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262. How to Build Systems That Support Work-Life Balance as a Solopreneur · The Life-First Solopreneur

• 0:00
  Carly Ries: What if your business could support your life even while you're on the road? In this episode of the aspiring solopreneur, Joe and I talk with Mike Lynch about building a flexible, automated business while living the RV life. Mike shares the real truth about solopreneurship, that it's harder than you think, takes longer than you expect, and rarely goes as planned, but it can lead to a better lifestyle than you ever imagined. We dig into how Mike uses automation and custom GPTs to save twenty to forty hours a week, how he protects his creativity, and how he replaces busy work with systems that actually build momentum. So if you want more freedom, smarter workflows, and a business that works for your life, this episode is a must listen.
• 0:46
  You're listening to the Aspiring Solopreneur, the podcast for anyone on the solo business journey, whether you're just toying with the idea, taking your first bold step, or have been running your own show for years and want to keep growing, refining, and thriving. I'm Carly Ries, and along with my cohost, Joe Rando, we're your guides through the crazy but awesome world of being a company of one. As part of LifeStarr, a digital hub dedicated to all things solopreneurship, we help people design businesses that align with their life's ambitions so they can work to live, not live to work. If you're looking for a get rich quick scheme, this is not the place for you.
• 1:22
  But if you want real world insights from industry experts, lessons from the successes and stumbles of fellow solopreneurs, and practical strategies for building and sustaining a business you love, you're in the right spot. Because flying so long business doesn't mean you're alone. No matter where you are in your journey, we've got your back.
• 1:42
  Mike, I told you offline that I wanted you on here for personal reasons because we share a love for RV life and working while doing RV life. Before we get into a whole conversation about that, about working remotely, about everything that you do, let's get to our icebreaker question that we ask all of our guests. So the one that you chose is, what do you wish you would had known before becoming a solopreneur?
• 2:06
  Mike Lynch: Well, what I wish I had known is it will be a lot harder and everything will take a lot longer than you can ever imagine. I started with a travel blog with this crazy dream of I'll start this travel blog. I'll write a few stories. Everyone will love me, and I'll make a bucket of money off of ads. And I watched my site, had a few stories up, and literally nothing and no one found me.
• 2:36
  And what I started to learn almost immediately was that being a solopreneur takes resilience because there will be a lot of days that don't necessarily make money, but you still have to work really hard and keep showing up. And what I began to really learn along the way was there was something missing from kind of what I was trying to escape from, which was this creativity. And that's what I discovered in solopreneuring career that I really had this yearning to jump into a creative state. And, you know, jumping into a creative blog allowed me to do that. And then that has led me down paths that I would have never dreamed if I hadn't just started.
• 3:28
  So probably kind of three things. One, it's harder than you think. Two, it will take longer than you think. And the road where you end up isn't exactly where you thought you might go.
• 3:45
  Joe Rando: I'm feeling this. I'm feeling this.
• 3:48
  Carly Ries: No. It's so true. And Mike, thanks for being so transparent because I think a lot of I mean, most solopreneurs experience that. Not everybody wants to admit it even though everybody goes through it. So I just think that's so relatable.
• 4:01
  What a way to kick off the show. And it's funny because number three, you were talking about the road may change, life on the road. what is so cool about solopreneurship is you can kinda create your own lifestyle around it. we talked to some solopreneurs who travel around the globe, going from Airbnb to Airbnb, who just have a flexible lifestyle in general. You have a flexible lifestyle with RV life.
• 4:27
  Can you talk about how you as a solopreneur, how you can kind of integrate RV life as an option, but also how you can actually work when you're on the road?
• 4:39
  Joe Rando: And before we do, we should define RV life, because not everybody probably knows what that means.
• 4:44
  Carly Ries: Oh, Mike, do you wanna go for that?
• 4:46
  Mike Lynch: Yeah. That's great. So RV life probably has a lot of different meanings. There are some people who live in an RV and literally never move it.
• 4:58
  Joe Rando: It's a recreational vehicle for us neophytes.
• 5:02
  Mike Lynch: Yes. And they take all kinds of shapes and sizes. And so we have a pull behind, you know, kind of almost travel trailer, but large. It's 40 feet long.
• 5:17
  And so we're hauling 40 feet of camper, a lot of gear, two kids, and a dog with us kind of everywhere we go. And when we go out on the road, because we travel a lot, but we also have a home that we home base to. We will go out for two weeks, three weeks at a time. And as we're doing that, we have a very set kind of route that we're on. So last summer, we went to Colorado, we went to the four major national parks, we had a certain number of days in each place that we were at.
• 6:00
  And as we were planning the trip, one of the things that was very important to me was really thinking about how I was going to design my kind of work around where we would be. And so first, I thought about, how I would integrate those trips into my content that I was creating. I also thought about the timing that we would be in, you know, Rocky Mountain National Park or at Great Sand Dunes and made sure that I was able to have enough time to be able to do my work, but also to be able to spend the time with my family because at the end, that's really what so many of us are doing this for. And, I think that's one of the benefits of being a solopreneur is you have this ability to better control your time. And, you know, work life balance gets a lot of press, but, sometimes it's really important to say, you know, sometimes I'm gonna win and I'm gonna be out on a hiking trail at noon on a Wednesday with my family eating in an amazing place.
• 7:12
  But sometimes, I may have to skip, I don't know, going to get ice cream, which I never would. But, you know, you may have to skip something in order to, have a phone call with a client. Right? Things like that. Or even when we're home based, I will, kind of set my schedule up to be able to get all of my solopreneur work done early in the morning, in the evenings, as well so that I have the chunk of my day, which means a 03:45AM wake up call and you know, 09:30, 10:00 bedtime just so that I have enough time to get in all the things that are important and meet my commitments.
• 7:54
  Carly Ries: I just love hearing how people structure the work life balance in these unique working situations. For us, we actually we had a travel trailer as well, and we pulled it behind a truck camper. So my husband's truck camper was his office. So he could get away from the craziness that was going on in the RV with family stuff, dog kid, everything. And then he'd escape to the truck camper to work, and then go back into the RV to kinda separate the two while we're on the road.
• 8:24
  But you were talking about the sand dunes. You were talking about Rocky Mountain National Park. Some places are a little bit more remote than others, and you need to rely on automation to get things done while you were in kind of these places. What made you realize that automation could actually protect your creativity instead of kill it and really work for you?
• 8:45
  Mike Lynch: Yeah. So this is such a really, really great question because in the, kind of early days, and I say that because, you know, ChatGPT and LLMs, the large language models, generative AI has been out for almost three years now, on kind of the mainstream stage. And before that, there were tools like Jasper that were helping content writers produce really quickly. But it didn't necessarily keep your voice. And so naturally, a lot of content creators who are my primary audience who I help serve now outside my blog, they've been skeptical, like, well, how can I use chat GPT to kind of keep my voice? I was fortunate because about the time I started getting into this, Google was rolling out these helpful content updates, which you all are probably very familiar with. And they were decimating some of these major blogs where people were making a lot of money. And my blog at that moment was so small that literally, like, Google forgot that I existed. So I had the ability to kind of play with ChatGPT. And then I also had the benefit of having a spouse who would read all of my posts, and she would not so kindly say sometimes no one uses the word delve.
• 10:14
  Don't ever say this in a post again. Please stop saying this like no. Nobody talks that way ever and certainly not your friends, Mike. And so you're right. I started to evolve, and I said, well, okay.
• 10:29
  If I just give chat GPT this assignment of go write a blog about Cumberland Falls State Park in Kentucky, and I give it some parameters of this many words and so forth. It's going to do that, but it's going to be terrible because it doesn't have my experience. Right? And so what I learned that that was bad, And I would go through and still have to do the work. I would put together my outline, and I would start to write my paragraphs.
• 11:00
  And I developed this little process that was still manual, which I would take my paragraph, I would dump it back into chat GPT, and chat was much better smoothing out my words than I was, it could do that so much faster. And so this process kind of started to automate, but still very manual. Then the concept of custom GPTs came out, and I started really diving deep there and learning how to build a GPT, give it its own instructions and its prompts so that I didn't have to re prompt the thing every single time that we I could walk through effectively a flow. So I could say, here's my keyword, here's my secondary keywords. And, there's still some prompting that goes on.
• 11:48
  But now, within an hour and a half, I have a blog post that I feel good and I feel confident in as opposed to a ten hour process before. So I've been able to use that automation to help it help me still sound like me, even with using AI. And so I've been able to take that, help other blog other bloggers to to use the same tool to teach them how to create those those custom GPTs in order to go from, basically having a minimum conversation with Chat, set new intern to, we have something that's actually useful. And now in the last year, we've continued to evolve and take those pieces of content and develop opt in freebies to develop your newsletter sequence that you're going to send out. Tonight, we'll get together with our community and we'll talk about a new GPT that helps you build your content calendar.
• 12:56
  So the goal really is to use these tools to help us manage our businesses better, and allow us to go from we just needed to produce a piece of content to now we take that piece of content, and we can show up in all of the places that you need to, whether it's Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and so forth, and it becomes much much easier. And then depending on the level of tech savvy that someone has, they can go from, I have kind of an array of GPTs to I can put this inside of, say, an automation tool like Make or Zapier or something similar to that.
• 13:47
  Carly Ries: Well, instead of just being productive, this all sounds so efficient, and you kind of have what you call a flywheel mindset. I'm gonna mess with you here. Can you delve into that and tell us what that mindset is?
• 14:02
  Mike Lynch: Perfect. So the flywheel mindset is really we want to build momentum and not just create motion. And it's easy. I found myself for probably the first year of being a solopreneur reverting back to so many of the habits that I had as a regular employee worker bee. And all of this kinda stems back to those days when we were in elementary school and you had your little notebook planner and you had to write down everything that was due the next day.
• 14:40
  Right? And, I became a list person. I would write things down that I already knew were finished, so I could cross them off of the list. So it was literally just kind of motion for the sake of motion. And by starting to create my flywheel mindset, it allowed me to say, Okay, instead of having all of this chaos, now I have this blog post, it's done, and I need to shove it out to all these different places, and then randomly and haphazardly doing that.
• 15:15
  The flywheel method and the flywheel mindset is really about getting, having a systematic way and a systematic process to doing that. And automations are fabulous, except that if you're not somewhat organized, they're not going to perform well for you.
• 15:34
  Carly Ries: Yeah. Absolutely. As these processes I mean, just this whole idea sounds applicable to so many of our listeners. You help people from the beginning kinda develop all of these processes. If a solopreneur is like, I haven't started this yet, or feeling overwhelmed, where should they start when it comes to automation?
• 15:55
  Mike Lynch: So probably the best place to start is to think about one of two things. One, what is something that probably frustrates you the most, because that's a process that could likely be automated, it's probably something very repetitive. And from there, let's think about how can we break that thing down into smaller chunks. For me, what I hated about creating Facebook content was the fact that I needed a whole 10 different Facebook posts. so I started creating, you know, effectively a GPT that would allow me to take a blog post and carve that up into 10 Facebook posts in a handful of moments and use and sound like me from my own blog posts. So if I haven't, if I were a solopreneur, whether I'm a content creator or in any other type of business, I would really suggest if somebody hasn't started with custom GPTs or hasn't spent much time with chat projects, those are awesome places to start. They really will help you get up the curve quickly. You don't have to be an expert to put those together. And there are a ton of resources online to basically go figure that piece out, or there's a lot of people who will show you how to to make it go live with minimal minimal time and effort.
• 17:34
  Carly Ries: Well, yeah, that's a great place to get started. And you have also said that you think that solopreneurs with the right systems can do the work of five people. So let's say they get past the beginner phase, what are three other core automations you'd recommend that even work for your business or not?
• 17:50
  Mike Lynch: Yeah, so I mean three, like, hands down, custom GPT is the way to go. Then one there are two tools that I really love, and they would probably come in, you know, call it two a and two b. One is my analytics tool that I use from Coefficient, and it plugs into g four analytics, or Google Analytics, and it plugs into any number of other dashboards, but essentially, it will grab all of my data and make it so that I have a nice easy to follow dashboard, and I can take actions off of that. And then call it 2B is a tool called Gamma, which I absolutely love this thing. Because anyone preparing presentations, whether it's a client presentation or something you want to perhaps give away, knows that putting something together in Canva or PowerPoint or whatever, it is incredibly time consuming.
• 18:54
  They produce amazing results. But Gamma is an AI tool that will produce PowerPoint like presentations. You can put in photos, your own photos, you can use stock photos, you can have the tool go out to the web and source photos, or even create illustrations. And I love the fact that I can take the ideas or the output that may come from a chat conversation that I've really refined, put it into gamma. And within a minute, I have a wonderful looking, effective presentation document. I'll go through at that point and spend the real brainpower actually editing that. And then the last tool that I really like is a tool called make. And it's very similar to Zapier, who a lot of people use as well. But I love the fact that it has plugins to virtually any and everything that I could ever want. And that's a tool that I use every single day, and it runs automatically in the background. one of the tricks that I have, I'll use my phone every day to take a voice recording, and I use a tool called Weatherly. And that voice transcription comes through, I hit a webhook, and that fires straight into make, it updates into a Google Doc for me. And then I'll take that Google Doc, and I'll use it as a tracking of everything I've been accomplishing inside of my business for that day for the week and so forth. And it helps keep me organized without having to, maintain checklist after checklist.
• 20:49
  Carly Ries: So Mike, I have to ask you, it sounds like you have so much going on. You have the automations running, you're actually doing the work, you actually even disclose your sleep schedule. Sounds like it's very minimal. You have a travel platform, tech automation studio, just all these things. How do you avoid burnout or losing focus?
• 21:09
  Mike Lynch: Oh my goodness. Well, I mean, I'm human too. So there are days that I get burned out. But I also really enjoy running, and I have been a road runner for a number of years. And one of the things that I will do, I have a group that I go run with several times a week, and it's super nice to be able to just go connect with them.
• 21:38
  And we unplug for a while as we're, running down the road, you know, sucking down air as as quick as we possibly can. I think that's one way. And then certainly, just keeping my eye on what it is that I'm trying to accomplish. And, you know, through listening to your podcast, I hear Joe talk about, think about what you want your life to look like in five years. And if I rewind a couple of years ago, our youngest son was, seven, almost eight years from being out of high school.
• 22:16
  And I thought, okay, when he is out of high school, we don't have to be bound to our home constantly. So how do we design the life today and work towards that so that in, five years or six years or whenever that we're able to go to Colorado for three months during the summer instead of two and a half weeks? And those are the things that really help drive me to continuing to do this.
• 22:44
  Carly Ries: Well, in what portion would of your work life would you say now is automated? Like, how much time is it saving you?
• 22:53
  Mike Lynch: Percentage, not enough, but more each day. And part of that is because, one, the tools are getting better every day. Two, setting up some of the make.com flows can be time consuming because, when you want to start building tools that are more and more complex, it gets time consuming. For instance, I have one that will go out, look at news sources, and it will summarize those news sources, create them into potential Facebook posts for me, including images. So that's something that would have taken kind of hours to just sort of go through and curate.
• 23:38
  And today, I effectively can sit down at my computer and inside of five minutes be able to look at those and and be done and have them posted. So also when I take my just kind of custom GPT and think about how long it took to write a blog post before, it would take ten hours. And today, it's taking, you know, an hour and a half, sometimes faster if depending on what it is. So at the end of the day, from a week perspective, I probably save anywhere from twenty to thirty or forty hours, based on what it would have taken to produce the same amount of results four or five years ago.
• 24:26
  Carly Ries: Well, that's not too shabby. Definitely a time saver.
• 24:30
  Mike Lynch: And I think we're just scratching the surface.
• 24:32
  Carly Ries: Okay. The other curiosity question that I have from a travel standpoint is to have any of your systems ever failed while you're off grid? And if so, how did you recover from it?
• 24:43
  Mike Lynch: Yes. I've had two. The first one let's see here. This was in our first big summer trip. And I was working with a company.
• 24:55
  We were selling part of the business, and we were doing a trip around Lake Michigan. we were en route to the Upper Peninsula. My phone started to get some messages that the people buying the business had questions, and I responded that I would be at our destination in, an hour and a half. I'd start looking at it then. Didn't realize that there would literally be no Internet there.
• 25:26
  So all of a sudden, we went from this is just gonna be inconvenient to this is a major problem. So I had to figure out how we would solve for this because at that point, we didn't have Starlink. I had a WiFi, like, hotspot that didn't work. So I triaged the best I could and decided that there must be a public library in the town, And I went visited, and sure enough, they had Wi Fi. The library had no air conditioning, and they were closing in like thirty minutes.
• 26:00
  So I found a plug on the stoop of this library sat there for like six hours plugged in swatting mosquitoes using their Wi Fi in order to solve this problem. So that was one, call it major system that failed. And we realized that we had to have Starlink because not having the internet was not going to work. The other was on . this was an actual business trip that I was on, and I received a notification that my SSL security, so security license on my website had expired. And I thought that that was set to renew.
• 26:50
  Well, I was with a whole bunch of people who had no idea that I was also running the site, and we were all traveling that day. So I didn't have the ability to triage it immediately. And all I could think for the next six hours as we were on the way back home was, oh my gosh, my site is going to be dead. Google is going to crush me. I was able to get back online within a few moments of walking in the door at home, got that remedied, and have set it to auto renew forever.
• 27:23
  And so as folks who run websites, you understand how the pit of your stomach just drops out when that happens.
• 27:32
  Carly Ries: Absolutely. Oh, man. But it sounds like you recovered okay. Well, just like these adventures on the road, what advice would you give to solopreneurs, what filled businesses that support their life and not the other way around?
• 27:48
  Mike Lynch: Yeah. I think you have to think about what is important to you and what are going to be your kind of non negotiables. And from there, start to build around what you know and how you can use that to help other people solve their problem. Because the more we help others solve a problem, then the better off, we will ultimately be as solopreneurs.
• 28:17
  Carly Ries: Such great advice. Well, speaking of advice, we ask all of our guests this question. So I wanna end with this. What is your favorite quote about success?
• 28:24
  Mike Lynch: So my favorite quote about success is it only makes sense when I look at it in reverse. And it's very true about life and careers at the same time.
• 28:39
  Carly Ries: That's a new one. I like that one a lot. Adding it to the show notes. Well, Mike, where I mean, you have so much going on. Where can people find you if they wanna learn more about anything that you're doing?
• 28:49
  Mike Lynch: Yeah. So if you wanna learn about RV life, check me out at ourcampfireunplugged.com. And if you want to learn about flywheel mindset, check me out at flywheelfactory.io. And if you type in aspiring - solopreneur, I'll send you the link for this. We have an opt in freebie, which is a GPT that any of the solopreneurs could go, they can drop in their ideas and / or blog posts or whatever they may have.
• 29:23
  And it will help you create effectively a lead magnet that you can use within ten minutes. So it's a really really cool tool. It will get you, I would say, 85 to 90% of the way there and do the heavy lifting for you. And then you just apply the brainpower to make it customly yours.
• 29:43
  Carly Ries: That is awesome. Thank you.
• 29:44
  Joe Rando: So check that out.
• 29:45
  Carly Ries: Yeah. And Mike, thanks so much for coming on the show today.
• 29:47
  Mike Lynch: Absolutely. It was a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for having me.
• 29:51
  Carly Ries: Yeah. And listeners, thank you so much for tuning in. As always, leave that five star review, like for real for real. Share this episode with a friend and subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform, including YouTube. And we'll see you next time on the Aspiring Solopreneur.
• 30:08
  You may be going solo in business, but that doesn't mean you're alone. In fact, millions of people are in your shoes, running a one person business and figuring it out as they go. So why not connect with them and learn from each other's successes and failures? At LifeStarr, we're creating a one person business community where you can go to meet and get advice from other solopreneurs. Be sure to join in on the conversations at community.lifeStarr.com.