"I told myself I'm not going to take on work I don't want to do and I'm not going to have anyone else's salary to worry about. I want no bosses, no employees hanging like an anchor around my neck."
Severson had a fairly good idea of how marketable his expertise was. He'd been selling his services as a political marketer for years. So when he decided, with the agreement of his former partner, to go solo, he took his political clients with him and remained, as far as markets go, on familiar terrain.
So for Severson, a recovering small-business owner, as well as for the ex-employees in the solo camp, the matter of choosing the right business, though critical, is by no means a black art. It is not a marketing enigma that requires exhaustive research or expensive advice. Soloists need not comb through ads or buy books about how to groom pets at home. It's "falling-off-a-log easy," according to Severson. For those who thrive at it, the formula is an open secret: Deconstuct the old job and reconstruct the new one using only the choicest parts. They simply sell what they've always sold -- to a former employer or to a past customer -- but they cut out the middleman who marked up their labor or their expertise for resale. For soloists, it's a decision to sell the same stuff, direct.
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The New -- and Hard -- Sell
It is a romantic notion: to walk away from a job and set up a wee, small workshop, to labor only at what one loves and disregard the rest. There is, however, one catch: there must be a buyer for the wares, which means there must be a seller, too. And when there's no one else around, that leaves but one person. Selling does not come naturally to many soloists. Cold-calling and closing are foreign and occasionally frightening concepts to anyone who is untrained or not genetically predisposed to sell. Even those who've spent their previous careers in sales and marketing can find the challenge of selling themselves -- rather than a corporate product or service -- daunting.
"Until you're out there selling yourself without the mantle of a corporation, you can't know how hard it is," says Jane King of Fairfield Financial, in Wellesley, Mass. That's true even of the affable King, who'd spent 20 years selling for her employers. "I was accustomed to marketing and selling something or somebody else. And I was quite comfortable peddling a company with assets of so much or a staff of so many."
Selling her stuff as a soloist was a different matter altogether. "Now I was selling only me and what I knew. There was no protection when people said no," she confides. "I couldn't help feeling they were rejecting me."
She recalls all too vividly entire days when the phone never rang. "I told myself, There are so many idiots out there bringing in business; I know there's got to be a client out there for me." She pressed on, diligently practicing all the time-honored tactics that her years with larger financial houses had taught her. "I was calling and writing and mailing and following up. I was all alone in an office 8 to 10 hours a day doing that" -- for months, as King tells it, before she realized she would have to learn new tactics as a soloist. She could not approach sales as she had in the past. "It took me about a year of wringing my hands over how to get new business to figure that out.
"As a one-woman show without the name or assets of a big company -- or any company -- behind me, I couldn't just get a list and cold-call. I needed somebody's seal of approval. I needed to be introduced."
Eventually, King stumbled onto the idea of selling by referral. She began to speak to groups on financial topics. "I asked people not for their business but for speaking opportunities." In the process, she would garner a captive audience as well as an implicit endorsement from her sponsors. "I could get 20 to 30 minutes of face time with 30 or 300 people all at once." And she could reap one to two solid clients from every speaking engagement, which she considers a fairly decent return.
King's experience illustrates the iterations any soloist is likely to pass through in winning customers. Traditional sales methods rarely work for soloists. They can prove both costly and time-consuming. Besides, few soloists show any native talent for selling. Referrals, on the other hand, often help pick the lock to new business. When that first good account is finally landed, it's a critical coup. "When I got my first client and that client paid me," King recalls, "I could have kissed that check. I didn't know whether to frame it or cash it." (She cashed it.) For King and her fellow soloists, that initial customer becomes the prized cow, supplying the cash flow (provided one learns to collect) as well as the confidence to win the next one. "You move from worrying, Will I ever have a client? to, Will I ever have another one? But that is a more manageable fear."
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Where to Draw the Line
In the beginning, survival instincts tell soloists to bring business in the door. Any kind of business -- it doesn't matter what sort. If the check clears, then it's a good account. If the cash flows, then it's the right business to be in.
The unwillingness to clearly define the enterprise is perhaps understandable at first. For soloists, training their sights on one niche seems a costly luxury when cash is scarce and business sporadic. But in the long run it is difficult for soloists to sustain a generalist's or a chameleon's existence in the marketplace. Generalists will frequently find that potential customers have enough of their kind on their payrolls already. The chameleons, constantly positioning and repositioning themselves, introduce inefficiencies into their own operations and create confusion in their marketplace. Soloists should seek to be flexible, yes. But invertebrate, no.
