Whether you’re leading a team from the corner office, crafting clothes from the kitchen table, working in a shop or bringing up children, I hereby declare you a solo business owner. You are the CEO of You Inc.
Life’s big challenge, just like in business, is turning the limited resources available into something we find rich and rewarding.
You can take a businesslike view of life by breaking it down in this way:
Resources – we have finite time and energy to invest in different parts of our lives.
Costs – nothing is free, all our choices have financial, personal and opportunity costs.
Income – we need to find ways to replenish our cash and energy reserves.
Profit – we each strive to meet our definition of a success in life.
To meet the financial costs of living, we typically exchange our time and energy for money.
When it comes to selling our time and energy, we have a choice about how to package, price and promote ourselves:
Sell the lot. The corporate banker working in a major firm chooses to package up all their time and energy and sell the lot for the price of a couple of hundred thousand dollars per year.
Sell a fixed amount. Many choose to package up some of their time and energy into 9 to 5 blocks and sell five days per week to one client for a negotiated annual salary.
Sell it by the hour. Many soloists and freelancers package up their time in hourly blocks and sell it to a range of different customers.
Turn it into products. Others use their time and energy to create products and solutions that they can sell at a profit to hundreds of different customers.
We all have a limited amount of time and energy to invest each day. I believe the fact that we each control what we do with those resources puts us in charge of our own solo business.
Whether we decide to sell the lot or sell a few hours a week, true success is finding that elusive balance between professional and personal fulfilment. It’s different for everyone and seems to be a moving target.
I better go and keep looking. If you find it, please let me know where it is.
