A Conversation with Renoir

Editor's note: This is a post that I wrote about 4 years ago for my old website. This is the first time it's appeared in this blog.

I’ve been hearing a lot about Michael Gerber recently. For those of you who aren’t familiar with him, he’s the author of The E-Myth and the newer E-Myth Revisited. His fans are fond of quoting phrases like “move out of your comfort zone” and “work on your business, not in your business”. His books contain a number of useful ideas and distinctions. However, I’m troubled by what lies behind those ideas.

Gerber’s basic premise is that most of us start small businesses not as budding entrepreneurs but as regular working people who for one reason or another have had an “entrepreneurial seizure”, a sudden desire to work for ourselves. According to Gerber, because we lack business skills, we end up merely creating a job for ourselves instead of a true business. We’re trapped in the tyranny of a business that depends solely on our own daily efforts. It’s a fair observation, and certainly highlights one of the challenges of being a soloist.

However, Gerber’s solution to this problem is to show us how to turn our “job” into a real turn-key business enterprise by adopting the entrepreneurial mindset. For Gerber, the one person business model represents “business infancy” and is ”doomed to fail” unless we make the transition to a “mature” entrepreneurial business with employees, operational systems, etc. Gerber talks about the “lost opportunities and wasted lives” facing those who don’t make the transition. The general attitude seems to be that soloists either don’t have the skills to run a larger business or are afraid to. The idea is that if we weren’t an entrepreneur when we started, we should learn to become one. He suggests that if we don’t want to be an entrepreneur, we should go back to working for someone else.

From Gerber’s perspective, it’s not the work itself that is important. What’s important is the business. Gerber’s ideal is the franchise model, a business that you as an owner can “replicate 5000 times” and have “operated by people with the lowest possible level of skill”. 

Let’s see how we might use this entrepreneurial approach to coach an artist friend of mine, a dedicated soloist. His name is Pierre Auguste Renoir. Let’s listen in.

Coach: Pierre, you’ve been painting for a long time now. You’ve made quite a name for yourself. I’d like to challenge you to play an even bigger game. You need to stretch yourself and move out of your comfort zone.

Renoir: What do you mean?

Coach: Take it to the next level. Create a real business. 

Renoir: Well, I’m finally making some pretty good money from my work, if that’s what you mean.

Coach: But think of what you could do if you weren’t trapped in the tyranny of having to paint day in and day out? 

Renoir: Actually, I quite enjoy it. I paint pretty much whenever I want. I’ve done a lot of traveling and studying. These days, I get together every afternoon at the Café Guerbois with my fellow painters.

Coach: That’s what I mean. You think of yourself as a painter. If you want to take things to the next level, you need to begin thinking of yourself as a businessman first. You could open a studio. Hire painters to work under your direction and paint in your style. You could sell lots of paintings without being tied to the actual work. Eventually, you could sell the business and embark on some new venture. You could open a gallery. Eventually, you could have someone managing your studio and someone else managing the gallery while you sat on the beach and drank wine.  You’d never have to paint again!

Renoir: But I love painting. I would get no satisfaction from managing a bunch of employees. For me, it would bring no joy. Painting is an expression of who I am. I began my career working for the Levy brothers, painting China plates in their factory. It was a great learning experience, but I prefer the independence and freedom of my life now. Besides, there is still so much to learn. I’ve hardly begun to scratch the surface of this art. 

Coach: But your business doesn’t exist without you. If you become ill or die, what will become of your business? Where are the assets? Where is the legacy? What about your son Jean? Wouldn’t you like to leave a thriving business behind for him? What about retirement?

Renoir: I’m not sure I’m every going to retire. Painting is my passion. Painting is my life!

In his later years, Renoir’s hands became so arthritic that he couldn’t hold a paint brush. His passion and commitment to his work were so strong that he continued painting right up until his death… his brushes tightly lashed to his forearms.

I don’t mean to pick on Michael Gerber. There are a lot of good ideas in the book. But it represents an attitude that is all too prevalent among those who offer business advice to soloists. It’s the attitude that a one person business is something “less”. That we’re not playing a big enough game. 

I disagree! A one person business can be a viable and fulfilling business and lifestyle choice. To be sure, there are challenges. The answer is not to abandon what makes you special, but to leverage it. For most soloists, choosing to create a one person business is about freedom, choice, control, personal values, contribution, and the work. The problem is that we buy into the entrepreneurial model and everything that comes with it ...then beat ourselves up because it doesn’t fit us.

I have great respect for the path of the entrepreneur! It takes courage, creativity, skill, and passion. Entrepreneurs are responsible for most of the job creation and innovation that happens in business today. However, it’s not a path for everyone.

We need a greater recognition of the uniqueness and the value of the one person business lifestyle... as well as the uniqueness of those who choose to pursue it.

Photo of Renoir painting by David Paul Ohmer

March 21, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

The Entrepreneur, the Virtuoso, and the Solopreneur!

Editor's note: This is a post that I wrote about 4 years ago for my old website. This is the first time it's appeared in this blog.

Let’s take a look at three people and the paths they take after starting a one person business.

Bonnie is an entrepreneur. She starts a one person business doing financial planning. She does well. She enjoys her work but finds that her real passion is for the business itself. Within two years, she has more business than she can handle. She hires another financial planner to handle the overflow. Her business continues to grow. Soon she hires another planner and then another. Now Bonnie is only working with a few of her favorite and most lucrative clients. The rest of the time, she is working on her business… managing, marketing, sales, planning. She opens a second office in a nearby town and hires managers for each office. Her business continues to expand. Bonnie loves that she has created a business that can stand on its own, has value, and provides jobs for others.

Howard is a virtuoso. He starts a one person business doing financial planning. He does well. He loves his work and the time he spends with his clients. Within two years, he has more business than he can handle. He quickly develops a reputation as the best financial planner in town. Howard finds that he resents the time he has to spend handling the administrative chores of his business because it takes him away from doing what he loves. Rather than expanding as Bonnie did, Howard decides to streamline his business. He creates a great support team for himself by handing off much of his administrative work to other professionals. Because of his reputation, Howard is in high demand. He can afford to raise his rates, reduce the number of hours he works, and become very selective in choosing clients. He does excellent work and his clients consider him a friend. Howard’s work provides him with immense satisfaction as well as a great income and lifestyle. He loves the sense of focus and mastery he is able to attain.

Vivian is a solopreneur.  She starts a one person business doing financial planning. She does well. She loves her work and the time she spends with clients. Within two years, she has more business than she can handle. Like Howard, she streamlines her business, puts in place a great support team, and makes sure she is well paid for her efforts. Vivian enjoys the flexibility and lifestyle her one person business provides. She has no desire to manage a bunch of employees. She doesn’t want the headaches or the responsibilities. Still, Vivian wants to have a broader impact with her work. She wants more variety, an even better income, and more freedom to take time off. Vivian begins to offer workshops. She finds that she loves developing courses. She licenses one of her most popular programs to other financial planners. Eventually, she develops a membership website where people can take courses at their own pace. Vivian still enjoys working personally with clients, but also loves that she can help many more people through her other programs. Vivian has enough income coming in from other sources that when she takes a two month bicycling trip in Europe, her business continues quite well without her.

These are rather idealized portraits to be sure. But let me ask you a question… Which portrait did you find most appealing?

How many of these statements resonate for you as a soloist? 

• You are committed to doing work that is meaningful and important. You see your work as a mission or a calling.
• Your business is an expression and extension of yourself. You identify yourself with your work rather than with being a businessperson.
• You have no interest in building a larger business. You see management and administration as hassles and intrusions upon your work. Given the chance, you would farm out administration and support functions so that you have more time to focus on the work. You want to streamline and minimize the administration aspects of your business.
• You feed on excellence and mastery. You want to keep learning and growing in your profession.
• You long for a chance to excel, to stand out, to shine.
• You are service oriented and highly ethical. You have a genuine desire to help others.
• Financial comfort is important, but quality of life is more important.
• You want to live life on your terms. You want to be able to fit your business around your lifestyle and your family needs.
• You want to maintain a connection to the work. You prefer working with clients to managing your business.
• You want to be your own boss. You have a strong desire to do business “your way”.
• You value freedom, independence, simplicity, control, flexibility, autonomy.

I challenge you to build a thriving, satisfying, and prosperous one person business… on your terms!

March 21, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Are you a lifestylepreneur?

For the last year or so, I've been seeing a disturbing trend. I call it Budding Entrepreneur Syndrome. Basically, it's the tendency of many business coaches to try and push soloists into becoming full fledged business magnates. There's a belief that every one-person business owner is in fact a "budding entrepreneur" who just hasn't flowered yet.

I blame Michael Gerber!

Michael, who is the author of The E-Myth series of books, has become the darling of many business coaches. His most often repeated mantra is "work on your business, not in your business."

Don't get me wrong. Gerber's book is loaded with great ideas to help your business. What bothers me is an underlying attitude that if you don't have an entrepreneurial personality, you should either get one fast or go back to working for someone else!

About a year ago, I wrote a rant on this topic... A Conversation with Renoir.

The simple fact is that you can't lump all one-person businesses into the same basket. To my reckoning, there are at least three different baskets and maybe more. Here's another article I wrote... The Entrepreneur, the Virtuoso, and the Solopreneur that looks at the different routes you can take in developing your one-person business.

The dark secret is that a majority of soloists have no interest in building a major entrepreneurial enterprise. Many of them don't even like business. These soloists thrive on the work they do, and would be very cranky if you asked them to give it up. For many, their work is a fundamental expression of their creativity.

What they want is a lifestyle. They want the holy grail of freedom and quality of life! They want to do work that feeds them, work that matters. They want to see their kids grow up. They do not want to be Donald Trump!

Paul and Sarah Edwards in Secrets of Self-employment were among the first to identify this group of soloists. They coined the unfortunately awkward phrase "propreneur" to describe those who would rather keep their businesses small. Jim Salmons and Timlynn Babitsky at Sohodojo coined one of my favorite phrases... "ruthlessly small businesses".

My friend Maria Sariego has one of the clearest takes on this whole matter. In fact, Maria has built her whole business as a self-employment coach around helping people build fulfilling lifestyle businesses. You can visit Maria at Lifestylepreneurs.

Stay tuned! This is a topic we'll be coming back to again.

May 23, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (1)

Just Smile!

Recently, I decided to add some new pictures to my website and blogs. On a sunny spring day, I dragged my wife Janice (otherwise known as the ever-patient one) outside to take some photos of me with the digital camera.

Now I don't generally take a very good picture. It's not the oldness or the baldness that bothers me. It's the fact that I have no eyes. If I smile even a little, my eyes scrunch up into nothingness. It occurred to me that having eyes was probably better than having a smile, so I determined to settle on a Bruce Willis like smirk.

So off we went to do our photo shoot, with me providing regular reminders to "make sure I show some eyeball". Janice took photos of me by trees, fences, playgrounds, the old iron bridge down the road, etc. I was quite pleased. Bruce Andor... male model!

In all, she shot about 90 photos. The results?

In about a third of the photos, I looked like I belong on TV... the guy on the slab in last week's episode of Six Feet Under. Pasty doesn't begin to describe it.

In another batch, I looked like Lurch from the old Addams Family TV show.

There were a bunch in which I looked pretty good... except for the slight tomato-like quality.

It wasn't my wife's fault. They were great photos! It was just the material she had to work with. Of course, she didn't help matters by constantly insisting that I looked cute.

We finally found some photos that I was willing to admit were pretty reasonable.

What does any of this have to do with running a one person business?

As a soloist, you are, like it or not, the face of your business.  One of the purposes of your website is to begin building a relationship with your prospective clients. Your photo is a key component of that effort. Prospects want to get a sense of you, a feel for what you're like... they want to get to know you!

But what if you're not that confident in your looks?

About six months ago, I had a conversation with a woman about the website she was creating for herself. The website highlighted her strong personality and personal style. Her logo and company name incorporated her personal name. Despite that focus, she was trying to decide whether to place a small photo of herself several levels down in the site or leave the photo off the site completely. She admitted that she didn't feel that comfortable with her appearance.

I looked at her photo. It was great! She looked warm and had a wonderful smile. I encouraged her to enlarge it to twice the size and plaster it prominently on her home page.

Since then, I've noticed how many websites for one person professional service businesses have either no photo or a picture that doesn't represent them well. I've seen lots of baby photos, line drawings, even people with their back turned to the camera.

I'll admit that some of these cases may be deliberate design choices. Some may also be unconscious choices. This is a sensitive topic for most of us. Few of us feel completely happy with how we look. But let me ask you... what's the effect on your business of being uncomfortable with yourself?

Certainly, the media helps to foster a lot of the unrealistic expectations we tend to have of ourselves. That's why I was pleased a few weeks ago when Oprah celebrated the fifth anniversary of her magazine. One of the segments showed how many people it took to produce one of her photo shoots. As Oprah said, "If you had 22 people working on you, you'd look this good too!"

The real issue is not photo or no photo. It's about claiming the self-confidence you should rightly have as someone who creates value in this world!

The simple truth is that none of us look as bad as we think we do, and I've never met anyone who didn't look good when they were smiling and feeling good about themselves.

So here's my advice... Put on a big smile, get that photo taken, and put it proudly on your home page. It may feel uncomfortable for a while but you'll get over it. And your prospective clients? All they will remember is that smile!

Now if I could only follow my own advice!

May 3, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Profiles In Excellence...
Marilyn Scott-Waters

Friends know me as the world's biggest 5 year old! So when I came across Marilyn Scott-Waters folding paper toy site at The Toymaker, I thought I was in heaven!

Marilyn makes her unique creations available online for children all over the world. Last year, she published her first book of toys. Some of her designs are stunningly intricate, like her paper theaters, and yet easy to put together.

Marilyn was gracious enough to take a break from her busy schedule and talk with me about her life as a self-employed artist.

You mentioned having been a "cube dwelling Art Director". What prompted you to make the move to being self-employed?

I was an Art Director for Nike for four and a half years with a staff of eight designers. My travel budget was bigger than my salary and I got to travel to many wonderful places and see lots of things. Then I had a baby... and everything changed. I left Nike and got a job closer to home with a lot less travel involved. For two years I designed high performance motorcycle gear which was the same old thing day in and day out. One Friday they wanted me to work late... which wouldn’t have been so unusual but it was Halloween. I had a three year old in a little kitten suit that was going to go trick or treating for the first time. My boss couldn’t understand why I couldn’t stay late. Feh! Two weeks later I was laid off. I’d thought about working from home for a long time. I was tired of the travel, not getting home until seven in the evening, not seeing my husband or little boy, so I took the leap and started freelancing. It was great and I never looked back.

What have been the biggest benefits of making that move?

I have been able to spend more time with my family. The day that my little boy graduated from preschool I cried through the whole slideshow showing all the field trips that they had been on. If I was working in a office  I never would have been able to go to the Pumpkin Patch or to the petting zoo. Another side benefit of freelancing is the amazing variety of projects that I’ve been able to take on. I’ve designed everything from brochures, teeshirts, websites, logos. I just finished illustrating a children’s book for a client! It was a dream!

What do you find to be the biggest challenges?

The biggest challenge is doing work and hustling work at the same time. Getting paid can be a pain sometimes, though I’ve been mostly lucky in that regard. Most of my work comes from word of mouth. Budgeting time can be a challenge, getting projects done and picking up the dry cleaning, running errands, picking up the kid from school, email, etc. You have to watch for time wasters.

As an artist, how has the change to self-employment impacted your creativity? Your choices as an artist?

Being self employed has made me three hundred and fifty four percent more creative. Having a wide variety of clients and projects has really made me stretch as an artist. Everyday is a challenge and something new, which I like!

You have two websites... The Toymaker and your design practice. Is one or the other your main source of income?

My income comes from Scott-Waters Design and doing commercial graphic design work. The Toymaker is my pet project. I am “building a brand” and am not worried about having to rely on it to pay the bills. The paper toys are free to download. (Although Paypal donations are more than welcome to help pay for my ever growing bandwidth.) My goal is to help parents and kids spend time together making things. I’ve really learned a lot by doing it, it’s been like getting a Master’s degree in brand building. I’ve learned how to promote a website, get to the top of search engines, put up a shopping cart, as well as build a huge mailing list. I’ve also learned how to get a book printed, ISBN numbers and all that.  I figured out how to get my book carried by Amazon as well as Borders and Barnes and Noble. Oddly enough I’ve received a lot of illustration work because of my paper toy site so it does function as an online portfolio. I’m hoping to grow The Toymaker into a line of paper toy books. Wouldn’t that be cool?

Marilyn, I get a real sense of play when I look at your websites. That's often a difficult feeling for soloists to hang on to amid the pressures and daily practicalities of running a business. How do you maintain that?

Play is what makes life worth doing. We all have to work! Today I have a stack of technical drawings to grind through as well as a letterhead redesign. (Which I find to be kind of relaxing, sort of like knitting or doing needlepoint or jigsaw puzzles) Designing fun paper toys for kids to make is more of a compulsion, a passion, something that keeps me up late at night. It’s not work, it’s play, so it feeds me and makes me a better designer. I’m pretty good about bribing my inner child. “Finish these schematics and you can work on your lightning bug and butterfly dominos.”  I also have a very supportive family. My husband is awesome. I couldn’t have begun to do this without him. My parents and siblings are so encouraging too. It’s all good!

April 19, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)