Solopreneur business model — what it looks like, plus 5 best practices for your solopreneur business

Now how do you need to approach your solopreneur business model differently than other business models? What are some best practices that you can employ with your solopreneur business model? 

I have five tips that I want to share with you today. This is not an exhaustive list. There are other things that you can do. But let's start with these five for today's video. 

Number one is to focus on your lifestyle wants and needs first, and then create your business around that. 

Structure your business, design your business, build your business around your personal life. This is very important for you as a solopreneur because again, you kind of are your business and vice versa. So you want to make sure that everything in our business is rooted around your personal values, your current lifestyle and your ideal lifestyle, your personal goals, how your brain works, your learning style, your personality, all of these different things. 

If you have anxiety or ADHD, if you are a parent with little kids, if you would love to travel the world, all of these different things are really good to take into account. If you're like me and you suffer from chronic insomnia and chronic nightmares, then you'll want to take that into account when you are designing your schedule for your business. If you're an introvert versus an extrovert, all of these different things are really good to take into consideration so that when you are creating your business everything fully supports all of those different aspects of who you are and what you want and need from your personal life. Your business can support that. 

That brings us to tip number two, which is to set up your business systems, strategies and processes in a way that works for you. 

This involves customizing everything to your unique wants and needs, and to really stop just copying and pasting what you see other people doing in the industry. Just because you see other people doing it a particular way doesn't mean that it is the only way or the best way or that it's going to be a really good fit for you. So you always want to make sure that everything that you are doing in your business is really set up to work very well for you. Okay, all of your business systems and strategies and processes. All right. 

So tip number one, really get very clear and understand at a very deep level what you want and need on a personal level and then create your business around that. And tip number two builds on that by making sure that you're setting up all of your business systems and strategies and processes, business foundations, all of these different things in a way that works very well for you. 

Tip number three is to develop self honesty and self trust. 

This comes back to tip number one, really being very honest with yourself about what you genuinely actually truly desire. This can be really tough, it can actually be very difficult for some people, especially if you've kind of just gone through the motions or if you've done things in your life in a certain way because that's what you assumed you should do. This can be a really tricky one to work on. But it makes such a huge difference and I would strongly recommend that you work on developing your self honesty and self trust skills. Really understand what you deeply desire. 

And then also learn how to trust yourself. Trust that you know what is best for you, that you are the one who knows what's best for you, trust that you are fully capable of doing different things and also again simultaneously with the self honesty piece, understand where you might currently be lacking and where you might need some support, where you might need to develop your skills further in different areas of business, right, all of those types of pieces. 

So you really want to make sure that you are constantly developing these skills of self honesty and self trust. We never hit a certain point where we cannot be any more honest with ourselves or we cannot trust ourselves any further. There's always more work that we can do with that. So constantly developing that self honesty and self trust is going to be a really big factor here. 

And that also connects back to what I mentioned earlier about having a really good relationship with yourself. If you are developing self honesty and self trust, that's gonna really help with your relationship with yourself. 

Tip number four builds on that and it is to learn how to communicate really well with yourself. 

So as you're developing this relationship with yourself, as you're building your self honesty and your self trust, you also want to make sure that you're communicating effectively with yourself. There can be a lot of communication problems. This is actually a huge issue that I see with many solopreneurs — oftentimes they will have communication problems with clients or customers and that can escalate into problems. And so you absolutely want to work on that piece. That is a really, really important factor. But you really want to make sure that you're communicating very well with yourself too. And this is something where a lot of solopreneurs again, kind of run into some problems. 

So a couple of things that you can do with communicating more effectively within yourself is to do performance reviews for yourself as a solopreneur — Yes, you should absolutely do performance reviews for yourself and with yourself, so really auditing your performance, assessing how well you're doing in your business, in your life, with the people around you, with your community, with your clients and customers, and assessing things and then moving forward creating sort of plans of action and strategies and understanding how you can improve your performance and then implementing that. So that's one piece is doing performance reviews as a solopreneur. 

The other piece of this when it comes to communicating really well with yourself is to do routine business audits. You could do these on a weekly basis or on a monthly basis where you are auditing what's going on in your business, identifying what's working, what's not working, why is that working? Why is that not working? And then pivoting and assessing how you want to move forward as a result of doing that audit and assessment.

Tip number five, to wrap everything up, is to keep things simple. 

Stop overcomplicating. This is another huge problem that I see many solopreneurs do. We have this tendency, this inclination to overcomplicate things as much as possible, we always want things to be much more complicated than they really need to be. So really always constantly bring it back to, “how can this be simplified? What can I do to simplify this just a little bit more?” 

Pretty much everything can always be simplified at least by like three to 5% at least. So always adding that in, connecting it back to, “where am I overcomplicating things, what can I do to simplify this just a little bit?” 

And again, you really want to do this because you're just one person as a solopreneur; you are responsible for everything, you are juggling everything in your business, so why wouldn't you want to keep this a little bit a little bit simpler for yourself? 

This also comes back to using energy management as that foundation for time management, which if you've watched my videos before, then you will know that I'm a big proponent of energy management. It's really the foundation of healthy, non toxic productivity and really good time management. So constantly bringing things back to, “how can I make things easier for myself? How can I work with my energy levels and my creativity levels,” all of that type of thing. 

Okay, so there are your five tips for best practices with your solopreneur business model. Again, this does not cover absolutely everything but this is a really good starting point for you if you are looking to upgrade your solopreneur business model and take back control with it and really see even more success as a solopreneur. 

Now I can help you with all of these things. So if you are looking at these five different things and you're thinking “okay, I won't be able to do this but I want some guidance or some support with this ,or I want to learn a lot more about them. I want some help with implementing all of this,” then I am here to support you. 

I work with solopreneurs in my six month one on one coaching program, Solopreneur CEO, so you can learn more about that and book your spot at SaganMorrow.com/ceo.