Are you a solopreneur looking to grow? What’s stopping you? The chances are it’s one or more of these big three obstacles. Growing your business could break it.
Many businesses start as one-person operations. It makes sense to do everything yourself – Up to a point. There comes a point where you don’t have enough hours in the day to do everything you need to do. You also might realise that your skills and knowledge are lacking in some areas.
It starts to make sense to hire a freelancer or someone to work part-time from home.
Premises Issues
You can run your business from your garage or your spare bedroom as long as it’s just you. The minute you want to hire someone else, you need an office. Or do you?
The solution is to either hire a freelancer or to look for a co-working space.
Freelancers sort out their own working space, their own computers, and their own taxes. You just pay the invoices they send for work done. This is the simplest way to expand your business. The process is simple: Set up an account at a freelancing site, set up a project, wait for bids, and choose the person you think will do the job best.
Co-working spaces work best when you need a team to work on a project. You can hire two or three desks at a daily rate and work together without any long-term lease commitment. There are many co-working spaces in every city.
Legal Issues
When you work on your own, you just have to fill in your annual tax return. When you start employing others, you have to deduct their income tax and pay it for them before paying them the balance of their wages.
You need to learn about your obligations as an employer; pension contributions, insurance, and contracts just for starters – Legal advice doesn’t come cheap, either. However, start by reading the government’s free advice for small businesses and entrepreneurs.
Communication Issues
If you decide to employ freelancers who live hundreds of miles away, how do you talk to them?
Forget email as your main comms channel -You get no tone of voice or sense of what’s really happening with your freelance employees. Phones work up to a point, but you can’t read facial expressions and body language over the phone.
Video calls are your best alternative to in-person meetings. You get tone, facial expressions, and body language for total communication.
You may be thinking, “Ahh, Zoom, Skype” but there are many alternatives. The best conference call service for your company depends on your priorities – Cost, ability to record, encryption, the maximum number of people on a call, and many other factors.
Personality Issues
Are you a manager or an entrepreneur? You can’t be both.
Every hour you spend managing employees, assigning tasks and on essential admin is another hour you are not growing your business.
You cannot do everything yourself because every role needs a different skill-set, and entrepreneur skills are very different from the leadership skills a good manager has.
There comes a point where every entrepreneur has a decision to make; to employ others, or to remain as a one-person operation. Growing your business could break it, and that’s the reality of things.
Only employ others if you can see your way to employ a manager as well. You have many skills, but you are not and never want to be a manager.
