Focus on the A-level tasks of your solo business
Want to "make it"?
I watched an interview with Dan Koe once, and here’s what he said when they asked him how he organizes his work:
“You know, I don’t really do that much.”
This coming from a guy who made $4.3 million in 2023.
So why is it that he’s cruisin’, making money while he sleeps, and the rest of us work our a$$es off?
Is it just because he’s already successful?
Or is his approach to work the very thing that made him successful?
I’d argue it’s the latter. Dan Koe is a solopreneur, true, but he’s the leader in his one-person business, not the employee doing repetitive tasks.
So how do we become more like Dan and less like… well, us?
I asked
, a Doctor in Business Administration with a research interest in self-aware leadership, to tell us more about how to be successful leaders, even when there’s no one to lead.Here’s what she explained.
Leaders aren’t what you think they are.
“There’s this idea that leaders are those people at the top of big hierarchical organisations. The traditional view stemming from the industrial age is that leadership is synonymous with the functions of people at the top of organisations. If you ask most people to name the leaders in their organisations, they’ll give you the names of the ‘higher-ups’.
But I’ve worked in enough organisations to know there are leaders operating at different levels right across the organisation. So, I’ve got curious and explored the idea.
It’s led me to new types of organisations emerging in the digital age. It’s also highlighted changes happening in traditional organisations, in response to knowledge work and changing employee needs.
When I say organisation, I mean you. You embody an ‘organisation’. You are an organisation of one.”
Coming up:
The 5 levels of work in your solo business
How to be the leader in your solo business
Leadership: a new way
The 5 levels of work in your solo business.
“To help me talk about this distinction between leadership as a job title and leadership as a function, I’ve developed the five functions job level framework.
I call people at the top ‘strategic level’ people. Essentially, I’m splitting out the functions of leadership and management. Some people have the skills to do both. Some don’t.
Here’s that framework in visual:
This framework won’t overlay perfectly onto all organisations. The smaller the organisation, the more likely it is that roles will straddle more than one level.” If you’re a solopreneur, then you’ll be operating at all five of these functional layers at any given time. You might even move through all five within a day.”
However, growth is achieved at the top two levels, and you should do whatever you can to spend as much time there as possible.
Strategic: setting strategic direction, making big decisions and implementing significant change.
Senior Management: have overall responsibility for the implementation of policies, procedures, and budgets.
Management: first-hand implementation of policies and procedures.
Business: responsible for managing the business of the organization. Within an organization, these are the team leaders, supervisors and first-line managers. In the context of solopreneurship, this is a step above your core operations: short-term planning, re-posting of content, reading stats, and more.
Operational: no management responsibility within an organization. This is your core solopreneur function.
How to be the leader in your solo-business.
As a solopreneur, you can’t avoid the operational & business levels. In fact, as artists, that’s often where we spend most of our time: writing, designing, and coaching.
What I and Dr. Nia Thomas would like to invite you to do is to start spending more time on the Strategic & Senior Management levels.
“This idea of leadership at all levels and leadership moving to meet internal and external influences and interdependencies is played out in the Agile management theories like Scrum, which on a very basic level works on the basis of “we’ll work out what to do tomorrow when we work out the impact of what we did yesterday.”
In Scrum, the leader’s main job is “removing obstacles and distractions that may impede the team from meeting goals.” How would your business look like if you thought as a leader who’s trying to remove obstacles?
Million-dollar solopreneurs play at the Strategic & Senior Management level much more than you and me. To become more like them, include in your schedule:
Creating a long-term vision for your business. Stop focusing on the $500 from this or that platform & plan your million-dollar business.
Experimenting with your business to find the perfect fit.
Resting & living a quality life, which allows the mind to work at a different level.
Building relationships.
Relationships Rule
“In the late 2010s, research became more interested in how people work together and how leadership is shared and distributed among different groups and organisation. It became more about the relationships between people and how people evolve as part of a bigger system. The focus is on where people’s paths cross and how they interact, rather than on individuals themselves.
“It’s the spaces between people that are key to leadership, i.e. it’s the relationships and connections between people, rather than the actions of people themselves, that are important.”
Leadership: a new way.
“New organisations and companies that have been established post-dot.com boom are embracing new ways of working, thinking and operating. They are leaning into complexity leadership, complex adaptive system structures and shaping new decision-making processes.”
You’ll have heard that the gig-economy is growing and increasingly more people are making the decisions to go solo. You might have also read the odd article about people delivering work on short-term contracts related to their skills, becoming more prevalent.
This definitely reinforces the idea that we’re moving to a complex adaptive system with leaders moving within and through it and system thinking becoming a more sought-after strategic skill.”
Dr Nia D Thomas is the Director of Thoughts and Ideas at Knowing Self Knowing Others, host of The Knowing Self Knowing Others Podcast, and author of The Self-Awareness Superhighway: Charting Your Leadership Journey. She has a doctorate in business administration with a research interest in self-aware leadership. She also works full time as a Director of a Children’s Charity, with a career spanning 25 years in the public and charitable sectors in Wales and England. She describes her work in the public and charitable sector as ‘what’ she does and self-aware leadership as ‘how’ she does it.
All quotes are taken from her book, The Self-Awareness Superhighway, or referenced accordingly.
 | A guest post by
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Really enjoyed writing this with Maya! Thanks for the invitation!