What is Creating Unnecessary Friction in Your Solopreneur Business?

A lot of solopreneurs like working alone for a reason, and fair enough. If you think about it, working alone can lower your costs because you don’t have staff to pay or to worry about. Plus, it’s really nice not having endless meetings, no waiting around for somebody else to do their bit, no having to explain a vision twelve different ways just to watch someone ignore half of it anyway. 

Plus, a lot of the time, it’s very much a “my way or the highway” setup, and honestly, that’s part of the appeal. Overall, here, the process is personal, the standards are personal, and there’s a lot less tolerance for other people slowing things down or messing things up. Just some people really do work better alone, and there’s nothing bad or wrong with that either.

But of course, just because the business is being run solo and done a very specific way, that doesn’t automatically mean it’s running smoothly. Which, yes, maybe that’s a bit of a shocker here. Actually, that’s where a lot of solopreneurs get a bit too confident. A personal process can still be clunky and cause some bottlenecks, too.

The Back-End of the Business Might Pretty Messy

But isn’t the back end of any business pretty messy, though? Well, sure, there’s that potential of course. But this is usually where most of the friction hides, though, because from the outside things can look fine enough. Like clients are being served, invoices are going out, money’s coming in, work’s getting done. Lovely. 

But what’s the back setup look like, though? Are the spreadsheets half finished? Are the notes scattered? How much are you trusting your own memory? Should you be? That kind of setup works until it doesn’t, and once it starts getting messy, it gets irritating fast, like really fast. So it might be time to just reconsider and look at your options for a better system.

How's Your Money System Looking?

Usually here, anything money-admin oriented tends to be one of the biggest stressors, which, of course, makes total sense here. Sometimes it's super stressful, sometimes it’s just frustrating; it just really depends here. But it tends to be the smaller things like payments need checking, expenses need sorting, or tax needs thinking about.

So, another problem tends to be the laziness where personal money and business money (the money itself and expenses) are not being separated. So it’s going to be smart (and honestly, really quick and easy too) to just have a sole trader business account, so money doesn’t mix, so there isn’t any confusion (and this prevents more confusion from piling up too).

Repeating Manual Tasks Starts Wasting More Time than it Should

Are you guilty of this one? If something only takes a few minutes, it doesn’t feel like a big deal. But then it happens again, and again, and again, and before long, a weird amount of time is being spent on tasks that really shouldn’t need that much human involvement anymore.

Obviously, it depends on what it is, but since it's spread out across the week, it can be hard to clock just how much energy it’s eating. So it might be time to consider some automation; there’s more than enough AI tools you can look into.