3 Things Every Solopreneur Needs

let me just be clear you do not need to have a single employee or team member to make a lot of money as an entrepreneur you can be a solopreneur and do at least multiple six figures a year I know that because that was me my first three to four years of business which got me to about 250 000 a year in Revenue it was just me as a solopreneur so don't let anyone tell you that you need a team or employees to make a good living online now on the other side of it you may want a team and I have had a team from one person all the way up to seven people and everywhere in between so I've managed small teams and they all have their place so having a team is great being a solopreneur is great we're not going to talk about pros and cons today because I'm speaking to you the solopreneur or considering being a solopreneur because I want you to win and there's three things that every solopreneur needs and I guarantee you that most of you if you're a solopreneur are missing out on two of these one of them is relatively obvious but you may not realize how powerful it is the other two I guarantee you're missing and it's going to hamper your ability to get incredible results so if you want to make multiple six possibly seven figures a year with no employees contractors team members whatsoever you want to run solo then you need these three things let's discuss [Music] thank you [Music] welcome back to the Graham Cochran show where each week I'm unpacking the habits mindsets and strategies to help you build a highly profitable and life-giving business I'm your host Graham Cochran pump to hang out with you today we're going to talk about the solopreneur life we'll be very practical today and I honestly believe that being a solopreneur is one of the greatest gifts of the modern era I don't know if you want to stay a solopreneur forever that's for you to decide personality wise needs wise but you can go very very far all by yourself and don't let anyone tell you otherwise and don't let anyone shame you or make you feel less than as an entrepreneur if you don't have a single team member there is some sick culture of you're not a real business if you don't have a team and so I want to put that argument to bed that's not true you're a real business if two things happen you create a product or service that's valuable in the marketplace and it's changing people's lives and you're profitable that's that's it right you can be profitable selling drugs I don't consider that a business because it's not very ethical but if you're creating a product or a service that's making a difference in people's lives in the marketplace and you bring home a profit after your expenses to run that business that's a business you're in business okay even if you're the only person on the team and you are not less than a business that has five employees ten a hundred that doesn't it's just a stupid conversation to have they're different challenges to having a team and there's different challenges to being a solopreneur they're just different makes sense so if you are a freelance web designer if you are a uh you know a personal trainer if you are crafty and you make beautiful shirts or scarfs or handbags or if you're a coach or if you're a speaker or an author and it's it's just you you're a business okay I got to see James Clear author of atomic habits at a private event in Orlando a few weeks ago and he was talking about his book and he's mentioned this on podcasts before but homeboys got the best-selling book in the last five years uh and he sold over 15 million copies he has one employee this is him and his employee and he's a multi-multi-multi-millionaire I don't think anybody would say that he's not a real business he's a very big business it's just a speaking authoring business and it's very simple and it doesn't even require technically his other employee he's just doing a lot of writing and speaking and he needed someone to help him out as he blew up because he's selling 15 million copies of a book so let's just put that argument to bed if you want to embrace a solopreneur lifestyle let me affirm your choice let me encourage you but let's move past that instead of saying yay you're a solopreneur let's talk about the three things that you need because I guarantee you like I said at the top of this episode that you're missing probably two of these one is rather obvious but I'm going to unpack the full extent of it but the other two just somehow get missed in my conversations with team members and clients and friends because interesting enough some of my team members are solopreneurs as well so all right let's unpack it the three things are very easy to remember they spell out the word Ace Ace like the Ace of Spades the Ace of Hearts like the number one when you're playing cards right the ace so it might be easier for you to remember Ace number one is you need automation and man are you lucky to be alive right now as a solopreneur you could be a solopreneur 20 years ago and just be a freelancer or be an author or a speaker and it was very very hard to scale your business and make a huge dent in the world without help we are living in the world of automation and I'm going to lump AI into that world as well artificial intelligence not because it's trendy because it's it's only making Automation and automation tools that much more powerful so basically to run a business we we do need help it is very hard to scale a business to multi-six seven figures without help the differences today you don't need humans necessarily you can use the robots and the powerful automation tools I'm going to give you what I think is the best single best automation tool for a solopreneur today in the digital economy or the Creator economy and that is kajabi if you follow me that's probably not a surprise and I'm going to push my affiliate link here because it's the best thing for you and for me if you've ever been looking for the tool to end all tools to get rid of everything else go check out Graham cochrane.com kajabi k-a-j-a-b-i uh kajabi gives you a 14 day free trial but if you want to play with it for 30 days use my link I'll link to it below in the video but Graham cochrane.com kajabi I can get you a 30 day free trial with my affiliate link I'll also give you a free course the moment you sign up for the free trial called Ready Set kajabi to help you get up and running and making money on kajabi in 30 days and if you stick around and become a paying kajabi customer because you use my link part of your monthly payment comes back to support me in the show at no cost to you and to say thank you I'm going to give you my undying love plus I'm going to send you one other course my three-step sales copy formula mini course absolutely free so you get double the free trial two free courses and all you got to do is just use my link to sign up instead of their website kajabi is everything that you need and what's insane is I've been using kajabi for 10 years since 2013. and it has evolved and evolved and evolved and it's continued to expand and every time they add a feature I almost need one fewer team member or it speeds up my workflow here are just five things off the top of my head I feel like kajabi can do for your business as a solopreneur number one again it's an automation tool and you can use other tools you don't have to use kajabi but it's the one I've been using for a decade and it's the one I endorse because it's the best platform and that's why I talk about it all the time number one content automation for your marketing and this is where the AI tools are coming into play so kajabi launched as of right now it might still be in beta so not every account has it but it if it's not by the time you listen to this it's probably available for everybody but create a kajabi Creator studio is their AI tools baked into kajabi and so what this does this is insane not only does kajabi already have some AI baked in where it'll build you a sales page it'll build your website it'll build you you an opt-in page like it'll pre-design like it'll build your course like outline my course Automation and it'll do it for you based off of your Niche and it'll give you a bunch of ideas but the power is in the Creator Studio what Creator Studio can do is it can take your weekly content let's say we're doing this episode right now I can record this episode audio or video let's say video because I like to do both at the same time so I'm recording a video I upload it to kajabi's Creator Studio it's going to do a bajillion things it will create clips for me for Instagram reels and Tick Tock and YouTube shorts it'll do captions it'll create transcribe Trail transcribe it for blog posts it will take it can take online courses that I've already uploaded to kajabi and I can take us like a 20-minute module from a course of mine upload it to Creator studio and have Creator Studio spit out short form content for Instagram from my course so I can repurpose paid stuff free stuff I can turn it into podcasts I can turn it into blog posts I can turn it into tweets I can turn it into all kinds of stuff using AI so instead of having a content manager and a video editor you no longer need those people if you have Creator Studio baked into kajabi so it's your content automation for repurposing your content and it's getting insanely more powerful by the month number two is email automation for your sales and onboarding you don't need a sales team or an onboarding team if you sell a membership or a course literally kajabi collects the lead for you automatically and then can sell to that lead for you automatically and then if they buy and when they buy it can upsell to them automatically down sell to them automatically cross-sell to them automatically order by promote to them automatically and then when they buy it can deliver the product automatically and walk them through an onboarding sequence that can last a couple days a week a month whatever you want it can then automatically ping them to send them a new promotion in 30 days for an advanced course or your community and it's targeted to them and so it's follow-up sales you can build that out for the next year if you want to so you turn one lead into a customer One customer into a customer of multiple products through the upsell process and then that one customer who bought multiple things or not into a repeat customer 30 days from now 90 days from now a year from now it's it's pre-loaded campaigns timed to when you want them or if it's not timed you can have those campaigns triggered by behavior when somebody completes a course then subscribe them to a promotional sequence that'll go out in a week if they complete this video or they click on this link then send them an email follow-up it's just insanely powerful it is not hard to do you just have to dream it up and then enter it into kajabi and it'll do it for you so the sales like this is how you scale is just it's the replacing having someone smiling and dialing either for cold leads or calling your customers and how have you been enjoying your product you know we've got a new product in stock that I think you might like or because you ordered you know that thing I think you might really like this thing I noticed you bought an iPhone 15 Pro Max we've got new cases available that'll fit it perfectly instead of having someone that you have to pay to follow up and do that and say hey hit up all these customers every week hit up 20 or 100 kajabi can do it for you so it's email automation it can build all your funnels one click the robot will build you a funnel that'll print money it can build your webinars one click can create webinars and what that means is the registration page the welcome sequence the the reminder sequence of when the webinar is happening and where it's happening the sales page that promotes the thing the actual webinar room itself the follow-up sales sequence like the all of that it's all time to the event it can be an automated webinar one click kajabi can build that for you instead of having to hire a tech person like your Tech stack is done because it's one click and then you just drag and drop and edit and replace the copy for whatever you want it can even create copy for you as a starting point and then this is one that's underutilized that I love though is auto segmentation for your customers based off of behavior so again you can have certain tags set up in kajabi just set it up at the beginning so that basically anytime a customer or a user clicks on a certain type of thing it can be Tagged so you can know what your customers like and don't like and so when you want to send a promotion to the people that really like your sales copy stuff if you're teaching sales copy it'll only go out to people that have engaged with sales copy related content if you want to send out a promotion to only your best customers it can tag people who have spent a certain amount of money with you or bought a certain number of products or completed a certain number of courses so you always have a tag or curated segmented list automatically of people who are your top customers however you define that this is powerful stuff this is saving you hours or people man hours and I just pulled five and I had to stop because we got to move on with our lives this is all under the automation you need automation and the great news is if you're not a tech person do not be overwhelmed because look I was building online businesses 14 years ago in 2009 when none of this existed you had to learn some code and buy some janky WordPress template and find some plugins that broke every six months that mess with your other plugins when things got updated and then strapped together a PayPal button and have zip files of your products and and the triggers didn't always talk to each other so sometimes they would buy and they wouldn't get the zip file downloaded I mean it was a nightmare and you couldn't do half the stuff you had to do now you had to build everything yourself webinars were a pain in the butt funnels nobody would make it for you your website didn't look great and it was expensive now you can you can use one tool kajabi and it can do everything for your business and more so I whatever you use whether you use kajabi or if you think about kajabi go check it out Graham cochran.com kajabi and play with it for free for a month and you'll get a course for me for free you get to keep whether you become a paying member or not but check it out and then use the heck out of that thing because it can do so much more than you can imagine but if you don't use kajabi use something else you're gonna have to leverage Automation and it's cheap and it's easy so that's the a automation that's probably the obvious one these next two I think most solopreneurs Miss number two is community and this is the C man if you're going to be a solopreneur and if you got the automated automation to run your business you technically don't need people okay all the introverts in the world celebrated yay we don't need other people we can do this by ourselves but you're missing out on so much you need a community and you need it for four things but when I Define community I'll share the four things but when I Define community this could be a lot of things this could be a mastermind I highly recommend you join a mastermind of some kind whatever you can afford of a group of people that are doing the things you want to do or the things that you haven't done yet and you might join different masterminds and hey when you join a mastermind commit to at least two years like don't dip in and dip out like you you literally are wasting your money and you're wasting everybody's time commit to two years and then decide if you want to stick around after that the one when you find the right Mastermind you want to stay in it for life but give it two years because it takes time to develop relationships and to get to know all the different people in The Mastermind and to get the full value out of it so just a mental note for you if you're joining a mastermind join a mastermind if you can't afford a mastermind join a paid community like I've been running the six-figure coaching Community for years now and that's you know it's like a more affordable version of like what my Mastermind was um at least you can get some coaching you can be in a community with like-minded people you all paid to be there it's curated you get a lot of great feedback right so join a paid Community if you can't afford a mastermind if you can't afford a paid Community join a free Facebook group there's so many Affinity groups either in your Niche or in business in particular heck even kajabi has their own official kajabi Heroes Facebook group and then if you start to make a lot of money there's the kajabi heroes gold and then there's a kajabi millionaires Facebook group so that I'm in like three kajabi Facebook groups and they're free and these are like many communities and many masterminds if you take advantage of them you could be in it and not do anything for you but engage with it you can get so much value out of it four things I'll share those are in a minute and then look the last thing if you can't even get into a Facebook group just get a friend get a business buddy another solopreneur especially if they're another niche like become your own two-person Mastermind that's all a mastermind is is two or more Minds coming together Napoleon Hill who wrote uh Think and Grow Rich popularized this in the 1930s the concept of The Mastermind two minds coming together creates uh not just two minds but like almost like a third mind is kind of the way he described it there's something powerful not only about the physical energy because all our bodies are is energy but like the multiplicative effect of our wisdom coming together you're creating like almost like a third mind or a mastermind so all you need is one other person to get all the benefits so find a buddy a business buddy so here are the four things a community gives you that if you had a team you would have but if you don't have a team you still need and these are sort of the Phantom benefits of a team and sort of the Phantom requirements of being successful that nobody talks about we all want to talk about the first one automation tools kajabi yay AI but these are almost more powerful ready Community gives you ideation or inspiration I don't care how I I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that you are a very smart wise creative intelligent person how do I know that because you're listening to my show no I'm just joking no because everyone was born a genius right order McManus says everyone's born a genius I believe everyone everyone's born a Genus there's genius there's a genius within you and it just needs to come out and play and so you're a genius but you know what you're only one person and the great things in life weren't invented by one person alone they were a collaborative effort with ideas coming together and sometimes your greatness and your uniqueness and your Genius will only reveal itself when triggered by an external source I want to give you an idea excuse me I'm fighting a cold back in February 2023 uh I got my idea for my latest book Rebel find yourself by not following the crowd coming out 2024. it's it's phenomenal and it's going to change a lot of people's lives and I'm really proud of it I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this book is going to be a bestseller it's going to impact A Million Lives and it's going to change my life I have a feeling I'll report back and give you the details but I believe it's happening but let me tell you this that that book would not exist if it weren't for me getting in a room with my friend John Gordon now John Gordon is uh multiple Wall Street Journal New York Times best-selling author top keynote speaker and just all around great husband father and dude and I knew I needed help I didn't even know what I needed help for I really tapped him to like help me think about how to become a world-class speaker and author and I said John you know 20 years from now I want to be like where you are I want to be doing what you're doing I want to be traveling and speaking at the highest level I want to be writing books at the highest level and so what do I not know tell me what I I don't know that I don't know what I didn't know was going to happen that day is that I was going to get the idea for my next book Rebel and it came in a Flash and it came in a Flash because he was in a conversation with me asking me questions pressing me on the things that are passionate I'm passionate about and the things that are deep within me and drawing me out just by being a good friend and asking good questions and there was a couple of hours of nothing coming out because he's like what's the next book going to be about it's like I don't know John I've been praying about this for six months I don't know man I have a lot of things I could talk about and teach about I could do more business books I could do stuff about generosity like my TED talk I don't know but nothing really just jumped out until he noticed something about my story when I was like well tell me your story I was telling him my story I want to be a rock star and this crazy story I write about in the book about my guidance counselor when I told her that I wasn't going to go to college because I was going to be a rock star and she said I had to apply for college because I go to this I went to this college prep school she's like I don't care what you do but we have 100 College acceptance rate and you must apply to one school and get accepted by one school and I was like or what you're gonna kill me like what like What's Happening Here I am in like a 17 year old kind of being subtly threatened by my guidance counselor that I have to go to college um and I was just telling the stories like I didn't want to go to college I didn't want to do the military like my parents I didn't want to be an engineer or a teacher like my parents I I wanted to be I didn't want to be like my friends who wanted to be investment bankers and all this stuff and I was saying all these things I didn't want to do and all the pushback and John goes Graham bro you're a rebel I was like Rebel I was like that word means so much to me there's so many layers of what being a rebel means to me I was like that's my whole life bro I'm like that's my next book and we unpacked it a God gave me a framework for it it all came out in a flash of inspiration and that inspiration did not come by me sitting alone in this room like I am today talking to a black dot speaking into a microphone it came sitting knee to knee with another man who's not in my Niche who has a very different life experience than me but who's brilliant in his own right doesn't even know my story that well we're newer friends getting to know each other still and inspiration six days later I signed my next book deal and and now the book's you know being finishing up the edits right it's insane so being in community with at least one other person you're going to get the biggest ideas and the biggest inspiration and that alone can print money for you and look just one little side note for you when you get ideas and inspiration give credit where credit's due like I just did with John I'll tell everybody to the day I die when Rebel becomes a million cop copy seller and I've made literally millions of dollars off that book and the keynote of Rebel has made me millions of dollars and the impact is millions of lives like when that happens in the subsequent books and opportunities that come from it you know who I'm gonna thank and who I'm already thanking preemptively John Gordon so give credit where credit's due for the person that helped Inspire it for the moment where that idea came because it's just it's that generous act of giving and then you'll have a friend for life but also it's just the right thing to do so it's a beautiful thing so ideation inspiration is going to print money for you you don't even know and you don't know what's going to come out of you until you get a room with somebody even a virtual room number two is accountability I don't struggle with accountability so this one's I don't need this as much but a lot of my my clients I'm realizing need it and so just being in a mastermind being in a group it's amazing what that accountability would do for you like hey you said on our last call that you're working on that launch how's it going you're like oh crap I gotta do it this is powerful like just being accountable to other people even if it's just peer pressure and you don't want to look stupid that's a that's powerful and accountable and that's going to hold you accountable so you get the stuff done number three moral support man sometimes things just suck in business if you have no one to talk to about it and vent to it's just going to bury it and you're going to become bitter and you're going to grow bitter weeds and roots in your life and you need the moral support so you don't feel like a crazy person so you can unload but also moral support to celebrate when things go well it's hard to I mean when you have your first six figure launch and you make a hundred thousand dollars in a week or something launching something and you have no one to celebrate with other than your your friends or your spouse you don't have someone in the business space that you can really celebrate with who get that's it you're going to feel a little like subdued and it's going to pour like water on the flame of joy and it's going to rob you of it's one of the biggest payoffs of doing this is like that that high you get when you do something great because it's gonna the high will fade quickly on its own but you got to celebrate with people celebration is huge and I just love having that moral support of a community to celebrate with for sure and then fourth collaboration so whereas the first one like with me and John Gordon we're not collaborating on this book I just got inspired and got an idea by having a conversation with him collaboration is when like me and my buddy Joe Gilder who had a very similar business to my first business the recording Revolution back in 2012 I wanted to launch a membership he already had a membership but I also wanted to kind of do something with him and we had started a podcast together just for fun and then we said what if we started a new membership together that was built around the idea of both of us each individually mixing a song getting the same recordings from the same band mixing the song on her own and then posting it to the community and like letting the community vote on Whose mix was sounded better and then letting them mix it as well and just this cool concept that we call dueling mixes and it became a 250 to 300 000 a year product and we got to run together and that's called collaboration he's a solopreneur I'm a solopreneur but we created a new product and ultimately a new business together that we ran for seven years I made a couple million dollars doing it you know it's so fun and so collaboration comes by just being in community with somebody so so powerful you need Community more than anything I think of your solopreneur so don't don't poo poo it even if it's just one person and a buddy a business buddy a solopreneur buddy okay so that's the A and the C automation community and the E for Ace remember a c e the E is you need expectations what do I mean by this can I just give you some tough love for a minute if you're a solopreneur you're probably really good at one thing and that is winging it you're just winging it ah maybe I'll work today maybe I'll finish that course today maybe I'll check my analytics today I I don't know what I'm gonna do this year like I think things are kind of doing better oh I don't feel like working oh yeah maybe I should do something for Black Friday you just Wing in your business when you have a team that depends on you either financially because you pay them or their job literally they need communication from you to do their job you can't wing it you find that out real quick and you get a team that you're winging it is is actually like a is a detriment to the success of the business and so that I didn't know that until I hired my first team member who was just a customer support guy just a buddy of mine that I paid 10 hours a week to manage my inbox and take care of my customers I started to realize oh I'm winging it I need more communication he was like well how do you deal with this how do you deal when someone complains about this I'm like I don't know just so I had to create processes and systems it really helped me refine my process and every time I added a team member on the content side on the copywriting side on the sales and marketing side on the uh you know Instagram site whatever it was uh it it required me to to stop winging it when you're solo you can just wing it but just because you can doesn't mean you should when you're winging it you are literally diluting your efforts and you're not going to make as much money or as much impact so here are four types of expectations you need to set I'm serious this this is like most people don't do this and this is why most people don't have a thriving solopreneur business right number one expectation are your Revenue expectations you're going to rise and fall to the level of your expectations if you expect to make about the same amount of money you made last year you know what you're gonna make the same amount of money you made last year if you expect a 2X your income this year you know what you're going to do you're probably going to two extra income you can't say that uh this is kind of how the human mind works whatever you set your mind to your subconscious and your brain and your genius that's within it has to close the freaking Loop like we're Loop closers we this is why we can't turn off bad movies like you're watching a bad movie on the Hallmark Channel which is a why are you even watching The Hallmark Channel it's a bad cheesy movie and you hate it but you can't stop it because you need to know how it ends right does he propose to her on Christmas like she wants or not like I need to know so like we have to close Loops that's why open loop email subject lines like I slapped him and this is what happened like I have to open that email because I have to know what happens I don't even have time to read this stupidity but I have to know what happens or mind wants to close the loops and so this is also why instead of saying and Robert Kiyosaki is the first person that I heard say this and Rich Dad Poor Dad instead of saying things like I can't afford this turn into a how question how could I afford this instead of saying I can't afford a hundred thousand dollar car ask how could I afford a hundred thousand dollar car you don't know but by asking how your brain goes to work well I could sell a lot of plasma donate a lot of plasma I could do like you know you just get curious and your brain goes to work and when your brain goes to work the the body follows right there's something I teach in my new book Rebel called the life change formula and and this is something I learned from a coach of my name Julia it's belief thoughts feelings actions so new beliefs change to give you new thoughts which give you new feelings which lead to new actions so if nothing happens without action I can't 2x my business by not doing anything but if I change my beliefs AKA my expectation that's going to change what I think about if I'm think if I believe I'm going to 2x my business this year that I'm starting to think about 2x in my business and how could I 2x my business and what it'll it'll feel like when I 2x my business so my feelings change I'm getting excited I'm getting anticipation I don't want to let myself down especially if I have accountability for my community now there's peer pressure to do it my feelings my thoughts are all around 2xing and then I'm gonna have to start doing different things to 2x my business so change your beliefs change your thoughts change your feelings what changes your actions which lead to results that's the only way life change happens or business change happens so you need Revenue expectations what do you expect to make this year what do you expect to make next year this isn't just wishing I could say I expect to make a billion dollars next year I mean that's maybe not a bad idea right there's a great book called 10x is easier than 2x thinking about how can I make a billion dollars next year I probably realistically won't hit a billion but it might help me make an extra million you know like there's no harm in having huge expectations yet there's a culture of oh just temper our expectations I don't want to have to have expectations which I think is just you and me preemptively not letting ourselves down and getting hurt we don't want to be hurt we don't want to be disappointed so we just have low expectations we have small dreams this is something again I talk about my book Rebel um and so we're doing ourselves a disservice set Revenue expectations every business needs to know if you're a publicly traded company you literally by law have to like share what your expect quarterly expectations are and then you have to like give quarterly reports if you exceeded met or did not meet your your quarterly Revenue expectations right this is all kind of like tracked very publicly and I think that helps companies because there's accountability there to the shareholders and to the general public so Revenue expectations stop winging your Revenue number two quarterly goals these are your expectations for your quarterly goals don't just Wing what you're doing I'm so fascinated with the fact that my clients and my students sometimes have no idea what they're working on yeah I might work on this I might work on this what you should have one massive overarching goal per quarter so that could mean building and launching a new product that could mean overhauling all your stuff moving into kajabi that could mean developing a new keynote and practicing it and getting booked on your next stage that could mean writing a book like I I don't know what it is but have one overarching goal per quarter and then you can have up to two other sub goals but really it's one to three main goals per quarter and like every business needs to have quarterly goals of what you're working on what you want to accomplish what projects what things you want to create even if that's learning like I literally my quarterly goal um it's almost like a four month goal but it's like September through December I'm like deep in learning mode I'm I have coursework I'm going through for a new program I'm a part of for very specific things I'm learning and then within that I'm also developing a brand new keynote my quarterly goal for the summer quarter which is kind of like May June July that's not really a quarter I know but for that three month process I was writing my book because I get the book done that was my main goal right like so what do you what are your goals you need to have those expectations number three expectation your work Rhythm your office hours when do you expect to be in the office if you had a team when would they and when could they expect you to be in the office if you don't have set office hours you don't respect yourself I'm not advocating rigidity for the sake of rigidity I'm advocating intentionality and self-respect if you just wake up and like do I feel like working today you're not a real business owner you're winging it this is what gives solopreneurs a Bad Name They just they say the laptop lifestyle and they're like I might be by the pool that no don't mishear me I like working in beautiful places beautiful hotel lobbies by the pool I've even worked at the beach before that's great but I have work hours and I can change those work hours if I'm traveling or if I'm taking a couple weeks off but I have a schedule because I have self-respect I treat myself like a CEO of a company I it's not magic it's just this is why I'm wearing shoes and cologne right now okay I'm there's nobody here there's no one to see me there's no one to smell me that's why I brushed my teeth this morning right no one's going to smell my breath no one's going to smell my cologne no one's going to see that I'm wearing shoes or your pants you can't even see if I'm wearing pants I'm wearing pants okay why do I do this because I feel more professional when I've got shoes on pants on and cologne on very simple right and so my wife makes fun of me like why do you spray cologne and you go sit by yourself in your office for a few hours because I'm making money babe I'm a so I'm a CEO of a company so that's all that's just like side stuff but like I know when I'm gonna work and I know when I'm not gonna work just plan your Rhythm you get and that's the thing you get to decide you get to decide what that looks like and hey you're not stuck with it my work rhythms change seasonally throughout the year we just came off of the summer and in the summer I dropped down to one day a week because my kids are home and I want to spend more time with them and I only have four more Summers with my oldest and seven more Summers with my youngest so summers are precious to me so I changed my work with them but at least have work Rhythm expectations and office hour expectations you need to figure those out for yourself as well and final expectations you need to know is you need to know what your tasks expectations are and you need to review those tasks at least twice a year doing 80 20 analysis right where you look at every task you've been doing every day week or month and then you filter it through and I talked about this a couple weeks ago on my five hour work week episode of how to have a five hour work week you full you go through the the the process of eliminate automate delegate and then concentrate right which I stole from Rory made in the concentrate part but eliminate automate delegate I got from Tim Ferriss and I've been using that for a decade and it works beautifully um and you you apply the 80 20 principle to all your tasks a good CEO of a company is going to review all the tasks that he or she is doing and all the tasks that her managers are doing and their employees are doing now he might not be able to review everybody's tasks but he would have somebody review everyone's tasks because no company wants to have employees that are getting paid money to do work that doesn't move the needle right we'd rather pay them less and just do the parts that matter or double down on the parts of matter and keep their salary the same and when we double the results does this make sense so that's it your expectations Revenue expectations quarterly goal expectations your work Rhythm and work our expectations and your task expectations that's it Ace Ace every good solopreneur needs automation community and expectations my question for you is which of those three the a the C the E the automation Community expectation are you weakest on it's okay if you're watching on YouTube put a comment below which of those three are you weakest on I can tell you my weakness has always been community I've talked about this a month or so ago I did an episode on if I were starting over today what would I do differently in my business and there's two things I said that relate to community I would have hired a mentor sooner and I would have jumped inside of a community sooner being inside of paid communities free communities and hiring mentors and coaches I've seen the fastest growth and I've hired a variety of coaches in a variety of areas from wealth management to coat how to coach well to mindset to digital entrepreneurship to authoring to speaking all the things of a bunch of different coaches have been in multiple masterminds in multiple paid communities in multiple free communities and every time I've been in community I've grown the fastest but that's it took me probably three to four years before I got my first coach or Mentor or jump to my first Community I'm weak there I'm fine being by myself and I'm I guess I'm prideful I think I don't need anybody else or like I'll figure it out eventually I'm like the guy that won't ask for directions or help because I'll figure it out eventually um and that's that's a detriment to my success and I think it would have grown faster sooner if I commuted earlier so that's my weakest it has been but now it's becoming one of my strongest um because I've seen the power of it so what about you what's your weakest is automation tools is it the community or is it the expectations leave a comment below um and let me just final bit of encouragement uh being a solopreneur is a is a great privilege I consider it a great honor to have been a solopreneur most of my journey I have a small team now but I feel like I still embody the solopreneur life it has given me and my family the most amount of freedom um it sets so many of my friends and students and clients free and you are living in the greatest time in the history of planet Earth to be an entrepreneur in general and then to be a solopreneur in particular because you have more access to Automation and Community than ever before the expectations that's on you but the way the internet has gone is there's more opportunity and ease of access to Automation and Community than ever before so my friend you have so few excuses to be successful to not be successful like you've got this and I just want to encourage you don't feel like you got to hire people don't let anybody pressure you don't don't fall for the you know clone yourself delegate to to scale like these are all things I teach and all things I believe in but don't fall prey to the pressure to do it if you're not ready don't be afraid of it either it's not that hard but get these three things in place automation community and expectations in place crush your business get to six multi-six figures potentially and then maybe hire somebody and then watch yourself soar even more all right thanks for hanging out today it's been fun keep it real stay safe have an amazing week and I'll see you on another episode real soon [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Graham Cochrane

Views: 4,469

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Id: DU6GDZmGQ2Q

Length: 41min 11sec (2471 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 03 2023