Greg Smith is the founder and CEO of Thinkific, a leading platform for creating and selling online courses.
Success can often be a double-edged sword for entrepreneurs and creators. You spend countless hours building your business based on your unique expertise. You inject it with your core values and personality. Like many business owners, you discover that the more of yourself you put into it, the more you get out—so you work longer and longer hours.
That can sometimes lead to burnout. Unfortunately, it may feel like taking a break or even a small step back is impossible, especially if your business is entirely designed around your presence. However, the good news is that there are ways to simultaneously increase the success of your business while reducing its dependence on you. I’ve experienced this myself and have witnessed other entrepreneurs do the same.
As a lawyer, creator and entrepreneur, I’ve tried many strategies to scale the businesses I’ve started while reducing their dependency on me. Some have failed, but some have produced exceptional results.
Maybe you’re in need of a bit of time off, looking for some financial rewards, want to scale your business beyond where you can take it personally or even looking to dial back your involvement in the business for good. Here are some steps you can take, including an approach that’s well-known in financial circles but just starting to come up for creators and small businesses.
The bonus? When you free yourself up financially and give yourself time to think, you can often create even bigger opportunities for your business.
1. Remove Yourself From The Brand
When I launched my first creator business, an LSAT preparation course, I intentionally set it up with a unique business name rather than my own. I knew that I might want to bring in other instructors one day, and I didn’t want it to be tied to my face or involvement. Thanks to this setup and some top-notch automation, I was eventually able to remove myself both from teaching and running the business so I could build out my next idea.
I’m not the only one who’s chosen this path; more and more creators are going faceless with their businesses, operating them from behind the scenes without putting their name or persona out there. There is a trade-off with this approach: It can be harder to grow a business this way. The value of a personal brand can be significant—especially for social-first, creator-led businesses.
However, there’s a way to get the best of both worlds: Start with a personal brand and then evolve it by bringing in others. Without your name and face in the spotlight 24/7, you can start to redirect your time (or simply take some time off). It’s also a great way to expand your offerings by bringing in other areas of expertise and setting yourself up for rapid growth.
I’ve also seen top YouTube channels employ this tactic as they scale and then introduce new characters to the mix. For example, the founder of Shut Up & Sit Down, one of my favorites, has largely moved on to a new project, leaving the original business to continue operating with a new team. In Epic Gardening is Changing, the founder actually walks through the change with the audience.
2. Take On Investors
The beauty of distancing yourself from your brand and growing your team is it can actually make your business more attractive to investors, most of whom would rather invest in a brand than a person. As someone who has practiced securities law around financing, mergers and acquisitions, this is a subject I’ve spent some time on, and I’ve advised many entrepreneurs on how to structure financing deals and how to make their businesses more attractive to investors.
An infusion of cash means a little less financial strain on you, but in my conversations with many creator-solopreneurs, this topic surprisingly hasn’t come up. I suspect many solopreneurs simply don’t realize it’s a possibility; in fact, a growing number of venture capitalists are interested in aligning with creator businesses—particularly those with the potential to scale.
Unlike many of the VC investments you see making headlines, most creator business deals are small and involve a different kind of investor. A little research will uncover creator-specific VCs, and—no surprise here—they’re often creators themselves.
3. Consider A Secondary
Typically, when you take on investors (in a primary offering), the funds are allocated to help your business grow. However, that doesn’t really benefit you if you want to take a step back.
There is another way to take on investors—and it’s a lesser-known strategy that can benefit founders more directly. It’s called a secondary, and it allows a primary shareholder to sell some of their personal shares to an investor to pull out a bit of equity. The secondary has a ton of advantages, as it can set you up with some financial freedom while you still own and control the business.
Of course, there are other creative ways you can gain financial or time freedom from your business—recurring revenue models, partners, collaborators or a combination of them all. One of the best ways is by building an efficient, high-margin, high-cash flow business, and introducing digital products can be an easy entry point.
However you choose to do it, just remember that freeing yourself from financial and time stresses doesn’t have to mean the end of your work as a creator. Ultimately, finding ways to take a step back gives you the chance to thoughtfully consider what you need to do to keep going. In many cases, this allows you to think bigger and take the business so much farther.
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