A Roadmap to Self-Reliance for Solopreneurs

Harvey Manger-Weil's business proposition sounds like the type of wacky offer you'd find advertised in the back of an old comic book, then to the X-ray specs: A perfect score on your SAT, results guaranteed! Yet afterwards more than two years tutoring hundreds of customers, Manger-Weil has proved his merit.

Two years ago, he launched New York-based The College Wizard, offering his services via Skype video chat. Manger-Weil's approach--reviewing customers' practice tests and giving them weekly one-on-one lessons--is time-intensive, involving the kinds of tasks that can lead to burnout for a solo entrepreneur. However The College Wizard is thriving, in some cases because Manger-Weil followed the advice of his college classmate and business partner, Bruce Judson.

Serial businessman

A serial businessman and entrepreneur-in-residence at the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute, Judson is the author of several influential books, including 2004's Go It Alone! The Secret to Building a Successful Business on Your Own. In a time when the half-life of business books is shorter than a Kardashian marriage, the advice in Go It Alone! has remained popular and relevant, as business owners and wannabe entrepreneurs look for ways to hang their own shingles without the headache of partners, real estate or advisors.

Now Judson, along with Manger-Weil, has launched a new venture, Your Personal Action Plan, an online portal where customers sign up for a personalized road map based on Judson's principles of automating and outsourcing, evaluating and adapting to start a solo business. The $249 service helps customers determine what solo endeavor best suits them and creates a step-by-step action plan, pointing users toward online tools that can get their businesses up and running quickly and cheaply.

The business

When he started the business, Manger-Weil had students fax their test sheets to his home. When he found eFax software, which converts faxes to PDFs and e-mails them, he was freed to conduct sessions elsewhere. It was a simple off-the-shelf solution, the type that Judson endorses.

Find a need and delegate Creating a profitable solo business is a daunting task, and the Go It Alone road map to self-reliance makes no guarantees. Nevertheless it does offer basic, easy-to-follow principles to increase the chances of launching a successful operation.

Judson advises entrepreneurs to focus on their strengths and delegate other tasks. When Bibby Gignilliat was featured in Judson's book, she was the jack-of-all-trades for her San Francisco-based business, Parties That Cook, which runs cooking classes as corporate team-building exercises for Fortune 500 companies. Nevertheless as Parties That Cook has grown, she's been able to step away from functions like accounting and running the classes to focus on what she does best.

Gignilliat's company, which has grown from a solo effort to 12 employees in four cities with more than $2 million in revenue, relies on outsourcing. She contracts with an independent CFO who works eight to 10 hours a month and has built a sophisticated financial model. She checks in with an outsourced search engine optimization professional monthly to make sure she's getting the most from the web. An HR consultant she met through a local small-business association helps her with hiring.

The cloud Much of Judson'

Head in the cloud Much of Judson's advice boils down to this: Keep it simple. "Systematize everything you can," he advises. "Look at your business and see what pieces you can automate and outsource. Ultimately, every business is a repetitive system, and you need to automate that so you can spend your time doing the things that in effect add value."

Part of that systemization means taking advantage of the cloud. Using cloud products instead of building a custom infrastructure plays into one of Judson's golden rules, which can be summed up as: Don't hesitate, act. Using the cloud means getting your business up and running quickly, which means you can start tweaking and refining your model instead of spending months in preparation of launch. "This is something people coming from the corporate world have trouble with," Judson says. "You need to say to yourself, ‘Let's get things up and start learning,' even if you don't have everything perfected."

Joe Strahl at Mr. Trademark is familiar with this. His trademark-search service uses free products like Google Apps and Google Chat. VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) services let him set up local numbers across the country that filter back to his cell phone in Las Vegas. He subscribes to LinkedIn for networking and Salesforce for just about everything else. To communicate with customers who don't speak English, he uses Google Translate. "Is it exact, or grammatically correct? No. Nevertheless I get the message across. That's key. I don't need a perfect translation, just basic communication," Strahl says.

Try, try again Evolving and perfecting the business model is the straightway step--often through testing out various marketing and promotion tactics. Free or low-cost web-based marketing means there is minimal risk in trying out multiple e-mail and social media strategies and service offers.

Sometimes the revision process results in a change of the key business function from the original vision. That's OK--flexibility is a hallmark of good go-it-alone entrepreneurs. As a matter of fact, Judson has seen several of his own startups morph from their original concepts into products he had never imagined. For instance, he launched New York-based T1 Anywhere as a way for small businesses to upgrade to broadband services, but in the long run found that his key clients were large, established companies seeking cheaper broadband options. Judson made tweaks to his company to better serve that demographic.

A low-cost, off-the-shelf infrastructure means a business can scale, retool or refocus quickly and inexpensively as new opportunities and markets arise. "People start out thinking their business is one thing," Judson says. "You need to be in a position to capitalize on a target market that be may different than the one you set out to attract."

And that's what going it alone is all about: being nimble enough to capitalize on a unequalled skill, a great niche business no one else has thought of or just a burning desire to control your own destiny and pull yourself out of unemployment. It's a new way of thinking for many people who have spent their lives in a cubicle.