How to design a one-person business around yourself
Part 2 of 3 on designing a business around yourself.
Last time I wrote to you it was with a question: What is your Unique Contribution?
A quick reminder: your Unique Contribution is your personality and intelligence, your skills and experiences, values, curiosities and your WHY.
In today's post I share how you can use this information to build a one-person business around yourself.
Rarely do perfect jobs exist. But when you build a business around yourself you can literally design your ideal career and life because you are at the centre. It’s your very own masterpiece and will be your life’s greatest work.
This is not self-serving: it’s about identifying which problems in the world your Unique Contribution can be of service to.
Your one-person business is about creating a sustainable business model without the need for investment, a big team, huge overheads or unsustainable growth metrics. It's a type of entrepreneurship for people who LOVE what they do and want to spend their lives getting better at doing it.
It's the work that you, and only you, were designed to do in this world and done correctly, will get paid incredibly well to do it.
Interested?
Keep reading for the exact steps on how to do just that, leveraging your Unique Contribution.
Building a one-person business around yourself is not a get-rich-quick scheme of day trading, flipping houses, NFTs or joining a multi-level-marketing scheme.
This is about designing a business you want to run for a long time, getting insanely good at your craft, and working with better clients – for higher fees – as you go. Where you can create time and financial freedom but relish the times when you are at work because you’ve designed something that aligns so well with who you are and how you exist in this world.
I’ve made hundreds of thousands of pounds doing this kind of work, and know that at the end of the day, it's not even about the cheques themselves. It’s about your freedom. Freedom because running your one-person business means you get to call the shots about what to work on and how you do it. Then, outside of work, you can design your life how you want it to look.
In this piece I share the steps I've taken both myself and The Ask clients through. Steps that will help you to answer the all important questions: What’s my business’ vision? What will I offer and how will I deliver on this promise to my customers? How can I stand out? Get clients? Make enough money?
Whether you are just about to embark on your one-person business building journey, have already started, or are pivoting into a new direction, you can apply these steps today.
PS as you go through these steps if you feel you’d value more support, take a look at my 1-1 coaching and mentoring programme that will get you to a profitable one person business in just a matter of months.
1) Positioning your one-person business
If you read this post about finding your Unique Contribution you’ll know how your personality, skills, values, life experiences and missions are the bedrock for your one-person business.
The second stage of this process turns these inward reflections outwards and asks: how can I position myself into the external world and map my Unique Contribution onto the external world, and get paid to do it?
Whilst a business vision and mission might seem like something only VC funded businesses should work through, I know from experience how much guidance they can offer one-person businesses alike. I’ve coached and consulted PR professionals, strategy consultants, startup coaches, marketing and comms experts (and more) to define their business’ vision and the exercise that follows can help you to do the same.
Steps for Positioning Your One-Person Business
Your Impact Statement
This is an inspiring, mental picture of what you want your business to achieve and how you will change the world as a result. For example, a psychotherapist I helped create their private practice, came up with this impact statement: “To bring about greater awareness of unhealthy behaviour patterns within romantic relationships — to create more sustainable relationships both within the partnership and with ourselves”Your Method
This is the method by which you’ll achieve said impact. What exactly will you offer and through what medium? Events? Courses? Community? Coaching? Entertainment? Your methods should be grounded in what your Unique Contribution statement tells you. Some clients are more equipped for live, in person events, than others, for example. My love of writing has meant that my coaching business has always had an educational, content-rich angle to it.Your Principles
This is how your one-person business will show up in the world. It’s what you’ll prioritise and ultimately be known for as you pursue your Impact statement. As a one-person business it's helpful to have a checklist to follow before you create something new or execute on an idea, you only have so many resources, your Principles are designed to keep you honest. By following them, not only does it give your work a unique differentiator to others out there offering similar things, but ensure you’ll only produce work you are proud of and will develop loyal customers and fans along the way. One client has ‘Create Wonder’ as a principle and it’s a constant reminder to experiment, and to produce completely novel ideas for her clients.Your Game-Plan
You know your impact, method and your principles, now you need to plan the steps you’ll take. Your Game-Plan for your one-person business can be written up like a mini essay. ‘Here’s how I will run this business” and get it on paper. Creativity happens within the confines and there is no greater confine than having just one person in your business! But to leverage this to your advantage, you will come up with a plan based on staying nimble. This is about leveraging your specific superpowers, unfair advantage, your network and experiences in a way your competitors can’t. For example, a client wanted to go into general strategy work, and because of their time working in Soho House group, has focused their niche on membership clubs and hotels which gives them an advantage above the other generalist strategists out there.Your Goals
You can – and definitely should – pick goals which are important to you. Not vanity driven goals to please your ego or the opinions of others. I’ve got this wrong SO many times, for example going for bigger and bigger email subscriber lists, to later realise it was a vanity metric. Now, my goals need to be more about the LIFE I want to live, both during the working hours and outside of them. Your goals help you to judge YOUR version of success in your one-person business, and may be related to developing your craft, your time-off, income, who you work with etc. Beware – more goals isn’t necessarily better and less goals forces you to make decisions on what actually matters most.
With those five positioning questions answered, you have a clear head start over other one person business owners on your journey to building a profitable and sustainable business, over the long term.
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1) Designing your unique offers & process
When it comes to turning your one-person business vision into a reality, you’ll need to provide your customers with something that they want to pay you for.
This is your offer aka what you are offering them, and your process, aka how you are delivering upon this promise.
I’ve seen SO many clients think they need a laundry list of offers and to cater for every price point and buyer out there.
Nope! You must try to keep it simple when you’re starting out and over time, you can evolve and add to your plate.
One of the best descriptions I’ve ever seen of this process is from the essay ‘Ladders of Wealth Creation’, by Nathan Barry, who explains the journey moving away from trading your time for money (in a job) to building something divorced from your time entirely (typically building software, media or assets).
He shows us in this diagram what that progression looks like, and there are four ladders, each increasingly complex, and the rungs within them, increasingly complex, too.
Image from Nathan Barry
If a one-person business is your end goal then you don’t need to build an entire marketplace – only big software teams are able to get to this level. Rather, one-person businesses typically do well in the services category, with digital products to supplement.
It’s likely you’ll find more wealth the closer you get into the ‘Productised Services’ ladder. For most, however, they’ll start out with either hourly or contract work based on a project, as they get to know their services and their clients better. Eventually, you’ll want to package up your unique offers and methods into something that can be recurring or delivered with a ‘packaged’ service. For example, my Unique Contribution coaching & mentoring programme, delivers a set of deliverables to a similar client, with a consistent end result: a profitable one-person business.
A new coach who is just starting out or who doesn’t have a niche, can easily get stuck delivering one-off sessions to clients. But after not too long, will realise their income has become capped to their ability to find enough of these clients on an ongoing basis and deliver enough sessions. This method will never give you the life you want.
Sure, some coaches can join as a member of a team inside a coaching organisation, but know that that is not much different than having a job. It’s certainly not the same as building a one person business.
Assuming you want a one person business, use this ladder to help you design your offers and process in a way that not only makes sense for your target clients, but for your own lifestyle and financial goals.
I help 1-1 clients to define their ‘suite’ of offers – usually that’s two or three. A recent client within their first year running their one person business has built a 2k strong email list & community, and designed a set of offers for business clients that generated six-figures of income. Those same clients often came off the back of the newsletter.
His results were so incredible because he worked really hard, but crucially, did the groundwork with me to define his Unique Contribution. From here, this work was in line with his natural talents, interests, missions and causes and made the process of generating client work more enjoyable – and faster to execute upon!
Here are some best practices to keep in mind when building your offers and services:
To start with you are going for case studies and experiences, so figure out what will be an easy ‘yes’ for the clients you want to work with. In time you can reduce scope or increase fees, but get the experiences first and they’ll serve you well later. I kept coaching fees low in the early days, and ran a recruitment business on the side, until I was able to switch to doing coaching 100% of my time when I had more experience and could charge higher fees, for example.
Start by offering high-touch personalised services. This is often the work that doesn’t scale, but means that you can see for yourself in real time what resonates most with your clients, and where they need the most help from you. Then at a later point in time you can look over this data and ‘productise’ what you’ve done into a digital offering, course or book for example. These mini products can present you with opportunities for passive income, but are hard to start off, without the experience of helping your clients in a 1-1 setting with this kind of transformation.
Consider how your products and services can serve as a bridge to one another. Perhaps the most quick and low-cost way to work with you, is the first step on a client's journey with you. But if they are impressed with how you helped them, they will see your higher-ticket offers as less of a risk. If each of these offers serves the same type of client, and helps them with the same type of problem, you can create leads into your other offers, by delivering a great service on the first ones. You’re literally being paid to create new leads.
You can’t do this for ALL types of clients, on ALL types of problems though. You want to develop a process that works consistently and can scale without you, over time. To get here, you have to pick something specific to offer and get known for doing that.
Creating a one-person business can be a life-long journey of going deeper into your specialism. Of learning it inside out and staying in this narrow field, rather than broadening outwards.
In ‘The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth’, author David Baker explains how many entrepreneurial experts he knows have gone so narrow in their offering, that they can command a super high fee for what they offer because it's so unique. They can then use this income they’ve created to afford a variety in their personal life. Through hobbies, skills and interests on the side. Or raising a family. Or learning about history, culture and macro trends and thinking about how they intersect and interact with their unique craft. For me in the last couple of years I’ve maintained a tight niche on client and coaching offers, but travelled the world doing so, picked up a new language (Spanish) and performed Improv comedy (my hobby) on stages in London and Chicago.
If you like variety, a one person business model may not be for you. Or, if you follow the Unique Contribution method you can have a niche business and find other ways to bring variety into your life. In a way that doesn’t involve having to create lots of different products and services to lots of different customers and getting lost and burned out in the process.
3) Standing out from the crowd
With your offers in place, it's time to stand out and ensure people care enough to buy from YOU. My coach once said to me that marketing is as simple as asking “am I good at this?” and “do other people know it?”.
If you’ve followed the steps up until now, you can tick off that first box. You are really good at this thing – it's your Unique Contribution, after all!
But do people know it? That’s where many people get stuck. We live in a crowded world, where prospective buyers might be able to find our one person business from anywhere in the world (thanks to the internet) but by that same virtue they are inundated with so many other options.
I want you for a moment to imagine that you are on stage and you’re an actor, but you don’t have a script. Why? You’re doing Improv. Terrifying, no!?
That means, not only do the other actors not know where this scene is going, but neither does the audience. I’ve been learning Improv for a few years now, and one of the biggest ‘rules’ you get taught in Improv training is to give your character a ‘Point of View’. Ideally something strange or unusual e.g. an immoral priest, the insecure model, the indecisive courtroom judge. The reason ‘Point of View’ is so important here is that it makes people CARE enough to follow this character, and for your character to more clearly communicate to the other characters on stage, as well as the audience, what they are about and what’s going on. It’s what keeps a scene together.
The same needs to be true for your one-person business.
You are on the stage when you market your services, and the audience are your prospective customers. What do you stand for? How can you tell a story they can get behind? A story that they believe enough to care about and then ultimately buy from you?
Despite being a one-person business you’ll be surrounded by people – your clients, your mentors, your business buddies, suppliers, collaborators and maybe even a freelance team for specific projects. These people will all care enough to work with you if you stand for something.
So the way that you stand out, is to stand for something.
It might be obvious but you have an opinion by… having an opinion.
Look inwards, and keep refining what you know and what you believe. From there you can do ‘marketing’ and promote your business better because you’ll be more authentic about what you put out there.
Many business owners resent the marketing side of running a business because they think that they must follow the trends set out by the major platforms and what’s in vogue at this point in time. It can be exhausting.
So, how should you choose your activities?
It's the ones that sit at the intersection of enjoyment and effectiveness, and your experience of business-building on the whole will improve. Find tasks that bring you mastery, domain knowledge and skills you would love to possess, not resentment. Try these examples on for size:
If you’re struggling with SEO and keywords due to the data-driven mindset they require but are a natural communicator and relationship builder, then a podcast may serve you better than a blog.
If you’ve never used Twitter in your life but you’ve spent hours pouring over visual inspo on Pinterest to decorate your house and plan your dream wedding, then choose the platform you know and love
If you are somewhat disorganised then running in-person events to gain awareness for your business might not be the best fit, where setting up some automated sales funnels could save you a lot of stress.
I recently let go of YouTube marketing because the hours spent fiddling around were super draining, instead, I’ve gone into these long copy documents!
Having a focused list for you means instead of trying to juggle many things, you’ll have more time and headspace to run a more successful, profitable, one person business.
I’d argue that being a one-person business owner is not about keeping UP it’s about doubling DOWN.
Your clients need you to commit, and stay focused.
Remember that you are in this for the long run and you want to choose marketing and promotional activities that you’ll love, not just tomorrow, but in ten years time. That’s because those activities will actually be in line with your unique talents and you’ll love the process, not just the result. That’s authentic.
Ignore the distractions, let your competitors try and game the system and go viral to find that their tactics were short lived.
Finding clients and making money in your one-person business.
The steps I’ve just shared with you will take you up to the point of being able to actually sell your services to clients, and get attention for your work. Next up, you’ll need to work through a sales plan and the financials for your business, to ensure it all stacks up
I’ve covered a lot in this post alone so for now, sit with these steps and then in two weeks I’ll be back in your inbox with steps 4 and 5 (getting clients and creating profit).
Until then, I would love to hear how you are getting on with the steps shared so far, and as always, if you want more support with this process, to work through questions, fears, or ideas and be held accountable to making real progress, The Ask’s Unique Contribution programme is designed for getting one person business owners clear, focused, and up and running.
