Category Archives: Solo Professionals

Organizing Challenges For Solopreneurs and Solo Professionals Working From Home

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As one person doing everything yourself for your business, do you find it difficult to stay organized? Most solo professionals do! It’s a case of too little AND too much–too LITTLE space, too MUCH paper, and too LITTLE time.

1. Too Little Space

What happens is that a home-based business usually starts small, so the space allotted to it is small. But then your business starts to grow. The little computer desk you started with that was tucked into the corner of the dining room may have been fine when all you had was your laptop. But it won’t do now that you have a desktop computer, a file cabinet, and other pieces of business equipment.

Soon you realize it’s really inconvenient to have to go to the other side of the room every time you want to file something, so you start a little pile next to the desk. Before you know it you have stacks of projects on the floor. Next it starts to bother you that there’s no handy place to keep your daily office supplies. Going to the closet every time you need something is clearly a waste of time. These are signs you need a desk with drawers to keep files and supplies you need every day right at your fingertips.

When these things happen, you probably need to reconsider your office arrangement to better accommodate what your business needs now. Perhaps you should move the furniture around, add work surfaces and storage, or even relocate your office from the corner of a dual-purpose room to a place of its own.

Business growth often sneaks up on you. Just like a child who has outgrown his clothes, your business may have outgrown its initial home.

2. Too Much Paper

It’s astonishing how much paper a small business can generate! The expanding file that used to hold your files is now bursting at the seams. You’re wasting time because you can’t quickly find what you’re looking for. Customers have to wait while you locate their most recent order. It becomes clear you need a real filing system in a real file cabinet.

To create a filing system, take the time to analyze the kinds of paper you have to deal with. Usually, businesses need customer files, vendor files, financial files, project files, reference files, and a few other major categories. Separate your papers into broad categories like these and organize them into hanging files in your cabinet. It’s not necessary to sub-divide most categories too narrowly. Only when a single file reaches 20+ pages does it become more efficient to create a separate file than just to flip through the papers in a single file.

Even a basic filing system like this will save you time looking for documents and will improve your morale every time you walk into an office that isn’t cluttered with paper.

3. Too Little Time

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Freelance Writing: How To Handle Criticism

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No matter how you slice it, a freelance writer’s life will always have its fair share of criticism. For me, criticism is like fire — depending on how you handle it, it could be a blessing, or a curse. How do YOU handle the criticism you receive as a freelance writer?

The Wrong Way Of Handling “Fire”

Some freelance writers I know take criticism quite badly. They listen to the criticism, then they ACCEPT it as truth — and then they dwell on the criticism for a long, long time afterward.

Here’s a question for you: If one day, you received 10 compliments and 1 criticism, which would you think of more?

If you answered “The one criticism,” then you’re probably handling criticism the wrong way.

As I said at the beginning of this article, criticism is like fire. When you dwell in the criticism you receive, you’re basically dwelling in fire — and the longer you dwell in it, the more it will eat you up!

There’s a much better way to put all that criticism to good use.

How To Handle Criticism

Very recently, my own uncle criticized me for choosing to become a freelance writer instead of pursuing my former career as an architect. He told me that I was totally wasting the effort I put into becoming a licensed and registered professional architect.

Of course, criticism like this always stings. But after dealing with so much criticism from the people around me all these years, I’ve learned how to “tame” this fire, and instead use it to my advantage.

Instead of dwelling on the criticism and allowing it to swallow me up, I used it as fire in my belly. I went into my office with the sheer, insatiable drive to prove my uncle wrong — and I started writing up a storm.

On a good day, I probably write about 3,000 words. That night, I probably wrote up to 7,500! And that fire in my belly is still there today, driving me to go the extra mile, to write that extra article, to finish that project a day or two early.

Friends, how do YOU handle criticism?

Do you let it burn you down? Or do you use it as fuel to grow you, sharpen you, and drive you towards your goals? How will you handle the next stinging bit of criticism to come your way?

Here’s a tiny bit of advice before I end today’s article: Remember that EVERYONE around you, no exceptions, is entitled to their opinion about you.

Just remember that YOUR opinion is the only one that’s correct!

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Building Up Your Endurance

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In high school, I ran on the track team. While I was often placed in the sprinting events, my true passion was long distance. My coach never put me in long distance because I was built with a sprinters body not a long distance one. But I knew that to finish any race involved mental stamina and I could finish a long distance race if given the opportunity.

One day, opportunity showed up. After a dismal track meet, the coach made the entire team run the two mile race, which was the last race of the track meet. I suppose that running two miles would be a punishment for most but I loved that race. The only difference is that we had to start after the other runners started and stay on the outside lanes so as not to interfere with the runners who were being timed.

To everyone’s surprise, I “placed” that is, if I was truly being timed. The coach couldn’t believe it but I knew deep inside that it wasn’t the fact that I didn’t have that super lean long-distance body rather it was my mindset and determination.

Many small business owners look at the start of their business as the reason why the business isn’t doing well and justify it by looking at the external things, “I didn’t have funding.” “I’ve never owned a business before.” “The economy is bad.” Like running a long-distance race, success is the result of a healthy mindset, preparation, practice, and keeping focused on what’s ahead.

Success isn’t dependent on your start, but requires your willingness to build up your endurance. When you focus on the inside and the opportunity arrives, you’re ready to step up to the plate and shine.

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Make Your Coaching Business Generate a Six Figure Income

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Most coaches, consultants, and service providers get in business to make at least a six figure income. Yet, the majority of them fail to do it.

Let’s examine how this can be achieved. The coach can increase his work hours to work as much as he can, while at the same time increasing his hourly rate. With enough billable hours and a high enough rate, a decent living is very possible (ask any lawyer).

However, in this scenario, you are trading your time for money and the question becomes how long can you do this before you burn out and how much time do you want to spend working?

Another way is to start your own company and hire a number of other professionals to work for you. If you had five professional coaches on your payroll, then all you need to do is manage the business and take a sizable cut out of your employees. This could work out very well for you, depending on the demand for your company’s services. Of course, the upfront cost for this can be very high with both the facilities and the marketing and now you, as the business owner, carry the burden of making sure you get enough clients to pay the bills. Is that your skill set or something you are willing to invest a lot of time learning?

What if there is a recession? What happens if you get sick, you have a slow month, or you become unavailable? And do you only want to be working in your local market, or do you want to extend your reach beyond it?

The way I suggest coaches start building your wealth (in your business) is through planning your business out to have multiple streams of income, or as Peggy Richardson says, “have five irons in the fire”.

This means that you have several ways for your specialized expertise to make money so that you aren’t relying on any one way (typically for coaches to only have active coaching).

What you want is to have several revenue generators in addition to live coaching, both passively and actively. These can include ebooks, printed books, DVD’s, CD’s, teleseminars, webinars, private coaching, high priced courses, week long bootcamps, whatever. Or perhaps create all these and put them together into a membership site/continuity system and charge your audience a monthly fee for access.

This way, you’ll not only be safe in case one of your streams of incomes underperforms, you are creating the chance to grow your revenue exponentially. The added bonus is you’ll also become very well known if this succeeds.

A final way (for this article anyway) for you to reach that six figure income is for you to systemize your specialized expertise so it can be duplicated and you either license it out or you hire other practitioners to work for you (similar to the above, company model, but without the overhead) but you do this after your business has a following and you have proven ways to make tremendous revenue.

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