Solopreneur Doesn't Mean Solo

For months I knew I needed to be doing more with my marketing, but nothing felt right. Every time I sat down to work on it I'd second-guess myself, change direction, or talk myself out of whatever I'd just decided.

I was having a hard time following my own advice, which is a strange place to be. Rationally I knew what I should do, but I couldn't get myself to do it.

So I hired someone to oversee it for me.

Not because I couldn't do it, but because marketing drains me in a way that other work doesn't. The attention to detail, the editing, the constant need to show up consistently on platforms and email, it costs me more energy than the actual hours I spend on it. Energy that would be better spent elsewhere.

Even if you have no plans to be an influencer, you need a presence that shows people you're serious. There's a certain amount of content creation that comes with every business now, whether you like it or not.

I knew I wanted a marketing partner in my corner. Someone who genuinely loved it, would help me stay on track, and could entertain (and rein in) my off-strategy ideas when needed.

And for the last 9-months she's been the idea generator and strategist behind the Next Step Club, my LinkedIn newsletter, workshops, and masterclasses. She saves me at least 20 hours a month.

I also hired a VA, but this time for an embarrassingly practical reason: I kept missing my quarterly tax deadlines. Not ideal.

But what she's done beyond that is quietly save me money by auditing my tech stack, catching subscriptions I'd forgotten about, and keeping me accountable to the things I'd otherwise let slip. She has paid for herself many times over.

Two very different hires, two very different problems, and the same result: I got time and energy back and could focus on revenue generation.

Here's what I've noticed.

A lot of solopreneurs I work with are doing the equivalent of what I was doing, spending hours a week on things they're not good at, don't enjoy, or simply shouldn't be doing themselves, and they haven't made the connection yet that this is costing them. Not in the future, right now.

I think there's a myth in solopreneurship that doing it alone is the point. That spending money on help is something you earn the right to do once revenue is where you want it to be. But that thinking has it backwards.

The math most people skip.

Most people look at the cost of hiring help and stop there. That's only half the equation. If you pay someone €30 an hour to do something that was eating 10 hours of your week, and you use that time on work that actually generates revenue, you haven't spent money. You've made an investment with a return.

Every hour you spend on the wrong work is an hour you're not spending on the work that actually moves your business forward. I was spending 5-10 hours a week on marketing execution. That has a price, even if it doesn't show up on an invoice.

There's a simple framework called the Eisenhower Matrix that sorts your tasks into four quadrants: urgent and important (do), not urgent but important (schedule), urgent but not important (delegate), and not important at all (delete). 

Most solopreneurs, if they're honest, are spending a disproportionate amount of time in the wrong two quadrants: delegate and delete. The stuff that feels pressing but isn't actually moving the needle. That's where the real money is being lost, not to an invoice, but to hours that disappear into tasks someone else could do better, faster, or more cheaply than you.

If you had a retail store, you wouldn't hesitate to hire a cashier so you could focus on running the business. You'd call it an investment and necessary, not an expense.

Solopreneurs need to think the same way, even when, especially when, revenue isn't where you want it to be yet.

So how do you know when it's time?

You're consistently doing things you hate, and it's showing. The quality is fine but the energy behind it is gone, and people can feel that.

You keep deprioritizing the same thing, week after week. It's not laziness, it just belongs to someone else.

You're spending time on something someone else could do in half the time, for less than your hourly rate is worth.

You've hit a ceiling and you can't figure out why.  Sometimes the ceiling is you, not your offer or your market. And the highest-return investment you can make, whether that's a VA, a marketing person, or a business coach, is someone who can see what you can't.

You don't have to do it all alone. That was never a requirement, even if it feels like it was. The solopreneur label refers to how you run your business, not how many people you're allowed to involve in it.

If you're not sure where to start, that's usually the right time to talk it through with someone. Reply or comment, and let me know where you're stuck.