The 6 Biggest Challenges You’ll Face as a Solopreneur

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It’s not that you’re not a people person. Far from it. You’re gregarious, affable and at home in virtually any crowd. You’re well liked and well regarded both personally and professionally. But when it comes to your entrepreneurial ambitions, you feel that your goals ambitions lie on a path best travelled solo. If this sounds like you, you likely have plans to join the swelling ranks of solopreneurs taking their lives, their careers and their livelihoods into their own hands and neatly sidestepping the false starts, roadblocks, frustrations and wage repression which are all-too common facets of the traditional career path.

For many ambitious and educated people, the traditional career ladder is not what they were sold while they were studying. And in an era where the majority of new graduates are herded into low-paying non-graduate roles it can seem as though the only way to live up to your potential is on your own terms. And becoming a solopreneur will allow you to make an impression on the world of business without the overhead costs and logistical considerations associated with building a conventional business. 

Still, while the opportunity-rich digital realm can enable you to set up your own business first as a side hustle and then as a full time occupation, this doesn’t mean that the life of a solopreneur is without caveats. You’ll no longer face the boredom and frustration that you felt in your old job but you will experience an altogether different set of challenges which can be your making or your undoing. 

Here we’ll look at some of the biggest challenges you’ll face as a solopreneur and what you can do to face them with aplomb…

Loneliness… it’s okay to talk about it

Even if you enjoy your own company and tend to be fairly solitary by nature, that doesn’t mean that you won’t encounter loneliness as a solopreneur. At the very least you should be prepared for it, and have strategies in place to deal with it. An ounce of prevention is, after all, worth a pound of cure. 

You might go months or even years without feeling a pang of loneliness while building your business. But when you go to parties and hear friends regale you with their tales of workplace antics or humorous anecdotes about their co-workers you may well miss having colleagues. 

This is why it’s a good idea to get out of the office as much as possible, especially if you work from a home office. Even something as quotidian as taking your laptop to your local coffee shop on a Friday or even enjoying a working lunch at a nearby restaurant can help to assuage your feelings of isolation. 

If you don’t mind some overhead costs, hot desking in a local business facility will give you all the amenities of an office at a fraction of the cost of renting your own. What’s more, you’ll be sharing a space with other freelancers and solopreneurs and it’s likely that you’ll find at least a handful of people with whom you can enjoy some enjoyable and inspiring chat by the water cooler. 

Getting the most out of every day

When you run your own business, every day can be a struggle for productivity. Where you will have an advantage over conventional business owners, however, is that you will be in complete control of your own productivity without needing to motivate, engage or energize a workforce… but this can be both a blessing and a curse. 

Productivity comes more naturally to us on some days than it does on others. But as a nascent solopreneur, you won’t have the luxury of sporadic performance. Lapses in productivity can at best lead to longer and more frustrated working days and at worst to lapses in the quality of your work which alienate clients and reduce their propensity to provide more work for you in the future. 

Getting the most out of every day isn’t just about what you do at your desk. You’ll need to make some positive lifestyle changes that ensure that when you turn up for work, you do so refreshed, engaged and motivated. This means ensuring that you get plenty of rest, that you exercise regularly (there are numerous links between regular exercise and concentration) and, of course, that you keep your body and mind well nourished and hydrated.

While maintaining productivity as a solopreneur is a whole blog post in and of itself, here are some ways in which you can ensure you get the best out of every day:

• Structure your time. Know what you need to do every hour and use organizational tools to help you.
• The internet is filled with distractions, so consider installing some distraction blocking software to keep you on-task.
• While you’re at it, keep your cell phone in your desk drawer.
• Take meaningful breaks every 2-3 hours, even if it’s just to take a 15 minute walk. Your brain is like any other part of your body, it gets tired and needs rest to maintain peak functionality.
• If creative block strikes, get away from your desk immediately. Take a walk, listen to a podcast or read for a few minutes. Nobody ever did their best work staring at a blank screen for an hour.
• Coffee is not a meal. Take meal breaks and ensure that you have nutritious snacks in your desk to prevent hunger from distracting you.

Outsource or automate- How do you know what’s best for you

Being a solopreneur allows you to handle your business your way. But it would be foolhardy to assume that you can do everything on your own. There are only so many hours in the day and only so much that even the best of us can accomplish. That’s why you may need to rely on external services to supplement your own efforts. And that can lead to a choice between whether to invest in more automated solution or whether to outsource external help.

Both have their benefits and caveats. Automation can reduce the time spent on administration and the more tedious parts of your working day. But as this piece by Global App Testing reminds us, the human touch is still necessary for best practice even in automated processes. Over-reliance on automation can stifle your practice and leave you vulnerable when things go awry.

Outsourcing, on the other hand, lends the human touch and gives you someone with whom you can communicate your needs and expectations… but you can typically expect to pay more for outsourced services and this will need to be factored into your cash flow.  

Image by Bruce Mars via Pexels

Feeling overwhelmed

No matter how confident you are in your abilities, no matter how hard you try not to overextend yourself and no matter how well you invest in your operational infrastructure, there will likely come times when you feel overwhelmed, not just by your workload but by the fundamentally untethered nature of entrepreneurship… especially if you’ve spent your entire career in salaried roles. 

When it all seems a little too much, the best thing to do is try and narrow your focus. Centre your attention on 3-5 tasks that absolutely need to be accomplished today and how you can do them to the best of your ability. Everything else can either be pushed to another day or delegated to outsourced help, an obliging intern… or your future self.

Feeling underwhelmed

While feeling overwhelmed is common among solopreneurs, so too is feeling underwhelmed. You may be giddy with delight in your early days as you watch the masses commute to work on crowded roads while you sip your coffee and enjoy the leisurely stroll to your home office. But over time you may start to feel as though the grass was greener on the other side. Your old job and employer might not seem so bad and you may wonder if all the risk and uncertainty you endure on a daily basis is now worth it.

A useful strategy is to commit your thoughts to writing. Make a list of everything you love about your new life and everything that annoyed, upset or frustrated you in your old job. 

You’ll likely find that one list is substantially longer than the other.

How to keep building value in your personal brand

Finally, like any small business, you’ll need to keep building value in your brand and giving your clientele a reason to choose you over your competitors. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that the best way to do this is to undercut your competitors on price. This is likely to do nothing sort of putting a squeeze on your cash flow and inadvertently implying that you’re not worth paying as much as your competitors make for potentially inferior work.

Instead, invest some of your time into generating useful content to establish your authority, build trust and help prospects perceive your value. Always keep learning and seeking new ways to develop. Keep networking with people who can help to round out your skill set or provide opportunities for collaboration. 

Think about it. Would you rather be known as the cheapest? Or would you rather be known as the best?