4: Learn to be a cult leader

By definition, most high-value skill stacks can’t be taught in schools.

If the masses could easily access them, they wouldn’t be high-value skills anymore. You would become replaceable. And value comes from scarcity.

Here’s the skill stack to thrive as a one-person business.

1: Learn to Tweet your way into a boardroom

A one-person business requires leverage.

You can get leverage via:

Money
Employees
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a bunch of money lying around or a workforce ready to do my bidding.

As a first-generation immigrant, money and networks weren’t given to me. So instead of going through the front door, I tried a back door approach.

How? Through social media.

I committed to:

Documenting my journey
Posting content 3–4x per week
Spending 3–4 hours networking per week.
My content works for me 24/7. All around the world. You can’t get better distribution than that.

After 3 years, the results floored me.

My now multi-millionaire business mentor DM’d me for a meeting
I attracted a five-figure per month client via LinkedIn
I got speaking opportunities, and meetings with high-level people.
Some might call me lucky. Others call me well-prepared.

Who’s right? Both.

Luck is nothing more than opportunity meeting preparation.

“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.” — Thomas Jefferson.

Make today’s work, tomorrow’s leverage.

Read also: How to manage your money as a single person

2: Sell your sawdust (and hammer)

What pisses you off?

Start there.

All my highest-performing content on Medium and LinkedIn came from a place of frustration.

I would identify problems and challenges that drove me mad, look to solve those problems, and then share my solutions.

You’ve done the same thing.

You had poor financial management, so you created a spreadsheet to help you budget and plan. Sell your financial sawdust.
You were overweight and unhealthy, so you created an exercise routine and diet you actually enjoyed. Sell your health sawdust.
You get my point.

Think about problems, create solutions, and solve in products.

3: Ditch the “build it and they will come” mentality

Nope.

That’s dumb (with a large dose of being naive).

Build something. And then learn:

Marketing & Sales
Branding
Offer creation
Positioning
This is the harsh reality:

A mediocre product with great positioning will beat a great product with mediocre positioning.

There are so many talented but broke entrepreneurs.

They have a suite of great products, but never thought about distribution (point #1). No one knows about their work.

That was me at the start of 2023.

I spent a solid 3 months building a digital product, only to release it to crickets. I was deflated. It took me several months to recover emotionally.

I’ve learned my lesson. Watch this space in 2024.

4: Learn to be a cult leader

Not really (but kind of).

You need a mission to live by.
You need to lead a tribe of people.
You need a vehicle and framework for impact.
My personal mission is:

I solve the problems of entrepreneurs, side hustlers, and creators so they can solve the problems of the world.

Every goal, strategy, and daily action I take is downstream from this mission.

This didn’t happen overnight. It took loads of experimenting, testing, and iterating for me to end up here.

But when every action aligns with a meaningful purpose, you wake up feeling like a winner every day.

A useful hack is building a community around your mission.

Find others who resonate with it.

Pro tip: Build a tribe with your vibe.

Read also: 11 ways to reaching your full potential

5: Build your value capture net

I started my career in the charity and community sector.

While I loved what I did, the incentives of the sector aren’t aligned. The people who produce the most value don’t get rewarded for it. Sometimes you can even be punished for it (weird right?).

And you can’t achieve financial independence through ‘feeling good’.

I wanted to have an impact, so I decided to drive a different vehicle.

So here I am, diving headfirst into the one-person business model.

I still work hard. I still care about impact. But through business and entrepreneurship, I can create value and capture it too.

As Warren Buffett once said, ‘It’s not about how hard you row, but what boat you’re in.”

Once you create value for someone. Capture it.

How?

By gathering:

Testimonials
Case studies
Reviews
This type of content will be the lifeblood of your business. It builds your reputation, and trust and validates the results you can get for people.

Social proof is everything in the online world.

Your income will never exceed your skill set.

Here’s the core message:

Get used to reinventing yourself every 12 months.

The pace of the world demands new skills. The skill stack that got you here, won’t get you there.

Upgrade, upgrade and upgrade some more.

With the internet, you have no excuses.

You can learn everything for free or low cost. You can use money to shortcut your learning curve by hiring a coach or buying a course.

As Naval Ravikant once said,

“The means of learning are abundant, it’s the desire to learn that is scarce.”

Contributed by Michael Lim

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