Solopreneur Bookkeeper: Building a Company of One

In my 30s, one of my favourite business books was The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. If you haven’t read it before, here’s the AI-generated, one-sentence summary.

“The E-Myth Revisited is a book about entrepreneurship and the common myth that most businesses are started by entrepreneurs when in fact they are started by technicians who know how to do the work but not how to run a business.”

The phrase that has bounced around my brain for the last 15 years is this.

“If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job.”

It started out as motivation. I was going to build an empire. I would have a team of people doing all of the client work while I strategized about the next big move. And when I retired from daily work, the business would continue to generate money for me.

Then, it turned into a source of shame. Years later, I was still working solo. I had plenty of work but no team. It felt like I was failing at being an entrepreneur. All of this work and all I had was a job.

This isn’t just the advice from one author. Go look at the popular courses people are selling online. If you want to become a successful bookkeeper, consultant, social media manager, or any other service provider, there’s a very common set of instructions.

• Start selling your services solo.
• Standardize your processes and tools, so you’re repeating the same steps with each client.
• Document your processes to create an easy-to-adopt playbook for every role in the business. (CEO, CFO, junior associate, etc.)
• Hire staff, teach them the system, and repeat the process until every role except CEO is filled.

I recommend this approach to most entrepreneurs. It’s a proven system and is your best roadmap for success. But it’s not the only path.

Some of us just don’t want to build a team. We want to be successful but are perfectly fine running a company of one. We’re willing to put in the hours it takes to do this ourselves and accept the risks that this entails.

In other words, if you feel like you’re not a real business because you haven’t hired yet, I assure you this isn’t true.

Here’s the catch.

One of the points Michael Gerber is making is still extremely valid. If you are the business AND all of your revenue is directly tied to your time, this is a problem. This means if you get sick or, God forbid, you actually want to take time off, your revenue stops.

Here are two strategies you can implement to avoid this problem.

Stop charging by the hour.

Whenever possible, charge a fixed amount based on the value you provide. If your client has Problem X, you will solve that problem for $1,000/month. Your client just wants that problem solved and the value that the solution provides. It shouldn’t matter if it takes you 40 hours per week or 4 hours per month to solve that problem. In fact, it’s a win-win if you can perfect your system to the point where you only need 4 hours to give them a month’s worth of value.

This is still active income, but by automating and improving your system, you are better leveraging your time. This means you could solve all of your clients ' problems, make enough to pay the bills, and still have time to travel for a week each month.

Have additional revenue streams that aren’t tied to your time.

Find a way for money to come in each month semi-automatically. The list will vary depending on your industry, but here are a few examples.

• Sell a digital product: This includes things like courses, guides, templates, graphics, etc. Something that you create once and can sell over and over with minimal upkeep.
• Recurring subscriptions: Software is the big one in this arena, and there are emerging no-code options, so even non-developers could create something that would be complimentary to the services you provide. I’ve also seen templates. Every month, they would get five new templates from a wide range of categories like web design or writing prompts.
• Investing: This is more generic life advice. The original form of passive income is investing your money. No, I don’t mean day trading or dumping your life savings into Crypto. I mean sensible, long-term investing. I’m not qualified to give advice here, so do your research or talk to a qualified financial advisor. These are all separate topics on their own, so maybe I’ll go into depth on these in the future.

If you’re cut out for Human Resources and enjoy the idea of building a team, go for it! However, if you’re like me and prefer to work solo, you can still grow a successful business. And you can build one that won’t force you to be at work 12 hours a day. You still can (I’m wrapping up another 70-hour week as I write this), but you don’t have to.

Additional Resources:

The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber: Even if you don't plan on growing a team, I still consider this required reading. You'll still gain insights on systematizing your processes to be more efficient and deliver a consistent customer experience.

Company of One by Paul Jarvis: The title says it all. This book argues the benefits of staying small while still growing a highly profitable business.