While occupying a niche might seem to limit opportunities, it can in fact expand them. For Severson, the decision to specialize ultimately made his business grow. "I started out as a generalist in the local market, but the local market went up and down and limited my growth. The business could grow only as fast as the local economy was growing, plus there were a lot of local accounts that could not afford me. I figured it would be wiser to be a specialist in a regional or national market, to get a smaller piece of the bigger pie."
The arena in which Severson determined to focus was narrow, to be sure: takeover battles involving rural electric cooperatives. Devising strategies to defeat hostile takeover attempts by large utility companies became his not-so-meager mainstay. According to Severson, that small stream provided a steady flow of clients. "That narrow niche has brought me business from South Carolina, Colorado, Arkansas, and Minnesota."
And, paradoxically, it has also led to opportunities outside his intentionally small purview. A utility battle in rural Colorado led to work on airport referenda in Denver, which got him a piece of the governor's race in Colorado and later led to contracts with gubernatorial campaigns in a handful of other states as well.
Like Severson, both King and Leanse realized the need to keep a tight focus on their markets. King homes in on a clientele of small-company owners, while Leanse sticks to installed-base and user-group marketing in her consulting practice. Keepers, Leanse's jewelry business, targets an even more circumscribed customer base: bespectacled women who are both fashion conscious and forgetful. She sells beaded eyeglass retainers.
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Battling Isolation
No matter how tiny the operation or how minuscule the niche, the solo enterprise is rarely a game of solitaire -- at least not one that's easily won. Without exception, the practitioners we interviewed considered isolation among their most formidable threats, psychologically as well as professionally.
"It can be lonely," says Jane King. "Anybody coming, the way I did, from a corporate environment is used to having a shoulder to cry on on a bad day or collecting a pat on the back on a good day. You lose that." Collegial ties are often sorely missed and difficult to replace. But the need for them is more than emotional. It's quite strategic. Says King: "It is very important to find other people who are like you. You need a consortium of mentors and trusted confidants, people who can console you when business is lousy but who can also give you useful advice -- tell you yes, it's normal to worry this much about the business, or no, that software program is not a good investment." Perhaps because her phone rang so seldom in the early days, King did a lot of dialing for counsel. "I asked every person I'd ever met if they knew of anyone who had done this. I'd get numbers and more numbers and call. It made an enormous difference to me to connect with others who'd been through the same ordeal."
According to King and several others, joining trade associations and professional organizations becomes an important ritual in fending off isolation and establishing contact with peers who become both benchmarks and boosters.
The soloists' obsession with relationships, under different circumstances, would warrant intensive therapy. But relationships are so essential -- both personally and professionally -- to the enterprises of people like Severson, King, and Leanse that it is not delusional to consider those ties, as Leanse does, "the lifeblood of the business."
Like a circulatory system, Leanse's network continuously pumps leads, referrals, new contacts, market information, and business advice through the channels of her operation. "There's no such thing as a useless contact," Leanse insists. A phalanx of old bosses, former colleagues, past employees, solo peers, vendors, subcontractors, customers, and advisers becomes a virtual marketing and sales force for the company of one. And its value cannot be overstated, especially given that soloists don't typically market by the rules. They don't conduct market surveys or do mass mailings or advertise or field armies of salespeople. They just don't talk to strangers. Unless they know a prospect or at least know someone else who does, they don't pursue that person's business.
The care and maintenance of relationships become paramount. That means that quitting a job or saying no to a customer must be handled with the utmost delicacy. When Ellen Leanse left Apple Computer, for instance, she didn't say good-bye. Or au revoir, either. "Just because you walk away does not mean the relationship is over," says Leanse, who continues to do business with her old employer in what she considers an open marriage, not a divorce.
In the nearly four years since she left Apple, Leanse has run several marketing projects as a consultant to her corporate alma mater. "Keeping the people at Apple part of my community has directed me to one business opportunity after another." A contract with Apple has led to a contract with Oracle to a chain of other projects from there. "It's an ever-widening web." She claims that 100% of her consulting business, called Concepts, Ink, in Menlo Park, Calif., can be traced to referrals.
