EVOLVE - The Two Types of Solopreneur
Please forgive the deliberate over-simplification in the title of this blog! It was done completely to make a point, but I bet that 80% of solo founders reading this will still identify with one of these two types. Today we’re exploring the struggles and victories they face in their journey through solopreneurship towards building a team of people around them.
I have recently encountered a lot of solo founders, and identified that they mostly fall into one of two categories. One group has spent time in corporate life – working for a larger company, earning a salary and developing skills. Often these skills are quite specialised, and have been honed to fulfil a particular type of role or handful of roles. I am in this group, having had a career in banking before I joined Entrepreneurial Spark. We’ll call this group the “Professionals”.
The other group have always been soloists, some of them for many years. They are the self-employed gurus, the freelancers, the consultants and the trainers. Some have made a living for a long time plying their trade, others have had a series of different contracts and gigs and so have broader, varied experience. We’ll call this group the “Self-Starters”.
Let’s look at the different challenges these two groups face around finding their feet as a solopreneur and then growing their team.
The Professionals often find entrepreneurship the biggest shock to their system. When you work for a large company the machinery of the business is often hidden from you. So when this group starts a new company, they can become quickly overwhelmed and demotivated by just how much there is to do! In my previous job if my laptop wasn’t working I would call someone up and they would fix it. There was a team somewhere that did marketing for us, and sent us employment contracts and figured out the taxes on behalf of the company. And…. What, you’re telling me that all this is MY JOB now?
This leads to three major challenges that Professionals face in the journey past solopreneur:
When to learn and when to lean on others. Even finding out what you need to know as a first time founder is a huge challenge. You then have to figure out if it’s something to do yourself, or something to delegate or outsource. This double-jump is major for those who have come from corporate life, and there’s no magic formula to answer the do or delegate question. The most successful founders build strong networks as fast as possible, so that they have a greater pool of people to fill the gaps in knowledge and resource.
Wanting to know everything about everything. When you have a deep skillset in a particular field, then you develop a sense of what it should feel like when you’re trying to do something. You want to feel capable, confident, adaptable. However when you start your business there will be so many areas that are new to you – it will certainly be uncomfortable! The mistake some founders make is to try and learn everything about these new areas, to match the level of capability and comfort in their existing skills. This simply takes too long, and prevents them from developing fast enough as a founder. Trying to be an expert in everything will see you spending more time learning than building your business. Instead, try to find a balance between learning just enough to get you to the next milestone, and when it becomes clear that further skills are needed, bring someone in who has them!
Not knowing how to recruit for other skills. If you have never worked in finance before, then how do you know how to recruit a good finance person when you need one? What do you ask them at interview? How do you know if their answers stack up? Professionals sometimes struggle with this because of their narrower experience. Once again, a great solution is to rely on your network. In the past we have invited our accountants to support when we’re interviewing finance people, or friendly marketing entrepreneurs to put marketeers through their paces. By relying on the knowledge of others you can save yourself a whole host of time and pain.
The positive side (in a people/team context) of coming into entrepreneurship from a Professional background is that they are often desperate to start building a team. There are fewer fears around loss of control and delegation, because they’re more used to relying on others to perform different functions for them. So this group of founders often push harder to raise funding or generate revenue specifically for growing the team, which is essential to growth.
Now we come to the other group, the Self-Starters. These founders often face different challenges from the Professionals. They tend to have a broader grounding in the fundamentals of business, having had to cover all areas of their business for a number of years. They have learned to be self-sufficient and self-reliant, solving their own problems as the fastest way to get unstuck. And they often have enough knowledge about functions outside their specialism to be clear about what they’re looking for in new team members, reducing the uncertainty of recruitment. A wedding planner who has done all their own marketing for a decade will find recruiting a marketeer much easier than an engineer whose firm had a marketing department and so never encountered those core issues.
However, Self-Starters who decide to grow beyond the solopreneur stage face a very different set of challenges in bringing on people around them:
Being used to doing everything yourself. Self-reliance is an incredibly useful skill for founders, but it can become ingrained if you do it for too long. If you find yourself saying “no-one knows my business like I do, so how can they do as good a job as me?” or “It’s quicker if I just do it myself”, then you may have gone too far on the self-reliance scale. Business growth requires a conscious decision to accept that you can’t know/control everything. Figuring out how to still get what you need when it’s not you doing the work is an important first mindset step.
Things not being done “my way”. Even if you get over the mindset challenge above, the practicalities of bringing on a new team member are different for Self-Starters compared to Professionals. Seeing something being done in not-quite-the-way you envisaged (or the way you have always done it) is a painful journey to go through for many founders. Do you give firmer direction and risk micro-managing, or do you let it ride and risk under-performance? Setting clear objectives and forming good communication patterns with new team members (including a culture of positive challenge) is essential to overcome this quandary.
Finding a new flow. When you have worked by yourself for so long you can fall into a rhythm that works for you. You’re not reliant on anyone else, can work as fast or slow as you like, and shift priorities around at the drop of a hat. When you bring on a new team member, even just one, all this changes! Suddenly you have to find a rhythm with another person, juggle their priorities as well as your own, and keep the day job going while finding a new way of working. Professionals struggle with this too, but the Self-Starter journey can make it extra-challenging because you’re so used to being a one-person wonder unit! Having other founders around you who have been through a similar journey and can share the pains and tips they picked up is very useful in tackling this.
Conversely, the benefits of having a Self-Starter background is the core motivation and discipline that comes from personal responsibility. When you are the one who is ultimately answerable, and there is no-one else to pass the buck to, it teaches you to get stuff done! Organisation and execution are vitally important skills for entrepreneurs, and we find that Self-Starters are often very strong in these areas.
It's fair to say that every entrepreneurial journey is unique, and the challenges above are not limited to people who fit the profile of a Professional or Self-Starter. Whatever you’re going through as an entrepreneur trying to grow your business and build a team, know that you’re not alone! The things you’re encountering are felt by other founders all over the world. We’re all winging it, figuring it out as we go along, and getting stuck even though we’re not sure why. There’s always a solution, if you’re willing to look for it and build a group of great people around you who can help.
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