181: How to Overcome the Challenges of Being a Solo Entrepreneur

Tackling the Biggest Challenges of Being a Solo Entrepreneur with Robert Gerrish of FlyingSolo In today’s lesson, I have a real treat for those of you who spend most of your working life alone as solo-entrepreneurs. Over in the ProBlogger Podcast listeners facebook group this week I ran a little poll to see how many of you as listeners work alone vs work in teams. The results were as I suspected - 93% of you work alone on your blogs. Of the other 7% - most had family members or readers volunteer their time to help out a little with some small aspect of their blog but it was largely a solo venture. This is no surprise to me at all because in the regular surveys we do of ProBlogger readers and listeners we regularly get asked questions on some of the challenges that solo-entrepreneurs face. As a result for today’s episode I asked Robert Gerrish to join me. Robert is a coach, teacher and community leader who has a passion for solo business owners. He’s the owner of an Australian site - FlyingSolo and has recently put together an excellent resource for solo-business owners called Soloism. I chatted with Robert earlier today, and I asked him about some of the biggest challenges I see in our community of solo-entrepreneurs. We talk about productivity, focus, loneliness, personal development, motivation, feeling overwhelmed and how to get through times when things don’t seem to work. He also gives us some tools and apps that solo business owners will find useful. If you’re a solo-entrepreneur (or want to be) you’re going to relate to a lot of what we talk about in this episode. I came away from this chat feeling motivated and inspired for my own business and hope you enjoy it to. Listen to this interview in the player above or here on iTunes. Further Resources on How to Overcome the Challenges of Being a Solo Entrepreneur Soloism 20% Discount Link ‘Note: we are an affiliate and earn a small commission if you purchase Soloism but we offer our genuine recommendation for it and the teaching of Robert.’ FlyingSolo.com.au 2x Your Blog Writing Productivity and Reduce Your Stress by Single-Tasking The biggest lesson I learned about Blogging (episode 38) A primer on the Pomodoro Technique Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hi there and welcome to Episode 181 of the ProBlogger Podcast! My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, a podcast, event, job board and a series of ebooks all designed to help you as a blogger to start an amazing blog, beautifully designed and to create amazing content for it and to grow that audience that you’ve been dreaming of and to hopefully make some money from your blog as well. You can learn more about ProBlogger at problogger.com. In today’s episode, I have a real treat for those of you who, if you’re like me, spend most of your time working alone as a solo entrepreneur. I do have a small team who works with me but I spend most of my day by myself and I’m not the only one. I’ve ran the ProBlogger Podcast listeners Facebook group this week, I ran a little poll to see how many of you as a listeners work alone versus working in teams. The result was as I suspected, 93% of you work alone on your blog. You don’t employ anyone, you don’t have anyone volunteering to help you in your blogging. Of the other 7%, most of you said that you had a family member or a reader volunteer their time or someone virtually offering their time in another part of the world. Of that 7%, most of you say you do spend most of your time alone as a solo entrepreneur even though you do have other people involved in the business. This figure of 93% or it’s probably 100% really is no surprise to me at all because every time we survey our readers, we find the same thing and we get a lot of questions from you as...