There’s a lot of surface-level advice online.
“How do I start an online business?”
“Oh, just wake up one hour earlier. Go to bed one hour later. Start posting content online.”
It’s like telling an obese person to eat less. It’s obvious and not very effective.
Look, solopreneurship is the new age of work, whether you like it or not.
- 10 million temps get placed in different companies every day. (What is a temp if not a solopreneur who’s outsourced sales?)
- Google works with 120K freelancers & subcontractors (and 100K employees)
- 54% of employees in the USA have side hustles, and 42% of employees in the EU are considering starting a side hustle (only 15% of Europeans have already started, but it’s coming)
I know some people don’t like to hear this. It’s fine. There will always be room for employees in the world. There will always be big institutions and corporations that have full-time staff.
If anything, solopreneurship will make employees more expensive, and don’t make a mistake — we NEED employees to be more expensive.
“From 1978 to 2018, CEO salaries grew by one thousand and seven percent. In the same time frame, average worker wages grew eleven percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute. And that’s average salaries. Not base ones. Not minimum wage. Federal minimum wage has only been raised ten times in forty years.
Today it only takes the average CEO until noon on New Year’s Day to earn what the average worker earns all year.” -Linda Caroll
If you genuinely prefer to be employed, great. Diversity makes the world go around.
But if you do want to jump into solopreneurship, only you still need a salary — here’s the first step.
Here’s the first step to transition from an employee to a solopreneur.
Go work for a startup. For a small, new company. For a dreamer.
You need a salary? Okay. I get that. But get your salary someplace where you’ll learn entrepreneurship.
Because solopreneurship is a form of entrepreneurship.
And you will never learn entrepreneurship in a corporation. Corporations have a top-heavy management model with a multi-layered hierarchy. With every management level, the scope of decision-making allowance goes down.
Simply said, an employee in a corporation — including low-level managers — is much better trained in executing operational tasks within small, pre-defined processes than in leadership, innovation and risk-taking (key characteristics of entrepreneurs).
Talking about characteristics, let’s look at the top qualities of an employee VS the top qualities of an entrepreneur.
Great employees, according to my vast online research, are:
- Humble
- Reliable
- Team players
- Leaders — but only if their type of leadership fits within the culture of the organisation
- Detail-oriented
Great entrepreneurs are:
- Curios
- Experimenters
- Decisive (how can you be decisive as a humble team player, exactly?)
- Risk-tolerant (corporations hate that)
- Innovative
- Long-term thinkers (which means big-picture thinkers, which is the opposite of detail-oriented)
“The problem isn’t the occasional control freak; it’s the hierarchical structure that systematically disempowers lower-level employees. For example, as a consumer you have the freedom to spend $20,000 or more on a new car, but as an employee you probably don’t have the authority to requisition a $500 office chair. Narrow an individual’s scope of authority, and you shrink the incentive to dream, imagine, and contribute.” — Harvard Business Review
Is working for a new company/startup really that different?
Founders of new businesses need results more than they need processes.
Which means they need employees who will take responsibility for their results. These employees get the relevant power to execute those responsibilities.
In a new company, you’re much more likely to work closer to the founder and learn entrepreneurship by example. You’re much more likely to be able to make big, fast decisions and learn from the consequences.
Startup employees live right on the edge between employment and entrepreneurship.
I became a solopreneur after working on a big dining table, shoulder to shoulder with my employer. The company had 30 employees when I started. Now, it has 700 employees.
My husband became an entrepreneur after joining a million-dollar start-up as their 3rd employee.
Tony Robbins says proximity is power. To become a solopreneur, get closer to entrepreneurs.
See how they think, act and make decisions.
Final Words.
No matter how much I’d love to say that my articles, my newsletter, or any online resource will make you a raving success, it’s not true.
You can only really get what I’m trying to teach you if you already have the basics of an entrepreneurial mindset.
To get there, quit your corporate job and work for someone who, if anything, will support you having a side hustle and bigger dreams.
For more out-of-the-box advice on how to build a super profitable solo-business and change your life, subscribe to Smarter Solopreneurs.