Problems solopreneur speakers face and how to solve them Part #2: It seems impossible to scale your business
Many speakers who run their own businesses fall into the category of being a solopreneur — while you might have a few people who come in and occasionally help you with certain tasks, the majority of your business falls on your shoulders.
There are a ton of advantages to running a business solo: you can earn higher profits than working for someone, or hiring and paying for a large team; you have the freedom to choose where and when you work; and ultimately, you get to be your own boss — meaning you make the decisions, and you call the shots. There is a lot of freedom and there are many advantages.
Are you running a solopreneur speaker business? Jump to this article to find out.
But running your own business, especially solo, doesn’t come without its challenges.
In this series, we’re looking at the 3 top, major problems a lot of solopreneur speakers face, and then we’ll give you a detailed how-to on fixing the problems.
In this article, we are going to focus on a major problem many solopreneur speakers face: how do you scale your business and take it to the next level?
Problem: It seems impossible to scale your business
As a solopreneur speaker, one of the biggest challenges is getting new speaking engagements.
While eventually you will get to the point where the event organizers are seeking you out — it probably won’t start there.
Then there is the issue of developing multiple revenue streams. If you are relying 100% on just your speaking engagements, unfortunately, you aren’t building a particularly robust business.
If an issue comes up where you can’t speak for a period of time, you won’t be making any money, which puts your whole business at risk.
Having multiple sources of income can alleviate that risk and ensure you always have some income, even if your speaking engagements dry up for a spell.
But how can you fit it all in? You are working all the time on drumming up new business leads, and when you aren’t doing that, you are traveling, speaking, and yet more traveling.
Let's imagine a speaker named Alex.
Alex is gaining some popularity as a speaker and has been doing relatively well for the past few years — getting booked at some major events in the industry, and being asked to do some pretty cool side projects. Alex is running the business solo but sometimes hires an accountant to help with taxes.
Alex does everything else.
Alex is a force to be reckoned with and can do up to 10 events a month.
But sometimes, one single 45-minute keynote takes a full three days. A full day of travel to get to the event, the event day itself, then a full day of travel back. It quickly adds up.
Sometimes Alex works for weeks on end, traveling from one event to another, working on the content of the talk on the road, networking before and after every event to drum up more speaking engagements, while tweeting and creating live streams from backstage, airports, and in the back of cabs.
With this it is impossible to triple the business’ income for the same time period using the same methods. And worse, what would happen if Alex gots laryngitis, and needed to rest for a month?
Not only is this model not scalable, from a business sense, it it also risky.
Solution: Delegate, automate, and get a business coach
The key here is to free up time for yourself to do the things that use your expertise and will actually help your business to grow significantly, so you aren’t stretched too thin.
It will also be beneficial to have someone who can objectively look at your business and tell you where you can make or save more money, and offer bespoke advice on how to grow.
Some of these suggestions do come with a price tag, but think of them as an investment in your business. If you want better figures, you are going to have to make space, and get inspired, for that to happen.
1. Delegate
While being a solopreneur means that yes, you run things solo, this doesn’t mean that you can’t have help. In fact, if you want your business to grow and be scalable, you are going to need help somewhere down the line.
If you are doing everything, your business will probably stay small, your bottom-line will plateau, or you will burn out.
Carve out more time and space to advance and grow your business by creating repeatable processes. Then hire others to do those processes for you.
You might need to hire a virtual assistant, someone to help you generate leads for events, a bookkeeper, a social media marketing expert, or a designer.
Look at what tasks take up most of your off-stage time, and what could potentially be handled by someone else.
Train them in the tasks and free yourself up some time to work building additional revenue streams.
For example: say you drum-up new speaking engagements using cold outreach. You find a list of conferences that are related to your topic. You find out the email address of the event organizer, then you email them personally and pitch your talk.
Most, if not all, of this could be turned into a process that you could train someone else to do.
How do you know when it is time to hire some help? And how to avoid high overheads?
You might find yourself going overboard and hiring a team of freelancers too quickly to do tasks that won’t actually add to your bottom line.
For example, hiring a pro designer to create a Twitter profile header might set you back $100. Will that new Twitter profile header actually make you any money back?
If the answer is yes, then go ahead.
Or if you think branding is going to be key to your success, then perhaps it's a good option.
But as a good rule of thumb, you should look at investing in help that will have a significant return on your investment.
For example, if you hire someone to help with event-lead generation, and you pay them that same $100 for a few hours of work and get a new speaking engagement for $2,500 — you’ve just profited by $2400.
This is a simplistic and straightforward example, but it serves to demonstrate how to think about hiring and delegating.
2. Automate
Figure out how to automate your processes wherever possible. Much like delegating your tasks, finding tools that will free up your time will create more space for you to focus on building multiple revenue streams.
Thanks to the internet, modern tools and technologies have made automating many parts of your speaking business possible and easy to do.
But what do we mean by automation?
Automation is accomplished by online robotic tools that make your job easier by doing the job for you.
You have to do some initial work to set them up, but once they are up and running, all you have to do is check-in once in a while and make sure they are running properly.
Can they do everything? No.
Can they help you free up more time? A definite yes.
Find out what is eating up the majority of your online time by conducting a productivity audit. Here are two tools to help you figure out which sites you are mostly on, and the amount of time you are on them: RescueTime and Toggl.
Here are some automation tools that can help you with your solopreneur speaking business:
Admin support for speaker business:
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Generate invoices easily with Sighted, Harvest or InvoiceNinja
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Schedule meetings and calls with Calendly, YouCanBookMe, or Join.Me
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Writing similar emails all the time: 17hats
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For bookkeeping, use Bench or Brightbook, or Wave
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Automatically log your mileage expenses with MileIQ
For marketing
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Newsletters: Mailchimp, Drip, GetResponse or ConvertKit
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Schedule new blog content with CoSchedule (or check and see if your blog platform has scheduling tools already available.)
For social media:
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Recycle older content with SmarterQueue or blog posts with Revive Social (for WordPress)
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Generate new content with MissingLettr or Feedly
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Share content across all channels simultaneously with IFTTT or Zapier
Two further great automation tools you should check out that will save you time:
Have a need that isn’t on this list?
While there aren’t automation tools for everything, there is a chance someone has created something that can help.
Try Googling your specific need with “[name-of-need] + automation” and see if there is something already out there which can help.
3. Find a business coach
If you are so deep into your speaker business that you can’t see the big picture—or you can see the big picture but have no idea how to get there—a coach can transform your business.
It can sometimes feel like if you just work harder (and harder, and harder...) then your business will grow. You begin thinking “OK, what else can I do? Should I work longer hours? Give more talks? Spend more time on social media?”
But then you run the risk of burning yourself out and not actually making more money.
Hiring a business coach is a next-level strategy to help you scale your business.
What makes a business coach different from an online forum, networking group, or mentor is that they will look specifically at both who you are as a speaker, and how you are running your business. Even if it is just for a few hours every couple months, that focus is going to be fixed on helping you grow your business.
Here are some ways a business coach can help.
1. You can’t see the next move
Remember that old adage, “you can’t see the forest for the trees?”
When you are neck deep in your business, it can be easy to miss the obvious.
You may feel like you are stressing out about a dozen different things and are not sure what is most important to focus on.
A coach will come in, look at your business objectively, and find the areas where you can tweak and make changes that will improve your business and help you scale.
They can spot the opportunities that you may have missed.
They can offer you a bigger picture view of your speaking business, and then help get you there.
A coach can also help you decide and prioritize what your business needs are at the moment, and which needs you can work on in the future.
2. You feel your business has plateaued
If you get the feeling that you are in some kind of rut, or that your business has hit a certain level and you just can’t seem to get it to move up — you may have plateaued.
Maybe you are running at maximum capacity (ie. doing the best you can with what you’ve got) and you can’t do more?
Or maybe you are running on autopilot. Somewhere along the line, you have found what works for your business, and can’t imagine anything outside of that?
A business coach can help get you moving forward.
Think of them as a catalyst.
They are trained and experienced in helping people change, build, and scale. It's their job to help you get to the next level.
3. You want to make more money
While it may seem counterintuitive to spend money when you want to make more money, think of hiring a coach as an investment in your education.
It's not just an expense — it’s an investment that can have a big pay off.
While your head is wrapped up in your content, your marketing plan, developing multiple revenue streams, cultivating an online community… you may well be putting budgeting on the back burner.
A business coach can help you plan out your finances better, smarter, and more efficiently.
They can look at where your business is losing money, and help plug the holes.
They can see the opportunities to increase income that you may be missing.
Lastly, with their experience and training, they can help you make better financial decisions for your speaker business that, in the end, will help you add to your bottom line.
4. Your business network is pretty limited
With a good business coach, your networking opportunities can skyrocket.
They might put you into contact with people, event planners, speaker and business networks. Organizations that you may not have been able to access alone.
Some will even become advocates for you, putting your business front and center for new opportunities.
They can train you on where to go out and find new networks, or how to level up your networking skills so that you start generating more business.
This mini-series is aimed at helping you build your speaking business. We are exploring the main issues that solopreneurs face.
In the last article we looked at what you can do when you begin to feel overworked and overwhelmed. You can read it here: “What to do when you feel overwhelmed and time management is a struggle”
Next in the series, we will delve into how to deal with isolation and loneliness, as well as top strategies to build your speaker business.
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