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When we operate as an individual running an entire business where there is nobody else, we get caught in bad habits, but we also crave a team. There comes a time when, if you’re doing everything right, you need to scale your business, but doing this faster than it feels comfortable is less about tactics, more about identity. The solopreneur who once did everything must now become the leader who designs, delegates, and decides, often before they feel ready, so what does it take for the mindset shifts we have to make at this juncture?
Stop Doing It All
The first mental shift is accepting that growth requires help! This could be a logistics finance company if you are expanding your team to deliver products far and wide, but it could also be a virtual assistant or a fractional CFO. What we need to remember at this stage is that instead of seeing it as a cost, we should view it as an investment to buy back our time so the business can run as a scalable machine rather than a one-person juggling act.
As a solopreneur, we get stuck in certain thought processes that can mean that we refuse steadfastly to give the reins over to anybody else because we think that nobody can do it as well as us. Instead, you have to think that your job is now to build systems so others can do it well enough, consistently.
Getting Out of Survival Mode
At the start, many solopreneurs constantly firefight, and this reactive nature to every email, request, and crisis slowly chips away at our abilities to do anything that delivers real value. It’s time to start thinking like a CEO and go from reactive to proactive planning.
Dedicate time each week to reviewing numbers, setting priorities, but also deciding what you should stop doing. Accepting that you can’t do everything is something that feels very dangerous to begin with, but actually, you’ve got to determine what is going to move the business towards your grandest ambitions.
Stop thinking about getting through the day, but actually cast your sights to 12 months from now and see what it takes to achieve that vision.
Build Assets, Don’t Just Cover the Bills
To grow aggressively, we need to think about our assets like systems, audiences, brand equity, and intellectual property, and ensure these things keep working even when we are not. Prioritizing our activities like documenting processes and growing our own channels, even if they don’t pay off right away, is a big lesson in discipline.
Not everything works right away, and rather than thinking that just because it didn’t work now means it never will, we should have faith in an idea or a process, but also give it time. This is one of the things that we often think we don’t have, but Rome was not built in a day!
When you start to think like an architect rather than a worker, the idea of rapid business growth stops feeling like a reckless entity and more like a natural evolution of what you are creating. The one constant in your business is you, so embody the right mindset, which may also mean getting out of your own way!
