Nine months ago, I climbed down the corporate ladder and jumped off a cliff into the strange and unknown world of solopreneurship—and somehow landed on my feet running.
Today, I’m planning big things for 2025, including a brand evolution, a 10-year anniversary celebration, and target revenues for my second fiscal year in business full time for myself. These things were inconceivable just nine months ago, and this little side hustle I started in 2015 is now profitable and growing.
But growth can be pretty intimidating—especially when you’re one person and you hit that wall one day without prior warning. Here are some things I’ve discovered over the last nine months of my solopreneurial journey.
Aim for more than freelance. From 2015 to mid-2023, Kanyon Designs was just a DBA under which I sold my marketing and design experience to the occasional customer when I had time outside of my normal nine-to-five. I had come extremely close to “jumping off the cliff” in 2019, but it was out of a sense of sudden desperation instead of with the intentional foresight of a solopreneur. As I’m closing in on my first full year with Kanyon, it’s become apparent that this business needs to become more than a mere DBA (it is an LLC legally, but I’m speaking somewhat figuratively). What do I really want out of my company? Do I want to be the CEO, COO, CFO, CTO, CMO, and, most critically of all, sole designer in ten-years’ time? Do I want to be in a position to sell someday? If so, who is going to want to buy a job (or a multitude of them)? It’s imperative that I build a true business—something other than a hat rack with an array of hats hanging on it. Something that stands firm whether I’m in it or not.
Spend more money. Having a family means I’m taking regular draws from the business to fund our living expenses and incidentals. But apart from that, I’m not spending near enough on the business. Organic growth is not free; it still takes reinvestment of funds back into accounting, advertising, technology, consulting and contracting, etc. Also, I’m funding my own personal retirement, so taking a healthy portion of my earnings and setting it aside in my IRA helps achieve that goal and lowers my taxable income. Finding ways to spend money on the business is a crucial part of any success strategy.
Never stop caring (and I mean truly caring). I’ve always felt just a bit icky when any company I’ve worked for in the past shares their core values with me. So many innocuous, banal, cringe-inducing words like “passion” and “trust” and “empathy” get spewed in every direction these days. These words don’t even mean anything anymore, and they certainly don’t differentiate anybody from anybody else. Moreover, they are all-too-often used as a passive attempt to boost internal morale and maintain a healthy retention rate, all of which go too far beyond any consideration of humanity and ultimately serve only as metrics for tracking and charting purposes. So I’ve decided to do away with written values, to kill them with fire. Instead, I will never stop caring about my clients—who they are, who they care about, their families, their lives. All future employees of Kanyon Designs will share this quality as well. It’s the only one required (and, therefore, it doesn’t even need to be stated). Our values are inherent in our actions, not trusted because they are in writing.
So, yeah—3 out of 4 ain't bad. In fact, that's called a win. But I'm not done yet, and I know there's still so much yet to do for and with my clients, my friends, my fellow small business owners, and anyone aspiring to become the latter. No matter what the world throws at you, never stop caring. It's easy to remember, and inherently understood.
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