Finding your way to Entrepreneurship may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the term “Business of One”. Yet today there are so many ways to use your time, skills and talents to generate some income that the concept of ‘Business of One’ has never been more appropriate.
Pre-recession most people were confident that they could find a secure job with a future somewhere close to home. Teens, college students and the recently unemployed could count on quickly getting employment prior to 2008. Now we see high and sustained unemployment in many sectors of the job market. The old way of looking for someone to hire you and keep you employed is changing.
Today, you have think of yourself as a Business, a ‘Business of One‘. The recent article in Inc magazine by Jessica Stillman (freelance writer based in London), illustrated this point from the perspective of using some of the newer web based outsourcing services like Elance.com and Fiverr.com among others.
Your Business Mentor Ray wants you to consider this in many contexts including the web services a lot of us Internet marketers have been using for years. Just telling people you know and those around you that you will do work for them will gain you some work. If you can tell the same story in a more focused way with a specific set of tasks you are willing to do – you will get regular work and referrals.
My thoughts on this started after reading the Stillman article, here is an excerpt:
“But just because the world is moving away from stashing every talented young person in a corporate cubicle for decades, doesn’t mean that the switch over is going to be entirely smooth, according to Rosati (Elance CEO Fabio Rosati). Young people looking forward to an independent career need to shift their thinking to prepare, he says:
When you are starting out in your career, you should absolutely begin to think of yourself as a business of one. If you decide that you are about having an independent career, that means you have to find work for yourself, deliver, get paid for it, and be your own advocate. You need to be able to maybe start working initially at a low hourly rate, but a year or two later give yourself a raise.
It changes the model. You are now in charge of your career. You get to choose which skills you are going to develop. You get to choose which clients you’re going to work for, how many hours a week and at what time of the day, and you also get to choose how much money you get paid per hour. I think that there’s going to be a lot more education and a lot more learning around this topic that needs to happen.”
I think of all the skills my 20 something step-daughters and their friends have and then all the needs of independent businesses trying to grow and market themselves with social media marketing and there is clearly a match to be made, hence the ‘Business of One’. The question is how to get them all together to match the skill sets and the needs. Fortunately there exists many websites to help with this matching. Initially these sites were developed to help businesses inexpensively outsource either highly technical work or very boring repetitive work to workers in places like India and the Philippines.
Now the issue has become to just find an efficient way for small business owners to get tasks done without the need to hire staff and promise permanent work. We now have the situation of the availability of these outsourcing sites eliminating the need for small businesses to hire, while at the same time creating an outlet for the new ‘Business of One’ workers to get work and be their own boss. There has clearly been a paradigm shift driven by the long term recession and the needs of the business world.
The article goes on to make a great point about this new ‘Business of One’ type of worker:
“They are starting to deliver their services instead of working at the pub, instead of busing tables, instead of babysitting. In fact, I’ve heard one saying that Elancing is the new babysitting, and I think that sums it up for young people.”
In my opinion it is more than something for young people. If you have a skill or even a willingness to but in your time for someone, you can get work. I have used these sites over the years for both graphic design help and outsourcing of articles. In many cases the people were competent and not what would be called ‘young people’ although some were. Some were from the US and others from overseas.
You may be thinking that you do not have the skills to get paid to work independently. Well you are wrong. Here are a list of the things people are doing for money on Fiverr.com just as of this writing:
Find something that you can do easily and that is fun for you. Create an account on Fiverr and then post your availability. If one thing does not work out keep trying others until you find a match that works. If you have writing or more technical talents be sure to look over Elance.com, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and Guru.com and any of the other sites, there are many.
For all you small business owners out there be sure to consider these sites for outsourcing some of your technical, content writing and marketing tasks. If there is something you know you should be doing to promote your business but do not have the staff or time – outsource it. Outsource to the ‘Business of One’ people.
To the ‘Business of One’ candidates the message is to promote your skills or talents. Work hard at it and keep trying until you figure out whats works for you. Once it clicks into place you will control your own hours and to some extent your own earnings. Work from where ever you are whenever you want to to.