Ep. 396 Peer support for solopreneurs: Why the right room beats more advice

This is for you if you’re getting plenty of advice, but still feel like you’re figuring this out all alone. Today, we’re talking about the peer gap and why, when you’re defining success on your own terms, finding the right room matters more than finding more content.

Welcome to Reimagining Success, the podcast that helps you build a profitable business as an independent expert, one that works for you and your lifestyle. I’m your host, Anna Lundberg, former corporate insider turned business mentor, executive coach and mum of two. Whether you’re a solopreneur, a coach, speaker, consultant, I’m here to guide you in creating a business that gives you freedom, flexibility and the fulfilment you’re looking for. Ready to redefine success and build a business that you love? Let’s get started.

The flood of advice (and why it doesn’t always fit)

Let’s face it, there is no shortage of information, advice and experts out there these days, including our friends, Mrs Claude and Mr ChatGPT, whatever tool of choice that you have, and that will give you advice on how to grow and what you should be doing. So maybe someone told you you should post more consistently on TikTok, because that’s the platform where everybody should be. Or no, no, it’s all about LinkedIn. No, you have to build a lead magnet, you have to niche down harder.

All this advice comes from a good place and probably it worked for them if we’re talking about a human being. A lot of business coaches will teach the model that worked for them. But something in you already knows that it doesn’t quite fit your situation. And that’s the thing I want to explore today.

The peer gap: who’s actually available for advice

So here’s the problem. 54% of established solopreneurs seek advice from their peers. I’m surprised it isn’t more, but perhaps we’re also lone wolves who think we can solve things ourselves. But if we look at who’s actually available for advice, in my case especially, I might be working with or have been working with beginners who want advice from me. They know that, oh, hey, you quit your job 10 years ago, you manage your business. So can I pick your brains? That’s quite a typical request. And even though I have a business actually selling this kind of support, that’s one group of people that I may spend my time with.

Or it might be people playing a completely different game, you know, someone who’s got 100,000 Instagram following or someone who’s top voice on LinkedIn. There’s another one who’s got a training company with ten different associate facilitators, someone who’s gamed the algorithm and now has a huge audience. They all have very well-meaning advice. It’s not necessarily wrong advice, but it’s calibrated for their model, for their experience.

And in particular, the big names out there probably saw success five or even ten years ago when the world was very different. Even me, and I’ve been around for a while, the strategies that got me to where I was in the first few years aren’t necessarily going to apply today.

Why old strategies don’t always work now

If you take the simple examples of the tools and channels, I did a lot of free Facebook challenges. They were the fun thing, the fancy, effective thing that we did back in the day, and people tired of those. And I closed my Facebook group, ultimately wasn’t the place I wanted to be. People weren’t spending a lot of time on Facebook. We just don’t have time these days to spend hours and hours online watching and engaging in big, long challenges.

Likewise, there was a phase when they did lots of automated webinars. They even pretended that there were people on the webinar with you, which was very odd. And that, thankfully, has died a death. But there’s always some new channel. There’s always some new thing.

Now, of course, with AI, there’s a lot of new things and some of the strategies from before don’t necessarily work anymore. But even if they do work, they’re not necessarily the right strategies for you.

When the blueprint doesn’t exist

When you’re building something conventional, maybe a scaling agency or a course business, a VC-funded startup, then there are blueprints to follow, people who’ve done exactly what you’re doing. However, when you’re building something deliberately different, something that is really unique and designed around your individual interests and passions, skills, strengths, personal situation, income goals, energy, health, etc, by definition, the blueprint doesn’t exist. That is the whole point of defining success for you and creating your own version of that.

However, of course, that means also there is no blueprint, which makes it a little bit harder and very confusing when all those well-meaning gurus and beginners and experienced people alike are bombarding you with lots of different models and lots of different advice.

The other issue is that you’re basically putting a patchwork together of lots of different people. If I follow the Instagram person and the TikTok and the LinkedIn and the YouTube and the Substack, unless I’ve got a team of people or I’m very, very productive, I’d be very, very busy doing all those channels and not doing a particularly good job on any of them.

Or someone has, again, they do training, facilitation, someone else does one-to-one executive coaching, someone does paid talks, someone does DIY courses, etc. If you’re trying to do all of those things, it’s just too much. And it’s not for someone else to tell you which of those things to do either.

So let’s say a person has done really well on Instagram. They might say, you know, consistency really matters, you’ve got to show up and post every day, and that’s fine. But their version of consistency and what’s been working for them may have nothing to do with your version. Or again, the training company founder says systems really matter. Their systems are built for a team, but you don’t have a team beyond perhaps a few freelancers supporting you. So that isn’t as important. It’s not such a big building block. Again, the paid speaker, all about positioning and thought leadership, but it’s built around stages and bureaus. Maybe yours is too, maybe not.

So the problem isn’t the advice in itself, but it’s applying someone else’s model wholesale to your own context.

Why no one is ahead of you on your exact path

And the deeper problem, I think, is that when you’re defining success for yourself, you’re by definition walking a path that nobody has walked in exactly your way. There is no one ahead of you on your exact path. So by definition, trying to find the right answer, and I’ve shared many times on this podcast and with clients, you know, I just don’t believe there is a right answer anymore. It’s just going to leave you frustrated because you’re not going to find that one person.

And to be perfectly honest, this has become very clear to me the last few years. Initially, I did have inspiring models. I worked with a coach who I really looked up to. She was building her business around a family, ironically, because I wasn’t at the time, but I really resonated with her values. I’ve worked with a number of people over the years. Right now, I don’t have one person I look up to. And I think that’s a good thing, because I can take little nuggets from this person over here and that person over there. And I can have a kind of intentional filter as to whether it will serve me and the business model I’m building, because I’m really clear on this is what I want.

Or at least even if I don’t know exactly what the business model might look like in this next chapter, I know what I don’t want it to look like. I know what my boundaries are. I know how much I want to earn. I know there is a sense of enoughness and beyond which I don’t want to grow. I know I don’t want to destabilise the balance I have with my health, with my family and so on. So I have that clarity on what success looks like for me.

What you actually need: peers at a similar stage

So what do you actually need then? Well, you don’t need someone who’s done it identically. Perhaps you just need someone who’s close enough that the advice actually maps. Or you need someone like perhaps myself who helps facilitate that conversation, asks you the right questions, shares what can work, what has worked, proven models, and then you get to choose how and where to apply it to your business.

So working with someone or finding a community of peers who are at a similar stage, you know, not working with a total beginner when you’re a number of years in, not working with or spending time with people who have huge teams when you’re a solopreneur and want to continue to be a solopreneur. Maybe they have much simpler or smaller ambitions than you do, or they have much bigger ambitions. Either way, perhaps it can throw you off your own.

All ways of working, you need only look on LinkedIn to see that there are all sorts of values and lack thereof. Some people care more about sustainable work. Some people say now is not the time for work-life balance. Some people are happy, hustling more than they ever did in their corporate job because they love their work so much.

And importantly, people who won’t try to talk you out of the thing that you’re actually trying to build, who yes, can challenge you, but also understand that no, you don’t want to scale, you’re keeping your business deliberately small, whatever small means, who understands that term time working means you have kids in the half term holidays and Easter and summer and so on, and working during that time is totally possible, but it requires additional support from a partner or from paid childcare or whatever it is. And who understands that those constraints are a choice, actually, and the constraints can make your business model much stronger. And that’s something I’ve shared again on the podcast before as well.

Why the right room is so hard to find

Now that kind of peer is extremely hard to find by accident. It’s quite nice to bump into someone who shares your values, and I’m certainly bumping into more and more of these as I talk more about how I see this and have done for many years, whether it’s at an event or perhaps online or in a community. But a lot of people don’t find that person, and so they do get kind of distracted and overwhelmed by those other advisors who aren’t necessarily giving them the support and the room to discuss what they actually need to discuss.

And this is the gap that I’ve kept bumping into. So many courses, even masterminds, group programmes, we don’t need those. I mean, there’s a role for them, but there’s so much of that. There’s so much information at our fingertips now, first of all from Google to begin with, but now also with Claude or whatever tool that you have, Perplexity and that.

Off Script: building the right room

What I’ve loved to see is how the different members are answering each other’s questions and reassuring each other and celebrating each other’s wins. They do that on the calls, they do that in the group, as well as me being there to guide and to structure and to support.

But it’s really needed, I’d say, especially now in this era of so much noise and slop and more and more people than ever going independent as well, to carve out what your particular version of independence looks like, to stay on that path, not to stay rigidly stuck to something that perhaps doesn’t work, but to hold true to your values, your vision, and then get the accountability and support that you need to make that vision a reality for this next stage of growth of your business.

Before you go, if today resonated, I want to tell you all about Off Script. It’s the community I built for established independents who’ve chosen their own version of success and want a small, consistent room of people who’ve made something like the same choice. Doors are now open for the July intake. Apply now at offscript.club.