👋🏾 Hi friends!

Well would you look at that? Another year pretty much done and dusted, where the heck does that time go 🤯 .

I’m about to head off to Italy to spend a quiet couple of weeks with the in-laws, so for the rest of the month, I’ll be sending out a bare bones Off Balance and kicking things off in the new year with a new format based around the post I wrote this time last year covering the 100 lessons I’d learned from 2 decades operating.

I hope that whatever you’re doing over the holiday period, you get to spend it with people you love and 2023 ends as well as 2024 begins 🎄 

Now let’s get down to business…

In this weeks Off Balance, I’ll be chatting about:

❓️ Planning a strategy as a first time solopreneur
❌ 10 things CFOs see founders doing that they REALLY shouldn’t be

Also, in this week’s Nothing Ventured, I spoke to Josh Bell, one of the founders of and General Partners at Dawn Capital which, over the summer raised a phenomenal $700m new fund.

As always, our Primer episode gives you a bit of background on how he got to where he is today 💪 

Also, if you have any feedback, or if there’s something you’re desperate to see me include, just reply to this mail or ping me online - I’m very open to conversations.

If you like what I’m putting out, do give me a follow on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.

(If you are trying to connect with me on LinkedIn, maybe read this post I wrote and make sure to start your request with “Off Balance” and, more importantly, tell me why you’d like to connect 💪🏾)

Don’t forget to like, rate and subscribe to Nothing Ventured on Apple, Spotify or YouTube, it really helps more people see what we’re doing - you can find links to these (and more including my Office Hours) right here!

Now let’s get into it.

How can did I add value?

This week I spoke to an old friend who has (relatively) recently taken the plunge to move out of employment into a brave new world consulting.

For me, what was even more interesting was that he was moving out of a career in education as a leader to take the plunge into carving out his own path.

You may be wondering what value I could add to any problem he might have been having but, having worked in the edtech sector with a number of educators (including Eton College) as well as the fact that the problems you face as a solopreneur are agnostic to the industry you’re applying your skills to, there were a number of ways I could help him think through the most sensible approach.

Here are some of the issues we touched upon.

Purpose
I don’t mean purpose in the slightly nebulous way that thought leaders talk about when they tell you to ‘find your purpose’ - if anything I have for some time now subscribed to the fact that this (along with ‘passion’) are the wrong ways of approaching a problem. Instead, you should find what you’re great at doing and you’ll often find that purpose and passion arise.

With that out of the way, the purpose I was talking about was what purpose he felt his consultancy was going to ultimately fulfil.

Did he want to be a consultant because of the flexibility it gave him? Or was the ultimate goal to create a business with all the complexity that entails (hiring staff, building processes, moving out of delivering services to (mainly) finding customers to pitch those services to?

It’s not essential to know the answer immediately or have a plan to execute immediately because, as was the case for me, you may well develop the plan organically as you continue to deliver the services as a solo consultant.

This gives you the ability to test out assumptions and not only see what services customers are actually looking for, but which of those can be packaged up and delivered by a team, rather than you personally.

But having an idea of which way you are likely to go helps you make sure that you have those assumptions at the back of your mind as you build.

One Thing
It turned out, that on top of the consultancy, he had also built out a small but growing digital community off the back of content that he and others were creating.

The immediate question I had for him was whether that was a business in its own right, and hence should he be focussed on one or the other.

Let’s not beat about the bush, building a business is not simple, especially when you are doing it on your own, and, making the mistake on trying to do too many things often results in you not being able to truly succeed in any of them.

This is something I have struggled with throughout my career - whether running a couple of manufacturing operations in Papua New Guinea or, more recently, trying to build both EmergeOne (a service based consultancy) and Projected (a tech product).

Being that deep in a businesses, especially a young one, means you have to give it all your attention. Once you have grown to the extent that you have a team under you and the ability to step away from the day to day, that may be the time to try and build something new, but for most of us that is either going to be a long way in the future or not at all.

The other way to frame it is whether all the activities you’re doing are focussed on the same goals or objectives.

For example, I actively decided to continue with the podcast and launch this newsletter, not because I thought either would be revenue generative channels in their own right (through sponsorship or advertising), but because they both actively helped drive my core activity (EmergeOne) forward, whether through developing my and the business’ brand or as active lead generation for the business. I stopped thinking of them as separate activities, but as core to the business itself.

As it happens, he hadn’t thought too deeply about this, but knew that some of the work he had won had actively come from the community. From my perspective this is the ‘lead magnet’ to drive business to the consultancy. Therefore focussing on building it out from a content perspective should be his first objective, monetisation might be a secondary goal, but I suggested that trying to both monetise the community whilst building the consultancy would end up with neither achieving what he needed in the mid term.

Where’s the Money
Finally, I suggested that he mapped out who the ideal customers are for the business and to concentrate on building relationships with them, even if that doesn’t lead to immediate business, as you want to keep them warm for when a need arises.

This is imperative when you’re building a service business as you have to balance the need to deliver the services (and hence drive revenue) with the need to be in the market pitching for new business.

It’s the biggest challenge most consultants have given the irregular nature of business activity and, let’s face it, many people are not great at business development and sales preferring to concentrate on delivery but it’s imperative to be active on both sides to build out a sustainable business - whether that’s as a soloprenuer or in a more structured situation (where it’s likely that the focus shifts further towards the business development).

As always, these were just my perspectives, it’s hard to be definitive over a short call on a business where you only have a superficial understanding of the complexities involved. I’m pretty sure he found it useful though, if for no other reason than it raised questions for himself that he can take away and resolve in his own time!

As always, my office hours are open, if you’d like to chat about this or anything else, just grab some time 😊.