#167: Elaine Pofeldt on Creating a Million-Dollar One-Person Business

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia. Hey there. Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast. I am your host, Ed Gandia and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. Just a quick reminder that you can find detailed show notes for this episode@b2b launcher.com Episode 167 and those notes are going to include a summary of our discussion as well as links to resources we mentioned during the show. Now, before we get to this week's episode, I wanted to let you know that I'm about to work with a handful of new freelance writers to get their business off the ground and land their first paying client. If you'd like to join us, send me an email to edwblauncher.com, put the words first client in the subject line and I'll reply to you with all the details. Now for this week's episode. This is a very exciting time to be alive. There's never been this much opportunity to make a great living as a self employed professional. It's really a combination of several factors. For one, there is a changing set of trends in the economy that's been going on for the past 10, 15 years. They've been shifting attitudes toward self employment. Cheap technology is another big one. Technology that was way beyond reach just a few years ago. And now for just a few dollars a month, you can run a multimillion dollar business out of your home. And then of course, the ability to easily and cost effectively leverage talent from all around the world really on a project basis for even the simplest things or really more complex endeavors. I'm proof that this is possible. This is not theory. I run my high six figure coaching and training business out of my house and I have a team of seven amazing professionals, all of them independent contractors who live all over North America from Vancouver to rural Alberta to Ontario, Canada to Southern California, Salt Lake City, Utah, Atlanta, Pennsylvania, you name. We're all over the place and we're able to run this business completely virtually. My guest today is going to go deeper into this topic. Her name is Elaine Pofeld and she is the author of a wonderful book titled the Million Dollar One Person Business. Make great money, work the way you like, have the life you want. And it was recently published by Random House. She's also one of us. She's a seasoned writer and journalist who specializes in small business, entrepreneurship and careers. Elaine's work has appeared in Fortune, Money, cnbc, Inc. Magazine, Forbes, Crain's New York Business, and many other business publications. And she's a contributor to the Economist Intelligence Unit. As a senior editor of Fortune Small Business, where she worked for eight years, Elaine has been twice nominated for the National Magazine Award for her features, and she also ran the magazine's annual business plan competition. In this interview, Elaine explains who's behind these million dollar solo businesses. She gives us several actual examples, very detailed examples, and she gets into how these people build these highly successful businesses without hiring employees or creating a nightmare job for themselves, without all that complexity that we tend to associate with businesses at that level. I think you're going to find this chat inspirational and I bet you're going to walk away with some great ideas of your own. So please enjoy my conversation with with Elaine Pofeldt. Elaine, great to have you on. Welcome.

Thank you so much, Ed. It's great to be here.

It's great to be talking with you. This is a fascinating topic. And before we dive in, I always like to start with a little bit of background and especially with you because you're one of us. You have some excellent credentials as a writer. You've done some really interesting work over the years and want to see if you could tell tell us a little bit more about how you got started as a writer and how you got to where you are today. What took you there?

Sure, Ed. Well, I'll give you the short version. I was one of those kids that was always creating my own newspaper and writing stories and that sort of thing. So I think I was just born a writer and I'm not good at many other things, so I stuck with it. And I worked on my school newspaper in high school, and when I went to college, I was at the arts and entertainment editor at my college newspaper. And, you know, then I went the usual route with journalism, actually. I had an internship at the Hartford Courant, the Los Angeles Times, and then I spent seven or eight years as a street reporter at two newspapers in New Jersey. At one point I covered the Hudson county jail. So I was really experiencing a lot of things that I had not, you know, as a younger person. And then I kind of burned out on doing so many tragic stories and needed to do something lighter and fluffier. I got a job as a, as a fashion features editor at Womenswear Daily, you know, which is the complete opposite of what I had been doing before. And it was fun, but it was A little too light and fluffy for me. So I did that for about a year and a half. But I found I really enjoyed learning about the business side of the fashion companies. And I always thought business was really boring before that. Honestly, I just had no interest in it at all. But when I saw how important it was to creative professionals being able to realize their dream, and how if they ran out of money, then all of a sudden they couldn't be a fashion designer anymore for whatever reason, that really resonated with me. And I wound up having an opportunity to join Success Magazine. An editor. I was there for a while. At one point I was acting editor. Unfortunately, the magazine closed and I wound up for the first time freelancing. And a freelance assignment that I took led me to the Fortune Group at Time Inc. It was a tiny assignment where I was paid, I think $150. I think it was an article about venture capital. And after I turned it in, the boss of the editor who had assigned it to me contacted me and said that she had left the company and did I know anyone who would be interested in joining. And I said, I'm looking for a job. So I came in and I interviewed. And so I got a job at Fortune Small Business Magazine. And this was in 1999, right? So the web was new. And I was also interviewing for a job as the editor of New Jersey Monthly magazine. I was actually given a job offer from them around the same time. And I had to decide did I want to join Fortune Small Business and run this tiny website, which would be me and one other person, or run a whole magazine? And I spoke with a headhunter that I knew about it, and she said, elaine, this is the last time someone who doesn't know anything about the web will be able to get in on this. And I thought, okay, where is the future of this field heading? And so I went with the small website. And so at that time, it was very hard to post a story. I don't know how long you've worked on the web, but you needed a producer to do it. It was that cumbersome. And her whole job was just posting one story a day and maintaining the website and that sort of thing. But we were able to build it up to about 800,000 page views a month. And then I went over to the magazine, to Fortune Small Business magazine. I always loved long form journalism and I did that for about four years. But then they wanted me to come back to the website and help build the traffic some more. So I was able to Build it in a few months to maybe 2 to 5 million page views a month. And it had gotten easier now because more people were on the web and social media had grown. In the beginning there really wasn't social media. But I wound up going freelance. I have four children and at the point I went freelance, I basically had three babies. I had twins who were about 4 years old, 3 or 4 years old, and I had a new baby. And I just, I wanted a little more control over my time. And that was about 11 years ago. And I started freelancing in the area that I knew best, which was entrepreneurship and careers. And that was actually what led to the book. One of my gigs is writing for Forbes. I do a blog five times a month and I write about the one person business. And when I came across census statistics showing that there were people breaking 1 million in these one person businesses, they're called non employer businesses technically, I was really curious about it and I started writing about it and ultimately it led to the book.

So yeah, that idea came first. It came from writing these profiles. How long were you writing that before the book was a thing?

It was a while. The first post was about three years ago, I think. And it was the original post where I just found these statistics and I wrote about what industries they were in. You can't find out who the entrepreneurs are from the Census Bureau. So people started writing to me and saying, elaine, I'd like to start a million dollar one person business, but I don't know where to start. I need a little more information than you gave me in that original article. So I wrote to the readers and I said, if you, one of these businesses people are really curious, could you tell me what you're doing and I'd love to interview you. So then I wrote a post that had about 5 of the entrepreneurs and it went viral like I've never seen. I had my phone on the dining room table and I felt like it was going to leap up off the table because I was getting so many emails so fast from people. It has, I think about 340,000 page views now. And it looked at people like Alan Walton, who's the founder of Spy Guy, a security camera store online. He's a young guy, I think he's about 30 years old. Rachel Charlepski, who runs the babysitting company, she started this business in college and she has a network of 2,500 babysitters that she manages. They're all contractors. She somehow manages it all herself. And she does on site Childcare. So like at a, you know, a sports arena, she would have her babysitters watch the children of the sports players. And there was another one, Dan Mezuritsky, who was a fitness trainer who wound up training other trainers in his methodology and bringing them under his brand. But they were all independent contractors and so on. And so over time, more of these folks would write to me and tell me about what they were doing and I would interview them one by one. Now, out of the 24 million non employer businesses in the country, there are about 36,000 over a million. So they're kind of a needle in a haystack. So every time I had one, as long as they were not in a scammy type of business, I would profile them and an agent noticed them, reached out to me and then that's how the book took place.

So tell me, just so I understand, kind of the timing of this, when did that first article with the five profiles, did that go live? What year?

I believe that was in 2012. I will, you know what, I'm online, so let me check it.

Yeah, so that's just wanted to get a sense if, you know, because that's when things really started kind of taking off in terms of tools and ways for you to do that. That actually is a good segue to my next question because I.

It was 2015, by the way. I have it up. It was. It's at 340,000, 43,000 plus page views. It was May 30, 2015. It's called How Bold Entrepreneurs Are Breaking 1 Million in One Person Businesses.

Gotcha.

That's the original.

So run through those stats again for me. So how many non employer businesses in the US are over a million dollars a year?

The latest statistics, it's about 36,000. 36,000, give or take. Yeah. And there are about 24 million non employer businesses. The average revenue for them is about 47,000. Right. So these folks are outliers. But what fascinated me was that they weren't all that different from the people that were making more average revenues. They didn't come with special advantages or someone funding their business. They were just working a lot smarter than the average person knows to do when they start out as a freelancer. But I believe everyone can learn from them. I learned a lot from them about how to run a better business. They use certain common practices. One thing I noticed was they're big automators. They really extend what they can do by using a lot of automated tools. They're users of Contractors and freelancers. So they don't try to do everything themselves. They may not have employees employees, but they are delegators and they'll use outsourcing. So some of those that were Amazon sellers, for instance, would use fulfillment by Amazon usually after having a bad experience where they tried to pack all the stuff up in their apartment and ship it out. And then getting overrun by a truck driving up with a pallet full of stuff and realizing this was not a good way to run the business. It was better to pay Amazon a little bit or use drop shipping or other methods. Sometimes they use back office services. So there was a fellow who ran unishippers of Oyster Bay in the book, Chris Cadigan, and he used a back office service to answer the phones and that sort of thing so he could focus on making sales in a franchise. And you wouldn't think in a franchise you can really customize it, but you actually he was able to do that with his processes so that he could get more done and generate more revenue and profits.

I love that. Yeah. So in, I think it's, it's the, the confluence of not just what was happening in the economy and the general shift in attitude toward being self employed, but also these things you mentioned, right. Automation, the ability to use contractors. So all these things started to come out. They weren't. That were very affordable now to buy and to use. In the case of tools, you know, these were now software, software service solutions that didn't cost that much money and you could leverage all kinds of resources and people for a fraction of what they used to cost just 10 years ago.

You know, it's incredible. And we take it for granted. I mean, when you think about it, when I started my business, it was about, it was in 2007, I remember getting price quotes for one of my clients who has a very small business. And it was about $50,000 to put up the kind of site he needed involving E commerce and some video and that sort of thing. Now one of my daughters who's in high school could put it up for free. Pretty much insane. Just think about that. That's money that doesn't come out of your overhead now. And it's, you know, when you think about our mobile phones, right, that seems like a, you know, very basic type of gadget, affordable to most people. And I use my phone for so many things. Right. I was thinking about this one day when I did a book event at the Brooklyn Public Library. I had somebody in the audience doing a Facebook live of the event for people who couldn't come from my phone. He was literally sitting in the front row doing this. Then I ran out. They wanted me to sell the book at the event. So I'm using square on my phone to process transactions. Then I'm driving home and I have everlance on the phone tracking my mileage for the accountant and so on. You know, Meanwhile I'm texting other clients and things like that so that I was keeping up with what I needed to do in my business that day. But we didn't have this, you know, 15 or 20 years ago. The average freelancer or creative just didn't have a tool like this. And it's really, really empowered us. And I'm not even talking about the more sophisticated tools that you could use to automate like CRMs and things like that. This is just the basics.

Well, I want to use and get some examples in terms of people who have been able to do this and have been successful doing it. But before we go there, I want to make sure I clarify things for people. So we're all on the same page when we're talking about a million dollar solo business. Freelancers. Right. People who do what we do. Writers and copywriters. We are solo businesses. So I want to first make sure that you would consider us to be solo businesses as well under this definition.

Absolutely. Anyone who runs a business with no employees is a non employer business. And they can be in professional services, personal services like a nutritionist, they could be a real estate investor, they could be a product driven business. Yeah, there's a number. Informational product creation is a hot area. So most definitely.

And then the other thing I wanted to make sure. And you kind of answered it. But I wanted to just clarify this. If I'm a freelancer or a solo business owner and I have a virtual, virtual assistant and several contractors whom I use, that is not. That's still considered a solo businesses because I don't technically have employees.

Exactly. Yes. It's. Yeah. Because they're not on payroll. So the way the government defines it, and I use the government definition because I know a lot of thought went into this, if they're not on payroll, then you're not technically an employer. Although you may be creating work for other people you're not creating. So that's the differentiation. But some of them have a lot of contractors. Like Rachel Charlupski, the woman with the babysitting company has 2,500 contractors. She's still a one person business on paper under the government's definition. And there is a difference because when you're running payroll and that sort of thing, it's a whole different structure to the business.

So let's get into some examples. And I specifically want to cater the example to my audience. Right. So here we are. I'm a writer or a copywriter. I'm doing my own work for my clients. And this idea, of course, of having a million dollar business sounds very, very attractive. Are there opportunities for someone like me to do this without creating a really complex business? Like, you know, I'm interested in the result. I'm not interested in creating this massive job for myself. What are the opportunities like? And can we get into some examples?

Absolutely. Well, yes, you can kind of build on what you're doing to create a scalable business. One example from the book is Pamela Grossman, who runs a studio in Atlanta called In the Present. She's a multimedia producer. She had worked in the advertising industry and then wound up experiencing a panic disorder that made it hard for her to drive and leave her house. But she was very ambitious, professional and wanted to continue her career. And so she started in the present a marketing and production studio. And she relies on contractors around the world to serve her clients. She's built this to a $2 million one woman business from her home and very, very inspiring example of turning a tough situation into one where she could thrive personally. And she's continued to run and grow the business. So she's a good example of how that could be done. And she's able to kind of make time zones work in her favor by using contractors around the world. So she has a very good delivery time on her projects. She's an example. Another one is Adam Borenstein who has created a business where he does content for premium clients. And what he does is, they call them executive clients. They offer a very. He and his brother offer a very high level of service to each client, but they charge higher prices to do that. And they'll maintain several, you know, maybe three or four clients at a time. He's out of Denver and they're both, I think, under 30. Actually they're quite successful with this business, just, you know, doing content, copywriting, that sort of thing. And they had done previously a nutrition coaching business where they got some experience with this, but then they branched off into Pen Name Consulting, which is a separate entity. So they were writers also too.

Gotcha. So these two examples, I would think of these as kind of the agency model, right? These people basically scaled, specifically the first one, they scaled what they were already doing and they scaled very strategically, so it wasn't like a massive shift where they did sort of selling something completely different.

You're right. Basically, they were extending what they could do by doing things like using contractors. Adam grew the business's revenues also through premium pricing. That's one way, when you're in a service business that it's easier to scale. If you can justify the higher prices, and that's a very important word in this conversation, then you can charge them and scale your revenue much more quickly. But you have to reach a certain level of proficiency to do that. So it might not be something you can do out of the starting gate. It's when you've really, really mastered your craft that you can do that.

Gotcha. So, yeah, these are. That's a great point. Two different examples. One is you're scaling by bringing in more people who could do the work and under, of course, maybe a certain framework or certain formulas or approaches that you've developed. The other one is using a lot of that, but then going to the. The top, you know, 1/10 of 1% of the market in terms of what they can pay in scaling that way. Right. So going with, like, really elite clients who can pay a lot.

Exactly. That's. That's an approach that you can often use in consulting firms if you're very experienced, or in this case, they were on the younger side, but just really good at what they do. And they were able to show that they were getting great results with other clients, and that enabled them to maintain this business model.

And it sounds like. So they weren't necessarily. They didn't grow up as writers. You said they had a nutrition business, but they had to get really, really good at the writing and the marketing. So that became kind of an added skill set they developed. Did I hear that correctly?

Yeah. I believe Adam also did have some journalism background earlier on.

Okay.

But I think in terms of more of the business, copywriting and that sort of thing, they picked some of that up in their other business as well.

One of the cool things that I think might be happening here with writers is that I think we underestimate what we already have that we bring to the table if we want to go in this direction. This just skill of writing, copywriting, and or marketing is something that we take for granted. But, I mean, that's a big, big part of creating this kind of business, right?

It is. I do think we take it for granted, but writing is not easy for everyone. It might be easy for us. It's not easy for us. Either, but easier for us. And I think what often happens is people think they can do it on their own, people who are non writers, and then they sit down and try it and things that would take us two or three hours wind up taking them 18 hours. And then they start to appreciate really what goes into it. And you know, it's the same as if we tried to do our own taxes instead of using an accountant. So it is important to recognize your own value because we all have our skill sets.

So this next category of examples, I think we're talking about it being more of a hybrid. Right. It's still leveraging writing skills, but a little bit differently. So can you maybe explain that and give a couple of examples?

Sure. We were talking about using your skills to create an informational product and two examples. One is Brian Dean, the head of Backlinko. He was a freelance writer working in New York City and was getting tired of the grind of doing one project after another. And he started blogging and he wrote a post about what it takes to rank in Google and the post went very viral. And in doing so, he learned a lot about SEO. And he leveraged what he learned to create a course on SEO that when I interviewed him, I believe was selling for about $900. And by selling that course, he was able to create his million dollar one person business. So that's one way to do it. I see a lot of people creating courses on platforms like Teachable, for instance. But it doesn't have to be on Teachable. That can be very effective if you package it right. I mean, there's some curriculum planning, I guess, that goes into that, where there's a learning curve sometimes for writers who learn that. But once you learn it, it's easy to scale it. Right. Because if the course is good, if you amplify it by using Facebook ads or another type of advertising, you can really ramp up your revenue. Justin Goff is another example. He's a copywriter and he teamed up with a fitness trainer who had been in the military and they created a military exercise based plan called the 31 Day Fat Loss Cure. And they sold it on ClickBank, which is a great resource if you have not come across. It's a marketplace for informational products and other things along those lines. They use Facebook ads to drive traffic to their product and that became a million dollar two person business. So they're a non employer business. Also, the government definition is the business has no employees other than the owners, so some of them have partnerships. But the vast majority are one person.

And. Yeah, so the information, I mean, that's how I got started. So I created a PDF guide in early 2008, and this is before Kindle or anything, so I was calling it an ebook back then. That's how I got started. I've shifted away from courses and gotten into coaching, which involves courses kind of on the back end, training on the back end. But, yeah, I'm very familiar with that one. I think it's a massive opportunity that a lot of people underestimate because, gosh, if you look at all these sites that are popping up everywhere, like Masterclass and Udemy, and what are some of these others that are just like, yeah, crazy people. Have a social media.

So many of them. Yeah, yeah. And I think it's convenient for people, too. There's so many people that work during the day that would like to learn something new. So many industries are being disrupted. So if you know some niche area of your field really well, it could be a great opportunity to create something that becomes passive income once you've created. I mean, any. Any type of creative product takes a lot of work on the front end. So I don't want to make it sound too passive because none of these things are really that passive in the beginning.

Oh, yeah, It's a lot of work.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it's like writing a book. Right. So. But. But once it's done and then you. You continue to sell it, then it becomes income that you don't have to keep on hustling to bring in, which gives you a little bit of breathing room to then free up time in your business to think about strategy and some of the bigger picture things that we should all be thinking about but kind of get lost in the shuffle from day to day.

Are there other examples that maybe we haven't talked about that maybe kind of a different flavor that writers might qualify for or might want to explore?

Sure. Well, there's sort of a hybrid approach that I came across also, and Megan Telpner is a really good example of this. She was an advertising professional, went on a trip to Africa, became very ill, and was diagnosed with Crohn's disease. And she didn't like the way that the medical profession was addressing it and decided to try to heal herself by going back to school and becoming a nutritionist, which she did. But she became a blogger, too. She started blogging about nutrition topics, and she brought her own unique voice to this. She would take on topics like Nutella. Right, Nutella. You know, it seems like Oreo cookies. Right. Who would have a beef with Nutella? But actually she had some strong points about how she did not feel it was healthy. And it sparked some debate on the site. She made it kind of fun. And she has a real flair for fashion. And she had studied fashion merchandising at one point. And so she wears vintage clothing on the site. There are these wonderful pictures of her in her collection. And she started selling informational products after about four years of blogging. Every day, diligently, she sold this three day green smoothie fast. And at the time she did it, this was about 11 years ago, she sold it by email. And she sold it to people who, whose email addresses she had. She didn't really have a formal list and it was a PDF file like yours, Ed, and it was $10 and it sold out. So she sold. I mean, if a PDF could sell out.

Yeah, I was gonna say the only print. So many of them.

Yeah, she hit. Well, she had a goal and, you know, she hit her goal and so then she remarketed it and then that led to other products and eventually she developed a course and that led to the Academy of Culinary Nutrition, where people pay substantially more than $10 to join and learn her methods of cooking. And some of the people that sign up are lay people, some of them are nutritionists. And so she's built a nice business around that and then also branched out into business coaching. Based on what she has done, I think she's just under 2 million in revenue and has. She has hired a couple of employees since I wrote about her originally. But she's basically the spirit of this sort of hybrid approach.

Yeah, well, you could use. I think the underlying theme I'm hearing in so many of these, again, is that writing and marketing are two key components. So one reason I really wanted to talk to you, Elaine, is that I was curious how people like us who have that skill already can. Can maybe leverage that. And being that we're one step ahead of most others who didn't have that going into it, that can be a great advantage. But I'm curious, right? So if I'm listening right now and I'm kind of thinking through all these ideas, you know, what do I know? What would I like to do? You're not really sure kind of where to start this process. I'm curious if you can maybe offer some practical next steps that someone could follow if they wanted to go in this direction.

Oh, absolutely. And I will mention, in case this is useful to folks in the appendix of the book, There are exercises that are fairly elaborate that will help people to identify what they should do. Based on interviews that I went back and did with a lot of the owners of these businesses, see how they identified their idea. But a sort of short version of this would be look at the clues around you. There are probably people coming to you asking for advice on certain things that you know really well. And it might not be in paid settings. For instance, maybe as a volunteer, people are coming to you and asking you about something you know a lot about. That might be a good area to think about. You also want to think about, which is areas you want to monetize. You might have an interest in something like yoga, for instance, but maybe you don't want that to be a commercial area of your life. So you have to look at things that you would be happy to monetize, that you would be happy to have in your head all the time. Because you know how that is as a writer, right. Sometimes you take on projects and you really don't like the subject matter and you start really regretting it as you work on. So you don't want to take something that everyone says you should do, but you actually don't enjoy thinking about. It's got to be something that you can, you enjoy thinking about enough. It doesn't have to be your life's passion. Your life's passion might not be something that should be a business. That's a good place to start. You want to think about client demand in your existing business. Maybe people are asking you for things that, that you don't offer or you find that you're hitting a brick wall. The services you offer don't go far enough. So what would be the next step that you could offer to people or what would be a higher end version of it? For someone who wants this Rolls Royce version of what you offer, those would be good places to start.

I think those are some great ideas and, you know, scratching your own itch can be. Be a great one. You mentioned some examples of that as well. People who, you know, suddenly we're faced with this massive challenge that they had to overcome and then they realized, wow, I had to get really good at solving that problem. I bet there are others who have gone through or going through the same thing, right?

It's. Oh for sure. It's important to think about them rather than I. Right. When you're, when you're running a business. So it's never really about you. It's not really about your personal expression. You may get that through the business. But if it's something where you're actually selling something, you have to really think about the people you would help through the business. What did they need? Where is their pain? Where can you be more useful? Where can you bring fun and enjoyment to their life? When you start asking yourself those questions, then you marry that to what would you enjoy and you know, what would help your business? Then when you combine all of those things, things, you can have a really nice revenue stream.

Yeah, that's a really important point, especially for us writers, because many times we just want to express ourselves.

But I'm one myself, so I know what you mean.

But this is not that. That's, you know, that's, this is not entertainment. This is really. We're talking about a business. And a business only succeeds as if you provide value to others because they have a problem that needs solving. So a great reminder of that. We've mentioned it a couple of times, but tell us about your book, the Million dollar One person Business. Whom did you write it for? Now I know the backstory, how this came about, but who did you intend this book to be read by?

There are a lot of people out there running businesses that get no recognition. I found as a journalist it was very easy to pitch a story about a scalable business that was doing really well, a Silicon Valley firm, you know, that raised venture money and was the next Facebook. But it was very hard to ever get editors interested in the one person business. And yet the vast majority of businesses in this country are one person businesses. And when I came across the folks running them, I found that they were often very happy with their lifestyle. They loved what they were doing, they had a lot of passion. And their pain point was more the business side of things because often they came to it from a corporate background or doing something else and they just didn't have the business training. And I wanted them to see how much potential their businesses had because I was seeing it by doing these things. So it's really for these sort of unsung heroes who are out there running these tiny businesses that take a heroic effort to run. It's really not that easy to do what we all do. It looks small, but it's not small. And I think even a one person business can touch a lot of lives. Just think about the reach that a writer has, right? Scaling your ideas through the printed word, or not even the printed word anymore, whatever we call it, the digital word work. It's pretty incredible what people are accomplishing.

It really is. It really is. And that's why I love about, I love your perspective because you understand where we're coming from. And as one person businesses ourselves, you understand of course, not just the opportunity but what it's taken for us to get to where we are already. So where can folks learn more about the book? Do you have a site set up for it?

I do, yeah. It's the million dollar one person business dot com. It's all written out in words, not numbers. Or they can go to elainepofeld.com and I'm sure my spelling is in the show notes. I won't take up time spelling it out.

Oh yeah, yeah, we'll include links for sure in the show notes, so make sure to check it out. Guys, I think you're going to walk away with some wonderful inspirations because your book is full of case studies and examples. So this is not theoretical, this is you actually looking into a bunch of different one person businesses at this level and just kind of unpacking all the different stories and how they got there, what they do and all that. So very inspirational, but also practical. Like you said, you have all those exercises to help people take action on that inspiration.

I hope folks find it useful. I would like to say important to review the case studies more than once. One of the things that most people listening to this podcast will realize is that when you're in a business there are no five easy steps. There are no rules that apply for every situation. But you can learn from strategies that other people have used in the identical situations that you're in. So what I hope people will do is use it as a source for creating creative inspiration for their own business. As you know as to your business model, revenue generation, how to be more personally fulfilled, and sometimes if you read them more than once, I've had a number of people contact me and say, I've reread these four times and now I really am applying certain things. That's what I hope people will do because these folks are really smart about how they run their business and they're just a few steps ahead of where most writers and copywriters and freelance types are in their business right now. But they're not so far away that it's unattainable. And I think if you apply just a few of their strategies, you'll be surprised at how much it helps your business.

Elaine, thank you so much. This has been wonderful, eye opening, very inspirational and I appreciate you coming on the show.

Oh, thank you Ed. It was great. I appreciate, really enjoyed your questions.

The high income Business Writing Podcast is a production of B2B business launcher. Learn more@b2b launcher.com and I appreciate you appreciate you coming on the show.

Oh, thank you, Ed. It was great. I really enjoyed your questions.

The High Income Business Writing Podcast is a production of B to B Business Launcher. Learn more@b2b launcher.com.