Who can be the first billionaire one person business? with Ellen Donnelly #75

After all, all art is experience.

Hello and welcome to The Company Doctor. This episode, we're joined by arguably the perfect Company Doctor guest in business mentor, solopreneur, and business owner Ellen Donnelly, who talks to Gary about the major potential of the one-person business model and the power of self-belief, among many other fascinating topics from AI to improv. This is episode 75 of The Company Doctor. Who can be the first one-person billionaire business with Ellen Donnelly.

Hey Ellen, thank you for joining the Company Doctor podcast.

Welcome. I'm excited to be here. Thank you. How are you doing?

Well, really well, because we're really excited to have you because our audience is a business to business, but there's a lot of one-person business owners in our, in our network. And the title today is Who Can Be the First Billionaire One-Person Business? What a great title.

We came up with that one, didn't we?

We did. I think it's just great. It scares me a lot, and probably you, right? But anyway, let's kick off. Before we get into it, let's find out about you. Much more important. So Ellen, tell us what makes Ellen Ellen. Give us an intro to you, a brief intro to you so everyone can understand you.

Yeah, I'd love to. So I live in East London. I'm very much like an East Londoner now. I feel like I've kind of acclimatised to life here, which is canal walks and lots of flat whites and all the kind of cliché things. Yeah, it's like, I cycle to work. So, you know, I've done like— I've left the kind of quote-unquote corporate world a bit of time ago now, and I've been creating a little life for myself doing the work I love in a part of London I love, and consider myself very privileged and, you know, fortunate to do that. So how I spend my time as a business owner is working with typically individuals on their businesses. So I'm a trained coach. I call myself a business mentor and consultant now because of all the hybrid of things that we do together when I work with someone. And outside of work, I am a big fitness nerd. I love working out. I do a bit of improv comedy, and I try and travel and, and do the kind of remote thing occasionally with my business and the laptop so I can make the most of kind of that freedom of the solopreneur lifestyle that many people can afford.

Yeah, absolutely. And, and by the way, I'm going to dig into that stuff. I was, I was fascinated to hear about you doing improv, so really interested to talk to you about that. And, you know, you've had a really interesting career and I think, you know, people listening will really benefit from your journey. And I know you've kind of, you've written a lot about it, but my first question is, you know, we, we came up with a bold title together, but, but it's an important title because I think it, there's the art of the possible, but as the title is bold, then I started looking at your blogs and, you know, one of your blogs and you've, you have many, you talked about your journey, the exact moves you made. As a business owner to a six-figure income in, in only 3 years. But the first step you talked about, the bold thing, was to quit my job without a backup plan. So I'm fascinated to understand that. Well done. And is it well done? I don't know. Was it a good idea or not?

Great question, because, you know, people come to me with that same question all the time, and I don't necessarily advocate for, for having no backup plan. And the reality at the time was that I'd quit a job that wasn't going very well. In the kind of first 8 weeks, it was very clear to me I wouldn't be happy there. Culture fit, the type of things the company were doing, like I was just not, it wasn't for me. And I just wanted to give myself an opportunity to try and work for myself. You know, it was this idea of if not now, when? And this was 2019. So, I quit. I did not have any other plan other than I'm going to put some money into this coach training. That I've found and test out whether I can do it, whether I can be a coach. And that was the biggest leap of faith, I suppose, that I've ever taken in the sense of not only did I not have an income from a job, I'd also recently become a homeowner. I then put that minimal income that I had savings-wise into an investment that was quite large, quite substantial.

Then someone threw COVID in the mix as well, right? You didn't see that one coming, I suppose.

COVID's an interesting one because in, in many ways it was a curveball. In other ways, it worked out for me to be a good opportunity to have a captive audience of people who were questioning everything. And I'd already called my business The Ask, and the point of The Ask is to question what your purpose, life goals, work fit is. And COVID sort of threw a lot of people into that field, um, more so than ever before. So I— it is a COVID baby, but it wasn't a Oh, I lost my job through COVID, baby. You know, it was already being birthed, if that's not true.

It's interesting because we've had a lot of people on the podcast that did pivot through COVID, and I appreciate that you, you made that jump. And that, you know, you said you didn't necessarily recommend people to kind of burn their bridges, but looking back, do you think it's the right thing for people to do, to kind of be all in?

My criteria to be all in would be a very good conviction in yourself that you do know that you want this thing. You really want it, and I'd had that burning desire for a while, that you have some financial safety behind you. You know, I did have some savings that I've been building up. It wasn't, I'm living hand to mouth, so I have to make this work month one. And I think thirdly, if you are pretty sure you don't want to go back to that work, or, you know, you're, you're quite ready for a change, then going all in provides lots of benefits. You know, your full focus and attention go to that thing that you're trying to build, and that creates momentum that people who side hustle maybe miss out on. It's not that side hustling is bad, of course. It's the pro and con equation you need to weigh up.

Yeah, but it's interesting, isn't it? Because when you're all in, you have to make it work, otherwise you don't get turkey for Christmas. So I kind of like the idea of that because you have to make it work, you've got no choice. But do you, Ellen, do you really believe that someone will become a billionaire, one-person business?

I am convinced that the one-person business model has infinite scale potential that we haven't yet seen. Do I think that would reach, let's call it, a billion-dollar valuation company? Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, has a group chat with his friends, and they have a bet as to who will be the first billion-dollar AI-based kind of business, one-person business. And there have been sort of talks about this, and people have identified that we are really we're a really long way off from that. And so AI is one piece of this puzzle, right? But without AI and those sorts of tools, it's near on impossible to achieve that kind of scale on your own.

Okay, well, I definitely want to come back to that, but before we get there, I just got a couple of questions for you because a lot of people that listen to our podcast, they either work for corporates or they do have their own business. And some, you know, some are getting started, but a lot have got started and been quite successful. And part of their challenge is that they've got, if they work for themselves, they've got 220 days a year, after holidays and things, if they're lucky enough to have those. What's the dynamic that enables someone to multiply themselves without multiplying themselves? How do you get more time when you've only got 24 hours in a day?

I would question what the end goal is. If it's infinite scale, as I just described, then we have to throw tools and software at the problem. And tools and software are one thing. And another thing you can kind of add to that mix is media and IP that scales through the reputation you create. So we see that through creators, people with big online followings. You know, the world of social media and advertising allows people to create scale around a personal brand. And then when you throw tools and software into the mix, your back office, so to speak, of that business operation that your brand has can scale beyond you. Those would be the two kind of core components, and obviously that requires huge amounts of skills, right? You need to be very charismatic, you need to also really understand the tech, you also need to have a lot of ambition and a lot of grit to go that full hog. So, I don't think it will be many people achieving that goal short-term.

But leadership is thin, but does that mean we all need to go and do improv so we're funnier or more engaging? What do you reckon?

I think improv is an amazing life skill for not just humor, which I— is a value of mine, so I do appreciate that, but also for the art of like flexibility and adaptability, teamwork, listening. So I don't know if improv is the main business, uh, agenda I would put on the books if I was, you know, running Stanford Business School, but it's, it's important to me.

No, absolutely. And look, you work with lots of entrepreneurs and you've gained a lot of experience from other people as well. Is there a, from your experience, is there a common thread from these entrepreneurs that you work with that you think, you know, when you meet someone you think, yeah, this person's gonna be successful 'cause they've kind of got what it takes. And if so, what is it?

Yeah, I think it is a lot of the self-belief and we can sniff at that, especially in Britain. We can be a bit cynical and a bit, who are you to believe in yourself? A bit British about it. Yeah. And you know, I do think there is something to be learned from that, like, let's call it American kind of self-belief and hustle. And when an individual has that, it allows them to take risks and put themselves in situations that they wouldn't otherwise. Without self-belief, you don't take those actions, and then action is what breeds results. And so it's very, very difficult to make your business successful without a degree of self-confidence. And so a lot of the work I do with people is not just tactical how do you put one foot in front of the other from a business perspective, it's also how do you step into that zone of, yeah, of course I deserve this, of course I can do it, I'm more than capable than anyone of this thing. And that's really hard because you haven't yet done it, right? So, you have to see into the future and imagine yourself doing it, being successful, repeat, and suddenly the small things that you thought were big things, you know, the next set of big things become more possible as well.

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a rounded problem because as you were describing it, I was remembering, you know, I think our parents tell us when we're growing up, you know, not to get overexcited because they don't want us to be disappointed. And then sometimes people that are close to us don't want us to get ahead. Well, maybe that's not true. So, you know, is there more— is there more of a 360 thought about this? Because you've got to have your own self-belief, but what about your partner or people around you? How much of that influenced someone's success or failure?

Such a good question. And massively, I think it impacts you to the extent that you take it on board. So, if you're waiting for the day that everybody in your life approves and supports you to do something, you'll be waiting a really long time. And so, the conversation that I encourage people to have is look around them at who is their supporting tribe. Brené Brown says that if you're in the arena, and she is literally in the arena, you know, she's on big stages, then she should only listen to other people in the arena with her for advice. And the same applies when you're starting a business. Don't take advice or caution from the people who've never left the confines of their salaried job. And people are, A, like you said, trying to protect you, not just not see you disappointed, and B, not always wanting to see you succeed because it says something about them. So, you have to be super careful about influences and I really encourage people to perhaps create a new circle, not ditch their friends, but, you know, put themselves in circles where they are around more people who are supporting them.

But is there a foundation that you need to have? A good example for me is I started my own business in 2008 in the worst recession we'd ever had at that time, but my wife was massively supportive and a real cheerleader, and without that, I would have found it really hard. Is there like a foundation where you do need someone to be on your side, or should you just be gung-ho and go I'm just going to do whatever it takes. I don't care what people think.

I think to do the latter requires a certain personality type that not many people have. I think a lot of, you know, we're social creatures, so we do want that support. So you were fortunate to have your wife. Not everybody has a romantic partner in the first place, let alone who is like that. But if you do, and I would actually say filter for your romantic partner choices for that, which I do, um, and it's an important one because the person or the people that you spend the most time with, if they are in any way resenting that, holding you back, or not championing it, then it's not going to be productive. So yeah, I think you need people or one person to support you. But that's why people do pay coaches, because you have that safe, supportive space to go to every week or whatever and be really held and seen, and then given that platform to go, of course you can go do this thing, I'm here for you if you need help to help you.

And also challenge, if you know, to get them on the right track. Makes sense. And what advice would you give someone, a single business owner, if their business is kind of okay but it's not quite where they want it to be? They need to pivot to get back on track, things aren't really working. What advice would you give them?

Yeah, I would say that pivots are a really exciting time, and they're difficult because they call into question often everything that you've done. But what you can do from a pivot that you can't do from a standing start is you can analyse what has and hasn't worked so far. So I would encourage somebody to go, okay, what are my strengths? What are the assets I've created? What are the relationships I've created? Where am I getting repeat customers or higher profit margins? And then the alternative to that would then be, what's been really hard? Where am I losing customers? Where am I losing money? And so looking at all of that from quite a data-driven perspective can help you make decisions about the right next step. And then I always talk about product founder fit. So, we hear about product market fit, where you just go for what the market needs. But today's day and age, the market has most solutions. And so, you're really better off thinking about founder fit. What do you, as a founder, do really well, better than anyone, that you can fit your business around? And I constantly encourage people to find that alignment between themselves and what they're doing. And I think the more you know yourself, the better you can run your business.

That's good. On our last podcast, we had Adele and we were talking about superpowers, so it kind of makes a lot of sense. Is there a pattern, Ellen, on the way a business goes? Does it grow and plateau before it is successful? Is it okay for it to kind of go backwards before it goes forward? You know, is there a pattern?

I think that some people can run the same business for 10, 20 years and it can stay similar, and that might be enough for somebody. Other people might have a couple of, let's call them quote-unquote failures, before they find that thing that really goes far or, or really ticks for them. And so whatever flavor of entrepreneurship you go for, I would say it doesn't really matter what that growth trajectory looks like from the outside. It's more about what are you experiencing. So are you experiencing new growth, learning, enjoyment, fulfillment, financial security? Because if you're missing all those things then like a big business on paper isn't better because you're more stressed, or maybe you're not actually managing to save any money, and so on and so forth. So I think it's about creating a personal value-based approach to your business and saying, what are my big values here? So Gary, I don't know what yours are, but maybe they're things like impact and connection and freedom. I'm guessing from the minimal amounts I know about you. And you can say, actually, yeah, my business stayed the same this year, but I had more of those.

Does that rubric kind of make sense? Yeah. Make a difference is big on my agenda, I would say. So if I'm making a difference and hopefully making money at the same time, that's great for me. And you kind of posed the question in my mind from what you've just said and what you said earlier about self-belief. I absolutely agree that I probably have too much self-belief, and that's part of my question. How do you get your self-belief big enough How do you get it big enough to believe? What, you know, what, what is the engine of that motivation and self-belief?

I think of it like, um, a cake, you know, requires a few different ingredients. It's not one thing. So we spoke a little bit about support, you know. I don't, I don't think entrepreneurship, even the one-person business journey which I'm familiar with, it's not a solo game. You have people around you. So I think ingredient number one, let's say the right support. Number 2 would be self-care practices that make you feel good, and that's personal. It might be going for a walk with your wife, it might be hot baths, it might be journaling, gratitude. So, having a toolkit of things that you go to that just make you feel good in the first place. I think the third I would suggest as inspiration. So, feeding yourself with inspiration about what's possible, stories, experiences of other people that allow you to think big and see the possibilities. And then you really can't have self-belief without taking action. You know, it's all very well just sitting there and going, I'm amazing, I'm going to do this, but then on paper nothing's changed. You know, you, you build confidence through taking action. And so it's a really interesting chicken and egg one because some people won't take action until they feel confident, but if you don't feel confident, you won't take action. And so it's—

therefore you won't be successful, right? Right, it's a downward spiral as opposed to an upward spiral.

I would say look at your gaps, you know, because some people might feel confident from a, like, knowledge perspective, but not from a, oh, I don't want to be seen, or I don't want to be visible, you know, to the public eye. And then their work is about what's stopping them from feeling safe from being seen. Is there something in their childhood that, that made that feel the case? In which case, they might actually have a few therapy sessions You know, and somebody else might be like, I want to be seen, but I don't really know what I don't know. And then they should have some learning, some mentoring to fill that gap. So it's very personal.

Can you be overconfident? So you kind of believe your own shit— oh, I mustn't say that. Believe your own stuff and therefore you're living a dream that's not real. What's the line between having big belief and being blindsided?

Yeah, I wrote a blog post a few years ago that I kind of continue to share because it's still relevant, and I called it How Much Confidence is Too Much Confidence in Your Business. And we might think of this as the Dunning-Kruger curve, which is that when you're at the early stages of something, you don't know what you don't know. It's very easy to be confident because you don't actually understand the nature of what's to come. You don't know the nuances of the problems you're about to see. And the time it might take you. And so, I often meet people actually at peak confidence. It might sound from what we've discussed that I only meet people when they're low confidence, but sometimes it's the opposite and they're, "I'm going to be so successful. I'm going to get 6 figures in 3 months, blah, blah, blah." And I encourage them similarly just to start taking action, because the more action you take, the more you see how much there is to do and how much that you maybe don't yet know. And what happens with the confidence curve, the Dunning-Kruger curve is that you actually lose confidence when you realise— when you learn more. So, you lose confidence when you learn more because you realise you're not an expert. But what a lot of people do is they then quit and they think, "Well, there's no point because I'm rubbish at this." And you have to continue through that dip and keep going, and eventually you learn enough to realise that you start to know more than you did at the start and that you can increase your confidence again. So that's a long-winded way of saying the earliest people in entrepreneurship often are the most confident, but not necessarily the right confidence.

Yeah, no, it's good. I call it confident vulnerability, because if you're, if you're too confident, you become arrogant. But you do need to believe. You need to— so it's a tough one. And, and look, I want to get to the acceleration part because I want to, I want to get into your head on, you know, I'm, I'm determined now, you know, we'll get a race to be the first billionaire. And based on your own experience, you're looking back because it's quite useful sometimes to look back in order to look forward because you're a coach and you've spoken to so many people. What would you have done differently knowing what you know now?

In my business journey?

Yes, because your business journey, you've written about it and you're sharing your experience and success based on what you actually did. So now if you had a chance to go back, what would you do differently?

If I went back, I would have given a bigger push to certain aspects of my company that have been doing well. So for example, I've been writing, as you pointed out a couple of times, I've been writing pretty much weekly or every other week for 4 years. And so I do have this kind of body of work online that I think has served me very well. That is one area I think I could have pushed even further and put more behind it. For example, paid for more SEO support or ads behind it, or what's called aggregating it, so you put it on different channels, you know. So I think if you've already got an asset that, that's working for you, you should like double down on it. And I would say I, I only scratched the surface, and that's something I'm now thinking further about investing in. I would also put myself out there more from a networking perspective. I think that was a downside of COVID is that I got very comfortable being on Zoom in my you know, kind of home environment, your pajamas. Yeah, I would put on a nice top for coaching. But point being that I was in my kind of professional career quite good at networking, going to events and offering to do talks and panels and all that stuff. And I think when I started working for myself, I got a bit like, oh, is that really going to pay off? You know, I'm going to have to travel and pay money and put makeup on and all these things. And actually, I think that's held me back because there's so much opportunity out there for the skills and the stories I have to have shared further. So that's another area to probably push more now.

Really great. So now here I'm going to test your skills. Now I don't want you to be funny unless you really want to be, but using your improv as in being spontaneous. We want to help to get someone to be the first billionaire one-person business, right? So if you could give them 3 tips for breaking the barrier and only 3, what would they be? In the style of— no, don't worry about it.

I don't do impressions, I'm afraid. So I would suggest that they— so that their goal is to be a billion, billion pound business. Correct.

Well, on the track to, you know, whether they're going to make it, I don't know, but just like what's going to move the dial and really kind of accelerate them from being a regular Joe to 20 days a year, making six figures, great, but, but just being like a lot of others versus being the one that stands out.

One thing to nail from the get-go is divorcing your time from money. And so, any activity that requires you to be in person to get paid, you know, for a certain period of time is already going to stop you from being able to scale that. So, you have to then lean on things like education, courses, software, subscriptions, community, right? Anything where your time is not capped. And so, that would be point 1, just to learn about those opportunities. Point 2 would be to have a very strong stance, and I mean like stand for something, and that something doesn't have to be that controversial, but it has to be clear and it has to be specific, and it has to be able to rally people around it. And so, you can have the problem that you solve or the product that you create, but you also need it to stand for something in the world that people can rally around, and then you get that word of mouth, you get that scale potential because people care about it. And then thirdly, I would say do what you do really, really well and outsource to Code or to contractors everything else. If you can afford to take that hit financially at the start, you can reap that reward down the line. Because what a lot of people do in entrepreneurship, and I'm guilty of this too, is you know that you're good at everything in your business because you created it, so you keep doing everything in your business. But then months or years can go by where you basically just created a job for yourself.

Yeah, totally agree with that. That's a good, that's good advice. And Ellen, AI, blessing or curse for this business? For one-person business, a blessing or curse? Is it going to take over my life or is it going to help me be better?

For the one-person business, AI can help you be better because you've already made that decision to separate yourself from the confines of big corporate structures. And bet on yourself to create value for the world and keep 100% of what you make. So if you can then cut costs that you might have otherwise had to give to employees and a team by keeping it to AI, you can multiply your efforts. If— that's the big asterisk— if you learn how to use it effectively.

Yeah, that's fair. But I think a lot of people— there's a lot to learn, right?

So much. And I'm just scratching the surface already, but I'm excited for the opportunities to systemize and automate and really cut back on things that were otherwise just taking up a lot of my energy that were not in my strength zone.

Definitely, definitely agree with that. Okay, listen, I've got one more question and then we're going to get to your musical taste and maybe a joke, you never know. So here's my question: what does the future of work look like, Ellen, and what should I do to make sure I'm on the right side of it?

My whole thing at the moment, or has been really if I look back throughout my career, is that entrepreneurship is the future of work. I do not mean that there's no such thing as having a job, but I do believe that the future of work is much more nimble from a contract perspective. So, most people will, in some shape or form, work for themselves, whether that's 100% of their week or 10% of their week. The future of work is people using the tools available, using, you know, the fact that we don't work in offices 50 hours a week anymore. To their advantages, and corporates can access the talent and the creativity and the innovation from entrepreneurs and work collaboratively with them as well. And so that's the future I'm excited about and want to help bring about as well.

Brilliant, me too. I said that was the last question, but just here, I've got to finish with this, which is, who can be the first billionaire one-person business?

I think it's you, Gary.

I can feel it. No, no, no, but it could be— can it be anyone? Is it going to be a certain type?

Realistically, it's not going to be anyone. It'll be somebody like Oprah or somebody who's already like a household name who can actually leverage the assets they already have to reach mass scale, or somebody like Elon Musk who, who knows everything about that world, you know.

So unfortunately, I don't think the average Joe is going to be so exciting, is it? If someone's already wealthy, they're going to be the wealthy one. I know. I was hoping you were going to say anyone can do it.

No? You're going to kick me off your podcast now.

That's it.

But we don't need that much money, right? Because we don't need a billion profit, but you know, we can make really healthy profit margins through the one-person business and that's exciting. And why not go for 1 billion and see how close you get?

Absolutely. At least you— the only way is up, right? So that's fantastic. So listen, I'm going to ask you about your musical taste, but before I do, Thank you so much. It was really interesting, actually insightful, but really inspirational. You've clearly got lots of experience from the work that you've done yourself. And, you know, there's, there's places that we'll explain to people they can go to go and find out more about you, but also the experience you've gained from others as well that you've shared with us today. So thanks so much.

It's been a real pleasure.

Let's get to your musical tastes, Ellen. We, as you know, we have a podcast playlist on Spotify called The Company Doctor, weirdly, and we, we've got a collection from our guests of things, music that's inspirational, important to them. One or two tracks, what's it going to be? And maybe a bit of improv at the end.

Do you know an album I, an album I really like, which is even a little bit from my early, early youth, would be The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. She just has such a soulful voice. So yeah, songs like Can't Take My Eyes Off You, they just bring back that '90s nostalgia.

That's a great album. Isn't that the one that has the, uh, Killing Me Softly on that one? Yes, yes.

So those are great, great tunes. Do you know, I'm gonna stay in the nostalgia zone. Kooks, um, and Seaside. That was one of the tracks of my youth, so it's a beautiful song that I don't think gets old. And so yeah, those songs kind of remind me of A simpler time, shall we say, pre-AI time.

Yeah, yeah, when our life was our own. By the way, they're great tracks. We'll definitely add those to the playlist. Ellen, thanks so much for coming on. I think it's been really fun, and I was expecting a bit of improv, but I don't want to push my luck. But thanks so much for coming on, and we'll hopefully see you again soon.

It's been so fun, thank you. Yeah, speak to you soon.

Cheers.

Thank you for listening, and a massive thanks to our guest Ellen Donnelly for joining us and for being so inspiring. If you'd like to hear more from Ellen, visit theask.uk— that's the-ask.uk— where you can download her 5-step guide designed for professionals who are building a one-person business around their unique skills and talents. Thank you again for joining us today, and see you next time.