Success in Sweatpants

Deciding to fly solo in your profession can be scary. Whether you’ve been laid off, want time with your family, or just had enough of the 9-to-5 grind, the idea of not having a regular paycheck can be unnerving. As a solo business owner it might seem like you have little security and no guarantees. How much income you earn each month – and whether you earn any income at all – will depend entirely on you.

It may be scary, but it’s also liberating – your future is now entirely in your hands, and you will reap the full benefit of your successes. If your business does well, you’ll do well. If it doesn’t, you’ll need to identify what you’re doing wrong and make the necessary adjustments.

The question isn’t whether you will have a regular income, but how much your income will be – and how you will generate it.

When you start your solo business, most of your time will be spent looking for clients. You’ll be coming up with offers, figuring out your pricing structure, and constantly looking for leads. There will certainly be times when you wonder if it’s all going to work, and whether it wouldn’t have been better to take that salaried sales position after all. You’ll keep wondering about that salaried job until you land your first client.

Then you’ll land a second client, and a third, and a fourth and then like me, you will have added over 500 clients to your satisfied client roster.

From there it just gets better. You find that satisfied clients come back with more work for you. They pass your name on to friends, family members, colleagues and even acquaintances who will, in turn,  spread the word further. As you get busier and busier, you learn to work faster and smarter so that you can create more income in the day and free up your weekends and evenings.

Then, just as you’re beginning to relax and enjoy yourself, you run into a client who makes endless demands, or who refuses to pay, or who keeps changing the scope of the project – and you begin to wonder once again if it’s all worth it.

But those doubts don’t last. You realize that every client is different, that you can’t please them all, but that the vast majority are honest, trustworthy and do like the work that they’re paying you to do. Now, rather than fret about clients or get discouraged when a dud client comes along, you turn your attention to improving your business, your marketing, your offers.

And years from now, looking back on the beginning of the solo stage of your professional life, you will barely remember the fear, uncertainty, and doubt. What will stay in your mind is how great it felt to be on your own, making your own decisions, and solving your own problems.  And that salaried job? You won’t have thought about that for ages!