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You didn't become a solopreneur to build a business that runs your life. You did it so your business could serve it.
The Life-First Solopreneur is the twice-weekly podcast at the heart of the Life-First Movement. It's for solopreneurs who believe the business should be designed around life, not the other way around.
Hosts Joe Rando and Carly Ries, co-authors of Solopreneur Business for Dummies, sit down each week with solopreneurs who are building Life-First Businesses and experts who are helping others do the same.
Every episode explores what it really takes to design, run, and evolve a one-person business with your life at the center.
Basically, what we're trying to say is:
Life First. Then Business.
You quit your job to get your life back. So why does your business own you? In this episode, Joe and I unpack the LifeStarr Manifesto and the Ownership Trap. Sixty five percent of people start a business for freedom, yet eighty percent lose sleep over it. And the fix isn't motivation, it's design.
Carly Ries:Learn the three mistakes keeping solopreneurs trapped and how to build a business that serves your life instead of consuming it. You're listening to The Aspiring Solopreneur, the podcast for those in pursuit of a life first business. I'm Carly Ries, and my co host Joe Rando and I spend every episode with solopreneurs who are proving there's a better way to run a one person business and experts who are helping make it happen. We like to say life first then business, so let's get right to it. So, Joe, in a lot of our soundbite episodes over the past month or so, maybe two months now, we've been talking about our pivot into really focusing on Life-First businesses.
Joe Rando:I don't think of it as a pivot, Carly. I think of it as niching down.
Carly Ries:Thank you. Yeah.
Carly Ries:I like it.
Joe Rando:I mean, I don't feel like we changed direction. I feel like we just, as we got to know more and more solopreneurs, we started to realize what the people that we resonated with wanted and what we really thought we could help with, at least for service based solopreneurs. And so, yeah, I think we're following our own advice and niching down.
Carly Ries:I think you're a 100% right, and that's how I'm gonna say it moving forward. But we put in a lot of time and effort. You, especially, have put so much time and effort into really niching down both with the podcast, but also with LifeStarr and how we are not only marketing things moving forward, how we're running the business, how just everything. It's impacted every single part of our whole ecosystem. And because of that, you've created a manifesto that's basically like, this is it.
Joe Rando:well, I've created a manifesto, but it's not like one of those crazy people, like Unabomber manifestos. It's short.
Carly Ries:A short Manifesto. Thank you for the clarification on that. Do you know what that connotation? But can you walk us through that today? What does this manifesto look like? take us through the whole thing.
Joe Rando:Well, it really comes down to this concept we've been talking about of the ownership trap. If you build a business, and I think you said it first, Carly, based on your skills instead of on the life that you want, then the business will pretty much take up your life because you didn't set any parameters around your life. And that's just the nature of things that are, complex like building a business. It's hard, and there's a lot to it.
Joe Rando:And if the life aspect is second or third on the list, it's gonna get eaten up. So the concept here starts with, life first, then business. And we've said that. I know I've said that in a number of blogs and emails and things. but, the idea here, this ownership trap is that you go from maybe you're working in corporate and you don't like something about it.
Joe Rando:And you say, you know what? I'm done. I wanna take my life back because I'm sick of my boss or my hours or that they are making me go back to the office or my coworkers are all gossipers. Whatever it is or many of those things, but you've made a decision that you don't wanna work in corporate and you build your own business. And the next thing, I used to joke when I first started, you know, I started a business at one point and I said, my boss is a real jerk.
Joe Rando:I'm self employed. And, what happens is that you wind up building a business, and it owns you instead of you owning the business. And it takes your time, and it's really, really hard. So the idea here is to identify this trap, and what is it doing? So here are a few statistics for you.
Joe Rando:Sixty five percent of people that start a business do it for freedom and quality of life. They're not doing it to become multimillionaires or billionaires. They just want a life that they wanna live. And that's 65%. And a lot of those are solopreneurs. Because it's a lot easier in theory to have a business that kind of revolves around your life if you don't have employees that you have to, support. In theory, 80% end up losing sleep over their business. So that doesn't sound like, quality of life and freedom. Eighty percent of small business owners, this isn't just solopreneurs, but small business owners report poor mental health.
Joe Rando:Eighty seven percent. And one in three of those hit full burnout. So, the issue here is we're not talking about an issue of motivation. It's a design problem. We are not designing our businesses in a way that's going to allow them to serve the life we want to live.
Joe Rando:So that's what we call the ownership trap. there are really three causes to the ownership trap, but that first one, that no design, is the biggie. And it's the one that I don't know what the statistic is. I'll make one up. 97% of people don't design their business around their life. I don't know what it is, but it happens all the time. They design it around their skills. I can do this. I'm good at this.
Joe Rando:People will pay me for this. Let me build a business. But never think about, gee. How do you it say, Carly? What did your Tuesday look like? Is that it?
Carly Ries:What does your Tuesday look like? Like, in the middle of the week, not a Friday or Monday that you could take off for a holiday or something, but middle of the week, what does your ideal day look like?
Joe Rando:Right. And you know, if you can identify that, the things that, you'd be happy at the end of the day that you got to do instead of oh, I can't believe I had to do that. Or guess what, 06:00 comes and I'm not done. You know, it's just these are the kinds of things. So lack of design.
Joe Rando:But then another thing that can catch up, even if you have design, and if you don't, it's even worse, is that you don't have a system. if you work in corporate, you had all these pieces in place. I mean, corporations have managers, and their job is just to make sure that everybody's doing what they're supposed to be doing. And it's really great, if you have a good manager, it's really great because it keeps you on track.
Joe Rando:But when you're a solopreneur, you don't have a manager anymore. And a lot of solopreneurs are running their business and what we call their commitments, on communication channels, emails, Slack, text messages, and whatever. And the idea is that you've got commitments that you're making to yourself, you've got commitments you're making to other people, And most importantly, commitments other people are making to you that you're not usually doing a very good job of tracking. You might have your own to do list.
Joe Rando:You're doing a nice job there. Keeping track of things, but, where things are at in these things is tricky, but the stuff that other people are supposed to give to you, a lot of people don't track those, and then they wake up one day and find out that something was due last week, and now they're late on something that they were supposed to do. So, this is the accountability gap, we call it. There needs to be accountability, and you can't do that, or at least most mere mortals can't do that managing all the stuff they're doing in a business through their email inbox. It's just not feasible.
Joe Rando:So that's another issue. And then the last one is this idea that we have built a business, and I'm just gonna run it, but there's no plan to evolve. And the issue there is that things are changing. I mean, the world's obviously been changing like crazy. I mean, AI has made everything different.
Joe Rando:But there are other things changing and technology's changing and you're changing. You know? I've talked to a lot of solopreneurs that said, oh, I had this great business, but, I just didn't wanna be in that. I didn't want to do that anymore. it had run its course, and I wanna do something new or something different.
Joe Rando:And they're creating new businesses from scratch. Or it might just be, you know, some things that I'm an empty nester now. I wanna tweak my business so I'm spending, some time traveling because I kinda like to travel even for business. whatever it is. But you're changing.
Joe Rando:The world's changing. You need to have this process of every once in a while stepping back and saying, how do I evolve the business? And part of that is, keeping track of the things that are not working for you as you run the business. So you can have those to work from as you go on to the next step and evolve it. So that's really, the process that most solopreneurs aren't following, some or all of those steps.
Joe Rando:So one of the other things that this manifesto is talking about, that these are the problems. So what we can say then is that if you have a Life-First design, and you actively manage your commitments in an effective fashion, and you plan the evolution of your business as you run it, go forward with it, you then create, in our case, a Life-First Solopreneur business. You're creating a business that works for your life and not the other way around. I mean, does any of that not jive with you, Carly? Does it make sense?
Carly Ries:I mean, I feel like I'm the wrong person to ask that because I've been on this journey with you.
Joe Rando:Yeah. But you're the only person to talk to.
Carly Ries:The only person here, I know. But I'd be curious, listeners, what you think about all this. You can comment, you can send us an email. We will actually respond either at carly@lifestarr.com, or Joe, spelled Joe@lifestarr.com, or send us a message on YouTube or LinkedIn because we do want to know what you think about this. I will sit here and Joe will be like, I think this is the smartest thing in the world.
Carly Ries:But I've also been a part of this journey. I mean, I think the thing to drive home is at this point in the show and in LifeStarr , we've worked with thousands of solopreneurs and spoken to them, and these are the three things that they struggle with. Like, we now have evidence. If you came on here after episode 10 of the show and year one of LifeStarr and came up with the Manifesto, you'd be like, well, let's see if can prove our point. But this was developed because of what we do see.
Joe Rando:It's empirical.
Carly Ries:Exactly. We have the evidence now. we're over 300 episodes into the show. just, we have the data and for LifeStarr, we have countless community members and everything. So, yeah, those are my two cents, that this is not just a hunch.
Joe Rando:I mean, I could go on forever, but I think that kinda covers the big picture. And this is what we exist for now. I mean, to help any Life-First Solopreneur, you know, most of our educational stuff is kind of focused on the service based businesses. The coaches, the consultants, the contractors, and people who take their skill.
Joe Rando:But, some of this stuff applies to anybody, whether you're a content creator or an influencer or, an app developer. These philosophies apply as well. But like I said, our educational aspect at least focuses heavily on the service based solopreneur business. But things like the LifeStarr app will work for anybody.
Carly Ries:Absolutely. Well, Joe, thank you for putting that together. And so concretely, we've talked about this for a while, but I'm so glad we have it out. I'll link to the manifesto in the show notes of this episode, that all of you can go find it.
Carly Ries:Otherwise, you can find it on the LifeStarr website. But if this episode brought you clarity and it really struck a chord with you, we would love a five star review because it'll help us spread the word to other solopreneurs who might be in your shoes. You could also share this episode with a friend who you think might be struggling with one of these three things that we could really help with. And if you're like, gosh, now I wanna know more, then subscribe to our podcast on your favorite podcast platform, including YouTube. we'd so appreciate it. And we'll see you next time on The Aspiring Solopreneur.
Carly Ries:You may be going solo in business, but that doesn't mean you're alone. In fact, millions of people are in your shoes, running a one person business and figuring it out as they go. So why not connect with them and learn from each other's successes and failures? At LifeStarr we're creating a one person business community where you can go to meet and get advice from other solopreneurs. Be sure to join in on the conversations at community.lifestarr.com.