007: Million-Dollar One-Person Business with Elaine Pofeldt

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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

I am absolutely thrilled to have Elaine Beaufeldt here with us today. Elaine, in addition to being the author of the Million Dollar one Person business which is just launching a revised edition subtitle, make great money. Work the way you like. Have the life you want. She's also the acclaimed one of the acclaimed top 10 most popular pivot podcasts of all time. So we did our first conversation, episode 96 from April 2018 and it was just one of those instant classics. People were very curious about this notion of a tiny business with big money, which is also the subject of Elaine's next book, which I'm so excited about. She's an independent journalist and a speaker who specializes in careers and entrepreneurship. Elaine is also a proud wife and mother of four children while doing all of this. Elaine, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much Jenny. It's great to be back and I really enjoyed that episode too. I'm so glad that so many people listened to it. It's a testament to the great work that you're doing on this podcast to really bring people together around information that matters to them.

Well, thank you so much. I am just positively giddy to speak with you today because you were the first person, I mean as you say in the million dollar one person business. So many of us were inspired by the four hour workweek long ago which touted the benefits of delegation, automation, staying lean, staying agile, optimizing for freedom and free time. And then 2020 has hit. So I've been dying to talk to you to understand both how was this segment and I know you geek out about the the Census Bureau stats every May. So now I have a reminder set for, for May for myself as well. But what have you seen in the last year in terms of we know small businesses were hit very hard, but specifically these small lean businesses did more start. What are the trends that you're seeing now from this new vantage point?

Well, what we're seeing is that small businesses are being created in record numbers. That's, that's what the government has been finding. Unfortunately a lot of people are losing their jobs right now, as you know, as we see in the news all the time. But people are being very resourceful and some are finding this to be an opportunity to start that business that they've always been thinking about but maybe never had the incentive to start because their job seemed more safe and secure. Right now a lot of jobs are shaky and sometimes it's in those periods that we see the business best new businesses created. We definitely saw that in the recession and in fact I was thinking about how so many businesses in the book started right around that time, you know, when people couldn't get jobs or they lost jobs and it turned out to be the best possible opportunity for them. Although of course anybody who has lost a job is in a lot of short term pain. It's very difficult. But sometimes it motivates people to do something bigger than they ever thought they could accomplish. And that's what a lot of the folks have done.

There were many people I interviewed in pivotal who got pivoted. They didn't choose that. But looking backward there was nobody that said to me I was kept waiting for someone to say yes and this continues to be the worst thing that ever happened to me. And maybe that's the resilience of the human spirit. But, but every single person said I didn't have the courage to do that on my own. In the end I was glad that it happened. It's very shocking and there can be that grieving period or that what did I do? Or what's wrong with me? But it's it's true. I do think that it gives not only new small business owners and solo pluspreneurs courage to maybe jump into the self employment world. I also think it gave a lot of veterans of the industry. You know, I know you're 12 plus years into running your business, I'm 10 years in. It gave all of us some permission too to do things a little differently. Any thoughts on how you shifted in the last year?

Well, what I saw with a lot of the entrepreneurs, because I've done a lot of coverage on Forbes where I've checked in with them, is a lot of them shifted to a different area of revenue in their business. One example is Joey Healy, who does an eyebrow salon in New York City. He started out as kind of a freelance eyebrow stylist. He created the Joey Healy Method. Then he opened his own one man salon. Then it started to scale up and he licensed out his method to other stylists who were contractors and he started manufacturing his own line of brow makeup. Well, during the pandemic he had this shop in New York City with very high rent. He was near New York University and prime real estate and now nobody could come because it was under lockdown. So he thought about what could he sell. And what he did was he doubled down on marketing his makeup. He had a big supply of it using TikTok videos and Instagram videos. And then he started offering virtual styling where you could get him on a video call and he would tell you how to style your eyebrows. You would send your a photo of your brows in advance so he could study them. And he was offering that and that was what was getting him through the pandemic. Another entrepreneur, Elisa Shira, was hit hard. She is an event planner and she was doing live events. All of a sudden everything came to a standstill. And I talked to her a couple of days after the pandemic. We had just done an event and she was panicking for a couple of days and then she said, well, wait a minute, I've been saying for a long time I should learn how to do virtual events. And so she just dove into learning how to do them and she brought her skills at wrangling celebrities to virtual events and she started reaching out to big companies that were having their quarterly meetings and said, would you like to bring a celebrity to your event and liven it up a little bit? So that got her busy and then she started doing experiential events where she'd find a local chef who would teach a course as part of the Event and, and the last time I spoke to her, she had just done four that day of these types of events. And her business was BO and she was doing great with it. And I thought this is the essence of these million dollar one person businesses. It's not that they don't feel pain. I mean, she was very stressed when I spoke with her, but she channeled that energy into doing whatever she could do in the situation. Not everything was under her control. Live events are still basically closed all around the country, but the virtual events have been booming and now she's an expert in it and she maybe would have never gotten around to it. I think that's what we're all doing. In the beginning of the pandemic. For me, my business has multiple revenue streams. So part of it is being a journalist, part of it I do some content marketing copy and that sort of thing. And part of it is ghostwriting of books and that sort of thing. And in the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of the journalism dried up because a lot of the publications were no longer getting advertisements or getting very few. So all of a sudden that went off a cliff. So I just focused on the other stuff which was growing and there was a need for. And it's not always even right. You might have some months where the revenue is pret pretty low compared to what you usually make. But if you keep on showing up, I think that's the essence of business survival, is you keep on showing up. Eventually you get to the other side and it starts building back up again. Like now most of the journalism is back, some things aren't, but you just sort of wait them out. The vaccine is coming and I think that's a spirit we all have to bring. Just realize everybody's suffering a little bit or a lot. And if your business isn't perfect, it's no fault of yours. Look at the environment we're operating in. But you do what you can do and you commit to it and eventually things will pick back up again.

Yeah, I love that. Just keep showing up. If there's one thing that any of us can say is that, okay, I'm just going to keep showing up and keep showing up and try to ride out those dips. I'm glad you brought up your business model as well, because I was really struck in our last conversation that you are a writer, but you so clearly identify as a business owner because you are and you think about your business as a business owner. And particularly in the field of writing, for example, I think there can be a lot of stress when people are still straddling that freelancer versus business owner transition. And you say that, you know, freelancers are not yet getting out of the hamster wheel, maybe. And so how, as a writer, how. How did you make that shift to where really think of what you're doing as a business and not as a freelancer or service provider?

It's funny, I think it's a gradual transition for most people. And usually what happens is people start out in jobs. We're kind of programmed to have jobs. Very few people start out as an entrepreneur without any job before that. And then something changes in our lives, right? You, you have children and you don't want to work in an office, or you get fired or, you know, whatever it is, something changes your work situation. And at that point, you might become open to doing independent work of some sort. Freelancing for some people, maybe it's starting an Amazon store for other people, but it's basically starting some type of small venture. And I think in the beginning, we have a tendency to wait for someone else to give us the work, kind of like a boss would. And then there comes a point, usually with cash flow, where you realize you have to be a little more proactive about it, that things aren't going to just float into your lap the way they would at an office where everybody's always busy and can you do this project? And you might get a promotion if you work on it and you start to reach out a little bit more and, you know, build up your LinkedIn profile or put up some ads online or do something to market yourself. And I think it's at that point where you start to take responsibility for your own revenue streams that the shift starts to occur. And then if it works, all of a sudden you're thinking like a business owner. You probably don't recognize it at that stage. I mean, I certainly didn't. And it's a very good question that you're asking. I don't remember at what point I started to say that I was a business owner. But I think it definitely occurs at that point where you realize nobody's going to send you work.

You've got to be in charge of it. And that's the essence of being your own boss. Otherwise you just end up scrambling from one project to the next, and it's always feast or fam. And maybe, maybe it also occurs at the point where you realize you want to take control of your lifestyle more and, and that you have the power to put some structure in place by having a more organized way of bringing in new business and deciding what you will and won't do. I remember there was one transition I made where I wouldn't do in person work anymore because I realized the math of it didn't work out. If I have to take an hour to get there and back and I'm just working for a couple of hours and usually companies, the hourly rate they can pay you if you work on premises is not that high. It just I might as well be paying them not to give me the work. So I stopped taking that kind of work. That's when you start making decisions like that where you're thinking about profit. That's another sign that you're making that transition. But it's very important what you're talking about. I just moderated a panel for a company called Wethos. It's a research firm and they did a study of it was six figure freelancers mostly in creative and tech industries. And they found that those that had the highest revenue did identify as business owners and not freelancers. And they, they made a lot of decisions that flowed out of that, which was very interesting to me that statistically they are much more likely to think of themselves as business owners.

That is very interesting and it's such an important shift. I know for me I laughed out loud so hard when you said in the introduction to your book maybe you didn't read the E Myth closely enough. Like if you haven't learned how to scale automate, delegate yet that that's a common criticism. But in fact I started reading E Myth when I had just left Google almost 10 years ago. And I joke that this is the book that took me eight years to read because it wasn't until last year when I finally picked it back up, reread it and I said, uh huh, you know, I didn't leave my job, I just gave myself a new job. And so just as you're describing, over these last 10 years for me as well, there's this realization that I simply can't do everything. It's very cost ineffective for me to try to do everything. And if in fact I want to do my best most strategic creative work, I need to delegate and automate and get better at these systems. And in fact in my case I stopped taking on one on one coaching clients because there was a certain point where I too realized even the hour, it seems like it's just one hour for one client in a day or in a week, but there's a lot more that goes into that. And it. I really needed to zoom out and look at the business as a whole and really start to create a sense of scale. Even though like you, I like to stay delightfully tiny. So I don't have any ambitions of really running a big team. But it was so. It was so crucial to. And I changed my bio. It used to say I'm an author, speaker and career and business strategist. And in 2019, maybe it was early 2020, I changed that because I realized those titles were service provider titles. Basically that involved my time and flying around the country and hopping on the phone. And so I changed it to. Jenny Blake is founder of the Pivot Method. That was just my kind of. For now, that will work at least it implies that I'm running a business, not just delivering services.

That's such an important shift. I think that's another sign of when someone is really thinking of themselves more as a business owner and not as a freelancer. Is starting to think about products. Because you do get to a point where it's impossible. Even if you don't want to scale in terms of building a giant Elon Musk type of business, you might want to scale your revenue to $1 million. So how are you going to do that if you're. Even if you're charging. I interviewed a copywriter who was charging almost fifteen hundred dollars an hour and she said it was so stressful because she just feel pressure that when she had that call with people with her clients, she had to perform. And what she shifted to doing was a masterclass and doing mini PDF courses on her copywriting techniques. And then her calendar was freed up and that was really how she got to 1 million. It was when she started introducing those products. And I think thinking of yourself as a founder is the foundation of that. For me, even having the book was kind of interesting because when you write a book, if you write it for a commercial publisher, you get royalties. And having that experience of I put a lot of work into it, years of research and then actually writing it took a lot of time too. And then there's time spent promoting it. But once it's done, it's done. And then you get the royalties twice a year, which is a good reminder. It's not. I wouldn't say there's such a thing as really passive income. People say passive, but there's a lot of work that goes into building passive income. But it's. It's not a project that you had to scramble to do. And that's a good Feeling. And then once you have it, you start thinking about what are some of the other ones that I could introduce? How, how could I make my life easier? How could I take Friday off to spend with my kids or my friends or working out or whatever it is that you like to do? And I think the answer, it does come with thinking of it as a business. But you're right, you also have to invest in yourself. Act of hiring a bookkeeper or an accountant or a marketer or somebody who does, but you don't do that well and would be very inefficient for you to learn. Takes some courage. I actually just got off the phone with an entrepreneur I'm about to write about. He's an inventor. He had had a corporate job in real estate and he'd always loved design and he had studied architecture and he came up with some inventions. There are these different types of cup holders and he designed them. And he said it was a big leap for him to invest the money in coming up with the prototype because he had never really made that kind of investment not knowing if, if this was going to sell. And I think it's a foreign experience for a lot of us to invest in ourselves if we. I have to take a, a compliance course for a client that made me a temp employee for this project. And they're paying for the compliance course. Right. I'm not investing in it. I'm glad to learn the information. It's, you know, part of my arsenal of knowledge as a business owner. But when you, when you're doing it in your own business, you have to pay for these investments. And we're not really trained to do that in traditional careers. So once you start making those investments and realizing, you know what, they may pay off, but they may not. And it might just be a learning opportunity for me. And that will pay off too. That's, that's also part of the transition that you're talking about. But that's really what allows your business to grow, is saying, bring it on. Doing it, even if you're a little bit afraid, you almost have to have that as it's so true.

True. And then even I think of it in two forms because I do strive to stay as small as possible because it helps me be more agile and freedom oriented. And I don't particularly think of myself as a great manager. So I want to come back to that piece where you said not everyone's cut out to be a boss. There's the one off professionals you might hire. And then for Me, there's like a bunch of ongoing professionals like a bookkeeper or an attorney. Those that are just a go to. You gotta have them. And it is scary to invest and to start paying more and more to get people who are really qualified and not just these kind of ad hoc bartering with friends, but it's so vital. And then yes, as well, investing in your own education, investing in brand, investing in things that are going to, or you hope a prototype, a pilot that are going to move things forward. Advertising. This is actually a beautiful segue because you talked about your book being the beautiful asset that it is, that once you create it for however many thousands of readers you have, if not more, that is your scaling people saying, can I pick your brain? Or wanting to have coffee with you? It's right there in the book. And it's this asset that you get to have on your, in your body of work and in your tool belt in your business. So the next book, which I'm so excited about, comes out in 2022. You're working on it as we speak. Can you tell us about the premise of this next book and of course the title?

Sure. It's. Well, it's called Tiny Business, Big Money. And I am in the thick of it, really in the thick of it. When, you know, I know you're writing a book as well and I'd love to talk with you more about that. And this book looks at the next size business, the one that might have one admin or a few people doing customer service. They might be employees or it might be a team of contractors that they regularly rely upon and have to manage. That's a big challenge for people managing other people. And you know, as you mentioned, not everybody is cut out to be a boss, but there are ways to manage people without being what we think of as a boss. That's what I'm finding, that there are a lot of new ways that people are doing that so that they can have a business that works best when there are people other than the owner doing some of the work. It is definitely a transition, though. It's a mental transition. One of the interesting things I found, I've been crunching some of the numbers and the average size business in the U.S. because, you know, I'm a data geek about this stuff, has 21 employees. I'm writing about the micro businesses which have 20 employees or less. Well, for them the average size is only four people. So these are very small.

And in the group, even 20 sounds like so much to me, like, oh, that's so big.

That's a pretty good number. That's like a number you might have in an office. It's not in your house. It might not be remote. But the, the group that's four employees or less, the average size is only one. Right. One employee. So they're still very small and similar to the ones in the first book. But they do have something different in that they need to have more structure, they need to have more systems in place there. You know, when you have employees, there are laws you have to follow.

You can't do it on a banana peel or you'll get in trouble. So it needs more organization. And I actually think for all businesses you need a strategy. But it becomes more important than ever that you have a strategy that you can articulate to even one other person. Or else they're kind of operating in a vacuum. You also need a culture. And every firm has a culture. Even a one person firm has a culture. There's a vibe that every business gives off, right. Of like what it's like to deal with Jenny Blake and you know, he's.

Friendly and that should be Emmanuel someone, someone who's worked with me in the last 10 years. I'd be so scared to read it.

Well, I think we all would be. But, but it forces you to sort of think about that like what is the customer experience and you know, what, what is the result people get and what feeling do I want them to come away with from this business? And now how do you transmit that to another person who's a completely separate person from you, who has their own views on all of this stuff? And how do you get them to really feel passionate about the business that they don't own, that they're contributing to? And there are a lot of different ways that people do do this. And you know, there are issues of communication. What are the best ways to communicate? That's evolving very fast right now with the so many different technologies everyone uses. What, what are the best ones for you and what are the best ones for your team? And what if they're not the same tools? How do you, how do you figure out which ones they are? I'm, I'm finding it really fascinating to see because these people are, they're seven figure business owners, similar to the first book. They're the Olympic athletes of the tiny business. So they have a lot to teach everybody. They're really, really good at it and they are so generous in sharing what works for them. That's why I always love working with these Smaller businesses, when you work with corporate businesses, they're so close to the vest and so hyper competitive. But I think these folks, they realize there's only so much business one business can take on. So they're, they're happy to share the wealth. And that's nice.

I love that was one of the things you say in the book is that they're actually quite generous. Not just I'm so glad they're sharing their information with you so we can learn but also with each other that they, they're not as competitive as you might think. And I wonder, do you make a distinction then between the one person million dollar business, let's say from your previous book and then and they might have a whole network of contractors. Would you say that the tiny business that you're describing now has at employee outside of the owner, or could that still be some lattice of contractors?

Yeah, I would say I'm trying to. There's about 40 case studies and I think almost all of them do. There are some cases where they have a lot of contractors that it just requires a lot of organizational skill. So I think it's similar to having employees. Sometimes they have more global teams where they'll have web developers in Eastern Europe and some people in the US and maybe customer service folks somewhere else in the world. And so there's a complexity to it that's a little bit beyond what I wrote about in the other book where maybe the person's hiring their first bookkeeper, that sort of thing. And it's much more consistent because you're talking about having overhead. Basically you've got to pay these people every month which requires you to maintain stability in your cash flow too. It's a little different if you hire a web developer, you know, once a year to do a project for you, but you're not paying them all year round then then you have a little more latitude to just take the month of August off if you need to.

Relax. It's just a little bit different when you get to that next stage of formality with the business. But what I'm interested in is they do seem to preserve a lot of the informality. These are not folks that are really creating the buttoned up like go into the office. You look like a wealth management firm no matter what kind of business you are.

They're, they're keeping their lifestyle, which is what I think a lot of people want. Especially in this era of remote work. People are really enjoying it. A lot of people who never got a little taste of it now have had it. And they're saying, I love this.

And there's such a creativity to the owner saying, how can I keep the lifestyle, lifestyle aspects that I love and the culture that I wish I had back when I was working in corporate, let's say as any, any owner. I think that like you said, these are the Olympians of this space. Because to me it's not just about the money. I have no interest in growing a business only for the money. It's actually so much more about freedom and lifestyle. And you talk about this in the book relationships, time with family, time to work out. I mean there's just so much that goes beyond our day to day work. And actually the smartest businesses and business owners find ways to cut the time they spend. It's, there's not this glory in how long I'm sitting at my desk.

Desk.

The glory is in, wow, look at these systems and team I created to leave my desk.

Absolutely. Yes. It's because they value their time more than money. It's not that they don't need money. You do need it to pay your rent or your mortgage and buy groceries and make sure you have health care in this country and other other things. You just, you can't live without it. They, they, they want to be comfortable and not constantly obsessed with scarcity of money. But they don't need to be the richest person in the world either. And I think that's a healthy place to be. One of the things that I found interesting about them is whether they have contractors or employees, they really give back a lot to the people that work for them. And I think that's one thing we see in corporate America. There's a lot of talk about discretionary effort. You know, you've got to try to motivate people to sort of give their time to the company for free by creating a great culture, that sort of thing. And as when I was an employee for many years and that never made any sense to me because I would think, well, why not just pay people for the time that they give you, right? And then they'll really have buy in because they have to buy new tires if their tire blows out, they have to buy groceries for their family. What would be more motivating than to actually pay them for the time that they're putting in? But the big companies don't think that way. But, but one of the things I find is some of these folks really do, or they pay them in other ways by giving them opportunities to grow professionally. They're really invested in the people that they work with. And I think that's one of the secrets is they give back. They're not just asking people for the world, they're also giving. And that's the nice thing about a one person business because it is personal. They do know the people that work for them. They know what's going on with them and it puts them in a position where they're very symbiotic. And when their business grows, so does the other person persons. If they're a contractor or when their business grows, that employee has growth opportunities too. And that's something I think a lot of people who have jobs don't always find is present. They feel kind of a lack of purpose, a lack of investment by the company and them as an individual. And so in a way there's an opportunity. I think if you have a one person business, if you can offer that to people, just an environment where they're cared about and their development is prioritized, your business will grow quite a bit.

Yes, and like you said, symbiotically their business will grow too. I also feel like in these tiny businesses at least I, I have a lot of empathy. Like I don't want to create a culture where someone's working overtime or on weekends or at night or my emergency becomes their stressor. It's just, I don't know, I remember those days. Why would I create that? And so, and, and that even I ask, I'll ask certain of my team members because no one on my team is full time. I'll say, do you have extra capacity? I have a friend who's looking for exactly what you do. And you're am and it like the matrix continues weaving itself of these relationships and symbiotic connections and referrals. And it's not about, oh, holding people back by not making them an employee. It's actually I respect their business that they're hook connecting to mine and want to get them the clients they want. And the diversity in terms of number of clients and what they work on, it's just, I love it. I don't think that it's, I mean we know that certain aspects of the gig economy, it's kind of abused of overly working contractors and they have no security. But I think we're talking about here something different.

I think we're talking more here about highly compensated contractors. I that's what I remember speaking with Sol Orwell, who was in the first book about that, about a designer that he used who, who charged $150 an hour. And he said, some people think that's a lot of money, but in reality what she gets done in one hour is what someone else might get done in six hours because she's so good. And I think there's a recognition because these one person businesses are very good at what they do and they will pay somebody well to help enhance their business. And that's not exploiting somebody the way maybe some of the platforms do, unfortunately. And I think that's being resolved somewhat too in this country. Like there was Proposition 22 that passed in California where now some of the platforms have to provide benefits to the contractors without the contractors losing that contractor status, which, which a lot of them want because they need to work flexibly. But you raised something that is kind of on my mind lately, which is this whole idea of, of people needing diversity in the way that they work. I think we saw that with the pandemic where the sort of all hands on deck mindset of many companies hurts certain segments of society when you think about like mothers with young children, parents in general. But I think we're seeing by the Labor Department statistics are being put under immense pressure by this whole hybrid learning, online school environment because they have to be very involved with it and it takes a lot of time. And we saw record numbers since in the pandemic of women leaving the workforce to the point that we've lost basically all the gains of women in the workforce in the past 40 years. And I think in a one person business, you actually, or a tiny business, you have an opportunity to not be part of that negative trend. And say, I recognize that other people have lives and I recognize that they have children or aging parents or pets that need care or they're active in their community. And I choose not to ask people to work at 7pm and I choose not to create that kind of toxic work environment, no matter how passionate and tense I am about the company. I also recognize that other people have other priorities. And I feel like this is a frontier of diversity, inclusion and equity. Recognizing that not everybody has that support system at home to take up the slack if they don't do anything at all to contribute to the work of the home. And that's one of the reasons I find these tiny businesses so exciting, because corporations talk a good game. But then you look at all the, the data and they have made very little progress. And now even that little progress has been reversed. But it doesn't really have to be. I mean, you see it like that's why a lot of people work for small businesses because it's more of a personal atmosphere where they can say, oh, I have to pick up my child from school on Thursdays at 3, assuming they can pick anybody up from school in the coming year. But, but you can, you can do something about it instead of just going along with those toxic workplace practices. So that, that excites me quite a bit too. Or if you're not even at the point of H, you can create it for yourself where you don't have somebody questioning whether you're loyal to your work, if you have to go home and make dinner or your mom's in a nursing home or whatever it may be. It's not seen as a loyalty test if you have a life. And I think that's kind of what people get up against, especially in tough times when there are layoffs. There's so much pressure on people to prove that they'll do the job of three people when they have these corporate jobs. And it puts people under crushing emotional pressure and mental health pressures that you don't have to create in your own business. So I, I think it's going to be an exciting frontier for people to create a new kind of workplace that, that doesn't do those things because you really, you really don't have to. If you run it well, there's always ways to use automation, to use contractors, to fill in gaps so that you don't have to put that kind of pressure on other people.

Absolutely. I love what you just said, that it's not seen as a liability if you have a life a hundred million percent, you get a standing ovation from me on that. And there again, if you're a tiny business and you're optimizing for your own freedom, not just money and productivity at all costs, the way that some public companies must optimize for shareholder value every quarter and is this constant unceasing climb up and to the right of their revenue figures. I mean, it just is so toxic, even if it's unintentional to the teams. And similarly, if you're venture backed, you have people breathing down your neck. And I think what these tiny businesses are saying, I don't want that for myself and I'm not going to create that for my team. Because it's okay if we're less productive right now during a pandemic because we have lives and we have responsibilities and this is how it is right now. And let's ride this out together. And we've got this, you know, of course, and it's within limits where it is a business, it's not a family. I appreciate it. Reid Hoffman's book, the alliance, they say it's really a misnomer when leaders say, oh, we're a family, you're just part of the family. Well, no, no, that's not true either. A lot of people lost their jobs during the pandemic because small businesses had to make cuts in order to stay afloat at all. I wanted to ask you, you okay? Two things. Two things. Pick whichever order you want. I'm curious what new stats came out. I know it's, we're recording this before the May 2021 census, but already a couple months in, during May 2020. I'm curious what you were seeing about the trend with one person or tiny businesses. And in part two, I know in the revised edition of One Person Million Dollar Business, you talk about some new business models, so I'd love to hear about those too.

Sure. Well, one interesting thing that's happened, the census statistics are about two years behind. So we're recording this at the end of 2020. We had the most recent or 2018, and the numbers continue to go up of million doll. So there were over 41,000, which was the highest ever in history, which is really exciting. And it tells you more and more people are learning how to do it. And there's a pipeline of six figure businesses that are building their capabilities. Because when you think about it, what do we all learn? I mean every day we're learning how to build revenue and how to develop our businesses. And I think we're going to see many more of them. I don't know what's going to happen in 2020 because it's been such a strange year. You have some, some industries have done even better. I've had some people that I've written about this year that are booming. I, I'm about to write about someone who's a baby food manufacturer and she, she was a one person business when I last spoke with her, but I think she may have hired someone since then in the last few months. But her business has been doing really well. Others have been hit hard. So it'll be interesting to see what happens if there's sort of a shift in industries and a shift in the, in the numbers. But I think what we're going to see just long term is that this will continue to go up because the tools that enable it, the low cost tech tools, keep getting better and more accessible. I'm also finding the trend is becoming more global. I just did an event where it was entrepreneurs from the UK and Australia. And just after doing that I started hearing from a number of others from, from those countries and I realized I'm just, it's scratching the surface with this trend. It's. And, and it's going to take different forms in different countries. The entrepreneur I just spoke with was in the UK and he said if he confined himself to his local geographic market, he wouldn't have enough people really to get to 1 million. So he, he's in five different countries and he's using a global strategy. And I thought that's so interesting. Right, Because Americans don't really have to do that as much with a product based business because our market is so huge in terms of consumers. So I think we're going to see different variations on the theme in different, different countries.

So interesting. I would not have thought of that if you're coming from a smaller country. That's such a great point.

Yeah, it's really, it's, it's very interesting. And there are different marketplaces in the different countries, so we'll probably see that some of the marketplaces wind up catching on globally if they get big enough. And I mean it really changes by the day. I feel like these folks are on the front lines of everything that's exciting in entrepreneurship. So hopefully the trend will continue. It's a very democratizing trend in terms of helping individuals and very small business owners build wealth. And it's very accessible to all. I mean, that's one of the other things I love about it is you don't need access to capital because if you look at, I know you're familiar with the venture world, the numbers are terrible in the venture industry. There's zero diversity and inclusion in terms of who is getting investment capital. And I know they're working on it, but at a glacial pace. And banking hasn't, banking has done better, but banking hasn't come along as much as I have thought it would by now either. So this is an area where one thing I'm seeing is people are starting businesses with basically no capital. They're doing print on demand type products. I've written about a couple of businesses lately that they'll do things like T shirts with their own designs and they use a drop shipping model so that they take the orders in. Usually they build some sort of Facebook community or an online community and then they send the orders to the manufacturer and the manufacturer fills them. And when they fill them, the manufacturer takes the cut, you know, for their services and then pays the entrepreneur the rest. And this is tremendously empowering for people who just can't save up the money. Maybe their job doesn't pay enough. They could still become an entrepreneur. So that I think that's a big frontier that we're going to see just exploding. There's competition in it, but there are a lot of niche players that come up with unique spins on it. And one woman, she loved dogs and she created a little community for people who love Yorkies. And all her products had to do with Yorkies and that, that was what became her million dollar business.

That does not actually surprise me. I feel that people who love their breed of their dog will go all out, whether it's Yorkies or corgis, or in my case, German shepherd. It's like the, there's actually so many dedicated Instagram accounts, Reddit communities for every single breed. It's just amazing when you really get into people's passions and then you tap into something like our furry friends. I mean, I don't have to say it's like cat, Cat. Everything has gone viral since the dawn of the Internet.

Oh, definitely. Yeah. One woman I wrote about recently for Forbes. This piece got a lot of readers. Her name is Nicole Brown and she also lives in New Jersey. And her business is called Izzy and Liv. And what she sells are clothing, accessories and decor that are designed by and for women of color. And she created a box company, kind of like Birchbox, but it's called the Brown Sugar Box. And it has things like, you know, T shirts with empowering messages. And she sells things like shower curtains with African themes and, and that sort of product. And it's done really well. It's, it's almost at 7 million in revenue. And she had started out with print on demand and then she kept building it up and now she's at about, I think eight employees currently. So she's become a job creator. But she was a one woman band for a while. I really related to her because she has four children also. And there's sort of a chaos that you live with when you have with that many children. And I live with it daily. And she somehow managed to do this in between everything else. She actually started the business. She had a premature baby who was medically fragile, and it was really stressful for her going back and forth to the nicu. And I also went through that. I had twins in the NICU for three months when my older girls were born. And she distracted herself from the stress by starting this business. And she had worked at I Village, so she knew about community building online, so she had started building a community for women of color. And, and this sprang out of that. And I thought how wonderful that was, you know, that she had actually had to leave her job to take care of the baby. So it wasn't a good time to invest a ton of money in a. But she still was able to build this incredible business that's very fast growing using. Using that method of print on demand.

I am just awed by both of you. I think your third book or the one following should be Tiny Business, Big Family.

How are any of us stressed about our business? And I don't have any kids and I still am figuring things out every day. And see, not only are you juggling all the business owner assets aspects, but for children who by the way, have been homeschooling and home and in your house and your husband's there working as well, like, oh my gosh, please, please write a book on this or at least a few articles.

You know, it's funny, I don't, I don't hold myself out as a parenting expert. I'll leave that to others.

I, you know, we all do the best we can and still figure out some time.

Insanity, joke, struggle, like even if. Let's set aside the parenting grade, you know, but just to manage your time, your mind, your space, your sanity. You must have figured some things out by now.

Well, the only thing I can say is I, I keep things pretty simple. I realized when I had the kids that I, I had to really focus on the things that were most important to me. So the majority of my time is spent either with my family or working. And as they've gotten bigger, now they're ages 10 through 16, so I have more freedom. I used to exercise in the house on an elliptical trainer or do yoga videos. I've had the liberty of leaving my house and I can go running and go to a yoga class and I've added those things in and I just to keep some balance in my day because I'm at the computer a lot. Like often I break the day up with exercise. So I'll go to a hot yoga class in the morning at 6 o' clock in the morning and it's, it's snowing outside my window right now. But sometimes I'll take my son now out for a bike ride. If the kids were in school, maybe I go for a walk or go jogging or something like that, just to get up and moving. And then sometimes at night we do like a zoom Taekwondo class. Me and Two of my daughters and I, yeah, I find for me, physical activity helps a lot. Just clearing my head so that I can move on to the next project where if it's dinner time, you know, then I clear my head so that I can be present with my family. It doesn't always work. You know, we all, sometimes we have a lot on our minds, but I try to, I try to be present for what I can do. And I realize there's different seasons for things. So there's a lot of women in my community who are incredible volunteers at the school and men too. And I've really never been able to do much volunteering at the school because those two things that I do take so much time. But I realize it's not my season to do that type of volunteering. I do pro bono work in my business, but that's more manageable because I don't have to make the time to leave the house. But there's going to come a time where my kids are bigger and I can devote myself more to the community. And I think just recognizing that, that there are different seasons in life is helpful when you, you're beating yourself up for, for not being all the things that you think you should be at any one time.

So it's so beautifully said. Thank you for that. Thank you so much, everybody. Check out the revised edition to Elaine's book, the Million Dollar One Person Business, and keep an eye out. Follow her on wherever you buy books. But if you can, follow her author page for a Tiny Bit Business Big Money coming out in September 2022. And Elaine, where can people find you if they want to keep in touch?

They can Find me on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter under my full name. And I do write back. I love hearing from entrepreneurs, so don't be shy. Feel free to send me a message. And I love hearing from people so that I can become a better reporter. When I know what your challenges are, then I'll look into it and it will inform one of my future stories. So feel free.

That's so amazing. And I'm going to put all your links in the show notes too. Elaine, thank you so much. This has been a delight and I cannot wait for round three when the new book comes out.

Thank you so much, Jenny. It's always a pleasure to talk with you.

Likewise.

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