Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Solopreneur Sisterhood podcast. A podcast designed to help heart centered service providers like you build a purposeful, profitable and sustainable business that supports what matters most to you. I'm your host, Becky McCleary, and I am so grateful that you are here.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: Hello and welcome back. I am so grateful that you are here today. In this week's episode, we are diving into four reasons why solopreneurs need community. And I have been thinking about this one a lot lately because we have the free solopreneur sisterhood community and we have the paid society. And I've been seeing women come together. And so I've been seeing really different reactions and different experiences from women really diving in and building beautiful relationships and supporting each other and sharing like, how many opportunities are opening up for them because they're getting involved to women reaching out and saying, I don't have time for community right now and maybe I'll come back later. And so it's been really fascinating for me. So I've been thinking more about what it is that we are creating with a solopreneur Sisterhood. What is it all about and why do I believe it matters? So that's what we're going to talk about in this episode. And so my hope is that whether you join us inside the free community or the paid society, that you find community somewhere, because I really believe that it will be essential in helping you reach your goals with greater ease and greater speed. So the first thing I want to do is stress what I mean when I talk about a solopreneur. So I believe I spoke about this in an earlier episode, but in case you missed it, my idea with a solopreneur is just someone who is the only actual employee in their business. So you might work with contractors, you might have, you know, independent contractors that you have as team members. So you might not work entirely by yourself, but when it comes down to your business, you're the only actual employee and the decisions come down to you. I know a matter of months ago, I saw a woman write an article about how solopreneurs don't actually exist. And it's very rare that I strongly disagree with something. But her whole thing was that no one builds their business on their own. Everyone needs support. And I do agree with that. But I don't think that means that you're not actually a solopreneur, because I do think that solopreneurs have a unique set of circumstances in that the success of your business comes down to you. And your decisions and your efforts and the work that you put in to your business. Whereas any business that has multiple employees, multiple team members, it is more of a team effort. There are multiple people making decisions and impacting the results. So I believe the solopreneurs do exist. There are many of us where we are the only person in our business. I would also say that one of the things that makes us unique is that most of us are building a business because of the lifestyle we want to have, not because we want to build an empire. I know that when I first started out online I felt a little bit lost because I kept following these people with bigger businesses who were talking all about building your empire and, and that was nowhere on my radar. That wasn't really something I aspired to do. I just wanted to be able to help people make money, to help support our family and have the flexibility to be the mom that I wanted to be with my kids. And so I think if you are listening and you identify that way, you are not alone. And at the same time that I think solopreneurship is real. I also really believe that we need community. And so here are four reasons why I think we need community. So the first one is simply support and encouragement. Anyone who has been on this journey, even for a little while, knows that starting and running and growing your own business challenges you in ways that you probably never anticipated. Even now. Each new level I get to in my business, each new level idea that I launch, I experience that up and down that roller coaster of emotions with putting something new out there, being vulnerable, not being entirely sure how it's going to go, and kind of having to pick up the pieces depending on where things land. And this is a normal part of the journey. Anytime we're doing something new, we don't know exactly what's going to happen. We have to be able to adapt with it. And that doesn't mean that it doesn't feel hard. It doesn't mean that we don't get disappointed sometimes we don't feel frustrated sometimes we have all of these emotions. And one of the biggest things I have seen hold women back in business, and I will say this for myself too, is their, their self doubt and allowing those downs on the journey to hold them back, allowing themselves to believe there's something wrong with me. I just can't do this. Why can everyone else figure this out, but I can't. All of these are common worries and fears that we have. And when you have that supportive community, you have that safe space where you can go and you can say, hey, I'm really frustrated. I did this launch, didn't go the way I wanted.
I need encouragement. And you can have those people who have your back and it just makes the whole journey easier. It makes it easier to keep moving forward. It makes it easier to kind of rebound from those disappointments. And it makes it easier to know that you're not actually alone in this journey, to know that there are other people going through this too. I cannot stress if you haven't experienced it, get into a community that will cheer you on and support you, because it is so powerful to have people who believe in you. So when your self confidence wavers a bit, you have people who are cheering you on and can help you keep moving forward, even when part of you wants to quit. So the first reason why solopreneurs need community is simply for that support and encouragement.
The second reason why we need community is for making the journey easier.
I tell my kids all the time, you know, they're teenagers, they're starting to think about careers. I'm telling them, you don't have to have it all figured out because. Because the work that I do now did not exist in this capacity when I was your age. You know, when I was getting ready to go off to college. The idea of having an online business and be able to work with people around the world was fantasy. That was not, you know, having your own business, setting your own hours. All of this wasn't really possible at that point in time, and now it is. And so for those of us where this was never really part of our dream until. Until we reached some point in adulthood where we realized we wanted to have our own business, all of this is new for us. Everything that we are doing is new. A lot of the technology is new. It's always changing. There is so much to learn, so many different decisions to make, so many ideas to go through. And there's also all kinds of information just kind of coming at us all the time. And so it can really help to have that supportive community where you can get ideas from other people. They can recommend resources for you and you'll make that journey easier. So you can say, you know what, I'm looking to set up an email list. There are all of these different tools out there. What platforms do you recommend and why? And your community can give you ideas on that. Anything that you're looking to do in your business. Hey, I'm looking to be on LinkedIn more. I don't know where to start. What Resources would you recommend? Who do you recommend? I follow. So instead of having to take your time to research and do some searching online and try to go through all of that information, you have people who have your back, who want you to succeed, and who also have similar businesses. So most likely the resources they're recommending will be a good fit for you as well.
You have those people who can give you those recommendations to make your journey easier. And as with everything, part of being community is giving as well as receiving. So as you get further along on your journey, you can do the same for others. When you have resources you recommend, you can make the journey easier for others. So the second reason here is just to make that journey easier so you don't have to figure out everything on your own. You don't have to find all of the resources on your own. You have people to help you along the way.
The third reason why solopreneurs need community is so we can stop creating in a vacuum. I think one of the hardest things about working for yourself and by yourself is that a lot. I mean, every business owner I know has a lot of ideas, and it can be really hard to know which ideas to move forward with, which to maybe hold off on for now. And if we do things kind of on our own, it can be really discouraging. We could put out an idea out there that's an amazing idea, but we might be missing some things about it, or there could be a sales page where that just isn't quite hitting the mark. And if we're doing everything on our own, we don't have that feedback. We're kind of creating in a vacuum, and we're. We're telling ourselves all kinds of. Kinds of stories. And we're, in my opinion, making the journey harder because we're trying to figure out everything on our own. And so one of the things I love about having that supportive community that believes in you and wants to cheer you on is that you can say, hey, I had this idea for this program. It's for these people. What. What comes up for you when you hear about this? What questions do you have? What are some ideas I might want to consider? Or you have a sales page for a program, and you can go to that trusted community and say, hey, I created the sales page. Can you take a look at it? Let me know? What questions do you have about it? What works? What do you think I might want to come back to and work on a little bit more and get that feedback? And yes, I've seen people do these types of things just on social media. And I will say I always cringe a bit about this. The same thing is true with the asking for ideas and resources, because when you're putting out a post on social media, you have no idea who's responding to you. And a lot of cases I've seen people that like, they're not even in your ideal client base, they're not your ideal mark market at all. And they're giving you answers, but their feedback isn't necessarily valuable to you because they're not the people you want to be working with or the same thing with feedback on your business. A lot of times what I'll see is people will post and ask for help, but they're getting critical feedback from people who are actually trying to sell their services. That could be a totally different episode here to go into, but it's again, it's not helpful. I see a lot of it kind of almost tearing down business owners when people are trying to sell things. Again, whole other episode. But part of having a supportive community is it's that safe space where you have people who understand you, who are cheering you on, who understand what you're trying to do and can help you get there with greater ease. And so if you have that feedback, you're no longer creating an a vacuum. You have that support, you're getting some feedback. And I really believe that can help you to be more successful with your offers and your ideas and to also speed up the journey because you're spending less time in trying to figure it out, you're getting feedback more easily and more quickly and then you can adapt with that feedback. And on a little side note here, I also just want to stress this isn't one of our points, but I think that it's really important to have a supportive community of other business owners because you can have the best friends in your personal life, you can have a wonderful family who believes in you and cheers you on. I do think that the businesses we have, the journey that we are on is unique and we can sometimes get so immersed in it that we think everyone understands what I'm doing. But if you're like me, the people in your daily life still don't understand what you do. They still think this whole online business sounds a little bit made up.
I have family members who think I just played around on social media when I was a va. It's not what I was doing.
And I think it's so powerful to have people who understand what you're going through and and can be giving you support, encouragement, resources, feedback. With that perspective in mind, it just is going to hit differently than someone who believes in you and doesn't understand what you're doing at all. It's going to just, I think, be a better fit for you and maybe offer a little more value if you have someone who understands what you're going through, who is able to support you and encourage you and offer recommendations along the way. So I. If you have friends who support you, if you have family who support you, wonderful. And I think you should also have a community of other business owners who can help you along the way. I don't think we can ever have too much support. If you're fortunate enough to have that support in your personal life, that's amazing. And I think you can give yourself even greater support by having that community of business owners who can cheer you on along the way.
Okay, so our final point, our fourth reason why solopreneurs need community is for my favorite collaboration community and referrals. And so I think one of the most magical things about bringing women together in these communities is I was not even aware they were doing this. Is that beyond the mastermind calls that we're having in the society or in the beta test that we did, women were reaching out to each other in our online community and setting up calls beyond the mastermind. They wanted to get to know each other beyond that. And I'm hearing that this is still going on, which is amazing. This is something they're initiating on their own, and then they're coming up with these different ways to support each other. So we have some who are doing podcast interviews with each other. We have some who are doing a workshop for another person's community. We have some who are doing presentation or a workshop together. We have some who are talking about doing a summit together. We have all kinds of different things happening. And this is just women coming together to say, hey, how can we support each other? How can we do even more good for each other? We also have people in this society who are referring clients to each other. I know of a couple people from our beta test and one from the Society. So far we're on week four who are now booked out because of referrals they got from other people in the community. So here it's just a community. In the beta test, we had 15 members. In the society. For Q1, we have, I believe, 27 members. So just from a fairly small community, people are coming together to see how can we support one another, how can we Lift one another up. How can I help you in your business? And they're doing it. So I think it's so powerful to have this really supportive community that wants you to succeed and it can speed up your success when you can be connecting with these other women and seeing how you can collaborate together. Because I really believe that when you collaborate, when you reach other people's audiences, that's going to help to speed up your success. I was just talking with another business owner this morning about how I think a lot of what is taught out there about how to build your business is a really slow journey. So we talk about having a lead magnet, creating content, posting on social media, building your list. And all of that can work. And a lot of that takes a long time for it to work. And so what I love about having community is that you can be building relationships, you can be sending referrals to other people, they can send referrals to you, you can be collaborating in some way, building your email list, helping them to build their list, reaching more people, helping more people to know about you and the work you do. And you can do it with greater speed.
Okay, so that does it for this episode. So four reasons why solopreneurs need community. One, for support and encouragement. Two, to make the journey easier with ideas and resources.
Three, so we can stop creating in a vacuum. We can get feedback and recommendations so we can move more quickly with our ideas and hopefully experience greater success. And number four is for that collaboration, community and referrals. So again we have the solopreneur Sisterhood free community. We'll have a link to that in the show notes. We would love to have you join us if you haven't joined us already. We just started in November of 2024. It is growing. We are getting more active. We have the community where you can connect with people online. We also have a library that is growing with short trainings. We have monthly free networking events, virtual events, so you can join us from anywhere in the world. And then we have a number of guest experts who are coming in to give free trainings on various topics. So I would love to have you join us if you aren't already there and if you are looking for a bit of deeper support. I currently have a few spots open for coaching and strategic support in your business and we'll have a link to that in the show notes and then you can also hop on. The wait list for the society enrollment for Q2 opens up again in the middle of March and we have a special discount for those who join the wait list ahead of time. So I would love to have you join us either in the Free Community or the Page Society, or both. But whether you join us or not, please make it your intention sometime this year, hopefully sooner rather than later, to find your people, find a community that can support you along this journey.
[00:18:13] Speaker A: Thank you so much for joining us and listening to the solopreneur Sisterhood podcast. I hope this episode has offered you some encouragement, some insight, and some new ideas to support you in building a business that works for you. Remember that our world needs you, your gifts, your vision and your work. And I'm cheering you on as you bring your vision to life and build a purpose, purposeful, profitable and sustainable business that supports what matters most to.
