- Should you be a solo entrepreneur?
Should you build, run, and operate a business
all by yourself?
Well, there are pros and cons to this.
If you're managing and running your business
by yourself, the downside is that you often
are working in your business instead of on your business.
You're focused on operations instead of growth.
The good news is, that if your business is profitable,
then you're probably having a very good margin
and keeping the majority of your money.
It's not walking back out the door.
You just have to decide what you're willing to live with.
We're gonna talk about that in today's video.
Hey, everybody, this is Roberto Blake
helping you create something awesome today.
Welcome back to the channel.
If you're somebody who's new here,
first of all, welcome.
My name is Roberto Blake.
I'm a creative entrepreneur.
I'm a public speaker at events like VidCon,
Social Media Marketing World, and VidSummit.
I run my own successful social media coaching business,
and today I wanna talk to you about solo entrepreneurship,
what it's like to be an entrepreneur
and working mostly by yourself.
I've been doing this for a number of years.
I came from a background in freelancing.
And that kind of prepared me for the expectations
of what being a solo entrepreneur is really like,
but growing that and scaling that into a larger business,
that was something else entirely.
And I feel that one of the negative things
about being a solo entrepreneur is the mental part,
the mental and emotional part
of very much operating in your business alone
and having a tremendous amount of pressure on yourself.
You have to understand, the buck stops with you.
When you have other people who are working with you
and working for you, then there is shared responsibility.
The success is the success of the team;
the failures are the failures of the team,
and that alleviates a great deal
of the mental stress and burden.
However, it does cause some anxiety when it comes to
relying on other people and having to trust them to deliver.
You're trusting them with your reputation,
your name, your brand, your money,
and also with access to you, and that is something
that a lot of people don't talk about
when they're talking about entrepreneurship,
working for yourself, being your own boss.
Now speaking personally, the way that I operate today,
I've been doing this for a number of years,
is that I have a personal assistant that works part time,
not full time, and I also have virtual remote workers
and freelancers who do work for me.
A lot of times, I'm asked often,
Roberto, how big is your team, or do you have a team?
Because everyone sees me putting out so much content,
they see me traveling to events,
I'm at events maybe once or twice a month on average,
sometimes more, they see me doing a lot
of collaborations recently, traveling all the time,
and yet I'm putting out a tremendous amount of content,
I'm very active in social media,
and I still run a successful business
on top of all of my social media activity in YouTube,
I run a business outside of that.
So how am I getting it all done is what people
are really getting at,
if I don't have a team
of people working around me full time or even half time.
If you're gonna be a successful solo entrepreneur,
or even if you are going to have a team,
what's going to save you time and money and anxiety
is putting systems in place to accomplish
your work and your tasks.
Now, I'm not taking things as far as say,
The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss,
which is a great book, and I highly encourage
anyone in business and entrepreneurship
to at least read it.
You may not agree with everything,
but there is valuable information in this book
that I think could definitely help you,
and Tim Ferriss has a tremendous work ethic.
This book is not about being lazy.
I think that that's often taken out of context.
But I will tell you that automation and systems,
and the way that I leverage my freelancers,
plays a pivotal role in what allows me to get my work done.
You see, when I'm traveling,
and I'm doing speaking engagements and events,
because I built an inventory of YouTube videos,
I've done over 1,200 videos here on YouTube,
sharing different types of things.
There are literally hundreds of videos
on creative careers like graphic design and photography.
There are about 100 PhotoShop tutorials,
dozens of video editing tutorials on this channel,
as well as advice for growing in different
social media platforms, primarily YouTube
begin an example, and also how to make money online
with different ventures that you can pursue,
whether that is building a coaching business,
doing affiliate marketing, or monetizing your YouTube
channel or podcasts.
I've done so much content,
that you have to understand, that each of these different
content verticals, and I didn't bring it up
just to brag about how much content I've done,
I want you to understand,
these videos act as a sales force for me
that constantly generate passive income.
Being a solo entrepreneur means that
if I don't do the work, majority of the time
the work doesn't get done,
unless a system is doing it for me.
See, I'm the only one who can do the coaching calls
with my one on one clients.
I'm the only one who can do the physical workshop
on location for our brand where they pay me
thousands of dollars to come in and do a training event.
I'm the only one who can do the public speaking on stage.
But in terms of sales, and in terms of generating revenue,
content can do that for me.
Email marketing can do that for me.
Episodes of a podcast, videos on YouTube,
automated social media tweets or posts to Facebook
or Instagram or LinkedIn can all sell for me
and can generate revenue in various ways.
A lot of this is passive income.
I do a lot of my revenue through passive income.
The active income of doing coaching or speaking
or workshops or doing a brand deal here on YouTube,
yes, that's on me.
But I put a lot of effort over the last five, six years
into building systems for passive income.
And I've done entire videos on that.
I'm gonna link to 10 ideas for passive income up here
for you guys, because I think that could help
a lot of you with this.
But a big one for me, besides obviously
the revenue on YouTube, the videos on YouTube
on average per day, generate usually between
100 and 160 dollars per day on average from ad revenue,
and that remains true even in the month of November,
where I took two weeks off from uploading
any YouTube videos.
I took 15 days, because I was traveling through New York,
I was doing things at 368 with Casey Neistat,
I was doing two events, Smart Hustle NY,
and also I was doing NameSummit,
which was a real estate agency speaking engagement.
It was a very good trip, but it meant I couldn't
make these videos.
It also meant I could only do a limited amount
of coaching calls with my clients,
and I could only do so much interaction
with my membership group.
So active income was something that I wasn't
really going to be able to do as much of
during that two-week period.
And even without a staff to sell online coaching
and courses, even without a staff to be doing
the work in the background for me,
my business did not suffer for these two weeks
that I was traveling.
And on the affiliate marketing side,
I still did very good commissions on that,
and I have recurring systems of income set up
through affiliate marketing.
I'm gonna link to a video on how to get started
with affiliate marketing step by step
for anybody that's interested in that.
My point is that by diversifying the revenue streams
and also diversifying the ways that I can make income
without having to be physically present,
it gives me the ability to not only
do what I need to do in terms of networking events
and travel for my business,
but it also means that I don't have to work
myself to death despite not having a large team
or even a small team that is on site or on call
or working around the clock for me.
I don't have to do that because I've basically
deployed systems in the form of content,
automations, and marketing to facilitate this.
So that's the good news.
You can do this as a solo entrepreneur.
I know a lot of people don't think that you can make
it on your own anymore,
and a lot of you might have reasons
you need to do this on your own for as long as possible.
Now, I'm at a point where I probably should build a team.
But there are reasons why that is challenging.
Building a team means you have to have people
who are reliable, consistent, share your values,
and that you can trust.
Very difficult to do.
I have that relationship with most of the freelancers
that I choose to work with, however,
they don't necessarily have the availability
to work for me on a regular basis,
and I don't necessarily have tasks that can give them
full time or half time employment,
because the nature of my business
doesn't rely on just that volume of work.
There are seasons where I have heavy projects
where I can give a lot of work to somebody,
but then I might not need to give them a lot of work
for a month or two, and that's not consistent
or reliable or fair for them.
I'm also not going to pay someone just to twiddle
their thumbs all day and clock in and clock out.
I want something in terms of a commitment
that would be more for that.
So that's something that makes it challenging
to just have a team, because you don't always have
the need for it all the time.
You don't necessarily have the work capacity
to justify it, even if you have the income to justify it.
So having a team is something that a lot of people
are doing right now, just for the optics
of what having a team looks like,
and not wanting the story of working
out of their home office or their bedroom.
They wanna get an office space because
it looks prestigious to do so.
They want to have employees because it is
a very prestigious thing to be able to say
that you're a job creator and that you have
a staff or a team.
But is it necessary for you to grow
and scale your business?
Some of you are not in a season of hustle
to where that is necessary for you
to grow and scale your business.
Some of you can scale your business by buying ads.
Some of you can scale your business by hiring
a very good copy writer for a couple of projects
to make better emails that can convert for you
or better website copy that can convert for you.
Some of you can easily grow your business
by just raising the value of your services
and your personal brand to a point where you
can command a higher price and your business
will grow as a result of that.
If you wanted to hire anyone to grow your business,
if you're a solo entrepreneur,
I would recommend that you hire a direct sales person
that can close, that is a closer,
and will work on commissions,
that will work on 20% commissions
selling your high-ticket products or services.
That is what I would recommend
if you're gonna hire anyone besides a personal assistant
or a virtual assistant to eliminate tasks
like email and screen your calls, file things,
organize your Dropbox or your Google Drive,
things of that nature.
So again, should you be a solo entrepreneur
or should you build a team or do you need a team right now?
I think you have to audit yourself
and decide whether or not you have a pool
of candidates that you could hire
that would fit your needs, share your values,
and can actually grow your business,
or take tasks away from you that are keeping you
from growing your business
and working on business development.
If that's the case, then I think you should have a team.
But if those things are not something
that are necessary for you to do right this moment,
you just wanna grow your business,
then I would recommend that you look into things
like getting a direct sales person
or doing more email marketing or even doing
paid advertising through Facebook, Google, or Instagram.
And those are things I wanna cover in future content
here on the channel, because I wanna help you with that.
Now also to grow my business,
I'll tell you flat out, I grew a six-figure business
doing mostly organic content marketing
and not spending money on ads.
A lot of you are gonna start to see ads
follow you around, or you might see ads here in YouTube,
that's gonna be coming very soon,
but that's for me to scale and grow that business,
but I built it to a very healthy business
without doing that in the past.
I just wanna take it further.
So I have a question of the day for you.
The question of the day is this:
what steps are you going to be taking
over the next three months to grow your business?
I want you to tell us in the comments section.
I want a discussion around this,
and I want this to potentially help other entrepreneurs
or people doing a side hustle or running a business
that are watching this video,
I think they'll benefit a lot from the collective knowledge
of this community in the comments,
'cause I know that I always get value
from your comments when you share them.
So again, question of the day is
what are you gonna do in the next three months,
the next 90 days, that's gonna grow your business?
I would love to hear from you.
That's it for this video, guys.
I hope it helped you.
If it did, I hope you'll subscribe
and check out more content here on the channel.
In fact, I'm gonna link to a few other
business-related videos that I mentioned
like affiliate marketing and passive income videos.
I'm gonna link to those down in the description,
so make sure you're checking those out.
And also, if you wanna work with me directly one on one,
feel free to check out awesomecreatoracademy.com.
I'm gonna link to that down below as well.
Like this video if you like it.
Don't forget to subscribe.
Check out different awesome stuff here on the channel.
As always, you guys, thanks so very much for watching,
and don't forget, go out there
and create something awesome today.
Take care.
(smooth electronic music)