From employee to owner: Four mindset shifts for solopreneurs

Howdy! This is Career Freelancer, doable strategies and actionable insights on self-employment as a sustainable, financially rewarding, and engaging career.

Whether you’re just starting out as a coach, consultant, or freelancer, the hardest part isn’t creating an LLC or finding clients; it’s shifting your mindset on how you approach work.

It’s common to bring over the rules and restrictions of full-time employment into your own business as that’s what you’ve known all these years and it’s the most visible career path we’ve all been extensively educated on.

This takes shape in limiting beliefs in how you “have” to work, like sticking with a Monday through Friday nine-to-five schedule, taking a set number of vacation days, measuring hours logged instead of value created, or treating fellow solopreneurs as competitors.

Thinking and acting like an employee can have consequences, like losing out on repeat business if you’re delivering work but not proactively managing your relationships with clients.

Adjusting your mindset happens gradually by rethinking how you show up in your career. Consider these key reframes as a starting point for navigating self-employment on your terms.

What you’re working towards matters. And it shouldn’t be limited to a financial goal. This aligns to how many are redefining the American Dream without a single agreed-upon path.

According to a survey by Simon-Kucher, more U.S. adults are aiming for personal freedom and independence over owning material goods, symbols of success, and social status.

Of course, your solo practice needs to be financially rewarding first and foremost to sustain the business and support your life. That’s a given. But you can and should go after career outcomes that make your work more engaging and your life more enjoyable.

On the engagement front: it’s figuring out how you prefer to spend your time while working.

That’s getting clarity on the types of projects you want to focus on, what kinds of clients you want to work with, how you prefer to collaborate, and the results you’d like to deliver.

For example, one fitness coach might want to train new mothers on postpartum workout routines in person, as that’s what’s most interesting and rewarding to them. Compared to a breathwork coach who takes on clients of all ages and prefers to support them remotely.

On the enjoyable life front: it’s establishing how you want to design work around your life.

That’s defining how often you’d like to work, how much flexibility you want, and the lifestyle you’d like your career to support.

For me, I’m aiming towards working four days a week by 40, three days a week by 50, and at that point, I’ll feel basically retired, only working three days and being off four days a week.

Regardless of what you’re after, most of these circumstances that’d shape your ideal career aren’t what you’re at today. And that’s normal. You’ll get there by defining what goals suit you and taking consistent action in your practice towards making those a reality.

There’s no one-size-fits-all goal as it’s defined by you, and that’s the point. I often say joy should be a leading metric of success with self-employment as its outcome most of us want more of.

When you’re working as a full-time employee, the context is set for you. This is the company, these are our customers, and here are your responsibilities in this role. It’s usually static.

As you dive into self-employment, you get to decide who you work with, what you work on, where you work, when you work, why you work, and how you get your work done. It’s the W5H acronym from journalism defining who, what, where, when, why, and how.

You still need to cater to where there’s real demand for the skills and experience you offer (what people will pay you for), but you have considerably more say in all aspects of shaping your work.

At the same time, this can feel overwhelming at first given there’s so many choices to make and directions to consider. My advice is not trying to take it all on at once. In the beginning, focus on immediate opportunities to generate income and deliver work of interest, then one by one, make decisions about your W5H based on what is and is not of interest to you.

Some of this you’ll instinctively know based on your past work experiences, like potentially having a preference to collaborate with small teams at startups over large corporate clients.

The rest of your choices for how you shape your solopreneurship for the future come from consistently experimenting. Aim to commit about 10% of your week to exploring different ways of working, collaborating with different types of clients, or testing new business models.

You won’t know until you try, but it’s up to you to explore your options beyond what you’ve always done; otherwise you’ll fall into the same patterns of what’s familiar from full-time work.

Competition is of course a key tenet of capitalism. And while it works in many business contexts, the self-employed have room to consider this economic principle differently.

You’re undoubtedly being compared to other contractors when considered for a project and that’s why having career moats differentiates you and builds trust in your contributions.

But with limited time in the day to run a thriving business, I wouldn’t stress over competing with similar practitioners; instead, seek out solopreneurs in your industry worth partnering with.

Sure, colleagues in different industries might not compete for the same type of clients and projects you’re after directly, but they’re not likely to have as relevant advice to share.

I’m not suggesting you befriend every business owner you encounter or share all your insider knowledge too willingly. You’re looking to build relationships with other trustworthy solo owners with shared interests, ambitions, and experience in your sector.

One study called this coopetition, simultaneously cooperating and competing with your small business peers for everyone’s benefit. And more often than not, the benefits outweigh the perceived downsides.

Partnering with other solopreneurs is an opportunity to:

• Commiserate on the shared circumstances of being self-employed.

• Learn how others handle the unique challenges and make the most of the opportunities.

• Potentially earn and send client referrals to one another as trusted colleagues.

• Gain inspiration from the many ways solopreneurs structure their businesses.

Exposure to examples of what’s possible with self-employment can open you up to a wider range of possibilities in your own practice. In a sense, it can feel like permission to build out your career in the ways you want based on what’s working for others. It’s different than competition, but not the total opposite either.

The processes you follow and the tools you use in a salaried position at an employer aim to improve the team’s productivity, alignment, and performance.

What matters more when you work for yourself is that these choices help you deliver results for clients, manage your bandwidth, and make your day-to-day more predictable.

Whether it’s project management or keeping track of your finances, putting a repeatable routine in place for each key aspect of your business is how you build in more stability.

The best starting point in systematizing and professionalizing your solo work is finding processes and tools that make it easier for you to support your clients as they pay the bills.

Within reason, you’re on the lookout for ways to deliver more for clients in a shorter period of time, but it’s not quantity and speed for the sake of it. We’re looking for quality contributions that are actually meaningful to the client.

For instance, a freelance designer could design a logo from scratch in 15 hours for clients. Everyone’s happy with the result. But by using a style system and template, the designer could deliver the same caliber of logo in eight hours, building off of this newly created routine.

Again, everybody wins as the client is happy with a strong logo and quicker turnaround time, and your bandwidth is freed up to take on other clients and commitments.

A routine can also add balance to your workload and more reliability to your schedule. The point is minimizing moments of burnout from too much work by creating routines using tools, applying operational methodologies, following a set schedule for a task, or all of the above.

Once you have a series of these consistent, repeatable processes in place, you’re able to better estimate the time and resources required for each responsibility. From there, your bandwidth in a given moment is much easier to track each week, making everything a bit more predictable and clearer for you on how much work you need to land or when you’re at full capacity.

From my experience, having reasonable routines in place is the difference between a lovely solo career where you have more order and control over your circumstances, compared to one that feels haphazard and just as stressful and burdensome as a full-time job.

If this resonated with you, subscribe here for weekly insights on how to maintain a thriving freelance career that’s sustainable, profitable, and enjoyable.