The REAL Truth About Making It As A Solopreneur in 2025!

Welcome everyone to another Solopreneur Success Stack live episode. This is a special episode, something I hope to do more often where I'm going to be answering subscriber questions about leading a more fulfilling solopreneur journey, about helping seasoned solopreneurs close the gap between where they are and want to be with their business in terms of trying to build a business that funds and fits their ideal lifestyle. And so I'm just calling this just for the sake of it, Solopreneur Success Secrets for those of you that have been following me or read my, my Solopreneur Success Stack, none of these things will be a secret because I write about a lot of this quite often. But for those of you that might be new to me, my name is Scott Perry. I am the publisher of the Solopreneur Success Stack. I'm your guide in the Close the Gap 90-Day Solopreneur Success Accelerator. And I am also your guide in the Solopreneur Success Circle community of paid subscribers. So what I did is A couple days ago, I announced to my readership that I was feeling a little bit bored. I would rather feel useful and helpful. And if they would respond with some questions or challenges that they're facing around their solopreneur enterprise, I would host a live call and go through their questions. And that's exactly what I'm going to do. I was thrilled with the response. It looks like we have about 7 questions in the chat thread coming from both members of the Solopreneur Success Community, uh, circle of, of paid subscribers, but also a couple of free subscriber questions coming in. I'm going to go through them in order, but I am going to prioritize the, the folks that are in the Solopreneur Success Circle. I anticipate I can get through all or most of these 7 questions. And then if you are tuning in— and I see Aaron is here, Brendan, uh, thank you for distilling your question down, and Philip are here— so if you have a question that you'd like to ask, put it in the chat below this video, and if I can get to it, I certainly will. And if I can't, I will certainly get to it in a future broadcast. So Let's jump into the Q&A. We are going to start with our newest Solopreneur Success Circle member. This is Susan, um, who says, I am new to the community, and her questions are, how do I use social media to drive business, and how do you connect and make relationships with people to get them to look at what you're offering solutions to? So there's two really good questions in this. I'm going to start with the first one. Around how do you use social media to drive business? And I would say the first thing to do is operating from first principles and reasoning from first principles. Is social media required to connect with people that could benefit from the services or the products that you offer? I would argue that historically, since social media is a relatively new thing and businesses have been around for a long time, that it's quite possible. In fact, I work with a lot of people who have very thriving enterprises that do absolutely no social media at all. So although it would appear, especially if you spend any time on social media and you listen to any of the digital marketers and, and gurus that are talking about social media is the way to build connections that, that create prospects, leads, and clients, um, it may seem like that's the only way to do things, but it's not. And so I would first check in with, is social media something that you want to do, that you enjoy doing, that you want to spend more time doing to create connections. I've worked with several programs. I worked with the LinkedIn program, uh, I worked with Laurel Portier and her $7 ad strategy to, uh, drive business through social media channels. It can be very effective, but it's not the only way. And in more recent years, I've actually done almost no social media advertising or used social media as my primary leverage for attracting prospects, clients, and leads. So the first thing is, if— decide, do you really want to be using social media? If so, I can share some insights on how you might do that and how I'm doing that on a limited basis. The more important question that Susan asks is, how do you connect and make relationships with people to get them to look at what you're offering solutions to? And I would say that, um, that is a great question. And, uh, it's a great instinct because the fastest path to cash, the fastest way to connect people that will provide you with remuneration for the services and products that you offer to help them achieve an aspiration or solve a problem that they have is through conversation, through authentic connection. That builds trust and permission through generosity and helps people solve immediate problems. You can do this on social media. You can help solve the most immediate problem that the kind of person that you, uh, help is experiencing. That will often reveal the bigger problem that they will need continued help with, and that will help start a conversation and maintain a conversation that can lead to the, to the certain, to purchasing the services and products that you offer. So I think the impulse to start conversations, to connect with people, to identify the people that need what you have to offer, that have the problems that you help solve, the challenges that you have solved, or the aspirations that you help achieve, that's a really great, that's a really great instinct. Now I happen to know that Susan, is also fairly new, I think, to Substack and So this might not be immediately helpful, but you can take what I'm going to say and apply it to your social media strategy, a YouTube strategy, podcast strategy, blog strategy, or even in-person brick-and-mortar type of marketing strategy. And that is define where you can have the most direct, personal, and relevant conversations with people that would benefit from colliding with you and the difference that you can help them make. For me, that is Substack.. And so although I might push my content out to social media channels from the Substack app, I can push it to Facebook, I can push it to LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, um, I can post videos to YouTube and embed them in my Substack. So I, and I have the podcast, which I'm also able to leverage from, from the Substack app. I can drive people from other outposts where they may collide with me, YouTube, podcast, social media, get them into my the ecosystem by becoming free subscribers. And then I can give them a certain level of proximity and access to me and a deeper level of help as free subscribers through my free content, my free podcast episodes. And for those that want to take a bolder step into possibility and are ready to become paid subscribers, that gives them a much deeper level of proximity and access to me and the ability to have me help with the implementation of the principles, concepts, practices that I teach for helping solopreneurs close the gap between where they want to be or where they are and where they want to be in their business. So by strategically mapping out my marketing web and getting people to enter, increasingly, uh, move through concentric circles of connection where they get more and more proximity and access to me and eventually implementation help with me, I'm able to build those relationships, have those conversations, and eventually get people to hire me through my backend offer. So I'm not on Substack to try to make a living as a writer through paid subscriptions, but my paid subscribers become educated and, and understand my systems, my approach. They get to test drive my personality, uh, and then if they decide that they want to take a bolder step into possibility and achieving their goals and aspirations and solving their problems and challenges, they can hire me through my backend offers to do that. So that is the way that I would think about it, Susan, in a very general sense. Strategically, where can you have the most direct, personal, and relevant conversations? That's a Seth Godin permission marketing type of move. And then once you define what that is, how can you move people from all the other places that connect with you to that channel where you can have those direct conversations? And then what are the conversations that you can have that will help earn their permission and their trust so that they become interested in the change you can help them make and become enrolled in the journey you can take them on and finally invest in the solution that you have for achieving their aspiration or solving their problem. So Susan, I hope that's helpful. Moving on to MJ, who MJ is a longtime member of the Solopreneur Success Circle, but also is in her second round of the Close the Gap 90-Day Solopreneur Success Accelerator. So, um, it's great to see MJ here. She pokes a little fun at me because, uh, I mentioned that I was bored. That's why I was going to do this Q&A. And she says, bored? Goodness, what I would give for a little boredom. She, uh, has been out of town experiencing some transitional challenges as she comes back home. But her key, um, question here is What, what's your top routine tips or hacks that have helped you work to streamline your operations? So this is actually a great question and it is like really the primary offering that I make available to members of my readership in general, my Solopreneur Success Circle of paid subscribers in particular, and very specifically the folks that are enrolled in programs like Close the Gap where we are setting a 90-day objective, making sure that we audit and assess all the resources and assets that we have, and then defining the 2 or 3 things that have to go right in order to achieve our 90-day goal. And then we're just day after day after day through daily coaching and weekly calls helping define and navigate and eliminate the most immediate constraints that we can increase flow and collapse time to target. So what we're talking about is a system. Every system is perfectly designed to get the results that it gets. If you are a person that is spending, that, that is a solopreneur, that is a coach or a consultant or has some sort of freelance offering like web design or graphic design or marketing help, or maybe you're a creative that is a musician or a visual artist or a photographer or what have you. You probably started that business because you simply were— had this belief that you could make a reasonable living doing the work that you love. And then you start that business and you find that in order to have the privilege of doing that work that you love and making the difference that only you can make in the way that only you can make it as a creative freelancer, coach, or consultant, you find that you also have to learn how to become a digital marketer or have to pose as some sort of guru that can attract followers and get lots of impressions and extend your reach and all that sort of thing. And for a lot of us, we end up finding out that we really don't like to spend all our time grinding out content, funnel hacking, and becoming— doing all the things, trying all the strategies and tactics around digital marketing and so forth. So The first thing to do, and this is the first thing that we do in, uh, the Close the Gap program, is once we've defined what our objective is, maybe you have a program that you want to fill, maybe you're trying to hit a revenue goal, um, maybe you're trying to refine an offer or optimize your marketing web or whatever it is. Maybe it's just trying to start a subsack that you can leverage as your primary sales success strategy. The first thing after you defined clearly what that objective is and you create a measurable objective, you have to know that you achieved it when you, when you get there. So we have to have some sort of number that we're trying to reach, whether it's number of subscribers or number, revenue number or number of people enrolled in the program. We then want to know where exactly are we starting and what are we starting with? We want to take an audit of our financial assets, of our marketing assets, of our content assets, of our relationship assets. And once we have audited all that and we have audited all the things that we have and all of the things that we do, what we want to do is take, take account of how much time are we spending in our business as opposed to how much time we would like to be spending in our business and trying to close the gap so that we can spend more of our time doing the work that we love and less of our time doing the work that we hate. And make a reasonable living that allows us to continue to fund that lifestyle and to continue to make the difference that we make through the work we do. So thinking about it, uh, in terms— when we're thinking about streamlining and we're thinking about our system, what, what are the 3 things that are required for you to get a client or customer the results that they're hiring you for? There's usually just 2 or 3 things that have to go right enough for them to start to get some traction, um, and create a system that will help them achieve their goals, and then you can optimize that system. And the best way to do that is start with your own system. And then what you will find is that your system is very glutted, it's very crufty, it's full of all sorts of tasks and to-dos and activities that aren't really moving the needle in terms of getting you more of the perfect fit clients that will help you, um, fund your lifestyle but also do work that's fulfilling and meaningful to you. Working people that you actually care about and that you enjoy working with. So a lot of the initial work with kind of streamlining your operations is get rid of all the stuff that you don't have to be doing that you're doing anyway, just because you did it before or just because some digital marketer guru told you you have to do it. As I was just saying to Susan, you're not, if you don't like spending time on social media, you don't have to spend time on social media. There are other ways that you can reach more of the right prospects and there are better ways to turn the right prospects into great leads and turn them into ideal clients other than social media. In fact, I would argue that for some, there's, uh, social media might be the worst way to try to, or the least efficient way to try to, to try to make that happen. So eliminate all the things that are unnecessary. When you get down to the 2 or 3 things that, that are necessary in order for you to fill your pipeline or fill your waiting list or just simply start to fill your programs, then it's a matter of isolating which of those elements in your system is operating at the lowest efficiency or effectiveness and raise the floor on the efficiency and effective of the lowest performing element. By raising the floor, you automatically increase the ease and velocity of achieving the thing that you want to achieve. Because although our instinct is to push on the ceiling, and try to, uh, make the thing that's already working really well work even more well, the amount of time, energy, and other resources it takes to go from 90% to 100% is extremely large. The amount of time, energy, and resources that it takes to take something that's operating at 30% and raise it to 40% is much, much less. So you get a lot more return on the investment of your time, attention, money, and effort by optimizing the least efficient elements of your system, raising the floor. And then that will automatically narrow the channel so that there's less volatility in your system and it will create a straighter through line and an increasing flow, you know, as we like to say, up and to the right. Okay. So, When it comes to the routines and hacks that will help you streamline your systems, only identify what's necessary. Eliminate everything that's not necessary. You can always add it back in later if you want to. So the first step is subtraction, not addition. And then understand that systems operate based on multiplication, not addition. The more things you add, the less efficient it will be. It's a multiplication of the percentage of efficiency. So it's a, it's a, it's multiplication of fractions. And what you wanna do is decrease the least efficient components, and that will raise the efficiency of the overall system and improve. And that will save you time, that will save you money, that will save you attention, that will save you effort. So, uh, MJ, I hope that's helpful. I know we talked a little bit about that on yesterday's, uh, Close the Gap Catalyst call. Um, Sandra, her question is, my challenge seems to be optimizing when there are so many ideas and inspiration. So I had a, actually a one-on-one call with Sandra Yesterday. So I have a lot more context about that. Sandra has been a repeat offender in terms of being a client of mine. She's a member of the Soulpreneur Success Circle. She does great work in the area of qigong and tai chi, using movement to remove blocked energy and to help just improve the overall health of your physical system, but also your psychological and spiritual systems, which can only have a beneficial effect on your business systems. Just a little hint, Sandra and I are going to be doing a project together here really soon. In fact, I think we set a date for, I think it's actually exactly a week from today. So I'll be able to introduce you to Sandra more formally soon. But, you know, there is this, this challenge when we have, we have a system that's working and our instinct is to either do more or to add more, or to simply chase more. Like, your system is operating with some level of efficiency that is providing you with a little spaciousness in your life. You have a little bit of free time, and then you have this instinct like, oh, I should be filling this time. All right. I was having this conversation with Sandra yesterday because we both have you know, some, some, uh, Catholic experience in her background. I associate my need to always be busy and to doing more, um, with Catholic guilt. Like, I should be, I should be suffering more, it should be harder, I need to find a harder way to do it because that's the only way that it can be meaningful. So there's just like dealing with whatever baggage we're bringing from our past or childhood, whatever. But the, the, the thing that I shared with Sandra that I'll share with you all is if you have optimized your system so that you are reliably getting closer to the ideal lifestyle that you want your business to fund and fit around, when you experience that sense of, oh, I've got this time available, I feel I have this, you know, amount of energy available, or I have, you know, some attention at my disposal, even money at my disposal, I should do something with that. What you should do is do what you said you would do once you built a business that funded and fit around the lifestyle that you wanted. So just to give a pertinent personal example, I have optimized my business around my ability to be a full-time daycare provider for my grandson Jasper. In fact, I got on this, uh, on this broadcast, on this live, just after nap time. So Jasper and I finished our laydown. And so when I— when the kids announced that they were pregnant and we announced that we wanted to become daycare, I was working literally like 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. So, you know, working 80 hours, 70 hours a week, um, was not leaving any spaciousness and any available availability for me to be my grandson's daycare provider. And that's what put me on this quest to create systems that would help me reduce the time, attention, effort, and revenue I was investing in my business and coming and distilling it down to what was necessary to earn a living that would allow me to fund the lifestyle I wanted, which was really around being a daycare for my grandson. Once I achieved that, I found myself succumbing to this instinct of mine to be more productive, to do more, to add things and so forth. And what I am constantly having to do is say, wait a minute, I built my whole business to get to this point where I have this extra available time to spend with my grandson and to spend with my wife. Why don't I go do that? Now, if you are at the point where your business is, is performing well enough that you can, are, are getting some of the things that you built your business to fund and fit around, then invest the leftover time, attention, money, and effort in those things. If you feel over time that there's still a level of dissonance around those things not giving you the fulfillment, meaning, et cetera, that you want, then maybe that's a signal that that wasn't actually what you really wanted in life. And you can start to play with how, you know, where else can I invest that time? Like, for instance, I know MJ who just hopped on and I just answered her question. She would like to be doing more painting. She would like to be doing more meditating and spend more time traveling and being with her husband and all that sort of thing. So if your business is allowing for some of that, do more of that. And if that satisfies you, if that gives you fulfillment and meaning, just keep doing that. And just make sure that you've put all of your business systems on the minimum effective dose that maintains the amount of business and revenue that you need to sustain that lifestyle. So, um, the other thing is, and this was my experience between the holidays, is even after I invested the time, energy, attention that I had to spend with my grandson and spend time with my wife, I still had even more time. And so I set aside little chunks of time to experiment with things. Some of you experienced this. I ran a Silver Bullet campaign. You can learn more about that in the Solopreneur Success Stack. Just use the search feature. But I ran a campaign just to see if I could run a campaign. Because everybody told me you can't sell anything in between the holidays. And I thought, okay, well, Scott the contrarian wants to test that assumption, so I'm going to try to— I'm going to try this campaign that might generate some revenue in between the holidays, something that everybody tells me it's impossible to do. And to those of you that attended the, uh, over-the-shoulder where I shared all the results, I had a great week. I added revenue to my bottom line. I added, I think it was 7 or 8 paid subscribers to my Substack. And I had some extra time. I used the extra time to do something that was meaningful and fulfilling to me. It had a distinct beginning and end and outcome. And once it was done, it was done. And it got me through my holiday slump. And when my grandsons returned to— for daycare, I was— I had not done any harm to my business systems. So really to the point that MJ and Sandra's question both is pointing to, if you want to improve your system, whether it's a revenue generating system or a subscriber generating system or filling a program or selling out a limited run of photographs, whatever it is that you're, you're trying to achieve, treat it like a system. What's the outcome? What's the measurable outcome that I want in a reasonable amount of time? Where am I at in that endeavor right now? What are the 2 or 3 things that need to go right? Eliminate everything else and then optimize the things in the system that will help you collapse time to target. And if you find that then you have other time, the extra time, energy, or effort that you want to and find yourself being drawn to or seduced into things that will end up being a distraction or actually end up hurting your systems. You can be just a little bit more attuned and aware and make sure that you apply yourself to things in a way that maintains your systems so that you keep generating that revenue so that you can maintain that lifestyle that you optimize your business for in the first place and then find other more healthy, helpful outlets for using, investing that time that may just help fulfill you and provide you with a greater sense of well-being. Or maybe there are things that actually can be enhancements to your business systems. All right. Now we're— here's Bree's question. Bree says, I need help focusing as usual. I keep getting sucked into rabbit holes, but I like some of the rabbit holes, so maybe I need help with prioritizing my rabbit holes. Holes. I do have an Excel doc for that. I will take that out. It has tabs, you know, the make money rabbit hole, uh, the promise I do it rabbit hole, testing things rabbit hole, and so forth. Marketing, project focus, the daily to-dos. Um, I remember a past mentor taught me to write a huge list of things and then take 3 things off that list per day. So I, I think subtraction, Bree, is, you know, this ties very much into what the same question that Sandra was asking. So here's just a different perspective in case it's helpful to you and Sandra and maybe Susan and MJ as well. One of the things to think about is ultimately as solopreneurs, we are going to be at our best in terms of performing our professional tasks, but also in terms of our personal well-being when we are present in the here and now and taking and engaging the field, engaging with reality, colliding with reality as it actually is. Now, when I say be present and be objective about what's happening, what I mean is no anxiety about outcomes in the future that you may or may not achieve because they are largely outside of your control. So there's no point in getting anxious about it anyways. What's going to happen is going to happen. If you can maintain your receptivity and show restraint and take responsibility for your, for your decisions and actions in the here and now, the, the The future will kind of take care of itself. You may end up getting what you want. You may end up getting something different that may be actually better than what you want. At the— even if things don't turn out well at all, you have the opportunity to practice the necessary virtues of solopreneurship, like acceptance, humility, grace, surrender, resilience, and all those sort of things. So What you are always wanting to do is to, in the moment that you're in, take a clear-eyed view of your situation, the circumstances that you find yourself in, and without any adjective, adverbs, or value judgments, state plainly what's going on. State plainly what it is that you would like to accomplish. Acknowledge plainly where you actually are. And then looking at all the options for what you could decide to do, making your best guess as to the decision as to what thing, if what action, which decision, if I acted upon it today, would move me the furthest and the fastest towards the thing that I want. Okay. And another way to think about this, and we talked about this on a recent call in the Solopreneur Success Circle community, is you have to know what you're optimizing for. And if you're optimizing to improve the efficiency of your business systems and you're looking at all sorts of things that you could add to your to-do list or add to your experiment list or add to your business system, is that gonna help you get closer to what you want in, in terms of an, a more efficient business system? The answer is absolutely no. Cuz addition only can reduce the effectiveness and efficiency of a system. The effectiveness and efficiency of any system, business or otherwise, is a product of their, uh, of their, of ratios, of the, the ratio of the efficiency of each component. So if you're thinking about adding something, probably the best instinct is to put that on hold before you do anything, because adding anything to your system or adding anything to your to-do list or, or a list of daily activities will drive down on the efficiency of your system. At the same time, as I was saying to Sandra, if you find yourself with extra time on your hand and, and feeling energized and not having other obligations that, or, uh, interests that you should be investing that time in, and you want to do a little experimenting, that's absolutely fine. I have no problem. And I obviously, I just illustrated through my story an example of I just wanted to see if I could do something that people told me was impossible to do. Can you actually sell something? Can you actually run a campaign and earn some revenue in between the holidays? And I proved that I did, and that's all I really set out to do. I got the bonus of earning a little extra revenue and having some fantastic new people become members of the Solopreneur Success Community. All icing on the cake. But I didn't lose anything. I didn't, I didn't I didn't slow down or destroy the effectiveness and efficiency of my system because I did something that was completely outside the business system. I made sure the business systems were continuing to run on the minimum effective dose of attention, energy, effort, revenue that they require to keep working and working well. And I took some of that extra and invested it in something else. I just made sure that it was in a container. Where it could be contained, where it wasn't going to bleed into things that were going to interfere with systems that were already working. So that would be one thing that you could use as kind of a barometer, Bree, is what am I optimizing for? Is this thing that I'm considering doing actually going to help me achieve the thing that I'm— that I've stated as my priority, whether it's a 90-day priority like we do in the Solopreneur Success Circle or an overall business or lifestyle priority? So I hope that's helpful, Bree. I'm gonna move on to Clay's question now. I'm gonna circle back to you, Jennifer, if you're on the call. I see that we've got a bunch of new folks here. Kato is here and sharing some things that I can't read because my eyes are old and my prescription is out of date. So I'll try to get to the chat here in a minute. But moving on to Clay. I love Clay's question because Clay is Although he has a full-time straight gig, he is also a singer-songwriter, performing musician, and he's looking for ways to do more of this and make a living at it. He can play out at some venues, but there aren't many— there aren't many well-paying places that can perform privately for people, which usually means better money. But again, there's not that many gigs. I also thought about writing songs for people as gifts for their loved ones. How do I as an artist hone in on my offer? Um, great question. And because I have some experience, you know, as— because I had my own 30-year career as a performing musician, um, I'm going to share a bunch of perspectives, uh, from, from my experience that I think will probably, um, still be relevant and, uh, things that you can implement in your endeavor. Clay, the first is Um, let's be clear what your music career is actually for. I made a living as a professional musician for almost 30 years, and I still to this day get a lot of younger people saying, hey, I'd love to do what you do— did— and make a living as a musician. How do I do that? And my answer usually is don't. Like, we— as I was saying earlier about starting a business around, um, this work that you love, you up doing a lot of work that you don't love. You become a professional musician because you want to spend more time performing your songs on stage for adoring audiences and recording and so forth. What you actually end up doing is spending most of your time trying to hustle up gigs, uh, trying to, uh, you know, traveling back and forth to gigs, setting up for gigs, breaking down from gigs, chasing down the venue owner for your paycheck, dealing with, uh, you know, bandmates that, that, um, are ungrateful and smell funny and complaining all the time. Uh, there's just lots of things that go into the life of a professional music career that have very little to do with, um, the craft of playing your instrument well, writing a song well, or, or delivering a song well. So I would check, um, you know, what do I really want from this? If, um, this actually speaks a little bit to Jennifer's question, so I'll actually weave it in here. Jennifer is talking about a freelance business that she's nurturing, but she wonders if she can do that while she pursues looking for a full-time job. Full-time is more safe and secure, potentially, but she enjoys the newness and challenge of new projects. I assume meaning her freelance business. It also feels like I'm giving up if I don't pursue my dreams, my freelance gig, my solopreneur gig. But she acknowledges that her kids need to eat too. And so I'm weaving that into this point I'm going to make to you, Clay, which is there's absolutely nothing wrong. In fact, I would encourage most folks to come to terms with this, this, uh, what appears to be, you know, contradictory ideas. I think it is okay to do the work that you have to do so that you can do the work that you want to do in a way that maintains its intention and integrity. If you love playing music and you want to continue to grow as a musician and as a songwriter and develop your craft, it is going to be challenging to try to do that, to grow that, you know, what sounds like a side hustle now as a musician, as a side hustle music career, into a full-time vocation that replaces your, your straight gig income and provides you with the revenue that you need to live on. And again, you won't have— you'll find yourself spending more and more time on the mundane, chasing gigs, promoting gigs, driving to gigs, setting up for gigs, breaking down from gigs, finding the paycheck at the end of the night from the venue owner, driving home from the gig, um, and then trying to recover the next day, um, after a long night out, you know, to earn your $100 or $150, whatever it is that you're going to get, you know, as most of us will receive as kind of local musicians, at least in the area that, that Clay and I live in. Um, so maybe, um, an alternative to doing it the way that it appears it has to be done, which is like get more gigs and try to get better paying gigs, um, I would suggest that you try to take control of the things that are within your control. So it's not in your control that you can get more gigs or better gigs or better audiences or bigger audiences. That's because other people are involved in circumstances and situations and environmental factors beyond your control. Not to say that that can happen or won't happen, and that maybe representation is a way that you can do that. But something that will be relevant for every solopreneur on the call is the best way to create sustainability in your solopreneur endeavor is to become the best in the world at doing what you do in the way only you can do it. I'm going to say that again because it's one of the most important things I can share with you all today. A sustainable, thriving, flourishing career as a solopreneur doing work that matters with people that you care about can really only be achieved over time by continuing to hone your ability to make the difference only you can make in the way that only you can make it. And the more things that have nothing to do with honing that craft that you spend time on is time spent away from becoming preeminent in your domain, which is why so many solopreneurs burn out and blow up because they, as they take on more and more digital marketing chores and trying to learn all the, the flavor of the month marketing tactics, whether it's social media or YouTube, or, you know, there's a new one, new ones coming on all the time. Um, they spend so much time doing things that are really have nothing to do with what their business in, uh, what the, the, the aim or aspiration of their business is that they end up just becoming another choice in a faceless mass of choices. So how can you focus in on activities that allow you to build your craft as a singer-songwriter and musician, that allow you to do it in a way where you are standing up to be seen, speaking up to be heard, letting those— letting people watch and know and helping set up situations where the people that resonate with what you do, that support and encourage the journey that you're on can find you and follow you and support and promote you. And so, as, you know, musicians in this day and age, you know, I started way before the internet and way before social media. So everything I did was, you know, kind of old school, knocking on venue doors and hustling up gigs and going to showcases and all the things. And I was just really lucky that it worked out for me. But if I were to start now, I would look at the ways that I can be in control of the performance situation, the venue, the ticket sales, etc. You can do things online. Obviously, that's a really popular way that a lot of musicians have built a following and have had that following support them. From, you know, on YouTube. Uh, there used to be apps that you could host in per— or online house concerts and, and get paid. I'm sure there's still ways to do that. Um, other ways, I'll share a couple specifically from my experience. When, when we moved from Charleston, South Carolina to Floyd, Virginia, I was moving from a very vibrant market, uh, for musicians where I was in probably the busiest band, and, and the front person and, and main, uh, uh, booker for one of the busiest bands in the area to just being another, um, musician in, uh, a small town that is just awash with all sorts of musical talent. And so what I did, the first thing I did was I looked for, um, building Allegiance Capital and, uh, through authority loops, I found the best musicians in town. I found a gig playing once a week at a local venue where every week I invited a different musician to come perform with me. And, you know, sometimes that involved a little bit of a practice beforehand. We came up with an hour of music or 45 minutes of music we could play together. They played a set or I played a set, they played a set, we played a set together. I introduced them to my audience. They introduced me to their audience. I raised my status and reputation by associating with better-known, at least in this market, musicians. And so that was a way that I was able to build a following quickly, build a reputation quickly, and find other musicians that, you know, where we had alignment around values and artistic direction that I could start bands with or do projects with and so forth. So what's the relationship ratchet that you can start to leverage. You know, where are the authority loops? Who are the people that you can associate with, collaborate with to feature on shows? I did that quite a bit. I took all the people that I, you know, had worked with over the years, some of them, you know, reasonably famous in the blues world. And I brought them to my little bitty town and I promoted a show that featured them. Sometimes I would open up or sometimes we would play together. You know, they stayed at my house. It didn't cost me anything. To, to bring them into town. But by virtue of being the person that was bringing all this phenomenal, uh, all these phenomenal acts, many of them national acts, to play in small venues in this little town, I raised my stature and my reputation in town. Um, so where are the authority loops? Where are the places where you can be an impresario and put on the show as opposed to hope that someone else will put you on a show that they are hosting? You can do this obviously very easily online. You You can oftentimes find venues that will do this type of thing, or you can simply rent venues. I rented the top floor of the Floyd Center for the Arts for many, many, many shows. It cost whatever it cost, $100 to rent the venue. As long as I sold 10 tickets, I knew I was going to break even, and anything over that was money I could split with, that I earned by performing there myself or split with whatever talent I brought in. So look for the leverage. In terms of the relationships and put yourself in more situations where there is, uh, you are in complete control of, um, you know, performing the, the performing at the venue, collecting the money for the venue. Um, you know, the more that you can eliminate the, the gatekeepers, um, the better off you'll be. And at some point, the gatekeepers will start to come to you because if you earn a certain level of notoriety, reputation, and have, you know, grow a mailing list or whatever, people will start to come to you because they want to tap in now to your authority loop. You are actually the authority that they are trying to benefit by putting themselves next to. So I hope that's helpful, Clay. And Jennifer, Jennifer, for you, it's mostly just this idea of making sure, like, again, and our mutual friend Seth Godin said this to me in one of our many broadcast chats on the CreativeLive broadcast. Separate the work you have to do from the work that you get to do. There is nothing wrong with doing the work that you have to do to earn a living and provide you with security and your ability to take care of your financial responsibilities to yourself and your family. And as long as that job does not take all of your time or suck the soul out of your body, you will have plenty of time and energy to invest in building something on the side that you can build up alongside that. And if it eventually becomes— comes to a point where it can become your primary revenue, fantastic. That's, that's when you let go of your, your, your day gig or your straight gig or your, your full-time occupation so that you can now live off of your vocation. I've done this several times when I moved from being a wine buyer for a grocery store chain in Charleston, South Carolina, to a full-time professional musician. I played gigs on the weekends part-time for a few years. And when I got to the point where that revenue was obvious, it was obvious to me that I could earn as much or more as a musician as I was in this retail job. I quit the retail job and went to music full-time. And the deal I made with my wife is, as long as I make enough tonight to do it again tomorrow night, I want to just keep being able to do this. I rinse and repeat— repeated that promise for almost 30 years. Um, along the way, I learned how to, um, also leverage other income streams like, uh, you know, giving guitar lessons and doing showcases and promoting shows and all that sort of thing. But, uh, make the leap when it's time to make leap. And when I made the leap from musician to what I'm doing now in the Solopreneur Success Stack and all the things that I've done, uh, through my brand Creative On Purpose, I had a bridge as a head coach of Seth Godin's Akimbo Workshops. I earned more than enough through my coaching at Akimbo Workshops and the lessons that I was giving at the time and a little— the few gigs that I was still doing at the time. But I had that bridge that I could use to continue to reliably earn revenue and sustain myself and my family while I built this other business. And when the business finally justified my ability to let go of the performing, I let go of the performing, then I let go of the guitar lessons, and then I eventually let go of the head coaching gig at Akimbo. And I have been doing this full-time now for several years. But it's doing the right things at the right time in the right order. So Jennifer, I hope that's helpful. I snuck you in ahead of Brendan, and I think this is— wow, we've almost gone 50 minutes already. So I'm going to try to squeeze in 2 more questions here. So Brendan, I love Brendan's question because what he is essentially talking about is his, you know, his audience and the people that he serves are experiencing you know, things that are more existential in nature. They, you know, have, you know, their livelihood or their ability to exist sometimes is at risk. And so it is, it's not an audience that obviously he can earn a lot of revenue from. And I had a similar conversation with Megan, who I think popped on the call here a little while ago., so I can give you some insights on that. But then when I asked Brendan to distill his question down a little bit, he said, um, when I held a workshop on ancient wisdom for navigating turbulent times, I provided a framework that was helpful for people, uh, processing situations according to principles that I described from ancient and philosophical and spiritual traditions that help them navigate existential life or death issues or severe, significant hardship. He's thinking about how this kind of guidance could also be applied to processing situations amongst his community and presenting things to that community that would help them, provide them with insights that inspire intentional and immediate action. And so basically the idea— he says, basically an idea for a collaboration experiment applying the principles you're sharing. So yes, this ties very much into what I was just sharing with Clay and what I shared yesterday with Megan. If the population that you serve is not in a position to actually pay for the solutions that you provide or the aspirations that you help them achieve, then obviously you need to look look outside of that for, um, what's the source of, you know, revenue, remuneration that enables you to continue to sustain your business and offer those services. It's not really dissimilar to the, the conundrum that, um, people like, like me who, who have made or are making a living as guitar teachers, right? Are— we think our customer is the kid taking guitar lessons, but the customer is actually the parent. The kid doesn't have any money. And so the navigation is, how do I deliver a benefit to someone that is not the same person as the person that is paying for it? So just to illustrate using my personal example around guitar lessons, which has obviously is— has nothing to do with existential issues, Brenda, but I'm going to Hang with me, I'm going to get you there. What I would do is, number one, I, I made sure that I created this reputation as the best guitar teacher in town. Not the best musician, the best guitar teacher. As a guitar teacher that was considerate and caring and willing to understand the student's needs, wants, dreams, and desires and craft a path to get them there as quickly as possible. And then I would bring in prospective guitar students in with their parents. And I mean, sometimes the, the, you know, sometimes it was adults that were my clients, but oftentimes it was younger people that come out with their parents. And I would basically just kind of lay it all out, like, here's, here's who I am, here's how I think about music and the value that it brings to young people in terms of, you know, it's a silver bullet in terms of helping young people with other academic subjects like math and science and language and relationship and personal skills and all that. Um, but it's also a way that they can, uh, earn self— or create— it's a, a, uh, an amplifier and leverage point for developing personal awareness and for developing confidence and self-expression and all these. I would talk about all these things that have nothing to do with learning how to play wagon I was letting the, the student know that I was going to help them learn the songs that they wanted to perform for their friends and neighbors or in church or what have you, and letting the parents know that the benefits of working with me went far beyond just learning 4 chords and a handful of songs. And then I would let them know that I didn't have any availability right now because I was the most expensive person providing lessons in town. Often the very next question was, well, how much does it cost? Oh my God, that costs so much more than everybody else is charging in town. And I would say, well, I don't actually have any room right now, but if you want to be on the waiting list, I'll get you in as soon as I can. And if you don't want to be on the waiting list, if you want to go across the hall and try that guy, uh, or go down the street and try that guy they always have openings, and if it works out, great, and if it doesn't, you can come back and be on the waiting list. And almost inevitably, they would go try somebody else and then end up coming back, and they would obviously be even more educated and aware of the value that I was providing. And money, the, the price of the lessons, no longer was an issue because they realized that the value that I was bringing to their child was far and beyond the cost to them for those weekly lessons. Um, and then I would do things like host student recitals at a public venue that was really popular. It's a Floyd Country Store, for anybody that's aware of that. Um, and I would put on display, like, this is what happens when kids take lessons with me, this is what happens when adults take lessons with me. And that was another way, you know, Clay, that I created, uh, um, an allegiance capital and authority loops to promote my reputation, to advertise my ability, my expertise, my care, my consideration, and so forth. So just sharing that, Brendan, as a way of illustrating how you can serve one population while you are collecting the necessary revenue from another. One of the things that I talked to Megan about yesterday that's related to this is exactly But something that I talked about earlier on this, on this Q&A is who, where are the collaborative opportunities? Where are the people that share your values, that understand the importance and necessity of the services that you provide, and how can you bring them in as collaborative partners donors, as just members of this community of belonging where you are helping enhance the value of the entire community by transferring resources from people that have to people that do not. And so there's— if you talk to Penny in our community, we talk about this a lot. She is in the fundraising domain, and so that's a lot A lot of what she does is reaching out to people that have money and have an instinct and desire to be helpful members of the community and transfer that to other people. But there's lots of ways that you can also try to think about how can I make this whole experience valuable for the person that is providing me with the revenue, the remuneration, the donation that allows you to do this other work. And so building community, building whether it's some sort group or mastermind or just, uh, you know, community of, um, common interest and purpose. There are lots of ways to think about that. I, I don't have a ton of ideas that are leaping to mind, um, right now, but it's something that we can definitely talk more about in our community calls. I know that you just rejoined the community, uh, the Solopreneur Success Circle recently, and I'm happy to talk more about this. I would also really encourage you to talk to Megan because we talked about this a great deal yesterday is, you know, this, uh, another model to look at would be, um, Joe Polish and his, uh, Artists for Addicts Network and, and the things that he does to raise money to fund, um, you know, for the existential needs of a community that he cares deeply about based on his own personal experience. So lots of resources there, and I'm going to up with, um, Ashley. Ashley is also, uh, well, no, I don't think Ashley is actually a member of the Solopreneur Success Circle, or maybe just not yet. Um, but she's talking about leveraging Substack. She asked me to take a look at, um, her Substack, you know, welcome page, and she's got, you know, everything set up for, um, paid subscribers and so forth. Um, and just, you know, trying to make sure that the publication content is, you know, properly edited and grammatically correct and all that kind of thing. Um, so I'm just going to speak broadly, you know. Obviously a lot of you all that are on this call are, are bullish on Substack. Obviously I'm really bullish on Substack. Um, and you know, I think there's some, some things to think about, uh, regarding all this. And that is, you know, first, um, what are you doing Substack for? There are a lot of folks here that are growth hackers that are helping people grow their subscriber numbers, increase their paid subscriber numbers, you know, and looking at paid subscriptions as a revenue-generating system. And that's, that is definitely a model that you can develop. It's definitely something that you can focus on. I think it's, it's a, it's a definitely a longer game to play for most of us. You know, if you are already already a trusted authority in your domain and you, um, have a readership that you're bringing in from outside of Substack, uh, it is possible that you can launch a publication, um, for a specific audience that already knows, likes, and trusts you and, and wants a deeper level of access that they're willing to pay for through a paid subscription. That, that's one way to think about Substack. Or one model that you can go all in on. Another would be for folks that— and this was me early on in my writing career— I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I just knew I wanted to do something different than what I was doing as a professional musician. And so I did it on a platform other than Substack because it wasn't around then, but I just started writing about things that I cared about. And because I had earned a reputation as someone that is able to provide helpful insights and help people achieve their aspirations and solve their problems. As an Akimbo coach in Seth Godin's programs, I had earned a reputation and I was able to position myself simply as, I'm a guy that can help you identify your most immediate priorities and craft the simplest path to achieving them with the greatest ease and velocity. Capacity. And so a lot of my initial clients just came to me because I— they had collided with me and I had earned their respect as a coach in someone else's domain. And they came— when they came into my domain, they were willing to pay me money to help them do something that I'd already demonstrated I could help them with. So positioning is a great— Substack is a great positioning tool. You can just start writing and figuring out as you write and as you see what people are responding to and people are asking, subscribers are asking you to write about or commenting on and so forth, you can start to develop, um, your positioning as a person that can solve a specific problem or achieve a specific aspiration. What I, um, am finding really useful is making Substack the center of my marketing web. It's a system that we call Be a Blessing Marketing. You can look it up in the search function of my Substack and get lots of resources. But basically Specifically, as I have gone more and more, leaned more and more into this niche of helping seasoned solopreneurs optimize the business they already have to better fund and fit their ideal lifestyle, I have used Substack as a place to attract prospects by becoming free subscribers and accessing and implementing the free content. The folks that, um, join our monthly workshops, which are free to all subscribers but offer a paid Q&A and implementation session to Solopreneur Success Circle paid subscribers. Oftentimes free subscribers will come in and upgrade right on those monthly calls. Some will upgrade just to access the benefit of discounts on my one-on-one and group coaching services. Like Close the Gap, which is the 90-day solopreneur success accelerator. You know, being strict. So in other words, what I'm saying here, Ashley, is being really strategic about what do I want to accomplish with Substack? What you want to accomplish has very little to do, in my opinion, with how well-crafted your welcome page is or how many, how few grammatical errors there are or how catchy your subject lines are or how beautiful your images are. I mean, those things can matter a little, of course, not discredit discounting that at all. But for most of us, just showing up and standing up to be seen, speaking up to be heard, speaking our truth, demonstrating our expertise, demonstrating our authority in a domain or in an ability to achieve an outcome or solve a problem Um, that is mostly what people are looking for. I, I love, uh, one of my mentors is Nick Peterson. He has his own Substack here and is also, um, the founder of the Guardian Academy Substack, which is actually, uh, most of that content is not written by Joseph Robertson, but his— he built his— he built his business largely, um, on his book Bumpers, which was probably, you know, is probably the number one publication for being published with the most amount of grammatical errors and typos. And it didn't matter a lick. People were so impressed with the ideas and the concepts and his counterintuitive approach that they couldn't help but be drawn to reading the book and reaching out to Nick to get help with their business goals, their personal goals, their health goals, fitness goals. He does all sorts of things. So he, he didn't pick a niche. He didn't make a perfect publication. Um, he did his thing and let people watch and his people found him and, and he figured out what he could do with the people that were asking him to do a thing and develop systems around that. And I think that's the model that, um, I have been chasing as well is I am simply setting up concentric circles of proximity access and exposure, proximity and access to me. You can learn about me and what I do by seeing my Substack posts that are posted on social media, my YouTube videos, my podcast that's posted to podcasting platforms and social media. You can collide with me and consume my content wherever you get it. At some point, if you get— if you feel like you want to have a deeper level of proximity to me and what I'm doing, you will become a free subscriber. Subscriber. If you then decide that you want a level of access to me to help with implementation on the monthly calls or on the weekly calls, then you're going to become a paid subscriber. And if you decide that you want to get real about, you know, collapsing time to target with your professional priorities and business objectives and crafting the path that will get there with the greatest ease and velocity, you're going to end up buying one of my backend group coaching or one-on-one coaching offers. So for you, Ashley, I don't know enough about you and your publication to give any specific advice on this yet, but I would begin with what are you trying to accomplish? How can Substack help you accomplish that? That. And then, um, testing and iterating and improving the, the system that you build, you know, on top of Substack to get more of the right readers to subscribe, get more of the right, um, free subscribers to become paid subscribers, and figuring out ways that, that will deliver additional value to them that will help them become the evangelicals of your brand. I stopped, you know, doing Facebook advertising, uh, several months ago because I, I don't need to get strangers to try to— I don't need to try to trick strangers on Facebook to come check out my work on Substack. I've got so many recommendations coming from other publications, so many recommendations coming from, uh, my free subscribers and paid subscribers, so many paid subscribers that are talking to their friends and peers out in the world about our community and the difference that we're making and, you know, all the fun that we're having while we're actually collapsing time to target to our goals. And those are become the evangelicals of our, of our, of the brand. Um, they keep the pipeline full, they keep, you know, the, the programs full and so forth. But it, it's taken a little bit of time. I've been on Substack for about a year and a half. In that time, I added about 500 subscribers overall. About 5% of them have become paid subscribers. That percentage goes up and up and up. Those of you that saw me in my last live, I showed you how, you know, for the first 2 weeks of January, my paid subscriber to subscriber overall subscriber ratio was, uh, or percentage was 47%. It's still well over 30%, um, you know, but that all came through this diligent, judicious conscious, committed discipline of knowing where I was, where I wanted to be, and what needed to happen to collapse the time to that objective. And every day testing and tweaking, iterating and improving the system so that it gets me more of what I want, less of what I don't want, in less time, with less effort, with increasing velocity, and having a lot more fun. And experiencing a lot more, a lot more fulfillment along the way. Wow, that was a lot of talking from Scott Perry. And I see that there's a lot of folks here. I'll just confess that, um, it's really hard for me to read the comments on the app on my phone while I am scrolling. Um, so I tell you what, I'm going to end this broadcast because you all have put up with me far longer than I anticipated any of you would. I'll go through the comments and answer anything follow-up questions. I'll put some links in for folks that, you know, think they want to explore joining as a free subscriber or as a Solopreneur Success Circle member in terms of joining the Solopreneur Success Stack. Obviously, this has been, in my mind, a raging success. I love doing this kind of thing, so I will do it again soon. But just know that I really appreciate the gift of your time and attention. I do not take the responsibility of not, you know, taking care of that asset that you're sharing with me lightly. I hope you got some real value out of this. I hope that you will take some insight that you gleaned from this conversation and be decisive and take an intentional action that will help you get closer to what you want or clarify where you're going and how you're getting there. And if I can be of any assistance at any time, I'm very easy to get in touch with here on Substack and elsewhere. Anywhere in the world. So I'll leave it there, and, uh, thank you once again, and, uh, we'll look forward to doing this again and talking with you really soon.