You are not as big as GM. You’re not as global as Weiden+Kennedy or as massive as Kirkland & Ellis. You’re probably not even close to Jiffy Lube when it comes to manpower.
As a solo entrepreneur, you don’t have gigantic reserves of cash in the bank. You likely don’t have more than five employees (which is still a lot). You don’t have weekly management meetings.
Enjoy it. These are good things, cherish them.
In some ways, you are more powerful than larger businesses by virtue of being more flexible and more agile. I’ll give you an example.
Today I was listening to a teleseminar on marketing. One of the things I heard made me stop and take some quick notes. Lightning struck my brain during the call and I could see very clearly that I needed to take action soon.
When I got off the call, I wrote up a quick action plan. This wasn’t a trip to the moon kind of idea, it was more of a bus ride to Denny’s. However, for my business it could be very big for building relationships. It involves creating a membership “club,” providing secure download pages, and creating a means of dissemination, which in my case is an AWeber account.
About four hours later, it was all implemented. Granted, I have one small technical glitch that will have to wait for my support people to get back to me about, but for all intents and purposes, my new strategy is live.
How long do you think this would take in a large corporation? How many levels of approval would each step in the action plan have to get past? How many people would have a say in what the deliverables of the project should be? Would the project be the same one we started out with?
This is a huge advantage. As a small biz in a home office, you can experiment. You can try out new marketing strategies quickly and watch the results personally. You can try new things, jump around, learn from your mistakes and try again with a better plan.
Of course you don’t want to be rash and leap at every opportunity just for the sake of trying new stuff. You need a solid business plan and some focus. But just think about the fact that you have the option to do that if you want.
Take advantage of the freedom you have with your small size.
David Billings is an illustrator, animator, and writer. He currently runs two businesses from his home studio near beautiful Mount Hood, Oregon.
Sparky Firepants Images is focused on building kids’ brains to ginormous sizes while they have a crazy time. David creates fantastic, colorful images that complement books and educational media for preschool and elementary-level kids. A unique perspective on children’s publishing and the business of illustration can be found on his blog.
He also uses his technical expertise in creating corporate graphics and presentations to consult with and assist presenters of all types, keeping their audiences rapt with attention. Prepared Graphics focuses on helping individuals and small business owners with great content who don’t want to mess around with that PowerPoint stuff.
David lives with his wife and children on an alpaca farm. No, they don’t really smell that bad.
