I’ve had to face a lot of reality checks this year.

• I’m not as far along as I’d like to be

• I haven’t nailed the perfect product/market fit yet

• I may be transitioning from freelancer to full-time creator too quickly

• As a father and husband, my work/life balance is not great

• etc….

One of the biggest issues I’ve faced is knowing exactly what I should be working on at any given moment. Everyone has their opinion on what you should or should not be focusing on, but the reality is that…

It’s all true, and it’s all false.

Really, it all comes down to which phase of business you’re in right now.

Depending on the phase you’re in, there are critical tasks you should or should not be doing.

If you get out of whack with where you’re at and what you’re doing right now, you could find yourself exhausted and going nowhere.

The 3 Phases of Biz Growth Build Grow Scale

Let’s look at the 3 phases of solo business growth to learn where you’re at today, and how to ensure you’re working on the right things.

Knowing which phase you’re in will determine which tasks and efforts you should be working on.

Phase 1: Build

For your business to exist, it must be created.

But, creating a business and building a business are two different things.

Sure, you can register your biz, create an LLC, and open a checking account but that’s just back-office work.

Building a business requires you to set 3 things in place:

• A Target Customer - that has a problem needing to be solved

• An Offer - a solution to that problem

• A Point of Sale - a means of delivering the solution and receiving payment

Within this over-simplified framework comes all sorts of other stuff such as:

• Biz planning

• Audience defining

• Product development

• Offer Creation

• Marketing Development

• Money Management

• setting up all the tools, software, workflows, and supplies needed to operate the business.

As a one-person business, there’s a lot to do, and a LOT of trial and error in this phase. So if you’re like me, you may be here for a while - like several years potentially. And I should mention, you can still make money in this phase.

In the build phase, you have a few primary tasks:

• setting up and using discoverability channels (how people find out about you)

• Offer building - finding product/market fit

• Taking action, making mistakes, and learning along the way

If you’re in this phase, you shouldn’t be worrying so much about automation, delegation, or making anything perfect. The only thing to focus on is crafting a great offer and developing a deep understanding of the ideal customer you’re aiming to serve.

That’s it.

Since transitioning away from a full-time freelancer to more of a creator-based business model, I’d say I’m still in this phase and might be for a while longer.

Being in the build phase has nothing to do with your competence potential impact you can have, it’s simply just the first rung of the business ladder.

Once you’ve built the business, the next step is to grow it.

Phase 2: Grow

Growth means different things to different people.

For a lot of us solo-business owners, we aren’t really looking to grow in the traditional sense where we start hiring employees and creating multiple departments and so on.

Solo biz’s in the growth phase are often looking to do one thing…

Generate more revenue.

At this point, you have your target customer persona dialed in, and your offer is compelling enough to generate sales.

In this phase of your solo business, you’re probably working on things like:

• Testing different pricing structures

• Adding gasoline to your marketing efforts

• Optimizing your product/service

• Enhancing the offer

• Hiring some part-time assistance

• Creating systems and processes

• Automating/delegating low $ per hour tasks

Using the analogy of a motorcycle… You’ve built the bike and proven that it works. Now you’re upgrading the exhaust, the tires, the paint, etc.

The game of leverage starts to come into play.

I’ve talked about the 4 types of leverage before.

“How can I keep giving the same (or less) effort, yet increase my results?”

At some point in the growth phase, you’ll have to do some high-level mental analysis of where you want this thing to go.

You may be happy in this phase.

Many one-person business owners are - and that’s great.

There’s no specific need to do more unless your plan is to scale.

Phase 3: Scale

Admittedly, I haven’t scaled a business before but from what I’ve learned about this phase the whole game is making everything bigger and taking yourself out of the day-to-day tasks as much as you possibly can.

When solopreneurs scale a business they are typically either:

• Prepping the business to either be sold or acquired by a bigger company

• Structuring the business to run without them working in the business

• or both

This is where you’re shaving away at expenses and setting the business up to be as profitable as possible. It becomes all about the details and optimizing for every single little thing.

Scaling a business usually isn’t what one-person business owners typically set out to do. Usually, we are much more driven to create wealth, autonomy, and freedom for ourselves. Not so much trying to become the next Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.

You Need To Know Where You’re At

A lot of solopreneurs are focusing on the wrong set of tasks.

For instance, at one point in my solo biz career, I was obsessed with setting up a bunch of sophisticated email marketing automations and workflows. Pre-writing a bunch of emails, generating several design-heavy email templates, adding a bunch of contact scoring rules, 100’s of tags, yada yada…

But I had less than 50 contacts and no real method for getting more subscribers.

As great as all of that misplaced effort was, I had put the cart before the horse. Costing myself precious time and money working on the wrong things.

If you’re building a business… do the unscalable and deeply learn about the customer

If you’re growing a business… build systems that help you solve their problems better

If you’re scaling a business… keep the customer’s best interest in mind

An Important Final Word

Although presented in an extremely linear fashion, you may find yourself in different phases at the same time if you’re launching new products in a new niche, or adding target audience personas for example.

But don’t do this to yourself yet…

As a one-person business, there’s already a lot on your plate.

Keep your business extremely narrow and focused.

Find success in that before adding more to your plate.

The ‘3 Phase’ idea perfectly joins up with the ‘brick by brick' mentality. 🧱

This is the pragmatic (realistic) understanding that every great thing requires consistent output of calculated effort over time.

By understanding where you’re at today, you can confidently work on priority tasks while shamelessly ignoring everything else for now.

You are where you are today due to the actions of all of your yesterdays. Tomorrow will reflect today’s efforts. Make each day count.

Until next time ❤️✌️🙂

Ev