What if I told you that you can grow your online business without a team?
As a small business owner, chances are, you are working with a very low budget and you cannot afford to hire a full team.
The thing about online businesses is that you have a variety of tech tools at your disposal that can help you run the business on autopilot.
That is why we have so many solopreneurs now, although, no one wants to stay a solopreneur forever.
While you can absolutely run your small business without a team, you must understand that working with a team does a lot of of advantage for your business.
You will be having people from different backgrounds and with different perspectives manage your business for you.
This will add a lot of spice and variety to the solutions you provide for clients.
It’s also a pretty wonderful feeling to have a team of people working with you to help you actualize your dream of running a thriving business.
It means a lot for people to prioritize your own dreams and put theirs on the back burner, regardless of whether you are paying them or not.
But at these early stages, your business may not be able to afford to hire a team, so while you’re still in the solopreneur phase, you need to be able to figure it out on your own.
You need to be willing to invest a lot of your time, energy and money into seeing the online business take off.
With that established, let’s take a look at a few ways to grow your small business without a team.
But before we do that, I have created a video on this same topic on YouTube, you can watch it below.
1. Come Up with a Strategy
The first thing you need to do if you want to grow your online business without a team is to come up with a strategy.
If you’re working solo, you need to be super strategic.
Think of strategy as your parachute for when you want to jump off a plane (and I hope you don’t have to, except you are skydiving), or your seatbelt for when you are sitting beside a crazy driver.
Let’s say you are a freelance web developer, you want to consider some of the following:
Your goals for the business – You either want to make sales, build a brand around your skill, or something entirely different.
So we get it, you want to create a website that is visually appealing and easy to navigate, and that also has a high performance and capacity.
But who are you creating that website for? You need to really narrow down your target audience.
Are you creating websites for Churches? For eCommerce businesses, or for solopreneurs like yourself?
If you have narrowed that down, next is to figure out where they are and I think your best bet is social media.
But what social media sites? And how are you going to get them to know you?
If you are choosing advertising, what is your advertising budget? How much do you have to spend to get in front of these people?
Since you cannot continue to run ads every time you want to get a client, what organic methods can you revert to?
Social media, again, but this time, with really valuable content.
How then will you start creating your content? What channels are you going to show up on first and what kinds of content will appeal to your target audience?
Creating a strategy that will help you grow your online business without a team is about working on actionable tasks on a consistent basis, that contributes to your overall business goals.
RELATED: 5 WAYS TO BE VISIBLE WITHOUT POSTING EVERYDAY ON SOCIAL MEDIA
2. Automate Your Tasks
If you had a team, you’d have someone who’d be working on content, someone else would be managing social media, you’d have a video editor, a growth strategist and so on.
But since you are a team of one, you’d need to make automations your friend.
You see the fact is, even companies who have the budget to hire a large team still rely on automations to do the work.
When you automate, you save your business time and resources, you increase workflow efficiency, and you have the freedom to focus on what matters most to you.
It is important to automate when appropriate so what should you really be automating?
a) Social Media Posts
The days of posting on social media spontaneously are over.
These days, what works is planning your content in advance and scheduling them on social media management sites.
The first thing you need to do is to come up with a rough sketch of what you want to post on social media.
To do this, I usually use a Google document to capture all my thoughts.
Then using the same document, I start to flesh it out and make it look like exactly what I want to design.
Then, I copy and paste them on my premade templates on Canva.
After they’ve been developed, I arrange them on a content calendar.
The best content calendar I’ve ever used so far is Airtable, but right now, I’m not really feeling Airtable anymore so I’m still searching for my preferred one.
Then I schedule them on Instagram using the Facebook Meta Business Suite.
I can then focus on something else because I know that my social media is on autopilot.
By doing all of these, you don’t need to upload content one after the other, you can be on vacation and your business will be popping on social media.
b) Email Newsletters
If you are into email marketing, you already know how to automate your email newsletters.
If you are not, better start with email marketing now because you can really measure, track and readjust your efforts.
Just make sure you are using the right email service providers, like Flodesk or Mailerlite.
c) Direct Messages
Direct Messaging automation is now a thing, and it will be very helpful for your business.
I once saw a laptop cover vendor on Instagram with really beautiful pictures that did justice to her products.
The next thing I did was to slide into her DM.
Immediately I sent her a DM, I got an automated response asking me what kind of laptop I used.
As soon as I replied, another automated response came up and told me that they do not have covers for my kind of laptop in stock.
Pretty cool right? When it comes to autoresponders on DM, you can either use a chatbot or use the Instagram built in features.
Automations/autoresponders give you enough flexibility to work on other things that matter in your business and helps you avoid spending hours on each task.
3. Use Productivity Techniques
When you use productivity techniques, you help your business to be better everyday.
You become more efficient and because you are a team of one, you can produce satisfying results for your customers.
Satisfied customers are happy customers and happy customers return.
My recommendation for you is to have a to-do list for every day in your business.
The first thing to do when you wake up is to write a to-do list, you can also do this before you go to bed the night before.
The thing is, if you don’t write down a list of what you will be doing in the day, you will be giving room for other things, which are usually not important, to take your time.
The to-do list is a very active productivity technique that has been saving business owners for years.
You don’t even have to write it down in a notebook, you can simply use an app like Sticky Notes on your phone. The Sticky Notes app allows you stick the page on your phone screen.
So anytime you pick up your phone, you are starring at your tasks in the face.
You can also block out time for each of the tasks you’ll be doing that day.
For example, if you’re going to be writing a new block post, you can block out an hour for that by setting a timer for when the time for that task is up.
You can set another timer for the next project, maybe to create a digital product, another timer to respond to client enquiries, and so on.
It helps you to get a lot more work done.
There are tons of productivity techniques you can do if you want to grow your online business without a team and on autopilot.
4. Prioritize What Matters
There are times in my business that I need to watch a few tutorial videos on YouTube or to set up a new automation for my email newsletter.
Sometimes, I want to read a few articles on Medium or take a course online, all these things are important and will help my business grow.
But what I have realized is that I need to do what matters at that very moment.
While doing all of those things – watching videos on YouTube, reading articles on Medium – will help me grow as a business owner, I have deliverables pending.
I need to create a design and send it to a client before COB, I need to create YouTube thumbnails before the week runs out, and so on.
There’s a ton of work to be done, and so maybe I’ll get to watching videos and reading articles later on.
So you need to know what matters to you, to your business, and to your client most at that moment and make it a priority.
5. Outsource
Outsourcing your work to other freelancers is one of the best things you can ever do in your online business.
Outsourcing helps you to focus on what you alone can do best, while you give someone else what they can do for you.
Outsourcing will help you grow your online business without a team because it helps you increase efficiency for some time-consuming functions that you may lack the resources to pull off.
You can optimize your working time and invest that time into your business all because someone else is handling a project for you.
As much as I love to design with Canva, I often outsource my designs to a graphics designer so that I can focus on other things.
And being able to focus on other things will improve my efficiency and make me deliver quality results for my clients.
Now, what you need to do is to outsource what is important. For me, graphics design is important because it’s like the core of the content that I share on both my page and my clients’ pages.
For you, it could be video editing, it could be ads, it could even be copywriting.
So no matter what it is, make sure that you are outsourcing the right things.
Conclusion
In the beginning of this article, I made mention the fact that working with a team of skilled people can help your business grow faster.
However, if you are not there yet, both financially and structurally, you can grow your online business without a team using these few tips.
Make technology your friend, use productivity tools, and figure out how you can do more in less time.
Also, learn to maximize your time more for the goal than for the works.
Let me know what you think in the comment section below.
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