with Sarah J.Bray of S.Joy Studios

As I sit here fully caffeinated, running on zero hours of sleep in the Starbucks down the street, solopreneurship is heavy on my mind. I’ve given it up. And if this fails, I cannot, will not go back.

It’s not that being on my own was that bad. In fact, for the first few years, I swore I would never hire anyone. With barely any overhead and my ability to do anything and everything to the epitome of perfection (a trait I’ve since discovered isn’t quite as good as it sounds), I was invincible. No economy could blow my umbrella inside-out. I was too nimble for that.

But around March of this year, I started struggling with anxiety in a massive way. My Type-A self has always had a bit of a nervous streak, but until recently I’ve counted it as an asset. When I am faced with a problem, my ever-ready mind keeps attacking it until it’s solved. My fear has given me a sort of edge. I’ve succeeded where others have failed because my mind just. won’t. quit.

But when my general feeling of apprehensive problem-solving turned into the feeling that I’d almost been hit by a car — 24 hours a day — I was forced to see my anxiety as it really was. Not as a normal part of my personality, but as something that was killing me. And if I let it, the business that I worked so hard to build.

In the beginning was the girl

2007 was my first year as a solopreneur — at least, for part of the time. After I quit my full-time corporate job, I took on three part-time jobs that would allow me the flexibility of working from home. By day, I was an event planner at a local university, data entry clone for a yearbook publisher, and editor for a budding author. By night, I designed and developed websites for myself — each one being God’s gift to the internet. I had spent the few years prior to that building up a blog, which I eventually sold, giving me the impression that I had a green thumb for online business.

It took me six months to realize that building a blog with later hopes of selling it was not an effective business plan. It hit me that I needed a product or a service to sell if I wanted to be self-employed any time soon. Enter S.Joy Studios.

The solopreneur that was not

By late 2007, I was fully in business. I quit two of my part-time jobs and worked hard to be seen as a “real” business. I said “we” a lot. I used big words. I had a blog (that no one read) that talked about all of the impressive things “we” were doing. I knew I needed credibility, but I didn’t believe in myself enough to make a dent in that department.

Still, people need websites, and I was a good designer. I eeked out a living over the next year and a half, and I started getting really interested in design accomplishing things. Without knowing it, I became a student of web strategy.

In late 2008, I quit my last part-time job. It was the scariest leap I had taken up to that point, but I was so stressed doing both that I knew it had to be the right decision. It was.

By that time, I had dropped the “we”. I had come up with an idea for packaging my services that, at the time, no one else was doing.

My service packages immediately tripled the number of people who wanted to work with me. I discovered Twitter and met Danielle LaPorte, who was the first person to tell me that I was a genius.

A paradigm shift

In early 2009, I decided to take another leap — to do a fire starter session with Danielle. It doesn’t sound like a big deal to me now, but at the time, I was a card-carrying Boot Strapper. Capitals. I didn’t spend money on anything. To pay someone $300 to talk to me for an hour felt like having surgery without being knocked out first. (Note: The price has since gone up.)

My session with Danielle LaPorte was a turning point. Something shifted in my brain. I finally knew what I stood for and what I didn’t. My tentative idea for a pre-built design solution came out fully-fledged — LiteSites grew wings. So many intangible notions took shape that day, most of which I can’t even explain. (By the way, I’m not affiliated with Danielle’s Fire Starter Sessions in any way. All of this is just my experience.)

Two weeks after our work together, I became booked solid and have been booked to over-flowing ever since. I launched LiteSites last summer, which was an immediate and earth-shattering success. I started planning the gold-digging excursion, which was my tippy-toe into sharing all of my hard-won knowledge via an online multi-media classroom format. Things were very, very good, and I was working very, very hard.

The burst of my solopreneur bubble

My flood of anxiety came at the worst possible time — during the launch for the excursion. I plowed through anyway. I kept on persevering throughout the excursion, which I was incredibly supported by — such an amazing group of people giving me positive feedback every single day. But by the end of April, I was done.

But I wasn’t done. I still had clients. Projects that I was excited about starting. I still had (and still have) stuff from the excursion I needed to wrap up. But I couldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t check my email. I couldn’t get on Twitter without this tidal wave of fear swallowing me up.

Surrender

I had lost all of the strength that I was so proud of. My stubborn independence and unwillingness to fail was taunting me. It felt like the whole world was watching me. I could do nothing but lay in my bed and cry buckets.

For a few weeks, the only way I could function was to pray that God would give me the motivation and desire to get out of bed. I would literally say, “I can’t do this by myself. I am not getting out of bed unless I get this sudden miraculous desire to do it.” Some days, it would really happen. I would lay there for 20 minutes and all of a sudden, my desire would shift, and I would find myself at a coffee shop, happily working away. Other times, that mysterious desire wouldn’t come, and I’d sleep until 12 and feel like a horrible person because of it.

Somehow, I started re-gaining my strength and made the decision to hire my first employees. Leah had coded for me in the past and was a dream and a half to work with. Julianne was one of those rare creative firecrackers — if I was going to have a team, she was going to be on it. And here we are.

What three years of solopreneurship has taught me

Life is different now. I still struggle with anxiety every single day, but I’m working through it with a counselor. My days are different now. The more people I hire, the more people I realize I need to hire.

But I don’t regret going at it alone for so long. Solopreneurship was an exciting, rewarding experience. And if I had waited until I had the resources to hire people, I would never have started. Still, if I could go back in time, there are a few things I would tell the younger me.