by Mario Peshev, author of “126 Steps to Becoming a Successful Entrepreneur: The Entrepreneurship Fad and the Dark Side of Going Solo“
Running a business alone is challenging, but this is usually not the end goal for beginner entrepreneurs. Even if you’re not aiming to become the largest corporation out there, scaling your business would probably mean that you’re going to need a few people to help you in different areas.
Additionally, you’re not expected to excel at every single vertical of successfully managing the business. But it’s a lot harder to prepare a proper business plan unless you’re planning ahead of time and considering the additional resources, you will need help you with this endeavor.
How is a business plan usually structured?
Most business plans aiming for seed funding, or any sort of initial support, or even for recruitment needs, are distributing the efforts and planning the projections over the business over the course of several years.
This includes market penetration, growth, entering new markets, monetization funnels and opportunities, and a lot more. Of course, to make yourself available, you normally plan to hire several people along the way, who would be helping out with different initiatives.
This is why you should think like a 10 person team, but from the start, when it may be just you working on and executing the business plan.
Many times being a solopreneur means spreading yourself too thin by constantly bouncing back and forth between multiple endeavors.
This has several specific drawbacks.
First, on a day to day, you’re probably missing out on 70% or more of the initiatives that you have to work on.
Second, emergencies are going to pull you in, even though other critical areas of the business really need attention.
Third, it’s a lot easier to plan resources when you project a full-time resource available with 160 hours a month, ready to kick asses.
So, the other key area is planning the actual team that you would otherwise build. Or, in other words, who are the first 10 people you would hire for the business.
This practical strategy exercise is extremely valuable for many reasons. It helps you align your short-term strategy to a tangible long term goal, considering you have a reasonable action plan on what you want to accomplish.
Instead of blindly trying to grind on a day to day basis, and losing track of time, you can instead build a solid plan that includes an actionable list of people you would hire to help you out with different initiatives. For instance, what is it that you need the most? Is it help with marketing? Or maybe with sales? Or is it customer support? Software development? Product management?
Assembling your team in your head would make it clear as to what would you ideally implement and what would you focus on a monthly basis if you had access to this team you built yourself.
Jogging your brain with this mental exercise will paint a clear picture of where the priorities stand if you’re a 10 person team instead of a solopreneur. Because it’s a lot easier to focus on your future team’s needs and how to scale it instead of blindly following the daily emergencies.
Mario Peshev is the CEO of DevriX, a global WordPress agency serving industries from publishing to automotive and airline. Peshev focuses the majority of his time on running his business and leading distributed tech teams at DevriX of 50+ people crafting high-scale WordPress solutions optimized for revenue. He is author of “126 Steps to Becoming a Successful Entrepreneur: The Entrepreneurship Fad and the Dark Side of Going Solo“.
