Transitioning from Solopreneur to Entrepreneur | Ep #77

Hey, I'm Chris Placke, host of the Lead you'd Team podcast. Running a million dollar business is not easy. And whether you're just getting started with building your team or you've been at this for a while, I'm going to bring you honest, specific and clear practices you can use right now, today to improve how well you lead your team. Let's go ahead and get.

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Well, hi, how are you? Welcome. I'm so glad you're here. I have so many things that I want to talk with you about. First of all, I want to thank those of you who continue to share reviews on itunes that's just super fun and super grateful and read all of them. So if you are a listener and you have been a listener and you haven't yet, I would so appreciate if you hopped on over to itunes or Spotify or SoundCloud or Google Play. I know there's so many different places people get their podcasts now. But I certainly would be tremendously grateful for your review and your thoughts means a lot to me and it's certainly helpful to other women like you who are looking for this information, which I'm learning more and more is harder and harder to kind of find because what I do such a sort of narrow scope and specialty. So anyway, thank you for that. Second of all, I hope you're all doing okay. We're in the midst of just this nutty summer. We. I am recording this at the end of July, so I know we're approaching the fall season when it comes to school. And I appreciate there's so much, much out in the world that is unclear and ambiguous and uncertain. So I hope you're taking care of yourself and resting. I am going to be taking a week off next week and I'm really looking forward to that. I'm actually going to go away by myself. I was just talking with my team. I'm going to get in my car early in the morning.

And drive all alone. I'm not going to drink anything so I don't have to stop anywhere and I'm going to go check into a beautiful hotel on the beach and not leave it. So I'm super excited and really ready for a little downtime. So I hope that in whatever way, shape or form you can create that for yourself, that you find time, even if it's an afternoon. Dr. Camille Wise, who was our conscious inclusion advisor, she gave me a jigsaw puzzle a couple weeks ago and I have been doing that on the weekends and it's so relaxing. I'm loving it. So I'm probably going to get a couple more and take one on my little excursion. So the other reason that I'm excited to go away is I am going to be launching in the fall a live course. We haven't worked out a lot of the details yet, but I can tell you that the name of the course is how to CEO for Female Entrepreneurs. It's going to be Live Teaching with me. Live Coaching with me and my team. We are assembling an incredible team with Chris Plackey coaching group to support female entrepreneurs in all the key areas that I know you need support in your time and productivity, diversity and inclusion, your money hiring. So we are building a group of women that will be part of this course to not just teach you, but to provide consultation and coaching. We're going to have a lot of office hours and availability. So if that sounds like something that you would be interested in, I'd love to know that that's an interest of yours. You can join the wait list. There's nothing to do yet, but but I'm starting to build the list. We're going to limit registration here. This first group, one of the other things I want to tell you about this because for many of you who've been longtime listeners, this group does not have a revenue requirement, meaning you can have one employee, 45 employees. The live training will be for all of you. And then we're going to provide coaching on the back end of the live training based on where your business is. So I think you're going to find this is going to be so fabulous. I can't wait to get it into your hands. I am overjoyed with it. So we're putting all sorts of really cool things together. So that's another part of why I'm going away. So if you want to join the wait list, go to howtoceolive.com that's how with the number two ceolive.com or how to t o c e o live.com but that's how you get on the wait list. If you know anybody who you think would like to do this that you think would be it would be advantageous to them to join, go ahead and get on that wait list. We're going to release it to the waitlist first. And so and we're pro and again, we're looking at a launch and start date in September. And like I said, this will be live. However, everything will be recorded. So you'll also get to keep all of the content, whether you can come to a live call or not. So lots of really great things happening. And so what I thought about in advance of this then was to take some time and talk with you about some of the ideas that I'm already putting together to share and make sure that you understand where I'm going here. So I've been coaching leaders for 25 years and I've coached, you know, frontline managers all the way to the CEO chairman. And there isn't any guarantee.

That a frontline manager is any worse or better than a CEO at actually leading and managing. No disrespect to my CEOs out there, but learning how to lead is an effort and a commitment. It's not something that people just are born with. I think a lot of people think that leaders are born, not made. I disagree. I think anybody can learn how to lead. It just requires courage, which then leverages your own confidence. We have to talk about all of that. So what I want to do in this podcast is talk with you about really what's that first step, which is solopreneur to entrepreneur. And this is a big step. And frankly, a lot of people never make this step and you don't have to. I want to also really stress that I'm not telling you how to go, what you should do with your business. I just want everybody to understand what these terms mean, and especially in the way that I will help you learn them and apply them in your own business. So let's talk about being a solopreneur. I would call myself a solopreneur for many years of my business. I think a lot of people would. A solopreneur is a worker. You do all the work. It's about your name, it's about you. The business makes money, so you make money. It's, you know, the business's money is probably your money.

Right? There's not a lot of the walls or boundaries between that. A lot of people who are solopreneurs will also call themselves freelancers or consultants. And as I've mentioned, the solopreneur role is very much about you and your work and your production and your effort. And you aren't leveraging anything other than your skills and your effort and productivity. And like I said, many people are very content being solopreneurs. You know, solopreneurs make anywhere from, you know, 30 grand a year to probably upwards of close to a million. You know, you get to that million dollar mark and that's when the wheels start to feel like they're coming off, but it, there's a lot of people who do it. It's just a lot of work. Right. So solopreneurs are people who leverage, you know, they're a part of a group of a company where they have their own practice, their own business. So a lot of the multi level marketing, right, These are solopreneurships in most cases. So let's contrast that with an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur, unlike a solopreneur, who is like a worker person, a producer, if we're going to use that word, an entrepreneur is now a producer slash manager. And so there, there's always this moment for solopreneurs when they realize they can no longer do all the things they need to do. And there's a difference between me being a solopreneur and asking someone to help me, like hiring a photographer or hiring a bookkeeper to do those things that I'm not good at. It's different when you transition and you move into that entrepreneur role because now it's not just sort of having help you when you need it. You are now building a team of people who are working with you to get work done in your business. And so the key skill, if, if the key skill of a solopreneur is whatever your technical, functional skill set is, your, your asset, Right. For me, it was leading and being a coach. Right. Everybody's asset is a little different. You know, if you're a photographer, your asset is photography. That's your talent, that's what you have in the world. If you're a graphic designer, that's your talent, that's your asset. When we go into entrepreneurship, we start to now leverage the assets of others to support the business. Although most entrepreneurs, especially those when they first start working with me, are still thinking about leveraging other people's talents to help them. So we'll talk more about that as we do the next podcast, which is going to be about transitioning from entrepreneurship to CEO, which I'm excited to talk with you about. But this entrepreneur role is deep in the knees with managing and learning how to manage people. This is at its infancy. Entrepreneurship is when we start to develop systems. We start to isolate and build our practices for our business. We start to create replicatable processes that can be done by others. As an entrepreneur, this is when you start to learn. Well, hopefully we start to learn how to take what's in your brain and put it in the world so that other people can take that knowledge and turn it into results. Right. It's not Just dependent on you. But that pain, that is a very painful transition for a lot of people to leave solopreneur hood and transition to entrepreneurhood. Now, here's the thing that's really fascinating is in my experience, this has nothing to do with company size. This is mindset, because I have known entrepreneurs who on paper are called entrepreneurs, who call themselves entrepreneurs, who have 50 employees, but they are still acting like solopreneurs.

So when you're a solopreneur, the only person you really have to worry about people, I should say, is you and whoever your client is. Right. And so the boundary issues usually for solopreneurs are around clients. You give up too much of your time, you agree to weird hours to work with people.

You don't charge enough. Right. So your boundary challenges are with your clients. When we get to entrepreneurial hood, the boundary issues start happening with your staff, your team and the work. So even though you're an entrepreneur role now, and you've hired all these people to help the business, you still see yourself in many ways as a producer. But the boundary issues tend to be around the work and the team. Okay, so when I meet, sometimes I meet entrepreneurs who have 40 employees, 22 employees, but they're still acting like solopreneurs. They're still literally doing the work that they were doing when they started the business. So they're still a solopreneur, really acting like they have this business and that. And so the problem is, that's exhausting because if you still think of yourself as completely in control of everything that needs to be done every day, you're never going to catch up with the growth of your business. It's exhausting. So the biggest transition for entrepreneurs is we go from me center, which is solopreneur, to we center. And we have to start thinking about your business as a we environment, not a me environment. And these are. There's subtleties. The language of a solopreneur is, I'll get that done. I'll make that happen.

I can do that. I'll take care of it. The language of an entrepreneur right after we've done some development is we'll get that done. We'll make it happen. We can do that. Not I, not me. Then be able to transition into the CEO role, which we're going to talk about next week, is that willingness to first be a we.

Be a we. That's funny. Sounding right, is to allow the team to start to carry the responsibilities of the functions of the business.

And in order to do that you have to learn how to manage people. I can't say it enough now. I believe a lot of people start a business with the image of a CEO in their head, which, again, we're going to talk about, right? The CEO who isn't working 400 hours a week, who does have a lot of money that they've earned and built in their business, who does have a lot of resources. But the path to get there is not sexy.

But you get there. If you do the work, it's so worth it. I promise. It's magic, is what I say all the time. It's just magic. I came to work today and opened up my email, and Miriam, who's a member of my online business team, wrote an email on my behalf. That's a summary of one of my podcasts. And I literally started to cry. I was so happy that she wrote this incredible email. And I was. I mean, I was certainly happy that she wrote that email. But what I was more happy about was that she. That it can be done, that there can be people on the planet who can hear what I say in the world and turn it into beautiful words. Beautifully done. That is magic. The more we do that, the more we lean into managing others, to delegating to others, to having expectations of others, to holding people accountable for their delivery. That's magic. And the CEO role is on the other side of that work. Okay, so we have to first be honest with ourselves. Where are you? Are you still sort of behaving like a solopreneur? There's no shame in that. Like, let's just get it. But that means you're over producing. You are the producer, you are the worker. You rely on yourself. You don't rely on anybody else. You immediately think about, I can do that versus we. You have people who help you. You don't have a team. Huge difference. Entrepreneurs. You have people on your team. You have a team. You're not really sure what the hell to do with them yet you're figuring that out. You don't know how to manage. It's hard. It feels like it sucks. It feels like you're never going to get it right. That's welcome to entrepreneurial life.

Right? But you've transitioned into seeing this as a business. It's not just about you. You have gone from me to we. So think about all that. If you have questions about it, let me know. Hellohrisplacky.com I always love to hear what you have to say. Otherwise, go and get your name on the wait list. If you want to learn more about the class. And one more action item if you're interested, which is to write a review. Thanks for tuning in. I'll talk to you guys next week.

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