102: Elaine Pofeldt - Get the Most out of Less

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done? I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent, and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have. Talk to docs of Talent and you won't be disappointed. Go to docsatant.com Bill G. Again, that's doxataalent.com Bill G. One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G. Check it out today. Well, whether your business is large or small, whether you want to be a solopreneur or you want to conquer the world, there's a message for all of us in today's show. It's all about how to get the most with the fewest number of people. So we're really talking today about how to have a business over a million dollars with just one person. But, but you'll hear that it's relevant even if you wanted to create a business of several hundred million dollars. And we'll show the range of it. So listen in. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business Podcast. I'm your host and growth coach, Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today is Elaine Pofelt who is going to talk all about building business over a million dollars, but with just one person. So this is really great if you're a one person solopreneur or aspire to be. But it's also gonna be relevant for those of you with bigger businesses to rethink some of the things that you're doing and how you're scaling. And I think that'll be clear as we go on. So welcome to the show, Elaine.

Thanks so much, Bill. It's great to be here.

So Elaine's an independent journalist and speaker. She's worked with Vern forever and ever and she's the author of this new book, the Million Dollar One Think. The ideas in it and also the many, many case studies in it are really interesting. And I heard her speak in a meeting at our Scaling Up Summit and I thought we should do a show with you right away.

It's wonderful to be here and continue the conversation, Bill. It was a lot of fun to be there at the summit.

That's great. So why don't you, before we get into the million dollar Business, Some of the examples of it. Tell us about, give us a little bit of your background. So how did you get into become a business writer and how'd you connect to Vern and like that?

Oh, that's a long story.

Yeah, goodbye.

I started out as a reporter, as a street reporter in Patterson, New Jersey and Jersey City, New Jersey, and then I morphed into, into a business reporter sort of accidentally. After about seven or eight years of covering things like the Hudson county jail, I was looking for something light and fun to cover. So I took a job as a fashion editor at Womenswear Daily, a totally different beat. And I found that I was very interested in the business side of the fashion designers businesses that I was covering. So. So I had an opportunity to join Success magazine as an editor and came on board and worked there for a while. And then I moved over to Fortune Small business at Time Inc. That was actually where I met Vern. I was his editor at Fortune Small Business magazine and have collaborated with him on his Scaling up book since then. But the way I came up with the idea for the book came out of my journalism. I am a contributor to Forbes and I write a blog for them about one aspect of entrepreneurship, the one person business. And one day when I was brainstorming for topics, I was surfing the Internet and I came across the US Census Bureau's non employer statistics, which sound very wonky, but they're really actually quite fascinating. And they look at businesses that have no employees except for the owner. So they could be solo entrepreneurs. Mostly they are, but sometimes they're partnerships. It might be two friends who are partners, a husband and wife, et cetera. So I noticed that there was a pocket of these businesses that was breaking 1 million in revenue. And being a freelancer myself and knowing a lot of one person businesses, I thought, wow, that's pretty high for one person business. So what are they doing? And fortunately I was able to slice and dice the data by industry and figure out, okay, some of them are in manufacturing, some are in retail, etc. I wrote a blog post about it and people started writing into me and saying, I need to start a million dollar one person business. What are they doing exactly? I know you said retail, but I want to know a little more. What are they selling? Is it online? And you can't find that out in much depth from the Census Bureau because they protect people's anonymity when they fill out those surveys. So I wrote to the readers and I said, if you're one of these businesses, people Would like to hear what you're doing. And they started writing in. I wrote this one post with profiles of about five of them and it went very viral. It had over 300,000 page views. And it started off an area of coverage that I followed for a few years now. Eventually an agent started reading all the posts about these different entrepreneurs and that's what led to the book.

So you start collecting stories and you realize there's enough stories here to make a book. And all organized around this one idea that you can get over a million dollars in sales with just one person. Right? And there are a lot of different approaches to it and yet some common themes.

What was so interesting, Bill, was that although people like Laszlo and the others in the book were in very varied businesses, they had some things in common. Laszlo Nadler's business is called Tools for Wisdom. It's an Amazon store where he sells planners or day books online and he designs them. He was a project manager at bank of America. In his earlier career he was a dad with an at home wife and two kids. And so he couldn't just quit his job and become an entrepreneur overnight. So he started this business on the side. He loves things like personal productivity and he thought there's got to be a better planner that's focused more on helping people move towards their life's biggest goal and not just plowing through a to do list. So he designed this. He worked with a freelancer to come up with the designs and piloted it on Amazon at a very small level at first, experimented over a period of two years until he was able to sell enough that he was bringing in six figure income from it. And that was about two years into the business. At that point he went full time with it. He left his job and now he's gotten to about 2 million. He started it in 2012 and recently, I think it was in March, he hired his first employee, but he got that far all by himself. And so what is different about Laszlo Nadler from a lot of people who run one person businesses? One thing about him which a lot of the businesses had in common was he automates things. So if you were to speak with him, he is a font of wisdom about apps and tools to make your life easier. And unlike a lot of people who know they should be automating things, he actually does it on a pretty grand scale within the business. Another thing that he does is he uses freelancers. And that's another thing where a lot of entrepreneurs say they should delegate. But then when you actually scratch the Surface, they're really not delegating very much. And he has found freelancers in very unusual settings. Sometimes the woman who did his designs turned out to she was a business student who was cleaning his house for extra money and he got to chatting with her and it turned out she had this talent for design and he gave her a chance. And so he's always looking for talent everywhere. So if you don't have a network of freelancers and you don't know where to begin on the platforms like upwork or freelancer.com looking around you for people that might have a talent can be an option too. Some of the others use outsourcing, which is a little different than simply hiring a freelancer. What they'll do is use back office services. So one entrepreneur in the book, Harry ein, brings in 4 million in revenue a year in a non employer business. He's in Walnut Creek, California, runs the business from his garage. He sells swag and it's things like T shirts with a company's name on them, that sort of thing. He uses a company called ipromoteu, which is a specialized back office provider for swag sellers. Who knew right there would be such a business? But there is. And that frees him up from things like invoicing and just tedious tasks that he doesn't need to do. He spends a lot of his time with his best clients, cultivating those relationships, winning new business, et cetera, which are the types of things that the owner of the company should really be doing. So a lot of these entrepreneurs in the book are doing a combination of all three. I would say. There are a couple of other things I've noticed in doing panels with some of the entrepreneurs since the book has come out and in the reporting for the book, they step away from the business a little bit. These are folks that, that aren't chaining themselves to the computer. They get some distance, they go to business events, they surround themselves with other entrepreneurs, whether it's online or in person, to try to keep a pipeline of ideas coming. And I think that's important. I think they're also believers in coaching. I found that to be interesting because I know a lot of the programs for small businesses. As a small business journalist for many years, I've noticed things like the Make Mine a million program at American Express are focused on helping people bust through that middle area of revenue where you're like in the $250,000 to maybe $500,000 range and can't get out, which is where they'll get Stuck. That's sort of the capacity of one person. In many, especially professional services businesses, no matter what they charge, these folks will get a coach to help them. And what was very interesting to me was sometimes it's a little bit of an ego blow to say that you need a coach when you have a very successful business. But they able to get past that and that helped them to figure out, okay, what was my stuck point and how do I go around it so that I can, I can get to a million and beyond?

Well, long before I became a coach, I started using coaches. So I had like a running coach, a swimming coach, a triathlon coach, a financial coach, a speaking coach, a leadership coach, a CEO coach. I had a lot of different coaches and after a while I thought this is pretty interesting area and I should go and pursue it myself. And I started part time coaching and then became a full time coach eventually with Vern, obviously. But I think that's right. It is a benefit. And I'm a coach today and I help companies grow. But I'm often thinking about, okay, what am I not seeing for myself? And I look for coaches and mentors and folks to help me to examine my business, to see what I'm not seeing about it, and see pathways to scaling and growing that.

It's really interesting though that you've had so many different types of coaches. I bet that informs your coaching in terms of all the different things you can bring to the table. What's so interesting about these businesses was a lot of them are deliberately lifestyled businesses. And I think the owners fully believe in embracing not just their life at work, but their life outside of work. And I would imagine having a coach who cares about the other parts of life too would help quite a bit with that.

Well, right. As a coach, you think, what is it that you're trying to accomplish? What do you want to do? So that gives you a kind of a game to play or something interesting to work with. And then the coach may teach you something like a new technique for managing your money, or a new technique for your running, or your new technique for the way you interact with other people or communication or that kind of thing. And then you go and practice it and you apply it to yourself. And then the coach helps you to get unstuck to see what you can't see, like, oh, you're running like this or you're swimming like that. Right. In my mind, I remember it's a great analogy for, for the business coaching for my swimming coach who's like, all Right. So you're doing this and that. And in my mind, my swim stroke looked magnificent, looked Olympic and all that, except I knew I was painfully slow. So she took a video of me from several different angles. And then from in the water, from on the side, from the top, from the front. And I saw myself swimming. And that was deeply humiliating. I'm like, oh, yeah, now I can see why I'm slow. And now with that new image fixed in my mind of how I actually looked, I could begin to do certain things like stretch out further, reach further, instead of slamming my hand right back in the water and stretch out the spine and drop the head and do things like that, change those things. The same thing's true with business. Look, we talk to somebody about some approach, and then they go apply it to that. So outsourcing, getting coached. What are the other things that you said?

Well, automation. Automation, I think, is the. Is the best first step for most people, because a lot of people have an issue with hiring other people. They don't feel confident about even hiring a freelancer. And so the first thing I think to try to do, if you feel like I could be making more money, but I'm wasting a lot of time on things that are tedious, is make an inventory of what you're spending your time on and think about it. You know, am I spending hours and hours entering stuff into my QuickBooks? I mean, there is a. There's a balance with some of this stuff in that, like, you do need to know what's going on in your bookkeeping, but do you need to enter every single element, or could you attach your bank account to QuickBooks and your credit card to QuickBooks and have it automatically update, and then you just approve each one before you send it off to the bookkeeper, if you. Assuming you have a bookkeeper. So there. There are steps like that. I. I use an app called Schedule Once to schedule my meetings because I. I have a lot of phone calls as a journalist, and that was one of. That was something that was sometimes taking up to five hours a week of my time going back and forth. And I found out about this from Ari Meisel, actually, who's also part of the Gazelle's world. And I never went back. I love this app. Other people use Calendly. There are a number of competitors, but they all basically do the same thing. And I was at the point of hiring somebody to do my scheduling, and then I thought, you know what? That isn't going to work, because I work, I have four kids I work at variety of different hours that maybe they wouldn't be available. So if I just send this link to people and they can pick whatever time that's beautiful. It doesn't work perfectly every single time. Sometimes you still need to email back and forth because of some nuance. But it saves a lot of time. And if you can set a goal of freeing up seven hours a week. Right. That's the standard American workday. That's a lot of time you can get back to thinking about higher value activities. Like what is your strategy? Is your strategy working? Do you need to? Course correct. I found that these folks are big readers and they are also big learners. And if things are not going well in the business, a lot of times they'll step back and just start doing things completely different. There's a couple that I met since writing the book Colin and Angie Raja that run Rim Sports, which is also an Amazon seller. It's. They're both into things like CrossFit and boxing and. And she found that the equipment was kind of ugly and she wanted it in more color, colors that women would like better. So they put it on Amazon. They built the business also to 2 million in revenue. They got to about a million on their own. And they had a real season of imbalance in the business where they were just working basically 24 7. They didn't see their friends and family. They couldn't do anything other than work on the business. And instead of just saying we have to sell this, this is a nightmare. They realized that they were doing too much themselves. And she especially had a hard time because she had been. They both had corporate jobs in finance and I think he was in tech in a financial services company. She was on the marketing side. And they had trouble letting go of the tasks. And so they started forcing themselves to document everything that they were doing and think about how can I document this so I can help hand this off very seamlessly to a freelancer. Eventually this led them to starting to hire employees. But that was the first step is kind of taking stock and just saying it wasn't working. And now they realize they really want to be part of the entrepreneurial community. So they've been making a lot of time to come out to meetups and things like that to sort of fuel their enthusiasm for entrepreneurship. So that's something where sometimes I see people just throw up their hands and just give up and say it's ruining my life. I've got to sell it or shut down. And instead of saying it doesn't have to. It's actually quite successful. So what do we do here? We're at an inflection point.

Yeah. Interesting. One of the things that we do regularly with teams is an exercise called Love and Loathe. So what do you love doing? What do you loathe? What do you hate doing? And just going through that and then looking at the hate side and thinking, okay, what thing do I really detest? Am I really avoiding or do I really do badly that you should now automate or delegate or abdicate. Right. And automate is often, as you put out, like, look, go in and sync that thing up to your QuickBooks so that you don't have to enter stuff anymore. But there's lots of ways to automate that are not always technology based. Like we have regular routines that we do in getting ready for client sessions and public workshops and things like that. And we've reduced most of those things to checklists now. So we, we've got a checklist to pack to get ready. We've got a checklist in the booking and planning phase. We've got a variety and then we just open it up and we go down through that. And then what we're automating in this case is the thinking that goes into stuff and other things will connect to QuickBooks and like that.

That's a great idea. Well, Vern is a big fan of the as listeners probably know, the Checklist manifesto. And it was funny, I was thinking about that because at the event where I met you, I travel light and I had forgotten that little attachment to the new. I just got a new iPhone, the attachment that attaches my square to the phone so that I could the dongle the book transactions at the event. And I thought, you know what? Thank goodness people there were able to suggest that I use the contact processing system instead. I kind of forgot that I had it with me. But that's the type of thing where having a checklist when you're flying to another city and you need to have certain things with you can save the day.

Brilliant, brilliant, generous, helpful and handsome people, I might add, that connect your contact list.

Yes, exactly. It was funny because my daughter, who's 14 years old, always reminds me to bring the doggle, I guess it's called, and she wasn't there. Usually my children help me out and sell the books for me. And I don't fly. I'm not going to fly them all to Atlanta from New Jersey to sell books at an event.

You know, it's funny. So when our kids turned Seven or eight. They began to be able to get themselves ready for travel. We travel a lot, right. So for work and for fun. Travel's always been a central thing in our family and I was overjoyed with it. But because they could now do it. So I had like two. I had like the summer beach packing list, I had the ski packing list and then I had the urban pack list. And I would just say, here's your list. Three days, you know, and then they'd be ready to go.

That's a good idea. It does get complex. I know we have four children ourselves and it's just. Does somebody always forget something that we need on the trip? The bathing suit.

Check your list.

Sometimes. It's me. It's me. Yeah, that's a great idea. And that's the very simplest version of automation. Because I do think the word automation scares people. You think it's going to be involving bots or something that you don't know how to do and then people just throw up their hands and don't even do it at all. But, but when you get that time back, I mean it really makes a difference. Especially people that have very busy lives. Certain things like taking care of yourselves and exercising, seeing friends, all these things that contribute to your overall wellness, it's easy to neglect them for a short time. But if you really don't pay attention to them for years on end, it's going to catch up to you. I've talked to so many entrepreneurs who had a wake up call with that. And if you think of the automation giving you back that time where you could go to a yoga class or cycling or CrossFit or whatever you like to do, or just having a cup of coffee with a friend is good for your wellness. I mean, social relationships are important too. That's a good way to sort of talk yourself into it if you're resisting it.

Well, you know, this ties back to your early example with the person who did the planners for their overall life goals and like that. I know that one of the things that I automate is my life, my well being, the sort of holistic nature of it. Because I can be like a lot of entrepreneurs where I can obsess on something and become completely engrossed in and pour all my time into something that doesn't always make sense in the bigger picture. Right in the moment it seems to make sense. So I have planned in things like when I'm awake and when I'm going to eat and I used to book myself right through lunch and dinner and then not have time with family or not have time to eat well and that kind of thing. So now I have all of those things in like when I'm in awake and I have like gratitude and now I only have it once a day because it's become more natural but like a moment to reflect and be grateful. I have waking up, I have exercise, I have getting ready, I have eating, I have playtime, I have regular sort of things that come up only once a quarter in once a month. All of these kinds of things are in an automated fashion in placeholders in my calendar so that I then don't overbook work or other kinds of client things all around it. And I've protected that. Oh no, I'm sorry, I'm already busy there. And if I move something I have to think about, well, that's going to have an impact on my sleep or my nutrition or, or my fun. So automating that kind of thing, thinking about all the concerns of your life and planning that in there, probably really important as a solopreneur because the blur between your personal and work life are not as clear as those who go to an office and go home at 5.

Oh, you're so right about that. It's life changing to do that, where you protect your time to take care of yourself. Because what I found I do the exact same thing, is you wind up getting the important things done, but you wind up saying no to those things that will distract you because you have to really decide, okay, well, I have this many hours today. I'm not working until 3 o' clock in the morning today, so what can I get done in a reasonable amount of time? There are times I have projects myself where you get into a crunch. You know, there's no way around it. Something goes wrong and there's a deadline. And sometimes I had one night this week where I was working till midnight. I didn't really want to be, but, but it had to be done because of a tight production deadline. But when you have everything in your calendar for the next day, it kind of allows you to start fresh again instead of just losing all control of your calendar. Just saying, oh, you know, I didn't go to exercise yesterday, so I might as well just forget about it for the whole week. You know, you're like, okay, I've got yoga in there, get back in the gr. Yeah, yeah. And I mean sometimes with things like that, you might say, you know what, it would be better for me to get a good night's sleep. But you're making a decision that you are your business's most precious resource and if you fall apart, then you're not going to be there to serve all the clients. And I think that was something that I learned a lot from the entrepreneurs in this book. I found that a lot of them really protect their personal. They didn't always, but they learned to do it. And now they're pretty rigorous about it and look at how much they get done. They're some of the most efficient people on the planet, I think.

Well, just to take this whole idea. So automating things, outsourcing things, getting coached, learning, rethinking this to create a business that really works for you. It doesn't just have to be a small business. One of our old birthing of giants graduates and scaling up veteran entrepreneur is a guy, Tim Danley in the Dallas area who had exited his last business and was thinking about what to do. And somebody approached him with an interesting technology and said, hey, I want you to help me to build this. And we had him as a guest on the show. You can go back and listen to that as well, Tim Danley. And you can find it. 200 million with only three employees is the headline, right? So he grew a business 200 million with only three employees. So this guy brings this technology to him, says, I want you to help me build a factory and scale this and take this. This has global impact and it's a good thing. So he had a technology that removed wastewater from industrial and agricultural and urban runoff and then removed the other things in a very efficient fash. He's like, this is a useful technology for the whole world and it's big and capital intensive. And Tim said, you know what, I've been through the program, I understand this. I'm going to do things differently this time. He said, first of all, I'm not going to base the company in my own town. So he based the company in Las Vegas, Nevada and he lives in Dallas. The second thing he did is we're not going to do things the same way everybody else does them. We have the valuable piece here is a core technology. Building it, deploying it, configuring it. Lots of people can do that. We don't need to do that. So all of that work got outsourced and continues to get outsourced to partners in other parts of the world who are licensed engineering, manufacturing type folks. All they did was build one demonstration plant and then they fly people in from all over the world who get a chance to see the Technology, sign a contract or a letter of intent or something and pledge the first x million dollars purchase. I think he said it's 5 million, something like that. And then they get the full specs and details, that kind of thing. And then another team goes and deploys it into their water recovery and into their utility Systems. Brilliant, right? Three employees and $200 million.

That's amazing. But we can learn from people like that.

Yeah. So he has massive outsourcing. Right. There's marketing, kinds of things to be done, there's selling. There's a whole world of things that goes on in deploying a technology around the world. But it doesn't have to be done with employees. There are people working and making money on it, but it gives them a great deal money of flexibility.

I think we're only going to see more and more of these businesses in the research that I looked at by the Census Bureau. Every year, the number of non employer businesses breaking 1 million increase, it's up 33% since 2011. And I think the more we see examples of these types of businesses, the more everyone else can study them and say, what are they doing right? And what can I bring to my business? I found that they were across maybe six different industries. They were in really every industry. But in terms of the big pockets of these businesses, I saw them in E commerce, manufacturing, professional services, personal services, like being a nutritionist. There was informational content creation and real estate. These are all very varied industries, but they did have some common threads. And I think these case studies that we hear on podcasts and other places and that we read about in publications are going to help a large number of people figure out the formula for themselves, which is very exciting because every year new tools are coming out that we can use to increase our reach. And the world is changing. The world of work is changing a lot. In that traditional jobs are, I think, not going to be as prevalent in the future as they have been in the past. We see the rise of the gig economy, et cetera, the rise of entrepreneurship. So the more we can do this well, the better.

Well, it's interesting to me that the principle that applies here, that maximizes revenue and profit per employee, is the same thing that applies at the very other end of the scale. And that Salim Ismail in Exponential Organizations talks about. In applying the same tools and ideas to scale massively and rapidly, the same concepts are as relevant now for these one person companies that are over a million.

That's very. That's an interesting observation. Yeah, I think you're right about that for sure.

Yeah. So whether you're a trying to grow a very large organization with many many employees to hundreds of millions or a billion dollars and beyond, or whether you really want to keep it simple and focus on the one thing that you do well but make more than a million dollars a year on it, I think the ideas here are great and relevant for all of us. The book is the Million Dollar One Person Business. It's Elaine Pofeldt. Thanks so much that@themillion$1personbusiness.com right?

That's correct. Yeah. Thanks so much Bill. I really enjoy talking with you and I look forward to hearing from entrepreneurs who listen to the show. I love hearing from entrepreneurs. I am a journalist. I'm always looking for great stories to cover. So even if you're not at 1 million yet, please reach out if you have a great story.

So go there and get the book, read the book and then share whatever story's back with Elaine about again. The million dollar one personbusiness.com thanks so much to Elaine and a reminder to our listeners that we bring you a new author, topic guru coach, somebody with something that's really relevant to Scaling up every week right here and you'll find the show, the blog, free tools, worksheets, guides for getting your team scaling up all for free at scalingupbusiness.com so find us there and scaling business.com and find the book at the Million Dooll one person business.com thanks again to Elaine. We'll talk to you all again next week. I want to give special thanks again to our original growth guru, Vern Harnish. Our show is produced by Nio Bade with audio production by Podfly Productions. Audio editing is done by Albert Burge and our show notes are compiled by Ayn Kadina with proofreading reading by Tim McGowan. If you got some value out of our show today, please share it with somebody else and let us know the parts that you love by dropping us a line, email, carrier pigeon, what have you. Thanks again for listening and Keep scaling up. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software. Powered by Align, it's the official software for scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With alignment you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with scoreboard by Align. To try it now, go to aligntoday.com Bill Gates one more time. Aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.