A hazard of my job is being on LinkedIn far more than is healthy, and a hazard of being on LinkedIn too much is falling prey to the themes of any given era.
At the moment it’s all about scale.
I appreciate that ‘scale’ can mean just growing your revenue, rather than your team and the structure of your business but, for the most part, that’s what people mean and/or think when you say ‘scale’.
I also don’t really want to exit.
That is, I do want to retire at some point of course, but I don’t want to take what I’ve currently got, ‘scale’ it, prep it and exit. And then move on to the next thing.
Apart from anything else, it sounds exhausting.
I want to be alone
Don’t get me wrong, I am all for SMEs growing. I’ve been helping small and not so small UK businesses do that for decades. I am a big supporter of small business and its key part in our society and economy.
But I’m a loner at heart.
I don’t want to be anyone’s boss.
I feel like ‘scale and exit’ is the one-man-band equivalent to the corporate ‘get good at your job then get pushed into management’.
It seems to have become ‘just the way things are’ and there’s no room for doing things any other way. Which is disappointing because a lot of freelancers, particularly, became freelancers because they didn’t want to get good at their jobs and then get pushed into management.
Words mean things?
The terminology around the whole thing is also frustrating.
Following a brief fad of calling everyone ‘solopreneurs’ (or ‘femprenuers’, excuse me while I hurk 🤮), we’re now all ‘founders’.
Founder suggests building something. Growing it.
What am I founding, if I want to remain as a one-person entity?
Horses for courses or blinkered thinking?
The problem with trends and prevailing themes is that they tend to become all-encompassing.
A few years ago, I was lucky enough to snag a place on a funded business growth programme for people in a certain region. I was looking to develop and strengthen the services I offered, as an independent consultant, and move away from the ‘feast or famine’ cycle that often comes with working for yourself.
It soon became clear that the purpose of the programme was to grow each business specifically so they could take on and train staff.
For the record, that’s a good thing for a lot of businesses.
For the record, I even actively help promote ‘scale and exit’ strategies – and the people who are good at helping businesses scale and exit – myself.
I just wish I’d known that about that course before I went into it; aside from anything else, not knowing beforehand meant I’d inadvertently taken a place someone else could have had.
I got a few weeks in and tried my best to make it fit before I realised that it really wasn’t the programme for me. So I left and embarked on something more appropriate to my own, highly specific, irritatingly independent, goals.
The force is strong
Fast forward half a decade and I’m currently enrolled on another business growth programme, this time to help me develop my new consultancy. So far, all the webinars and other support have been really good, very useful and effective.
Part of the programme offers the option to have a mentor allocated to you, to help with your aims.
I’m pretty sure I completed the intake form with some really clear objectives, but I’m still so incredibly wary of being nudged towards the scale and exit model.
Over the last half decade it seems to have become even more difficult to remain independent.
For flip’s sake
‘Founders’ are out there, tooting their horns, building, scaling, leveraging and, ultimately, exiting.
Where individuals are considered, they are being pushed towards ‘flipping their offer’. This means taking the services you already offer, repackaging them, shining them up and raising your prices to astronomical levels.
That also sounds exhausting.
I want to do my job, do it well, and be paid a sensible amount for the value I deliver.
That’s it.