Latest / The Life-First Solopreneur / 25. Transforming Your Life Through Self-Employment With Steve Coombes
Transcript
- Steve Coombes (00:00): Today I run three profitable, not just one, but three different totally different solopreneur businesses and I still work less than 40 hours per week, most weeks anyways. Sometimes I have a crunch week, but I have time and income and location flexibility I never had in the corporate world. Intro (00:16): Bigger doesn't always mean better. Welcome to the One-Person business podcast where people who are flying solo in business come for specific tips and advice to find success as a company of one. Here are your hosts, Joe Rando and Carly Ries. Joe Rando (00:35): Hello and welcome to the One Person Business podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Joe Rando. Carly Ries (00:41): And I'm Carly Ries. Joe Rando (00:43): And today we've got the Penultimate expert for solopreneurs. Steve Coombs is also known as the solopreneur coach. In fact, he's trademarked that name. He recognized from a young age the power of self-employment to transform lives. Yet it took multiple failed business ventures to learn the importance of seeking help from others, especially when you're a company of one. After seeking out mentors and coaches, Steve built multiple successful businesses as a writer, a coach, and a multi-platform e-commerce reseller. This has allowed him to enjoy a comfortable, flexible lifestyle full of fun and travel since leaving the corporate cubicle farm for good in 2009. Today Steve is a popular solopreneur success coach and podcast host with a vision of helping 1 million more follow their own dreams outside of their traditional career path in this decade. So Steve, welcome to the show. Steve Coombes (01:35): Hey, Joe and Carly, thanks for having me on. Joe Rando (01:38): Very excited to dig into this stuff. So listen, let's just get started here. The first question, what are the most important things that solopreneurs specifically need to think about when addressing, starting or growing their business? Steve Coombes (01:52): That's a great question and it really comes down to what are you trying to accomplish here. I've been a full-time solopreneur since 2009, but it's not always been that way. I've dreamt of being self-employed since I was a kid. My parents were in Amway, remember those days? Network marketing. I used to listen to their motivational cassette tapes more than they did. I mean bring the vacuum to the living room and listening to motivation tapes. Big dreams, no vehicle, right? I always wanted to be my own boss, but when it came to the real world, I failed miserably at making that happen again and again. Maybe I'm slow, but it took me decades to figure out how to become a successful one -person business owner. So that's a great question, how do you, what do you need to think about? (02:35): I figured out once you know the keys to success, you can replicate that success again and again. I've done that and helped others do the same. And as a result, and I'm gonna get to the answer the question, but today I run three profitable, not just one, but three different, totally different solopreneur businesses and I still work less than 40 hours per week, most weeks anyway. Sometimes I have a crunch week, but I have time and income and location flexibility I never had in the corporate world. If you want to hear about the three different businesses, I can tell you briefly what those are. I don't know if that's something of interest for you guys. Carly Ries (03:09): Yeah, I would love to hear it. Steve Coombes (03:11): Okay. Well, my first solopreneur business was as a writer. That started in 2007. And this is kind of key, I started that while I was full-time employed. I didn't just jump in with both feet and say, Okay, hopefully I don't sink. I went full-time and I got laid off from my last full-time corporate job in 2009. It still wasn't to the point where I wanted it to be, but for me, that writing business was writing sales and marketing copy for websites and emails and video sales letters. These days that writing business is primarily editorial copy for Natural Health, a long time client of mine, the first solopreneur business that worked really well for me. But several years ago I started teaching and mentoring other up and coming writers through the organization that taught me how to become a copywriter. (03:56): And here's something else to think about. How do you get the skills you need to have a successful business? For me it was finding the training, finding the coaches, finding the mentors to help. And I found that through teaching in their organization and teaching at Sunday school at church, I love teaching. I've learned that I love teaching, mentoring, coaching, that sort of thing and that kind of grew organically into that SolopreneursSuccess podcast I believe you mentioned in the intro, my free community for solopreneurs and direct coaching services and such. So that's the second business. And the third one actually came from a guest trainer I had in my community. The end of 2020, I think it was October, 2020, and had a couple of guest trainers come on to talk about Amazon e-commerce reselling. I said "that's really fascinating. I'm gonna jump into a third business." And I did. (04:44): That turned into another part-time business. Last year I made like 90,000 in sales at 18% margin, I think it was. So that's not too bad for working about 10 hours per week. That's about a hundred bucks an hour for a very part-time business. I had my mind that my goals for this year is probably about a hundred bucks an hour. I expect to grow to about a quarter million this year, same 10 hours per week. So that's a trajectory. So three different businesses. But to answer that question directly, you have to have a product or a service that somebody's willing to pay you for. And in all those cases, I did have those. And in my failures, I also had something that I thought would work, but I didn't have the support and the knowledge to really bring it to the marketplace. And that's where I really failed. And that's often the difference between success and failure. What do you think about is what is your idea and is it gonna succeed in the marketplace? And are you just kind of thinking this in your own head and dreaming big? Or are you actually getting real world feedback to say, Hey, this is actually going to pull into something that you can actually make money with. And that's really the key. Carly Ries (05:52): Definitely. It sounds like all these businesses are successful now, but you said you had a lot of trial and error in the past. How do you go about getting clients for each of your businesses when you're getting started and before they become those successful businesses? Steve Coombes (06:06): That's a great question too. It depends on the kind of business. For example, the writing business, that was my first successful one. And getting clients there came from a variety of ways. I'll just give you some examples because this could relate to a lot of different businesses. I started, like many do, friends and family, One of my first paid clients was a friend of the family who had his own car transportation company. I said, Hey, you need some help with that. But before that, I built a portfolio by writing website copy for a friend of my sister-in-law who had a roof cleaning company. I said, I'll tell you what. My wife's designing your website. Let me write the copy for you free just so I can have something to show others that I can actually do this thing. (06:50): And I actually invested time. It wasn't money, but it was time that I invested to prove that I could accomplish something. Sometimes you have to invest either sweat equity or it's money. Sweat equity i a fine learning experience and showing that you can accomplish the work. Another way I did that was what we call spec assignments in the writing world. It's kind of similar, you can do a trial project in your business, whether it's a service-based business. Maybe you give somebody a 30 day trial of your product or you're giving them a guarantee that if it doesn't work for them, get your money back. That's a trial, right? There are different ways you can handle that. In my case, I'll say, Hey, tell you what. Let me write a new headline and lead for your sales letter, and if it works for you, here's how you can hire me to write the whole thing. (07:37): And that was successful for me. That was a great way to get clients. Of course, I began building websites eventually. I went three years with a coming soon page on my website, which is pretty lame. But I didn't even have a website for three years. I just went out there and kind of just hammered the pavement, reaching out to folks who I knew were in the industry already hiring writers, you know, a hungry market and going out there and saying, Hey, here's a service I provide. Here's an example of past work I've already done. I'll take the risk away. Let me write you a headline lead. Until I got to the point where I had enough experience where I can say, just give me 50% upfront and I'll do the rest of the project and you pay me on delivery. (08:14): And that was how I did it in the copywriting as a brand new person. Teaching became a little bit different and coaching a little bit different because I had already established myself in business. I had kind of built some notoriety at that point so it's not really the same as a brand new business in a way, because a lot of the people that hired me were people who knew of me from the realm of writing to begin with at least, not so much now. But at the very beginning, it was writers that were hiring me because they knew of me through associations and the company that taught me how to become a writer. So that was really the way you do it. You have to build an audience of people who want to pay you to provide the solution that you offer. And you have to prove that you can provide that. Sponsor (08:55): And now a quick word from our sponsor, 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? Lifestarr has created 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 Joe Rando (09:26): Steve, that's great stuff and really helpful. It's amazing to me that you've managed to run and juggle three different businesses and be successful with them. I don't think everybody in the world is up for that kind of thing. But, very cool. So given your experiences of having some companies fail and then coming in and having three successful solopreneur businesses and now being a coach, what are common mistakes you see people make in one-person businesses? What are the kind of the things you see over and over again that people do? Steve Coombes (09:58): ? Oh gosh. Can I give you a list cuz there's so man. I'll give you some solutions to them as well, cuz I know that's important. It's not just enough to know the problem, but how to fix it. Joe Rando (10:08): Absolutely. Steve Coombes (10:09): I've heard this book title thrown out there so often and you've probably heard it too, "Do what you love and the money will follow." Well, that's only partially true. Like I said earlier, you gotta have a hungry market and the ability to feed it. If you're maybe running a food truck selling tacos, well, you're gonna park downtown at lunch hour where the hungry people are coming out of the office looking for food. You're not gonna go park on some quiet street in suburbia. You need to know that you're offering something that's, Joe Rando (10:37): But I love Quiet Street, Steve. I love quiet streets. That's what, that's where I wanna be. Steve Coombes (10:41): Maybe for living, but not for your food truck, right? . So depends what your goal is. If your goal is, I want a quiet place to sleep and hang out with a family, yes, a quiet street is fantastic, but Joe Rando (10:51): I've know some musicians that really love music that were never gonna have the money follow. Steve Coombes (10:57): , well then they have a hobby. I always say, the business is because you wanna make money with it, otherwise it's a hobby. That's the real key distinction there. Business is to make money. If you're a non-profit, you still have to support the non-profit to keep it going. Hobby is, you're investing without the expectation of return other than perhaps your enjoyment. So there's a big difference there. And musicians can make good money, but many of them do it as a hobby or they may get paid a little bit to help cover their expenses by playing clubs or whatever on the weekend. That's fine. It's just "what is your goal?" If you wannt to do it as a business, you have to treat it as a business. Getting to that marketplace idea though, I'm gonna say that you need to get some feedback. I'm gonna just say point blank, that supportive friends and family are great and important in your business, but they're not a great sounding board for determining whether you have a profitable business idea if you're trying to get off the ground. For a number of biased reasons, they're not going to want to hurt your feelings. (11:55): They're not going to want to discourage you if they're supportive. So a better way to find out whether you have a viable business is to test the market. You could start super small. Can you find anyone? I mean anyone willing to pay you something, even a small amount to help solve the problem you're trying to solve. Or they hire you or they buy your product or they pay you something for it. Then can you find multiple people willing to pay you? That sounds more like a hungry market to me. If you can't find that, then you need to question either A, are you actually providing a solution or B is there a market? Because that's the likely answers if you can't get anyone to pay you for what you're trying to provide. The earlier you do that, the sooner you can cut your losses and move onto something profitable if that's not a good solution. (12:43): There was a flip side to that, I just wanna say. Do you like people jumping into business saying Oh, I'm gonna make it happen. This is one of my failed businesses. Back in early two thousands. I used to be a computer programmer back in the day and I was developing a database, software program for churches to track bus ministry and attendance and stuff like that. It was a great program, I thought. I gave it to my church for free. I was gonna sell it. It never went off the ground for a variety of reasons. But there's a flip side to that exuberant optimism, and that's imposter syndrome. It's this idea that we get in our head that manifests like this, "Oh, I just need to take one more course. I just need to get one more certification, then I can start." (13:24): It's always one more. You never get off the ground because you never take the first step to start your business. I've seen countless solopreneurs do exactly that. It's always more learning, more learning, more learning, but no action taken to start a business. I'm a big fan of lifetime learning, but if you want a successful business, there comes a time when you have to stop only learning and start putting yourself out there to sell a solution to the world. Otherwise, you have an expensive hobby, but you don't have a business. We start businesses to make money. So go make some money. You can always improve as you go along. Do education and training and such. Joe Rando (13:58): When you think about it, it's a bit of a dance, right? You've got this situation where you don't want to just run off and do it, but by the same token, there's only so much prep work you can do before you gotta go out and see what sticks. It's a real dance, balancing the risk with the conservative approach to not taking risk. I found that to be a challenge and sometimes I've missed the mark in my life. Steve Coombes (14:22): Yeah, absolutely. General Patton had a great quote, and I'm probably gonna to totally mangle it, but it went along the lines of "even the best laid plans go to waste as soon as you go out there to battlefield". I'm not gonna try to quote, I should just learn that quote and memorize if I haven't. But the truth is, you make the best plan you can and then you go out and execute. You make the changes you need to make to keep things moving along as you go. You're always gonna find things don't always work out exactly as planned. Plan is just something to start from. but don't make a plan so it's an important part of your thing that if you have something go sideways, you can't adjust. Joe Rando (14:56): Absolutely. So Steve, if you had one thing that you wanted a person who was flying solo in business to take away today, just one thing that you could impart to them, what would that one thing be? Steve Coombes (15:08): This is something I say often to folks in my community, and that is, just because you're a solopreneur doesn't mean you live in a vacuum. You're not alone. You have to build relationships. Virtual teams are really the reality of most successful solopreneur businesses. I'll give you an example. It's never been easier to build a virtual team and to go global. In my business, all three of them, I've never had a W2 employee ever. My video editing guy, he's in Serbia. My podcast show notes guy lives in South Africa. My intro voiceover guy is from the UK. And I'm just talking about podcasts so far. I've hired VIR assistants to help in both my eCommerce and coaching businesses from Philippines and Egypt, all over the world. There are people willing to help you. Just because the partners you have, whether it's software products or accounting services. Your accountant is a partner in your business, doesn't mean they're a W2 employee. (16:03): You didn't hire them as an employee, but you did hire them to provide a service related to your business. So that's really part of your virtual team. What that means is, you're not alone. You are growing a business and you need to take advantage of resources that are available to you so that you can focus on the core task that you are best at. But starting out, you probably are going to wear many hats. I mean you're the sales guy to make sure you can sell some money or you're accounts receivable to make sure folks are paying their invoices on time so you don't go into a cash crunch. You're the guy to make sure that yes, I actually paid my quarterly estimates so I don't get a big slapdown from Uncle Sam come tax time. You have to take care of all those different things. I know some solopreneurs just want to do the thing that is all about their business, their product or their service, but you have to wear the hat of a business owner when you get in. Then as you grow, you build that virtual team and don't try to do everything alone. I think that's really the key. Konw you're not alone. Don't be alone. Joe Rando (17:01): That's great advice and kind of a recurring theme here. We had a person that runs a virtual assistant company that matches people up with virtual assistant. You're right on with that. You can't do it all forever or you're never gonna grow. Steve Coombes (17:17): Exactly. Joe Rando (17:18): Do you have any resources that you think would be helpful for people going alone? Steve Coombes (17:22): Yeah, I sure do. Two things I would mention are two books because I think as a lifelong learner, they say readers are leaders. And I think there's truth to that statement. I'm going to give you two books and then make another suggestion without a specific resource. Number one, first book that I read every year or two, High Performance Habits by Brendan Burchard. It's a terrific book, not just on mindset, but how to practically, in tangible form, build the essential habits in your life that help you become successful in every area. Not just in business, but including your personal life. I think it's a fantastic book. I highly recommend it. Another great book for business builders of any size from solopreneur to CEO of a Fortune 500 company, is 80/20 Sales and Marketing by Perry Marshall. (18:11): And you've probably heard of the Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule. Perry expands on that in that book to show how really it's an exponential rule. And using that rule, you can exponentially expand the sales in your company. Another book I read every year or two. It's really that good. I highly recommend both books. The suggestion I had as far as resources that came to mind was get plugged into more than one community of business builders. You're a business builder. I don't know if you're in construction or whatever you are when you're listening to this, but find a community within your industry to join and regularly participate. Maybe you're a public speaker, so join National Speakers Association or something. Then find a different community, one that's general in nature, or at least outside of your core industry. And the reason why is when everything you hear and see is inside of that vertical or your own market, you get group think and you always hear stale ideas because everybody's hearing the same thing. You're just sitting in this one little room. Get outside the room to get fresh perspectives and insights. Get into a general based community for business in general or something outside of your industry. That often helps to lighten you up with fresh perspectives and ideas. I think that's really important. Joe Rando (19:29): That's a fantastic recommendation because you're right, it just becomes stale then you go someplace else and the next thing you're getting inspired with things that nobody ever thought of in your industry. Steve Coombes (19:40): Absolutely. I get ideas outside of industries that I serve all the time and I try to stay white red. Just participate in different things, even networking events. Talk to somebody who would never be your customer, but just learn from them. Just having conversations is great. Joe Rando (19:57): Definitely. We are kind of getting to the end here, but, can you help us out with your favorite quote about success? Steve Coombes (20:05): I actually have a new favorite quote that I just heard recently. Our pastor used it at church. I said, That's fantastic. I actually wrote it down on this piece of paper, and I said, I'm gonna have to keep track of that. I actually looked it up and I don't know the source, it says anonymous, but here's a quote. "Procrastination is the grave in which opportunity is buried." Apparently that quote has been around a while. I only heard it recently but really it's talking about don't put off your own success. To me, make it happen now. I've procrastinated so many times in the early days of business and sometimes I still have to watch that I don't just keep putting things off in the back burner and never make things happen. So make things happen. Joe Rando (20:42): That's a good one. I hadn't heard that one, but very true. In wrapping up here, Can you let our listeners know the best way to get connected with you? Steve Coombes (20:53): Yeah, thanks Joe and Carly both. I just want to say thank you again for having me on today. I love to connect with anyone listening. The best way to reach me would be through my free Solopreneur Success Connections community. I think I mentioned earlier, but I ask every single person to connect with me via a virtual coffee. You don't have to but I like to open up and have conversations with as many people as possible. That's just a 15 minute chat on Zoom. It's also a great place to connect with a general audience as solopreneurs as I was talking about a little bit ago. We have in that community, live trainings every month. We have virtual networking events and all is free. It's a free community to join. You can get a free lifetime membership at my website, solopreneurcoach.com/membership. I imagine you'll probably have that in the show notes for folks. So just jump in, there's no credit card needed. Just join as a free member and get plugged in. You can also find a Solopreneur Success podcast on your favorite player, or again, at the podcast page on solopreneurcoach.com. Joe Rando (21:55): Well, Steve, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us today. Listeners, if you enjoyed this, please check out our other podcasts at Lifestarr.com/podcast. And you can subscribe to the One-Person Business podcast anywhere you subscribe to podcasts. So we'll see you soon and take care. Closer (22:20): 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? LifeStarr has created 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.