Wearing Multiple Hats as an Independent
Nine Key Roles and Responsibilities of a Solopreneur
A lawyer launching his firm, a yoga instructor developing a yoga studio, both will have to spend most of their time, energy and resources on roles and responsibilities outside of the core expertise. Any independent worker, solopreneur, or small business owner has to wear multiple hats, from Managing Director, Salesperson to Head of Communication and Financial Manager. The reality of running a business solo, being the one and only in charge, can feel overwhelming.
Figure-Out Your Strengths and Weaknesses
The idea is not to excel in each role. Knowing your strengths, weaknesses and limitations is essential. In which areas are you struggling? Do you have enough understanding of each area? What obstacles are you facing? What’s the cost of non action? What are your energy drainers and time killers? Can you outsource some tasks? to a bookkeeper, a business coach, a project manager, a legal advisor or an exec. assistant?
Play on your Strengths
Focus on the things that are easy for you and hard or time consuming for your clients. Build a business engine based on what you are good at, that you can deliver and that your clients are willing to pay for.
Learn to Juggle
Learning to juggle with multiple roles and responsibilities is an essential part of the solo-entrepreneurship journey. Let’s explore nine essential hats a solo-entrepreneur has to wear.
1. Managing Director, Visionary, and Strategist
You’re in charge. It is on you to set the main direction for the business, its mission and which demand to fulfil. You have to build a profit making system and the business engine to enable the project viability.
- Activities: Strategic thinking. Partnerships. Reviews of the business outcomes. Tactic Planning.
- Frequency: Weekly monitoring of the cash flow. Monthly Reporting, Bookkeeping and Monitoring the Profit and Loss Statement.
- Time Budget: 1 hour weekly. ½ day monthly.
- Time Management: Block a day monthly for a “big picture day” to monitor your business, review the key metrics, the outcomes and adjust your direction to ensure its alignment with your vision. Allocate enough time for this strategic role at the initiation of the project.
- How-to Improve: Take action. Learn from your mistakes. Reach out to other solopreneurs or an experienced Mentor. Hire a bookkeeper to help put in place the right statements, metrics and controls. Read the article “Turn Your Goals Into Projects”.
2. Service Provider, Consultant, and Expert
This is the core of your business — delivering value to your clients. Making sure to solve a real existing problem of your audience. Knowing the key pain points and how you can provide an impactful solution.
Your experiences, specific know-how, reliability at a good standard of quality build your reputation and enable the economic viability of your project. Most of your time and energy should be allocated to providing the best services possible to your customers and retaining your good clients.
- Activities: Client work, project execution, and problem-solving.
- Frequency: 4 days a week while on a mission. 4 weeks a month. 10 months a year.
- Time Budget: focus 70% of your working hours on billing / project hours.
- Time Management: Protect these blocks of work time from interruptions to maintain good-quality delivery.
- How-to Improve: Take action. Learn from your mistakes. Debrief with your customers, collect client feedback and adjust your way of working and interacting.
3. Project Manager
Every solo-entrepreneur is a project manager, initiating projects, setting priorities, affecting resources, mitigating risks, simplifying the work, monitoring the progression and ensuring to meet key deadlines.
- Activities: Taking the initial project briefing, planning, allocating resources, prioritising tasks, tracking progress, adjusting tasks, testing the results, deciding to close the project and reviewing the deliverables. Important to make sure to deliver on time and close properly on-going projects.
- Frequency: Weekly. Can take more time at the initiation of a project.
- Time Budget: ½ day weekly.
- Time Management: Use project management tools like Trello, KANBAN Boards, Critical Path to visualise your tasks, set priorities, streamline the workflow, track dependencies, mitigate delays, visualise the progress and communicate with your client.
- How-to Improve: Close Projects. Review the whole project lifecycle. Experiment with Agile methods, and apply the Kaizen approach. Hire a Project Coach to learn how-to streamline your projects.
4. Business Developer, Salesperson
Explore. Prospect. Engage with your audience. Secure new customers. Feel the waves, seize opportunities and close deals.
- Activities: Prospecting, engaging, communicating, negotiating. Building lasting relationships.
- Frequency: Weekly or Daily at first.
- Time Budget: ½ day weekly. Up to 40% of your time especially while starting up. Until you have enough enrolled clients and signed projects, this role should remain your number one priority.
- Time Management: Identify your audience. Observe, listen and care to understand the demand. Identify potential leads. Engage to convert prospects into customers. Follow-up to nurture the relationships.
- How-to Improve: Take action. Avoid middleman / platforms if possible, so that you don’t subcontract your learning curve or outsource your client database. Hire a Business Coach to get started faster.
5. Financial Manager
Managing your finances is a non-negotiable responsibility. You have to ensure that your business has enough cash flow at any time, a 6-month visibility and remains economically viable over a year period.
- Activities: Budgeting, invoicing, tracking expenses and cash-flow and anticipating taxes. Communicating and coordinating with your customers, your bookkeeper and the banker.
- Frequency: Weekly and monthly.
- Time Budget: 2 hours weekly, ½ day for monthly review. 1 day for quarterly and yearly reviews.
- Time Management: Automate the tracking of cash-flow, incomes and expenses.
- How-to Improve: Find the right people to support you like a bookkeeper or a financial advisor.
6. Admin/Ops Manager
This admin hat isn’t exactly funky but it helps to simplify your operations and to run smoothly your business by having the right tools, processes and contracts in place.
- Activities: Customers onboarding, relationship and correspondence. Tools management. Logistics coordination. Defining and enforcing your terms and conditions. Escalating incidents to your legal adviser.
- Frequency: Daily for small tasks. Weekly for bigger ones.
- Time Budget: 1–2 hours daily. 2 hours weekly. ½ day monthly. Take more time as you’re in setup mode.
- Time Management: Group admin and logistic tasks into a specific time block instead of spreading them throughout the day. Apply KAIZEN to simplify as you go, to minimise wasting time, efforts and energy.
- How-to Improve: Hire an Executive Assistant / CoPilot. Play with AI Tools to help simplify your operations.
7. Head of Communication, Ambassador, Marketer/Promoter
Building your personal brand, clarifying your positioning, creating content to engage with your audience and promoting your services to the right target are essential for enabling your business.
- Activities: Defining your viable audience. creating content (blogs, videos, or posts), updating and interacting on social media platforms, engaging with your audience, customers, clients and users.
- Frequency: Monthly and Weekly planning. Updates daily or weekly.
- Time Budget: ½ day weekly, 1 day weekly for content creation (?)
- Time Management: Document your work as you go. Share content that is relevant to you. Repurpose content across platforms to maximize your impact. Engage with your audience to know what they are looking for. Read, Watch to learn about your audience, the trends and the evolution of your market.
- How-to improve: Engage with your clients to understand their real needs. Review your content to evaluate how it reaches your audience. Look to document your work, your journey and create evergreen content. Use AI systems like you would work with a Junior or an Assistant writer to brainstorm ideas, review drafts, adjust your message to different formats and platforms, translate or fine-tune your content.
8. Learner, Personal Development Manager, R&D Lead
Continuous learning by practice is critical to staying relevant and innovative.
- Activities: Explore new places, engage with strangers. Follow your curiosity and be a sponge. Observe and spot emerging patterns. Experiment and test ideas. Make risky small bets.
- Frequency: Weekly, Monthly or Seasonal, like short sabbaticals or retreats.
- Time Budget: ½ day weekly, few days monthly or the time of a retreat or a sabbatical.
- Time Management: Dedicate time to explore, experiment and change your game.
- How-to Improve: Adopt a student / beginner mindset. Keep exploring and learning. Work with a Coach.
9. Well-Being Manager
Good Health is Wealth. Your physical, mental, and emotional well-being are on you. Cultivate inner-peace and mental clarity. Master your mornings. Practice deliberately. Control your time. Block time for physical activity, rest and recovery.
- Activities: physical activity, mindful practice, fun moments, quality time, well eating and downtime.
- Frequency: Daily and Weekly. Seasonal retreats or mini-adventures.
- Time Budget: 30–60 minutes/day. Specific to the type of activities and practices.
- Time Management: Make self-care an essential and non-negotiable priority. Schedule blocks of time for well-being activities. Plan your own wellness experiences and challenges.
Work Smarter with Time Blocking, Tasks Grouping and Communication Batching
Get better at managing your time effectively,
- Deep Work / Service Delivering: schedule protected and interrupted blocks of time
- Daily Tasks: briefing, admin, communication and well-being.
- Weekly Tasks: Project fixing, marketing and business development.
- Monthly Tasks: Strategic reviews, follow-ups and financial planning.
- Seasonal Adaptations: Time to rest and recover. Time to explore and experiment.
Find out what works best for you to maintain a good momentum: Mornings for wellbeing activities and blocks of deep work. Afternoons for admin and communication tasks. Dedicated days each week on a specific role or type of activities like business development, admin, marketing or learning.
Read related articles on Time Management with KANBAN and Time Blocking.
What is Simple to Understand, isn’t always that Easy to Apply
We can realistically defend the point that staying a viable and sustainable solo-entrepreneur is in many ways more challenging than directing an established company with a team of qualified and experienced individuals and a recurring clientele.
Wearing multiple hats is definitely not a small feat. One that most people are not prepared to handle smoothly. Countless independents discover as they go that their roles and responsibilities go far beyond just providing a product or a service to their customers.
You have to face reality, accept it and adapt by managing your time and energy accordingly. Figuring out your strengths and weaknesses in each role. Looking for the right people to help and support your efforts. Creating long term relationships with good clients, the ones who pay in time, understand and support your work. Knowing how much time and effort is enough, and when you have to slow down and recover.
Have fun, keep exploring and get better as you go. Enjoy the challenging journey of building a business engine that enables your dreamed lifestyle. Become an accomplished polymath. Get the control of your time, your ability to travel and your financial autonomy. It takes quite some effort to work on your terms.
Who Am I?
My name is Christophe Berg. I am helping business owners to develop their ideas into viable projects. I have more than 25 years of work experience as a Consultant / Business Coach and a Master of Science degree in Project Management. I am sharing ideas, tools and agile methods to apply an Independent mindset, control your time, build a sustainable lifestyle business and find ways to live under your terms.
Catch Me if you can at kristofberg.com/about-me
