TT#060 The Harsh Reality of Building a One-Person Service Business
Building a one-person service business is a romantic idea.
No one to manage. No one to answer to. No useless meetings. No subpar work to fix.
In other words: Full control, autonomy, flexibility, and freedom.
Sounds awesome. And it’s the mindset I started building online with.
But I was wrong.
Building a one-person service business was absolutely the best way to get started. But once you get established, it quickly becomes an asswhp to run and grow.
Maintaining a one-person service business meant:
Writing all the marketing content
Scheduling and publishing content
Engaging on social media platforms
Creating funnels, zaps, and tech
Taking the sales calls from prospects
Following up on sales calls
Day-to-day admin & operations
And more…
Were all my responsibility.
Plus, notice anything important missing from that list?
I also had to deliver the services I was selling.
Again, that's fine if it's for a period of time to learn, systematize, then delegate functions. But not to do forever.
Building a one-person business can work well if you’re selling digital products, like courses. But it’s a completely different ballgame when you’re selling services you have to deliver.
Digital products are entirely scalable, meaning each new customer has virtually no impact on your time. So you can focus all your time on marketing and selling your course. You can sell as many as you want because more sales doesn’t mean more demands on your time.
But making good money with a digital course for a sustainable period of time is a low probability game. Think about it this way...
If you’re selling a course for $150, you need to sell 1,667 courses in a year to make $250,000.
If your landing page converts a generous 3% of visitors, you need to get 55,555 visitors to your page.
If 1% of the impressions from your social media content creates a visitor, you need 5.6 million impressions on content.
And, once someone has bought your course, they bought it. So you have to keep building your audience at that same rate each year to maintain sales.
Impossible? Absolutely not. But it’s harder than it sounds and takes a good amount time to ramp up.
That’s why the most successful online course creators are those teaching people how to create online courses.
And some of them just straight up mislead their audiences about expectations. Like this post from Ron Stefanski implying the average online course creator makes $68k/year — using the average salary data of full-time employees from ZipRecruiter.
That’s why so many people opt for selling services online. Making $250k/year selling services means finding 4 or 5 clients who will pay you $4-5,000 a month. Doesn’t sound crazy. And even if you get halfway there out of the gates, you’ve created a six-figure opportunity for yourself.
The thing is, being responsible for all the administration, marketing, sales, operations, and delivery of services gets exhausting. And a lot of it gets boring.
At the appropriate time, hiring in your services business serves 3 purposes.
It helps you avoid burnout, which makes the business more sustainable.
It helps you handoff functions you aren’t good at, which makes the business better.
It helps you focus on your zone of genius, which makes you (and your clients) more money.
The question is, who do you hire first? That depends on your strengths, your preferences, and the state of your business.
I recommend starting with a 2-4 week time audit. Track your time for 2 weeks to see where it’s going. That’ll give you some objective data on which role will have the biggest impact on your business and quality of life.
A good resource to help guide that is Dan Martell’s new book, Buy Back Your Time
I did this myself. And I saved myself HUNDREDS of hours. Want to see how?
Watch full video
