Go It Alone!

Bruce Judson

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061744273
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

There is an epidemic of unhappiness in the American workplace. A full 70 percent of workers in the United States report that they are disengaged from their jobs. When asked, "Do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?" only 20 percent of nearly 2 million employees said yes. It is no wonder that 56 percent of all Americans dream of starting their own business. So why don't they do so? Because starting one's own business is seen as difficult, expensive, and risky.

In this extraordinary book, successful Go It Alone! entrepreneur Bruce Judson explains that the conventional wisdom about starting your own business is stunningly wrong. Using the leverage of technology -- e-mail, the World Wide Web, and the remarkable array of off-the-shelf business services now available -- it is dramatically easier to start your own business. Magnified by these new services, it is also possible to create, for the first time, a highly focused business.

Bruce Judson shows you the practical steps that will allow nearly any individual to create a business, often using job skills that seem to require an entire corporation for support. It is no longer necessary to spend time on the tasks that don't add value. It is now possible to stay small but reap big profits. Go-it-alone businesses allow the individual the freedom to concentrate on their greatest skills. After reading this book, your motto will be "Do What You Do Best, Let Others Do the Rest."

1

Overview: The New Go-It-Alone Business

The Emergence of the Go-It-Alone Entrepreneur

A fundamentally new class of entrepreneur is emerging: the go-it-alone entrepreneur. Businesses run by these entrepreneurs are characterized by three defining criteria:

• The business is started with a minimal investment, and the founder or founders retain full ownership and control of the enterprise.
• The business is run entirely by a small number of people, generally from one to six.
• The founder does not set out to create a small business. He or she is working from the premise that the business has unlimited revenue potential.

To the founder or founders, a go-it-alone enterprise is small only in the numbers of workers it employs. It’s designed to generate substantial financial returns and to play a sizable role in the business world.

The implications of these defining criteria are significant. When a business starts with a minimal investment, the enterprise must focus on generating cash from the outset. This, in turn, suggests that the business is able to swiftly develop a paying customer base. Unlike many start-ups, go-it-alone businesses don’t have a gestation period where dedicated, full-time employees spend months developing plans and products.

Additionally, go-it-alone business is not simply a fancy term for a free agent or a freelancer. These businesses provide their founders with far more stability than freelance work and more personal rewards than franchising. These entrepreneurs are building a substantial asset. They have control of their own destiny. In difficult economic times, free agents and freelancers are typically in the extraordinarily frustrating position of waiting for the phone to ring. In contrast, go-it-alone entrepreneurs always a have focus for their energies and an asset that will provide them with an income stream.

Moreover, freelancers, free agents, and many small-business owners typically work on an hourly or daily rate, or they charge by the job. In all of these cases, they depend entirely on what they can produce as individuals, and their earnings are tied to the clock. They have not established a business system that allows them to magnify or leverage their skills. As a consequence, their earnings are inherently limited. Go-it-alone businesses don’t suffer from this income constraint.

It’s equally important to recognize that go-it-alone businesses can be started by almost anyone working in almost any sector of the economy:

• Go-it-alone businesses are created by all types of people. They are not limited to young people with nothing to lose, masters of the Internet, or sophisticated former corporate executives. They include women, former corporate employees of all kinds, seniors starting newly independent careers, people of all nationalities, stay-at-home parents who are rejoining the workforce, and individuals of all types and all ages who are pursuing their passion, realizing greater financial rewards, and achieving far greater control of their lives.
• Go-it-alone enterprises create a wide range of products and services for businesses and consumers, as demonstrated by the examples and case studies in this book.

Successful go-it-alone businesses are not haphazard undertakings. If a go-it-alone business were a house, we would say that it was built on a well-constructed foundation, using a blueprint that involves several core engineering ideas. The ideas that form this foundation are discussed next.

The Idea of Personal Leverage

Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the world.

—Archimedes

Achieving leverage and the amplification of your skills is the keystone to becoming a successful go-it-alone entrepreneur. A Roman arch cannot exist without its keystone. Similarly, an entrepreneur can turn his or her unique skills into a keystone that holds together a variety of outsourced services. Thus, a substantial go-it-alone business depends on the effective application of leverage and extreme outsourcing. The impact of one or a few people’s talents can now be magnified through the combination of these two factors to an extent that was inconceivable even a few short years ago.

One simple example of the kind of leverage that exists today is generally evident in any Internet-based retailing effort:

• In the past, some of the functions required of any potential store proprietor included renting physical space, designing and furnishing the store, staffing the store during all hours of operations, and attracting walk-in traffic to the store through local advertising and other means. All of these activities took time, a substantial upfront cash investment, and multiple employees—leading to a substantial start-up cost and substantial operating expenses.
• In contrast, powerful, easy-to-use tools now make it possible for anyone with an idea for a store in the online world to get up and going at almost no cost—in a matter of hours. The Yahoo! Store, for example, typically charges under $100 per month and provides a full e-commerce suite. In the virtual world, unlike the physical world, stores are generally leased on a month-to-month basis: No large financial commitment to a multiyear lease is required.

That is not to suggest that Internet retailing is always a good business or even that it is an easy business. In fact, it can be an intensely competitive and often difficult business. The point is that in the past, it was not possible for a single person without access to capital to even consider participating in the business arena. Until recently, you either had to risk a great deal of money and time—if you could afford both—to start your own retail business or had to remain an employee somewhere. Today, the cost and time involved in becoming your own boss has decreased dramatically.

The risk of striking out on your own today can also be significantly decreased. Now, a person with a skill, a strong service idea, or an innovative product idea can achieve leverage through a wide range of inexpensive, easy-to-use services. The costs and time involved in getting a new business off the ground are substantially lower, which in turn makes such an effort a far less risky undertaking.

In this new working environment, the individual stands at the center of a carefully constructed business system. In Archimedes’ world, physical power was amplified by combining a lever with a fulcrum. In today’s world, business strength is achieved when you become the fulcrum, and the business system that you establish is the lever. It is now possible to amplify your own power by creating an effective business system.

For example, my company, Speed Anywhere, operates a fully automated system for channeling potential prospects for broadband to large telecommunications companies that will follow up with dedicated sales efforts. As a consequence, the vast majority of my time and energy concentrates on my marketing activities. And the total business system leverages these activities. If I implement an idea that cost-effectively doubles the number of prospects generated, everything else simply flows through the automated system with minimal increases in cost and no delays in time or efficiency.

Do What You Do Best—Let Others Do the Rest

The idea of the virtual corporation is a myth. The idea of the extraordinarily focused business is the important reality.

Every successful go-it-alone entrepreneur has a very real skill that can range from an expertise in Internet marketing, to a graphic-arts capability, to a gift as a high-energy entertainer, to an expertise in using specific software, to a mechanical orientation, to a talent for routinizing complex activities. What distinguishes all of these businesses is that the founders have figured out a way to focus their efforts almost entirely around their individual skills—around what they do best. These owners have outsourced all other business functions to people who can provide them better or more cost effectively.

In The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Success by Achieving More with Less, Richard Koch persuasively argues that most of us “only make good use of 20 percent of our time.” The remaining 80% is typically spent on activities that make little difference to our overall success. Similarly, in Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton studied the results of over one million Gallup poll interviews related to job activities and found that “the real tragedy in life is not that each of us doesn’t have enough strengths, it’s that we fail to use the ones we have.” In contrast, successful go-it-alone entrepreneurs have figured out how to structure their businesses as systems that allow them to spend far more of their time on the meaningful, productive activities that take advantage of their greatest strengths. In Koch’s terminology, they are able to significantly “move the time spent on high-value activities up from 20 percent.”

The best way to describe this systematic approach is extreme outsourcing. Here, outsourcing does not mean sending jobs or functions out of the country (the practice of offshoring). It simply means that a specific function is handled not by the entrepreneur’s business but a separate business. Extreme outsourcing is farming out absolutely everything except the core functions, which are designed to capitalize on your greatest strengths. Today, this type of outsourcing is easier than ever because of the Internet’s communications capabilities, creating the instant exchange of information between separate companies that can be physically located thousands of miles apart.

Quite simply, innovative go-it-alone entrepreneurs employ extreme outsourcing because they recognize that their most valuable asset is their time, which allows them to achieve an unprecedented degree of focus. They know that they may be capable of doing many things, but they are constantly setting priorities that will best build their businesses. Go-it-alone entrepreneurs may be superb computer programmers, salespeople, or graphic artists, but they won’t hesitate to outsource these functions if another entity can perform them well and cost-effectively. As much as possible, these entrepreneurs spend their time using the unique skills that make their businesses valuable.

A typical classic entrepreneur might say, “Yes, I can grow my business on my own—if I can only find 300 hours in each week.” By outsourcing all the noncore functions of the business, the go-it-alone entrepreneur effectively creates those 300 hours a week!

John Maxwell, a leading authority on leadership, addresses the value of focus from a different perspective. In Thinking for a Change: 11 Ways Highly Successful People Approach Life and Work, he discusses research that has demonstrated that simply having too many tasks, even if you have the time to do them all, is a distraction that can radically decrease your effectiveness. “Switching from task to task can cost up to 40 percent efficiency,” he notes. To create a working system that allows you to focus, you must create free time by limiting the sheer volume of different things to be done. Go-it-alone entrepreneurs do this through extreme outsourcing. In contrast, the vast majority of traditional solo entrepreneurs will tell you that they administer everything. They are the chief cook and bottle washer, as well as the CEO. The importance of this distinction cannot be underestimated.

Extreme outsourcing is, of course, closely related to personal leverage, discussed earlier. Indeed, they are the flip sides of the same coin. Go-it-alone entrepreneurs stand at the center of a highly focused business system, and their activities can be leveraged to provide extraordinary returns.

Relentless Repeatability: The Key to Leveraging Your Business

To succeed, your business must do something that is repeatable. In Beyond the Core: Expand Your Market Without Abandoning Your Roots, Chris Zook borrows a well-known phrase from golf legend Ben Hogan, “relentless repeatability.” Hogan described this ability as the secret to his extraordinary success. As Zook notes, “it is an apt term for one of the most critical elements in the growth of companies, the discovery of a repeatable formula to drive profitable growth.”

Similarly, there is a well-known adage that is often repeated to people who are launching business consulting ventures: Until you have generated at least one client that you did not know before you started consulting, you have not succeeded. The point here is that it is easiest to build on pre-existing relationships and sell services to people you already know. But ultimately, you will exhaust this pool. To thrive, you need a mechanism for repeatedly selling your services to a broader pool of clients.

The essence of a repeatable business is the ability to create processes and systems that determine exactly how the business will work. Here’s a useful test: Is it possible to write in a notebook all of the information on how your prospective business will work? If so, then you have created a repeatable system. I am not suggesting that you undertake such a time-consuming exercise. I am, however, saying that you only have a repeatable formula when you have simplified and routinized your activities to the point that such a manual could be created.

To apply the concepts of leverage and extreme outsourcing discussed earlier, you need a repeatable formula. It’s the formula that determines which ingredients of your business should be outsourced and leveraged. A case study at the beginning of Chapter 5, pages 106–108, shows how these concepts can be applied to create a winning business and demonstrates that you can create a repeatable formula for almost any kind of activity.

Good Ideas are Everywhere

Sometimes people assume that the key to entrepreneurial success is finding that one incredibly good idea. This suggests that there is a shortage of good business ideas. But in fact, one of the central findings of my ongoing research is that there is an abundance of good ideas. As detailed in Chapter 3, “The Great Shift in What’s Possible,” the rapid changes occurring in the way business works are daily creating more and more opportunities for go-it-alone entrepreneurs.

Where do good business ideas originate?

The answer turns out to be far simpler than most people imagine. Over and over again, successful go-it-alone entrepreneurs find their inspiration in solutions they developed for their own real-life problems. They typically encounter a problem, solve it for themselves, and then conclude that “if I needed this, other people probably do as well.”

Mr. Trademark (www.MrTrademark.com), which provides online trademark searches and related services, is one example that illustrates this point. Joe Strahl, the founder of this business, was formerly the owner of Prison Life magazine. When copyright issues related to the magazine arose, Strahl found that rather than pay a lawyer, he could research existing trademarks for free through a database that was available at the New York Public Library. After completing this work, Strahl realized that the basic research to determine the existence of any trademark conflicts does not require a lawyer. He concluded that he could build a profitable business around this research service. The benefits Mr. Trademark offers include far lower costs than those of lawyer-guided trademark investigation services and guaranteed 24-hour turnaround.

Mr. Trademark’s beginning is far more the norm than the exception. In fact, the majority of the go-it-alone businesses described here started the same way: The founder solved a problem in his or her own life.

I often find myself in situations where people are discussing good ideas for start-up businesses. These days, I participate by asking one simple question with two missing words: “In the past few weeks, when have you said to yourself, ‘I wish that there was a _______ so that I would not have to _____,’ and how did you solve this problem?” The answer is often the basis for a strong go-it-alone business idea.

2

Principles for Success

Go-it-alone entrepreneurs have carefully thought through the dynamics of their business system and eliminated the potential bottlenecks to growth. With few exceptions, these busin...