty sad. Record it in some central place, and you have a stockpile of great ideas just waiting for you to act on them.

As with most things, the right answer is what works best for you. It’s important to make sure that whatever method you use to pick your next tasks is one that supports you doing your important work in the world and doesn’t hinder you.

An owner’s manual for YOU

This post may not seem totally business focused because it’s about personal well-being and taking care of yourself. However, for solopreneurs personal well-being is inseparable from business success. You can’t give others your best when you feel lousy and are running on empty. You can’t fill someone’s cup if your pitcher is empty. So if your want a successful solopreneur business, your self-care must be a high priority.

One of my favorite concepts in self-care is the idea of creating an owner’s manual for you. You have an owner’s manual for every car, appliance, electronic device and major purchase, so why not have one for your biggest asset – YOU? By the way, your owner’s manual doesn’t have to be written out but it does help to think of it just like the documentation that comes with big purchases. It’s also important to remember that your owner’s manual is full of recommendations, not laws. You can decide how closely to follow the manual, but if you at least know whats in it you can make informed choices. What goes into your owner’s manual? It’s a personal list of best practices for YOU. It’s the habits, choices and practices that make you perform and feel best. It’s those things that life feels incomplete without. Here’s a few points to get you started on your owner’s manual, and some examples from mine:

Bedtime routine – what do you do before bed to help you sleep? Here’s one of mine: If I watch TV in the few hours before bed, I have to avoid high-intensity shows or I have restless sleep.
Sleep – how much? When? Naps or not?
Food – which foods work great and which are not so great? Which foods do you love but know are not supporting your health?
Exercise – how much? What activities? How often? One of my favorite exercises is to do heavy weights at the gym. I feel like I can do anything when I leave!
Environment – what do you need around you to feel your best? I find when my space is not in order, it is mirrored in the way my brain works.
Social time vs. alone time – how much time do you need with other people? How much time do you need alone? Both are important to well-being.
Unscheduled time – how much time do you need with nothing planned? I was surprised to learn how important this one is. I need at least a few hours a week with nothing scheduled when I’m free to do whatever I want.
Quiet vs. noise – How much of each is best for you? I love background music, but I do need to spend some time in total silence.
Other – are there any things you need that might not be so important for someone else? Don’t negate their importance just because other people don’t find them relevant.

What do you need to be your best? Start your owner’s manual today by leaving one item from your manual in the comments.