💡 Business Tip - Test, Commit, and Scale Your Lifestyle Business (Issue #76)
Overview of my upcoming Solopreneur course
In my recent Solopreneur workshop, we focused on how to come up with a great idea and plan for your first lifestyle business. My upcoming courses will dive into the next three phases:
Testing your new business idea.
Committing to your business and quitting your job.
Scaling your business for more growth, revenue, and freedom.
I’ve illustrated the flow of these three phases in the image below.
Phase 1 - Test
As I’ve mentioned before, I recommend testing your new business idea on the side while you still have a 9-5 job. People make rushed decisions when they don’t have money flowing into their bank accounts, and that’s not good.
I also recommend that you spend little money on your business until it’s making money. I wrote about how you can get started for free in this article. I’ll talk more about all of this in the course, as well.
Phase 2 - Commit
At the end of Phase 1, you should have validated that your business idea is working — or you keep adjusting and testing until it is. You have interested customers, and people are paying you for your goods and/or services.
In other words, there is a there there.
So, Phase 2 is all about committing to the business to help it grow and provide more income for you. Now, you can invest in some services and tools that will make your business operate more effectively and efficiently. You will also start creating a brand identity for your business.
You want to see that if you invest more time and money, the business generates more revenue. The model is working! It just needs your commitment to really take off and provide enough income for you to break free and leave your 9-5 job behind.
Phase 3 - Scale
The last phase is all about scaling your business to generate more growth, provide more revenue, and enable even more freedom. In the earlier phases, a business requires a lot of your active time to succeed and operate smoothly.
Now, it’s time to scale the business with automated processes and systems. You want things to run well without your constant involvement so you can spend more time doing things you enjoy with the people you love. Automation will enable good things like working less every week and taking longer vacations.
More to come in the future Solopreneur courses! So, stay tuned to this newsletter to find out when it’s ready.
Note that I said “courses,” not workshops. As much as I enjoy teaching the live workshops, two hours simply isn’t enough time for me to cover all the material, and it’s not enough time for attendees to absorb all the advice.
The benefits of offering courses include:
You can take the course when it is convenient for you. For example, I know many folks couldn’t attend the recent live workshop.
You can work through the course material at a pace that makes sense for you.
You can easily return to the material to review it later.
I’ll provide a course support channel in my private Solopreneur community so you can ask questions and discuss the material when you want.
You can ask my AI business coach questions to get answers at any time!
That’s right. I spent the last few weeks building an AI Coach that leverages:
My career experiences from the past 30+ years
~20 years in the tech industry as a contributor, manager, leader, and executive.
My ~8 years of career and business coaching.
~16 years of solopreneur experience.
More than 2 million words of the content I’ve written.
My many years of podcast episodes and videos.
And tuned with additional data that I keep giving the AI every day.
Right now, I have it available on my website, where you can hear it speak in my voice (click the little sound icons). It does sound a lot like me. Kind of freaky!
I recently added a phone number so you can text it, too. Just text +1 (251) 257-7691 with any questions related to solopreneurship, lifestyle businesses, careers, etc.
You can think of the AI as an advanced, powerful search engine for all of my content. It works better than anything else I’ve experienced!
Another cool thing is that it allows more people to access my coaching for a fraction of the cost of a paid one-on-one engagement.
Is it the same as talking with me live? Of course not.
But, talking to me live costs 20X more!
Try it out for free, and let me know what you think.
I’m Larry Cornett, a Freedom Coach who works with you to optimize your career, business, and life. My mission is to help you become a more "Invincible You" so you can live your life on your terms instead of being controlled by someone else's rules. I live in Northern California near Lake Tahoe with my wife and our Great Dane.
