Success Champions
Brain Drippings
Growth and scaling in a Business of One By Donald Dodson Jr.
H
ow do you scale when there is only you? Can you even do it? I am writing this from the viewpoint of a sole proprietor who makes a custom hand-crafted product which typically doesn’t allow for much room for scaling. But there IS still room to grow.
“Ok at this point in your business, you are likely wrestling with mindset. You are bouncing between employee, employer, and entrepreneur mindset”.
And, while I don’t expect that many of you are exactly in my situation, enough of you are similar enough (solopreneur, sole producer, hard to scale easily) that you can draw some ideas and benefit from what I am implementing, albeit slowly. The fact of the matter is we all typically start off as a ONE! One person starting the business and trying to make it all work. How do we successfully get passed that point? How do we scale one person without cloning ourselves?
Mindset Ok at this point in your business, you are likely wrestling with mindset. You are bouncing between employee, employer, and entrepreneur mindset. One minute you are in the trenches “earning” revenue producing products or services, the next moment you are attending a webcast on marketing, and the next you are looking over the bookkeeping or sales numbers and trying to decide a strategy. If you are like me, you are very content to do ONE of those things most of the time, maybe two. Me, I could make cool leather stuff all day. This is great for production, not so good for things like sales, marketing, or any of the bazillion other things that need done. You have the Swiss Army Knife mindset. If you have used a Swiss Army knife, you know that some of the tools work well, some are ok, and almost none of them can be used at the same time. Instead, you need to be a more taskspecific tool.
You have the Swiss Army Knife mindset. If you have used a Swiss Army knife, you know that some of the tools work well, some are ok, and almost none of them can be used at the same time. Instead, you need to be a more task-specific tool.
Goals and Mindset Goals What is your goal? Don’t just say I want to scale. That’s what business culture says you are to do. What does success look like for you? Hopefully you’ve already got this in your mind, otherwise the rest is pointless. If its world domination in
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your field – awesome! If its to get paid well to practice your skill, passion or whatever while living comfortably, that’s cool too. The point is you need to have that goal and idea, so you know how to grow properly to achieve those goals.
www.DonnieBoivin.com
Identify what your core competencies are (and those of your business) -- your strengths and your weaknesses. What are you good at and enjoy doing and what do you suck at or dislike doing? Make a chart. We’ll use it later. Remember that chart we made? Now we are going to put that to use. Strengths, which are likely the things you also enjoy doing on one side and weaknesses -- things you don’t like to do and are not that great at on the other. We also need to make yet another distinction on our chart. Are those tasks revenue producing or not? Business development tasks, though “administrative”
