MBA2542 Is Being a Solopreneur a Good Idea?

0:06Hey, welcome back to the$100 MBA show. I'm Omar Zinhome, and in today's lesson, you will learn whether being a solopreneur is a good idea. Spoiler alert, it's okay to start this way. I started out as a solopreneur, but you can easily be trapped into something that's far from true entrepreneurship. I'm very, very opinionated when it comes to this because I was trapped for a bit of time and it's not fun. Today, we're going to dive into why you need to move beyond solopreneurship as a model of business and build a sustainable, scalable business to improve your quality of life and be able to really build something that's significant.

0:46Okay, we're going to talk about what that really means. And I'm going to show you how to do it too. I'm going to show you why it's important and then what are the steps you need to take, the steps I took to break free from solopreneurship. When I was preparing for today's episode, I learned an incredible stat, a stat that really shocked me. 78 % of small business owners in the U.S. are self-employed with no employees. That's according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Most businesses start this way, but many of them stay this way. And today I want to show you how to get out of that cycle of trading time for money and go beyond, you know, this solopreneurship stage.

1:23It's just a stage I kind of see as like having training wheels on a bike. You got to take off the training wheels eventually and have a full-fledged business. So what do I mean by real business or true entrepreneurship? Essentially, it's you stopping the cycle of trading time for money. It's you using a form of leverage. And there are really four basic forms of leverage. I'm going to go through them, but I'll be kind of going into detail throughout the episode because they're so important. So the first form of leverage is labor. Old as anything, right? The pyramids were built not by one person.

1:56It wasn't a solopreneur that built those pyramids in Egypt. They're built by labor Many people working towards this And this is still happening today with manufacturing People helping put cars together Or planes or desks Or whatever it might be There's still room for human beings right now The robots do certain things But some things need dexterity And that requires the leverage of labor You can't really have A large business that mass produces product Without that The second form of leverage Is capital where you are using money to make money, right? Somebody like Warren Buffett leverages capital.

2:34He invests his money into businesses, whether as a stock or shareholder, or he's actually privately as an angel investor investing in a business. Banks make money off lending out money. So this is a form of leverage. The third form of leverage is code or technology. You know, when I had my software company, Webinar Ninja, I created with my team a code base, a software that served my customers. My customers were able to run webinars, rain or shine 24-7 when I was sleeping, and that product just sold itself online. So I leveraged the power of code and technology to make money. And the last form of leverage is media or content, and this podcast is a good example of that.

3:19You know, I'm creating this podcast episode right now. it's going to get published it's going to you know edited then published and put out in the world and hundreds of thousands of people are going to consume it and benefit from it somebody who writes a book is doing the same thing writes the book once and then it gets read and it gets sold to so many people so these are basically the four forms of leverage that you can use to break free from changing or exchanging time for money just to go over them again one more time number one is labor, two is capital, three is code or technology, and then four is media or content.

3:54So why does this matter? Well, as a solopreneur, if you're not using any forms of leverage, or all of them, which I prefer, you're essentially an independent contractor. Your income is tied to how much time you're putting into the work. And the problem here is there's a ceiling. There's only a certain number of hours a day, a certain number of days in the week, a number of weeks in the year. There's just a cap of how much money you can make. A good example of this is like a freelance designer, somebody who charges by the hour. They can only work a certain amount of hours before they collapse and they're tired, have to go to bed.

4:26And there's only a certain amount of hours they can bill every single month. Even if they work 16 hours a day, that's the cap. But if the designer starts building a team, starts using the leverage of labor and starts getting other people to design things or creates templates. and that's a product and he uses technology for that, right? Now they have a different business. Now they're able to sell things and produce things without their input of time. If you're doing all the work right now, you need to start thinking how you can leverage labor, whether it's hiring people on your team to do the work you're doing.

5:00And by the way, a lot of people see this as a blocker. And one of the mind shifts you have to have is that you're not special, right? You learned something and now you're doing it and you're charging for it. Somebody else can learn it as well and do it for you. So you can train people to do things your way and the way you prefer. But the point here is that don't think that you can't train anybody. Hire people to replace you so you can be free of time and you can start leveraging labor and start making money even when you're not around, when you're on holiday. Think of how you can leverage code or media or capital in order for you to be able to break free from that solopreneurship.

5:36Next, let's talk about what happens if you just stay as a solopreneur. What are the consequences of just hanging in the game of solopreneurship? Long term, this can lead to burnout. And this actually happened to me where I was just like, I just can't do all the work anymore. I had a really low quality of life. I was stressed out. I was tired. I had no free time. I wasn't really building anything that significant because it's really hard to build something amazing or great or impactful in the world when it's just you. And there's only so much you can do. It's okay. You're a human being, right? So the problem is, is that there's only so much you can do.

6:11And in my personal opinion, building a business alone is like building a business on hard mode. You can do so much better by building a team, by getting people to help you create code and technology to leverage your business, by taking the profits of your business and investing using capital, right? To leverage using media is so much easier now with YouTube and podcasts and all the different media out there that has no gatekeepers, right? It's so much simpler to be able to broadcast your information. But if you don't do this, this keeps you small, keeps you small in terms of what you could do in your business.

6:46It keeps your mentality small. It keeps you from taking long vacations or being able to handle unexpected challenges in life, like an illness or a family member needing you, family emergencies. It's really got you by the shackles and it's not fun. Okay. And it's really actually dangerous to kind of be a solopreneur for the longterm. You're asking for trouble in my opinion. Listen, I've seen many people go down this path of solopreneurship. They're very excited in the beginning of the freedom they have, and they don't have a boss anymore and all that kind of stuff. But then they eventually start working 60 plus hours a week and can't step away from their business.

7:23And they're worried about their business falling apart, if they get sick, that's not freedom. That's a trap. So I want you to start taking action. Okay. If you're feeling trapped, start delegating small tasks. One of the easiest ways to do this is just to hire an executive assistant or virtual assistant. There's some really good talent out of the Philippines. I've worked with a lot of Filipinos in my businesses, and they're really good at getting a lot of the menial tasks like emails and calendars and documentation and all that stuff, data entry out of the way, the things that don't really make you money, but you got to do it to run your business.

8:00And you can hire a good VA for 500, 600, a thousand dollars a month if they're really experienced. And, you know, a great resource for that is onlinejobs.ph. It's a great job board in the Philippines. I've hired over a dozen people off that job board. But my point here is that I want to challenge you to start delegating some task, even if it just costs you a few hundred dollars part time for somebody to do that. This will free up your time and allow you to focus on more strategic growth and not just the day to day operations of your business. Now, one of the things I learned when I started using these forms of leverage is that it allows your business to have exponential growth, meaning that the amount of work and effort I'm giving the business is not equal to my output.

8:48my output is actually exponentially better than what I'm putting in, right? I'm actually working far less than I used to since I've started using this, you know, about a decade ago. And each time I do this, and the more time that goes by that I'm using these forms of leverage, the easier and easier it gets to make money, right? Because this stuff compounds over time. So the key to breaking free from solopreneurship is really using these forms of leverage. Leverage allows you to multiply your efforts and grow your business without increasing your workload. A good example of this is creating an online course or some sort of subscription service.

9:25Once the initial work is done, once you've actually put it all together, it runs itself. Basically, there's some work you're going to have to do, but the amount of input you're putting into the business is nothing compared to what you're getting out of it in terms of financial gain. You don't need to be present every single moment and you don't need to be present to actually make the sale. This is the power of leverage, your business starts working for you instead of you working for the business. So here's an action step. Look for ways to automate or scale your current business model. Could you turn your service into a product?

10:00Could you create content that brings in leads automatically? Could you outsource some of your work to focus on high impact areas so you don't have to do the menial tasks? These are the questions that will help you find your leverage. Let's just take a timeout real quick. Let's get real, just like honest for a second. If you don't start leveraging labor, technology, media, even capital, your quality of life will suffer. You'll be stuck in a cycle of doing everything yourself, feeling the weight of the world on your shoulders, limiting your potential, and eventually burning out. This is the hard truth that nobody told me, and I want to tell you.

10:41The hard truth is that building a business alone is like doing it on hard mode, like I mentioned. With that leverage, you'll always be exchanging time for money, and eventually, you're going to hit that ceiling I talked about. So, to wrap up, is being a solopreneur a good idea? It's okay to start with. It's a good way for you to start learning what business is all about and the structure of a business and the different jobs that the business requires. But staying in the solopreneurship model far too long can limit your growth. It can limit your income and your freedom. True entrepreneurship is about leverage, and that's what will allow you to scale your business and break free from trading time for money.

11:19So please start using leverage as soon as you can so you can start exponentially growing your business. Thanks for tuning in to The$100 MBA Show. I hope you found this episode valuable. And if you're ready to start leveraging your business for growth, we got a whole lot more insights, a whole lot more lessons for you to consume templates, guides over on our website, 100mba.net. And if you're serious about growing your business and want to continue to improve your skills, I'm going to see you on the next episode. We publish three days a week on the podcast, on every platform, Spotify, Apple, you name it, or on YouTube.

11:57Check us out on YouTube over at 100mba.net slash YouTube. will take us straight to our page so you can subscribe and never miss a beat. I'll see you in the next one.