Grow Without Hiring

[00:00:00] Ken: What is a solopreneur? The term is thrown around constantly. It's gone beyond just being a buzzword to being something that is accepted in business and society. More and more people know what the term or the word solopreneur means, but I admit that when it came out, it felt a very loaded term. It felt like the latest flavor of the month, and part of it, I think with my frustration with the word is.
[00:00:29] Ken: Just like I've seen for decades now, people try to create words, especially to take advantage of trends. And the thing that we definitely have that is not just a buzzy thing in society today is that we have more and more people who are becoming disillusioned with the current workplace. They worked 60 to 70 hours a week.
[00:00:53] Ken: They sacrificed time with kids. They didn't get to family events. Then they woke up [00:01:00] to not having a job. That's obviously just one dynamic, but due to the rise of high speed internet being plentiful, tooling and systems being affordable and easy to use. I don't want to throw around the word AI here too much, but because of all of these things, many more people are saying, why am I making someone else all this money?
[00:01:21] Ken: I can go do it myself, and I have had clients over the last five years as I've been talking about these items. And these dynamic and these shifts in the marketplace, who as solopreneurs are beating bigger agencies. I shared more recently that a few years ago when I was. Just starting this current business as a quote unquote solopreneur had some conversations with agency owners as I was assessing what to do next, and I was helping those agency owners, and I still do that today with, you know, offer sales and systems.
[00:01:50] Ken: And I was talking to this one person who is definitely a $5 million a year agency. And I saw a lot of bloat. I saw they didn't really have a clear vision. They [00:02:00] kind of got taken in by, you know, the next book or the next idea and sort of chasing their tails around, so to speak. And now today, a few years later, talk with someone there and they're under 10 people and they're barely able to keep the lights on and they still don't really have that clear direction.
[00:02:15] Ken: So why was I upset about the word solopreneur? Is that I've just been doing that for 15, 20 years. We didn't call it that then, you know, we used. Terms like consultants. I didn't personally use freelancer, but people use the term freelancer. We had people who just were entrepreneurs. Ooh, fancy word, entrepreneur now compared to solopreneur, and I kind of just felt like people were using that term to get attention and to make money through many, many years of business.
[00:02:47] Ken: I have constantly seen the new trend, the new technology. The new hype cycle and people come along and they take advantage of that and they go and make some money because they were able [00:03:00] to use it as a marketing angle. But I was a hundred percent a solopreneur. We did use this term, by the way, a sole proprietor, so actually a way of.
[00:03:08] Ken: Forming a business, even the way to classify it as a business entity. But today, now we have people that will come onto my social content. I, for those that are newer and those that follow along for a little bit, I've got a decent social following on LinkedIn and they'll say, oh yeah, this is a cool strategy for a solopreneur.
[00:03:27] Ken: And I said, no, this is just a business strategy. This is just a business foundation. It can be applied to solopreneurs or people that have employees. But here's actually kind of what I want to get into. Can you be a solopreneur when you have employees or when you have team members? And the answer to me is yes.
[00:03:46] Ken: I can argue that when I had a 20 plus person team, and if I included, you know, partners and subcontractors and so forth, would be even a lot higher than that. I can argue that I was a uh oh solopreneur, [00:04:00] even though I had payroll. Even though I had employees and the reason why and why I wanna have this conversation around what a solopreneur is, I was the a hundred percent sole owner of the business.
[00:04:11] Ken: I was the rainmaker of the business and all of the vision and the execution of that vision was set up by me over time. I did have, you know, a creative director. I did have a managing director. I had some of these folks who obviously provided input, but essentially, if you think about. What a solopreneur does as we describe it today, they are someone who does marketing, sales, client delivery.
[00:04:36] Ken: They use systems, they use tooling. They use AI in certain cases, but I don't believe that you have to. That's what makes a solopreneur grow necessarily. If you do follow my stuff, you know that I've grown this business in record time because I have decades of experience to a very large number, and I have almost.
[00:04:53] Ken: Not used AI for most of that time, obviously. Now I use it for things like getting information quicker, you know, ChatGBT, [00:05:00]. I don't use it for writing my content as it stands today, my, my LinkedIn posts and so forth. But ultimately the point being we use as solopreneurs, A combination of those things. I also talk about the community of expert peers, fractional talent and so forth, to be able to grow without hiring, which is also the name of this podcast.
[00:05:18] Ken: So when I had that business, was I so a solopreneur? Could I grow without hiring? And my margins and how I ran that business was very different, especially since I was remote. Well before remote was acceptable. People used to tell me all the time, Ken, you gotta move back to New York or move out to Silicon Valley.
[00:05:34] Ken: That's the center of business. And no one does agencies in a remote fashion. And then this thing happened in 2020 and all of a sudden remote was acceptable. And even today, now there are a lot more agencies that are just saying we're fully remote. So during that time when I had developers, I had designers, I had product managers, I had different people doing different things.
[00:05:56] Ken: They essentially acted and executed against my [00:06:00] systems. I had, and I show my clients that they're. Blown away by how much SOPs I had. We didn't even have any like low-code, no-code stuff there. Then I'm pretty jealous of it today. I did have some very basic automations. I used, you know, templates and I used, you know, snippet expansions and things like that to save me a lot of time.
[00:06:18] Ken: But I could argue because they were executing against my systems, I was still a solopreneur under the way I just described all that. So I don't really want to get wrapped up in the terms necessarily. But I do get offended when I see people trying to use a term just for making money or try to create a version of that term that suits their needs, and that probably resonates with you.
[00:06:42] Ken: And I also do get offended today when people believe that having to have employees is an evolution of your business. It's just not true. I actually just had a long conversation with someone who was telling me, well, you know, I. I want to talk with [00:07:00] some people who, some other agencies that look more like mine and they have employees and so on and so forth, and I said, yeah, I actually just gave you a bunch of examples of testimonials from people that are even above you in terms of revenue, in terms of complexity of the business and so forth.
[00:07:16] Ken: But here is actually the more important point. I don't care if you have employees or SOPs, those aren't just. Check, check, you've become successful. I care about it. If you have the numbers to back up and support that you necessitated to have those employees and that your complex SOPs actually are helping you have great margins in the business, which this was a situation where that wasn't the case.
[00:07:41] Ken: So I don't really care if you hire someone or you don't. What I care about is how you grow the business. And do you need to grow the business in such a way where it's always more people, more clients? People. More clients, more people, more clients. That's actually what is what I call the hungry dragon of [00:08:00] most professional services or agencies.
[00:08:02] Ken: So that is the way that you're growing your business, whether or not you have employees or you don't, that's problematic, but you're not evolved. You're not someone who made it quote unquote by. Going and getting employees. I just wrote about this in my weekly newsletter briefing where I essentially outlined that people will say, well, I'm doing this because I want to go sell my business.
[00:08:24] Ken: And the reality of the situation is that unless you get to be a $10 million plus a year business, you're not gonna have very many interesting conversations. I know this because I was someone who got to $5 million a year, and then when I was a partner in a larger firm where we were 20 plus million dollars a year, the conversations.
[00:08:47] Ken: We're completely different. I'm not hating on having gotten to 5 million a year, but that is a very baseline entry point to be talking to someone who might wanna acquire a business. And in professional services, you're also not going to [00:09:00] get typically a very large multiple anyways. We happen to do so because we had hit a time in the market where a lot of businesses were interested in digital transformation.
[00:09:10] Ken: We definitely had. Despite that the world was suffering some good headwinds around a lot of businesses trying to learn how to do digital, these larger enterprises, which was a big segment of our business. But again, when I was in my solopreneur, $5 million a year thing. I had that conversation a lot and ultimately decided not to pursue something under that setup because I knew that it wasn't gonna be something better for me.
[00:09:35] Ken: So coming back to the point of this discussion and what a solopreneur is or is not, the ultimate question for me is more wrapped up in how are you setting yourself up to grow without hiring? A lot of agency owners actually wish that they were solopreneurs. They get stuck in that 1 million to $5 million range.
[00:09:52] Ken: They always have to get more projects. They're constantly dealing with clients churning and they become a people manager, a [00:10:00] people manager of clients, and a people manager of their team. They have to build culture and they have to do a lot of things that obviously they can get some help on. But ultimately, the real help, and this is why people like myself are still useful, they can't historically afford that help.
[00:10:14] Ken: They can't afford another them. A lot of agency owners. I want to take home a million plus dollars a year. I know because I have them as clients. So if you're running a two or $3 million thing and you wanna take home a million bucks, why not look at more significantly a model like myself who does that kind of revenue and doesn't have any of those other problems, no people problems, no big clients churning.
[00:10:36] Ken: That has a dramatic impact on the revenue. 20 to 30% if you're set up incorrectly. If you lose one of those, it's a big blow to the business, and now you have a very high payroll and you're either stressed out, tapping into your savings or a combination of those things. So for me, a solopreneur is a decision around how you want to grow.
[00:10:56] Ken: It's not about a label. It's not about [00:11:00] whether you have people or you don't. A lot of the people that describe themselves as quote unquote solopreneurs that are the biggest people, especially on social platforms. Have fairly large teams behind the scenes, whether or not they are in that business or they have other businesses that they're running, that they essentially get that help lended to them.
[00:11:18] Ken: They are not solopreneurs in the truest sense of the word. They just play that on tv or in this case, on social platforms. I can argue having gotten good at a lot of things, and entrepreneurs really do have to be good at full stack business, marketing, sales, and client delivery are the three big parts of the systems in the business.
[00:11:36] Ken: They get good at a lot of things, and I can argue even in my sense that I have pushed my current model harder than I initially expected, and I'm also working on new systems and bringing in new parts of my business to allow me to scale beyond even this current place. Do I really have to? That's the cool part about being where you are in this type of [00:12:00] business is that you have a lot more optionality.
[00:12:02] Ken: That's actually what entrepreneurs want. I don't care again about the term. If you're, you know, a solopreneur, you call it, consider yourself a consultant or coach. Obviously you could be those things and still be a solopreneur, but giving yourself that optionality and having the ability to grow the business if you decide to do so, versus stressing about where does that next client come from?
[00:12:23] Ken: That's what I want you to have in your business. That's what it means to be able to grow without hiring. Whether or not you ever actually put someone on payroll is a conversation for another day. What is a solopreneur? I think we have more clarity on it now, but as we continue to have these conversations, I want to hear from you, so feel free to write in.
[00:12:43] Ken: Feel free to leave a review if this is helpful, and I look forward to talking more about how to help you grow without hiring.