Can you run a successful one man business?

Can you do it all? Can you be a one man band?

The hassles of personalities are a lot less to deal with, sure you can bitch at yourself all day, and then laugh, shake your own hand and take your alter ego Dr Jeckle out for a drink later, but is there any room for real growth?

One great reason to go it alone is at the end of the day what’s left in the bank is all yours.

Another great reason is shareholders! Anyone who has seen the Steve Jobs movie would think they are just not worth the millions they offer!

To run it all alone your best feature must be delegation.

If you are going to run a one man business, you better have a decent business card list of people you can contract out to, and this seems to be a popular way for many, why take on all those new people when others have already done the hard work of recruiting, payroll, Insurance, training, sickness, maternity, days off etc. etc.?

In my experience you had better ‘know thyself’, if you are somewhat sensitive and introverted, and cannot forgive and forget quickly then perhaps it is better for you to go it alone, because there is no more flammable liquid to throw on a fire than friends and business.

it is not necessarily more cost effective to run things in-house any more, if you know the right agencies you can outsource all the aspects you hate so much, without all the inter-office politics we all hate, try as you might you can’t make everyone like one another!

Another thing most one man band’s mind is; exit plan, because time on Earth is limited and the whole reason you are doing all this is for the time and money dream of residual income, right?

Challenge business owners have; is we all think we can be a jack of all trades and try to keep staffing to a minimum and run all angles ourselves, which on paper seems like a sensible choice, keep assets high and liabilities low right? Wrong!

We cannot be the R&D the manufacturing, the packaging, the marketing, the sales team and shipping team all in one guy! At least 4 of these elements you are going to fail epically!

Guess what? There are people who love accounting, there are people who love knocking on doors, and there are people who love closing deals and asking for cash there and then, there are people who have almost every social media site at their fingers!

If you do everything yourself,  you will  hate  certain aspects of your business, you will start off with good intentions and when it’s crunch time and you have to get busy , you will find others things to do and put it off, the heart will always trump the head!

This is what business now labels as outsourcing, but it’s traditionally called teamwork

One of the most outsourced elements of business is Marketing; let’s think lunch for one minute:

“Can you make a better burger than McDonald’s?” Robert Kiyosaki asks.

When you think about it; anyone with a little effort could make a better burger than McDonalds! If this is the case why don’t we all have burger shops and own some of the most prestigious pieces of prime real estate in the world? One answer:

Marketing!

If you had a Billboard 50 foot high 20 meters long do you think anyone in the desert would see it?

billboard for Business directory Thailand

It is more profitable to have a mediocre product and excellent marketing, than to have an excellent product and shoddy marketing!

As Thailand’s leading social media marketer I have taken 7 years to amass a reach of over 50,000 people on Facebook alone, then Twitter and LinkedIn and all the bookmarking sites I have good followings and relationships with, means:

I can put any piece of information in front of 100 million people, it only takes 000.1% to see a great heading and click, read , love you and contact you! Sounds easy huh?

 Do you have a spare 7 years to earn little cash whilst building what I have?

I am, if nothing consistent, and stuck to what I wanted to achieve now everyone knows me as the social media guy right here in Bangkok, which is great now, but it came with a price.

I am lucky I came from a sales background of ten years in Blue chip B2B in UK, so sales and marketing is in my blood, that’s what they say you are lucky, HUH! Just like you have paid in time and tears to be damned good at what you do!!

It is said the average cost per acquisition is $3,000, as in the total cost  starting from scratch creating a whole new marketing strategy to educating and motivating sales to paying for the company cars and the time taken to see now clients and then processing the order =$3,000 per new client.

One area of outsourcing business people would love to see is leads outsourcing, this is the elixir that would cut out all the other elements of outsourcing and take you straight to the end result,

Oh I wish!

Cue Biz-find! TA DAAAA: (CHEESY TV FANFARE)

You can now log in every day to biz-findthailand.com and checkout the leads they publish in their classifieds section, and scroll down to your category and more often than not; in your category of business, and in your geographical area:

BINGO! We have a client waiting and you can contact them immediately and send them a quote or make an appointment. Not bad for $60 eh?