5 Common Mistakes New Solopreneurs Make

Starting a service business can be so exciting, but it can also be so easy to waste months and sometimes even years, making mistakes that slow down or completely stop our progress. And the truth is a lot of these mistakes are completely avoidable and preventable.

I'm going to walk you through five of the most common mistakes that new solopreneurs make so that you can avoid them and make faster progress with far less stress.

Hi, my name is Marcela. I am a business coach for solopreneurs and founders helping them to build simple, profitable, and sustainable businesses that allow them to live life on their terms. And here, I talk through strategies, tips, insights, and resources to help you make progress with your service-based business. Let's get into the topic today.

MISTAKE #1: TRYING TO HELP EVERYONE

Okay. Mistake number one, trying to help everyone this is such a common mistake. I made this mistake and pretty much every entrepreneur that I know has also made this mistake. We go into business and into the market thinking we want to help as many people as possible, and that is such a lovely thought.

But by trying to help everyone, we end up helping. No one in this day and age when we have moved away from the location dependent and geographical business model to a global business model. It's not about providing a generic service to your local area. It's about picking a specific group of people and a specific problem that you help those people to solve.

And we need to make that as specific as possible so that those people can identify that you are the person to help them. So that is mistake number one, and it is so easy to make. Trying to be too generic, trying to reach everyone is going to make it so much harder to break through the noise that we have in this day and age, and it's gonna make it very difficult to build that momentum.

You need to think about this when the message is too broad. People don't know why they should work with you. They need to see themselves in the offers and the messaging that you are conveying. Otherwise, they will choose someone that speaks more directly to their specific problem and challenge that they're trying to get solved.

So the clearer you can be around who you help, what problem you solve, what result you create, the easier it's going to be for that person to build confidence in what you offer and for you to be able to communicate your value. 

You don't need to get this right from day one and you don't need perfection. This will very likely evolve, but you do need to have some kind of direction and some kind of idea around how you're going to address this specifically from the get go. Otherwise, it's going to be very difficult to gain that momentum.

MISTAKE #2: WAITING TOO LONG BEFORE SELLING

Mistake number two is waiting too long before selling I made this mistake in 2018 when I had a tech startup and I built a mobile app, and I took over 12 months of trying to refine the product before even speaking to one customer. What a mistake. It meant that we built something that had absolutely no feedback and no real market testing, and we wasted so much time, so much energy, and so much money.

Most beginner entrepreneurs delay going out and selling by doing things like building their website, changing their logo, trying to come up with a business name, refining their offer, refining it again, trying to figure it all out in a room with a computer instead of speaking to real people.

We all resist it. I understand it's scary because we're putting ourselves out there. It means that some people are gonna say, no, we're going to face rejection. We're going to have to face that discomfort of having to have those conversations, but if we don't do that, then we don't have a business. It's so important to go out there and have real conversations with your potential customers and to test your ideas in the real world.

Otherwise, you are literally just wasting your time, energy, effort, and money potentially, and delaying the thing that's going to make it a sustainable business, which is income.

I can honestly tell you that once I finally got over that fear and I started reaching out to people, working with people, offering initial free sessions and then having paying clients, that's when my business really took off. And not only because I was making money, but because that's when I really understood the value that I could offer, how to package up my services, how to create offers, how to refine things, because I was getting real time feedback and there was a two-way conversation with my clients.

So this is going to exponentially create value and benefit for you and your clients as well, of course. But if you're always trying to refine things and do things in your head or in your room with your computer and not speak to anyone in the real world, you are not going to be able to get this business off the ground.

MISTAKE #3: OVERCOMPLICATING EVERYTHING

Mistake number three is overcomplicating everything again, this is very common. New entrepreneurs often think that they need a lot of complexity in order to be able to build a real business. So they create multiple offers.

They have multiple niches that they want to serve. They have complicated funnels, they have lots of different marketing strategies. They try to use all of the social media channels, and this is unsustainable, especially because most of us, when we are building businesses as beginners, we start on our own and maybe with a co-founder, but that is too much work and too much complexity for just one or two people.

And honestly, complexity leads to very quick overwhelm and burnout. Not to mention the fact that when you have something complicated that you don't really understand yourself, it's going to be near impossible to communicate your value to the people that are looking at your offers.

They're going to get confused and they're not going to buy from you. So the simpler you can create your business, the easier it's going to be for you to be able to gain momentum. One clear group of people, one clear problem that you solve, one clear offer, one main marketing channel on repeat. That is what's going to get you the result.

Not trying to do everything at once. Think about Amazon. Amazon started selling eBooks. That was literally the only thing that Amazon did. That was their one super specific thing that they were all in on. As they grew, they were able to then expand because they started to be able to expand their team, their resources.

They had more money, they had more funding. They understood the process. And as you know, Amazon sells absolutely everything these days, but they started with eBooks. That's literally all they sold. So you have to think about it in that same way. Dr Marcela: The more specific and simple you can keep it, the more profitable and sustainable your business will become. Not to mention more fun and less stressful.

MISTAKE #4: UNDERCHARGING

Mistake number four is undercharging again, very common and I see it even more so in women. We think that because we're new to business, that we need to gain a lot more experience, more credentials, more certifications before we can start charging appropriately for our services. So we're pricing our services from a place of insecurity instead of from the expertise that we already have and the value that we provide for our clients.

When it comes to pricing, there is so much psychology around this, but especially for beginners, there can be so much self-doubt and questions around, why would anyone pay me? I don't have enough experience. I don't have enough qualifications. I need more testimonials and a million other ideas that convince us that we need to undercharge over deliver, and then we end up overwhelmed, burnt out, and resenting our business.

This is not sustainable. We can create pricing that feels good to us and that is fair for the people that are working with us. And it's about really understanding the value that we provide and the results we can get for our clients as opposed to pricing from insecurity.

It's also good to note that we don't have to get pricing completely right from the get go. Pricing does evolve and it can grow as our confidence and expertise grows. But be aware if you think you might be pricing your services from insecurity and have a think about what is the real value that you provide for your clients.

And once you have a little bit of evidence of the value that you provide, then make sure that you're pricing according to that.

MISTAKE #5: WORKING LIKE AN EMPLOYEE INSIDE YOUR OWN BUSINESS

Mistake number five is working like an employee inside your own business this is such a common one as well, and is one that I really feel so passionate about helping solopreneurs to escape. Because what happens is that a lot of us leave employment only to find ourselves being employed by our own business, but working even harder as an employee with none of the benefits of being a business owner.

And this is a mistake because it leads to burnout, overwhelm, and having a business that is unsustainable and it leads to us being trapped in a time for money model where we have no freedom at all and we're not able to scale our business above and beyond our own hours.

Of course when we start service-based businesses, a lot of the time we are starting with a time for money model. And it can feel similar to when we are in employment providing those services. But it's really important to understand that we're not just replacing our old employer with us still being the employee, and that we are instead building a business. And this is literally what I do with my clients because when we understand this, we can build something where we can separate ourselves from our business eventually and build the systems, the leverage, the automations, and the ways where our business can work without depending on us all of the time.

From my experience, this is the hardest mistake or the hardest trap to get away from. It's a lot of the core work that I do with my clients. Even well established solopreneurs who have profitable businesses end up in this trap and they need a lot of strategic and mindset work to help them to step away from this model that they create for themselves.

So one of the things that I'm really keen on is helping people to escape that, but also helping those who are earlier in the journey to avoid that mistake altogether. Because it can take a lot of time and energy to correct those mistakes and it can delay that success and that scaling and leverage that we're all looking for in terms of building a business around freedom.

So if you're someone that's early on in the journey, do ask yourself, what do I want out of my business? What sort of lifestyle am I looking for? And what sort of ideal week would I want to build towards with this business? And reverse engineer from that so that you can start thinking like a business owner as opposed to an employee within your own business structure.

And to be able to build the right foundations from the get go to ensure you don't get trapped in this time for money model.

SUMMARY

Okay, so to summarise, the five mistakes that service-based business owners tend to make when they're starting out in business are:

1. Trying to help everyone.

2. Waiting too long before selling

3. Overcomplicating everything.

4. Undercharging because of fear

5. Getting stuck in operator mode instead of business owner or CEO mode.

I'd love to know if you are a service provider or business owner which of these mistakes do you think maybe you have made, and how have you avoided making some other mistakes so that your business has been able to grow and scale? 

And of course if you're a service-based solopreneur or founder and you would like more help, resources and support in growing your own business in a way that avoids these mistakes, then do get in touch.