How to Build a Million-Dollar One-Person Business | Elaine Pofeldt | Glasp Talk #32
This is the thirty-second session of Glasp Talk!
Glasp Talk delves deep into intimate interviews with luminaries from various fields, unraveling their genuine emotions, experiences, and the stories behind them.
Today's guest is Elaine Pofeldt, an accomplished journalist, content strategist, and author renowned for her entrepreneurship and small business expertise. Elaine has contributed to esteemed publications such as The Economist, Forbes, Fortune, and CNBC. She also authorizes two influential books, The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business, and Tiny Business, Big Money, where she explores innovative strategies for solopreneurs and small businesses to achieve substantial success.
In this interview, Elaine shares her extensive journey in journalism, detailing her experiences from her early days at Yale University to her career at notable publications like Fortune Small Business. Elaine candidly discusses her evolution into covering entrepreneurship, her unique insights into the dynamics of small business success, and the impact of technological advancements like AI on modern entrepreneurship. She also highlights her interactions with inspiring entrepreneurs, her experiences with early thinkers like Tim Ferriss, and how such encounters shaped her perspective.
Elaine delves into the challenges faced by aspiring entrepreneurs, the importance of resilience, and how one can scale a business effectively. Additionally, she provides valuable guidance on writing and publishing books, sharing her insights on how aspiring authors and entrepreneurs can harness their unique stories and skills to build impactful and lasting work. Join us as Elaine imparts wisdom on navigating the entrepreneurial landscape, finding your unique voice, and embracing change to achieve your personal and professional goals.
Read the summary
Glasp
Transcripts
Glasp: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Glasp Talk. Today, we are excited to have Elaine Pofeldt with us. So Elaine is an accomplished journalist and content strategist and also with a wealth of experience in entrepreneurship and small business. She has written for renowned publications such as The Economist, Forbes, Fortune, and CNBC.
Elaine: Thank you so much, Kazuki and Kei. Very nice to be here.
Glasp: Thank you so much. So first of all, you have been a journalist for over a decade, but I'm really curious, you know, your starting point, what did you, why did you become interested in journalism? Or, you know, have you always enjoyed writing since you were a kid?
Elaine: I was lucky that I always did. I remember I was an early reader and writer, and I remember writing stories in kindergarten. And I never stopped. I always loved stories.
Glasp: I see. And you, and then your career, first career was a reporter, right? And how did you become or end up, you know, being or becoming a reporter or journalist?
Elaine: I was one of those kids that I was editor of my high school newspaper. And, when I went to college, I went to Yale University, and I worked for the Yale Daily News. I was the arts and entertainment editor, I had no interest in business whatsoever. At that time, I was co-editor of arts and entertainment. And, then over time, my interests changed and, or expanded, I should say, and I ended up writing about entrepreneurship. But I worked for the first seven years of my career in newspapers, I worked in urban areas in New Jersey, and I had a chance to really learn a lot about how life works in doing those jobs. I worked for the Jersey Journal and the North Jersey Herald and News, which you probably don't know of actually the Jersey Journal I just heard is folding. You know, it was back in the era of print newspapers.
Glasp: Oh, I see.
Elaine: And then I got kind of burned out on writing about bad news. I was the, I actually one of my beats was, I covered City Hall, but I also covered the Hudson County Jail, and I would go to the jail. And you can imagine some of the stories. And after years of that, I felt like I'd like to do something kind of light and fun. And I wound up going to Women's Wear Daily, I became a fashion editor for about a year and a half. And it was really fun, but it was a little too light for me. But I found in writing about it, I got interested in the business of fashion, and just business in general. And then I wound up getting a job at Success Magazine, where I became the acting editor. And then I went on to Fortune, to Fortune Small Business Magazine, which I joined, they had a website, and it was the early days of the internet, and I ran Fortune Small Business online. And it was, at the time, very cumbersome to publish online. And it was just me and this one web producer, and it would literally take all day to publish one story. And if I made one single typo, she'd have to go get the engineers involved to fix it. It was a very interesting time. After all, I got to see the whole internet evolve, which is something that has made me very excited about AI because I saw how it was such a game changer for people around the world in terms of how we work and what could be accomplished. And also in terms of exchange of information, similar to podcasting, I remember I got, it was a letter from somebody in Vietnam, who had a question about dealing with nepotism in a factory that he was involved with in his family. And he asked me, because I was in the US, how we would deal with it.
Glasp: Oh, wow.
Elaine: And I remember, you know, nowadays, getting an email like that from across the world would have been nothing, right? Because we could write to anybody at any time. But at that time, you couldn't do it. And I thought, wow, this is going to be a big remover of barriers for people, though people around the world will be able to communicate with each other and get good ideas from other countries. And some of the walls between countries are going to come down, even if they'll still be there. They'll be permeable. And we can all learn from each other. And we saw this happen, you know, over the last 15 or 20 years, where opportunity has come to places in the world that had no opportunity. People find out about things going on, we have digital nomads like they'll travel to a place where things are happening. And it's been tremendously exciting. So I'm excited to see now what's going to happen with AI. I know a lot of people are worried about it. But I think it's going to be a very valuable tool for us and transform the one-person business and many types of businesses.
Glasp: Yes, I agree. And then some people say, so it's a little bit jump. But you know, some people say, you know, with AI, we could really build the one-person billion-dollar company. Because of AI, we can automate many things with AI, and so on. And you wrote a book, you know, the million dollar one-person business, but I think it could be the billion dollar one-person business, you know, in the future with AI, maybe. Do you have any thoughts about this?
Elaine: Well, I like how you think about that, Kazuki. I, I think that, um, it's very possible, because we're just learning how to use these tools, and experimenting with the prompts and everything else about them. Once people master them and start sharing that information, it's going to be very much like the web, where things just become second nature for us. And maybe one person can do the work that 40 people used to do, without sweating it without working 100 zillion hours a week, you know, it, where they can have a life, I think it will also give us back some leisure time where we can do more creative things than we have been able to do. Because, you know, you have a startup, it takes a lot of time, and the time you're putting into it is well worth it. But it's time you're not out walking your dog or seeing your family or doing other things. So imagine if we could get back that time and still have the startup and scale even faster. I think that's what it's going to allow us to do. It's also a tremendous game changer in terms of access to capital. Because not everybody is plugged into those networks. And why do we need capital, we need capital to hire people and to pay for technology. But if we need to hire fewer people, and now, you know, maybe we can use no code and low code tools to create things. Now we don't need as much money to do the same things. And now people that maybe they're shy, maybe they just didn't know about where to go for money, whatever it is, now they may not need that money, and they could still scale a startup or, or do a high revenue one-person business, I think we will see a million, a billion dollar one-person business. I don't know what industry you would be in. But it will be very interesting to see who is the first one.
Glasp: Yeah, yes. See, yes. And, sorry, a little bit back to you know, your career at Fortune, a small business magazine. And then you were at the time, I think you were interviewing many like small business owners and sort of planners, I think you're featuring them in the articles, I guess. And how do you remember any interesting founders at the time? Or, or, you know, any example use case, you know, and time?
Elaine: Well, one that stands out for me was Tim Ferriss from the four-hour workweek. He, at the time, we did a book excerpt, I was the book editor, among other things. And I had lunch with his publicist one day. And I said, you know, it's so hard to find good business books that are really engaging. And the person has business acumen. And it's not just all smoke and mirrors. And she said I have a book for you. You've got to take a look at this. And nobody knew of him at the time, he was new to the scene. And he sent it, and I loved it. And it wound up being the first book that I excerpted. And I had to interview him because we had certain requirements about the business details and things. And eventually, 10 years later, when he had the 10 year anniversary of the book, I wound up co-hosting the show with him a couple of times. And what I found in doing my books was a number of the people in the case studies had been inspired by his teachings. I had some real-life case studies of real businesses, not scammy, let me sell you a webinar kind of business, but like professional services businesses and e-commerce that had done what he talked about so early and realized it, and they got to one million. And it was very exciting to see when you excerpt something, you don't know if people will apply the ideas, but people did. And they took so much inspiration from him. And he was such an early thinker on all of this stuff. It was just incredible how he had that foresight.
Glasp: You mentioned it like when you interviewed each of us 10 years ago or something.
Elaine: So 10 years ago, yeah, I'm trying to think of when this would have been 2018. So probably 2008 was when his book came out. You can fact-check me on that. But that was when I did the excerpt. And then I had my family. I didn't really keep in touch with him that much, but I noticed that so many of the case studies when I was doing my book mentioned him. So I reached out to him and said, you're not going to believe this, but all these people were inspired by you. And he was excited to see how his ideas had been applied. And then it was, I think it was in 2018 that I was on the show a couple of times. But I follow his work pretty frequently because I think he's one of the most important thinkers on this whole idea of independent work and creating your own lifestyle based on what you want and not what the system says you should want. I think he's just tremendously engaging around talking about it.
Glasp: Wow. Yeah, amazing. And then, but you were interviewing and you met a lot of, I think, sort of entrepreneurs, small business owners, and at the time, but that was, I remember about 10, almost 10, 20 years ago. But then your first book came out in 2018. I think, what happened? Did you think about writing the book in those days? Or I'm curious why it took eight years for you and because you were preparing to write or summarize, you know, your learning into book, you know, I'm curious, you know, your journey from like learning from meeting small entrepreneurs to writing the book.
Elaine: Yeah. Well, it happened by accident. It was a result of my Forbes blog. When it was in 2007, I went freelance and I had my family. My older girls are now 20, but I had them in 2003, they're twins. And then I had another child. So I had three children under the age of four. So I went freelance for more flexibility, but I always worked full-time. And, you know, another desire that I had was to write about things that maybe I couldn't write about, just one publication. Usually, one publication will have a certain mission, but I had some other ideas too. So I started my business and I was writing for a whole bunch of different places over the years, you know, on entrepreneurship for a while. I was the small business editor for Crane's New York business. I did all these things as a freelancer. I wrote for the Economist Intelligence Unit. I wrote for Inc. You know, I was still doing a lot of stuff for the people at Time Inc., like the Fortune Small Business, et cetera. So I guess these ideas were just percolating. And I started writing more about freelancing for Forbes. And my editor at the time, Tom Post, said, you know, you're writing a lot of stuff about one-person businesses. Why don't you make that your blog instead of just entrepreneurship in general? And those posts were taking off. And what I realized was a lot of people don't have the dream of creating a startup, but they would like to be independently employed. Like there, I guess we're on a continuum, right? Elon Musk is on one end and maybe, you know, the solopreneur writers on the other. I'm mildly entrepreneurial, but I'm not as entrepreneurial as Elon Musk. And you're somewhere in between as startup founders. And I believe that entrepreneurship is very inclusive and that there's room for all of us on this spectrum. And maybe where I am right now, my shift where, you know, in five years, maybe my daughter graduates with computer science skills and we do a startup together or something like that. And now I'm more, I'm leaning more into that entrepreneurial side of myself. So I think everybody has that potential. And that kind of interested me too, that a lot of these people starting the one-person businesses, they were in corporate. And a lot of times people are told, like, if you're a corporate person, you don't have what it takes to start a business. You're so used to the cushy office and blah, blah, blah. But corporate jobs are not that cushy anymore. They're really hard. And my observation after interviewing probably thousands of entrepreneurs at this point over many years, is they're great entrepreneurs because usually what happens is they find something they don't like in the company, you know, how it's done. There's a better way. They ask their boss if they can do it. Their boss tells them no. They're really frustrated. They quit and start a business. And it may be many different types of business. It could be like a one-person FinTech. It could be a scalable startup. But all those skills that they're getting in corporate America are very useful. They're building a network. They're learning how to get along with people. They learn how to present an idea. They learn how to have good work habits. They learn how to get things in on time. They learn the art of selling, which even if you're not selling something specific, you're selling people and your ideas.
Glasp: Oh, yes.
Elaine: If you're sitting around a conference room table and they say, OK, you know, what's your idea for this project? And you speak up and say what it is. Of course, you want to be credible. You want to give them the information they need. You want to be engaging. So you're learning a lot of things that once you're out of that world are extremely valuable how to approach somebody that you don't know or how to network professionally, how to seem professional when you're dealing with people. It's such a great school. I mean, Tim calls it learning on someone else's dime. But what I find is not that many people in the business world, especially in the venture capital world, really embrace that. They think you've got to go all in right away. Meanwhile, people over 50 are some of the most successful groups of entrepreneurs. There are a lot of young entrepreneurs, but some people have kids. They can't just go all in and move to a business accelerator. Maybe they're starting it on the side while working a full-time job, but they're still just as entrepreneurial. And I think what's so exciting with the one-person trend is it's for all and you can tailor it to wherever you are in life and you're not locked into staying in that one place. Maybe it's the two of you in the startup. I don't know how many people you have, but you can always hire more people. You decide, well, this thing has legs and we want to go further or we got more funding and now we're going to grow it to 50 people. There's no one locking you into what you did in the beginning. But I'm kind of at that ground level where I'm looking at the people at that first stage where they could go down a few different possible paths.
Glasp: I see.
Elaine: But in answer to your question, that was a long answer. A literary agent noticed that I was writing all these posts about the one-person business and they were going viral and she followed this. I started doing it in about 2012 and I think she might have reached out to me in about 2015 she saw all of them and she thought this could be a book. It was kind of in the back of my mind anyway, but I didn't know how to make it happen. I had not written a book. She and I collaborated in terms of packaging it up in a book proposal and marketing it based on what I had learned and all that reporting. Luckily, by that point, I had done so much reporting. I knew it was a real trend. I had census data to back me up. It wasn't my own data. It was very thorough government-issued data. It was stuff that was out there in clear sight. Anybody can look at that census data. You have to know how to read it, but it's not that hard. It was very credible. I think one of the reasons it was not being celebrated was we always celebrated job creation, creating jobs in the community. We didn't celebrate creating an alternative to having one of those jobs, but there's a certain portion of the population, not everybody, but some people like that and that's their potential. If they realize that, they're going to be happy. Then other people love being part of a corporate team. I feel there's room for all of it.
Glasp: I see. Thank you. By the way, writing blogs and writing books are different.
Elaine: Pardon me?
Glasp: I'm sorry. I'm curious about the writing books process. Was writing blogs and blog posts and writing books different? Or what does the process look like? I've never written any books in my life. But I'm curious about that process.
Elaine: Well, writing a book requires a lot of project management, it requires a roadmap, like you would have a business plan for business, not everybody really has one, but kind of in the back of your mind, you need one. And with a book, you need to think through what the journey is for the reader, you're starting in one place, and they hope to get something I'm talking about a nonfiction book. They hope to learn something in the course of the book and experience some personal change in terms of their knowledge. Most people hope to be able to execute it. I mean, it could be a business book, it could be a book about fitness, it could be a book about finance, personal finance, whatever it is, but you're going into it to learn. So I have to think about where is the reader right now. And where do they want to go? And how do I get them there? So then I break it down, what are the steps? What are the big steps that they have to take in terms of their knowledge in order to get there? So you know, chapter one would probably be an overview of, you know, where they're heading, and you sort of highlight what's ahead. And then I usually do a very robust outline where I'll figure out which, when you're writing a book, you want to think about the reader's journey from start to finish. So chapter one would be an overview of where you're going to be taking them. And you'll look ahead to what some of those key steps would be. And then you might use chapter two to establish the why of the book, you know, what is the trend that you're going to be writing about? And why? Usually, what I'll do in the outline is figure out if I'm going to use anecdotes at the beginning of each story, I'll decide which ones they're going to be. So I don't go down rabbit holes, because you want to make sure the anecdotes support what you're trying to say. So sometimes you'll think this is a great story, I've got to get it into the book, but it doesn't really do anything to support your core arguments for the book. It's a big process. It takes me sometimes a year to do an outline because it's that robust. But then you also have to do a book proposal if you're going to publish with Random House and Norton and Co. So they require a pretty robust book proposal. And usually, you have to go through a literary agent. So if you don't have an agent, you have to get representation, because they don't want just some random person saying, oh, you know, my sister-in-law said I should write a book. Here it is. They, you know, they have a zillion people that want to write a book, kind of like American Idol, right? You have to be vetted. And then if they like it, they'll say they're interested. And then it might go to auction, where they're competing to be able to be your publisher, and then it might take anywhere from a year to two years after you've sold the book to write it. So you have to really look at it as a long game. You have it's something that like, maybe you'll make a lot of money from it. Maybe you won't. That's not the reason to go into it. Sometimes people think, oh, I have financial problems, I should write a book, it's going to become a bestseller because I'm a ghostwriter too. And I have those types of people approaching me. And I say you might not make any money from it. The only person who might read it is your mother. Do you still want to write the book? If you still are committed that you will do that, then it's time to go ahead. But it's good to test the idea. I had tested my ideas in a blog. But as you pointed out, it's not the same as writing a blog. But I didn't know which profiles people found interesting. If I didn't answer certain questions readers had, they would usually write to me and ask me about it. So I knew, okay, people are very curious about this. How did they find the time to do this? Or did they quit their job? And I started to get an intuitive sense of what people need to know to do this for themselves. And what I learned was, people like to learn from their own peers. It's sometimes too intimidating. We all love to get inspired by Elon Musk Sarah Blakely or someone like that. But they're so far ahead of most entrepreneurs that in a way, they're very aspirational, but they're also demotivating because it's so hard to get to where they are. So when I have people that are just everyday people that got to 1 million, it seems much more attainable, especially when they're doing real businesses. I started doing events either in person or I have a library program at the New York Public Library that's on Zoom, where I have the real people from my books come on and I interview them. So you can judge for yourself how credible they are. And they're all very heavily vetted by me. I really check them out thoroughly before I write about them because I don't want somebody misusing the platform just to sell something. These are people who have real businesses, like event planning businesses, auditing businesses, and everyday businesses, but they've run them well using the best of technology, using outsourcing, and being super smart about how they find new clients. And they share a lot of their best practices, which are always evolving too. So since I interviewed them for these books, many things have changed. So I always ask them, who are you and what have you been up to lately? Because every time I ask them the question, it has changed. And they're always doing new things, which is another lesson of never standing still and never just resting on your laurels. We all have to keep on reinventing ourselves and listening to the marketplace. Because last year, whatever was relevant then is not relevant now. It's changed.
Glasp: I see. Yeah, thanks. So in that sense, when do you think this is ready to publish a book? Because you can edit, and fix continuously many times. But at some point, you need to publish a book. So do you have any tips? Or yeah, this is the time to be ready to publish one. How do you decide?
Elaine: Well, if you're self-publishing, I think you need to get some target readers, like beta readers, to respond to the book and let you know, do they understand everything? Are there unanswered questions? Are they bored? Are they interested? Very trustworthy people, who will not just protect your feelings, people will be brutally honest with you. If you're using a commercial publisher, you get a deadline, and it's due. And they'll ask you if you're saying something. Like my first publisher, Random House, they asked me to send it in chapter by chapter, one chapter a month, which I thought was a really good best practice, because it's easy to let things creep up with a book. You can get into overwhelm. And all of a sudden, it's the last minute. These are a lot of my ghostwriting clients. They get a contract, and then they can't finish the book because it's due in two months, and they need help. That's not ideal, right? Because you need to let things bake. It's similar to a startup idea, right? You have the idea, that you're out going for a jog or a bike ride or something, and it's in the back of your mind, and then an insight will come. But if you wait till the end to do the whole thing, there's no room for the insights to come. You're just crunching it out, and it won't be as good. I mean, you need a little adrenaline to it. There's a balance. But I think you definitely need other people to read it. And you have to take yourself out of the process in a way and be very thick-skinned about it. And think about the fact that a book is a literary work, it's a creative work, but it's also a product. And people have to want to buy it, they have to want to read it. It's like a startup, right? You might be so passionate about it, but if you're too early to market if someone else has a better version of what you're doing, somehow you're not conveying how great it is, you just don't have the words to express how great it is, then it's going to fail, and nobody will purchase it, whatever you're selling. So you have to also put on your entrepreneur hat as a book writer. You're also expected to be very engaged in promoting it, which is another thing. If you're going to write a book, you have to set aside all modesty. It doesn't mean you have to talk about yourself, but you have to get out there and talk about the message of the book and find the audiences it will be helpful to, talk to them about it, and tailor it. So sometimes I might be on a real estate podcast, for instance, I'm not going to talk about all the other entrepreneurs except for the ones who are doing Airbnb and real estate, because that's what they're interested in. So you have to think about that the same way if you're marketing a product for a startup. Maybe one thing is for small businesses, and another track in your marketing is for B2B enterprise clients. You have to put on many different hats, but the goal is to get the book into the hands of people who will benefit from it. You might target the academic market. Some authors, like David Meerman Scott, wrote The New Rules of Marketing and PR. That became an academic bestseller, and became a textbook, even though it's a really fun-to-read book. So for some people that might be a way to get the book out, there are so many different ways. A lot of people who write books have podcasts, or they do LinkedIn Live. So you have to... figure out what is most comfortable for you. Some people do email marketing. When I work with ghostwriting clients, I have to impress that upon them because they sometimes think that if you build it, they will come. And that does not happen. If people don't know about it, they won't read it. And word of mouth is very slow with books. It's yes, maybe over 10 years, although people will tell their friends, but in the beginning, how do you get it out there? You just put it up on Amazon. There are thousands of books up there. It's not just going to rock it to the top unless you've done some prep work. It's almost like a crowdfunding campaign where there's a lot of prep work that goes in before that ever happens.
Glasp: I see. Yeah, that makes sense. And, you know, I'm also curious about, you know, from your experience and also, you know, from the interviews you talked about, you said you interviewed and met, you know, thousands of entrepreneurs, I think, in the past. And what are the common, some common challenges entrepreneurs face? And because you said, you know, ideally, we could outsource something and hire something, automate something, but some people are struggling, right? What are the challenges that they face and how do they overcome those challenges?
Elaine: Well, I think one common challenge is social pressure or social approval. A lot of us are raised by parents who want us to do well in school, go to a good college, and have a career with a company that they're proud of the name of that company to tell their friends. And if you're going to be an entrepreneur, at some point, you're going to have to let that go and do something that maybe people around you who love you don't understand the reason behind. They may feel that you're taking too big of a risk. And you have to realize that you may not be able to prove to them that what you're doing makes sense for a while and just be comfortable living with that. That's why I often recommend starting things on the side, because that way, you can build some runway because friends and family funding is very important for a lot of businesses. So if people around you don't believe in what you're doing, then you're kind of cutting off an important source of support and emotional support. And you could say, oh, entrepreneurs shouldn't really care what other people think, but we're human beings and we're not meant to live in total isolation. I think social support is very important. We saw that in the pandemic, just us all being cut off from each other, what that did to people's mindset. We need each other and we need community, but not everybody is going to have that kind of personal support. So you have to have a willingness to make it happen no matter how much support you have. So that might mean you have to build your network, go to tech meetups, or things like that. It might mean you get the support of a professor in your business school who mentors you. It might be that you just watch every YouTube video known to man about email marketing or something like that. But you have to have the willingness to make it happen in whatever way you can do it, whatever way suits you and your personality and where you are in life. I think that's very important. Sticking to it is important. And I think it's hard when you have an unstructured work life to be disciplined. I mean, some people are just natural creatures of habit. I'm kind of like that where if I don't get up and do yoga at 5.45, my whole day won't be as good. I'm a Virgo and I'm a creature of habit, but not everybody is. So if you have trouble with motivation, then either you have to find a way to build your own internal motivation or you have external motivation like a coach or a friend who acts as an accountability partner. A lot of times that's why people team up in a startup because you keep each other honest about how much work you're putting in. I would say work-life balance is also challenging because it is so hard. You're fighting a system where we're all meant to go into jobs. And it depends on where you are in the world. But if you're in the US, buying health insurance is very expensive. It's hard to get it outside of a job. So you have to somehow find a way to get that or do without it, which can leave you exposed. If you're riding your bike and you get hit by a car or something like that, then you're living with the threat of that. Not to mention housing is very expensive. So you have to be able to find a way around all of that. Those are just some of them. I don't know if any other specific ones popped into your head when you're asking the question.
Glasp: I see. Thank you. Yeah, so many challenges. And also at the same time, I'm curious about the scaling and time to expand the business. So I remember in the past, in your interview, you mentioned that there are around 30 million small businesses in the US, I think. Then over 40,000 companies make over 1 million revenues. And that's my understanding. Sorry, I need to check.
Elaine: That's good. That's good ballpark numbers. They've gotten better. The number of small businesses is down to 28 million after the pandemic. But the number of one-person million-dollar businesses is now over 53,000. But as I think you're pointing out, this is like a very tiny percentage, less than 1%. So these are the elite athletes of the one-person business. And why I'm so interested and obsessed with them is I think we can all learn a lot from them. They have found a way around some of the obstacles that many people face, which is they run out of money. That's a big one. They run out of time. They find ways to be very efficient. I mean, another way to describe them is capital-efficient businesses. They're doing more with less. They're doing things with the resources of one person that we could never have imagined 15 years ago or 20 years ago before we had the internet and mobile phones. I mean, I'm thinking about like, I'm really going to date myself here. But early in my career, if I had to check a fact, like how somebody's name was spelled, I had to go to the library and talk to the business librarian or call her on the phone, or him on the phone, because we didn't have the internet. How could we look it up? Or you try to call the person, like using the phone book. I mean, it was so cumbersome. And then when the internet came, it was amazing how much change we could do so much more. And so these folks are very good students of easy-to-use, free, and low-cost technologies. And think about Zoom, right? You and I are doing this program on Zoom at probably a very low cost. We're just operating on whatever internet connections we have wherever we are. It didn't take that much to bring us together. It took planning and thoughtfulness, but that was not possible years ago. Everything went through. If you've ever seen the movie broadcast news, these networks control that flow of information. Now, you could do a news show if you wanted to, and people could follow it. And it's totally democratized the flow of information. So these people are on the front lines of this. They have a business. Maybe they do a related podcast. Maybe they're doing a YouTube show that maybe it's YouTube, and then they make it into a podcast. And they're spreading their messaging. And going to online events and speaking at industry conferences. And in those conferences, there's so much combustion of ideas. And that in itself propels all the businesses forward. To me, it's so incredibly empowering, but you still have to have the passion for it and the will to do it. And not everybody does. Some people feel like they're calling us to be school teachers and work for the school system, which is a beautiful thing. And we need school teachers or whatever they do. Entrepreneurship is not right for them at this moment, but maybe it will be someday. I actually feel that with all the change that's going on, everybody should have entrepreneurship as a skill. Because we never know if our whole industry is going to collapse because of some technological change. And we could do everything right, have all the right network, have gone to all the right degree programs, be at the top of our field, and then some disruptor comes in and everybody in our field is out of work. And if we're not entrepreneurial, we won't know what to do next. So if we are entrepreneurial, we could do so many things. We could tap into a whole other set of skills that we didn't even value as sellable skills. Going forward, the human side of things is going to be very important. So things like, you know, for instance, being a mother, right? Like if you lost your job and you were a mother and now your kids are older, you could be a very high-end nanny making a six-figure income. I mean, that's not a scalable business, but you might not have ever thought of that as something that you could do. People are coming up with so many ideas just from very basic skills that they have that they may not even value as monetizable skills. Or you could be a mom who starts an e-commerce website for a certain demographic. That tells me something, right? They have that inner strength, they go inward instead of letting external factors always tell them whether they're successful or not.
Glasp: I see. Yeah, thanks. I think this is, yeah, you already answered a bit, but so, yeah, from your experience, what are the most important traits or characteristics to become a successful entrepreneur? You know, like changing, you know, openness or acceptance of change, or like, you know, keep running. So there are many traits or characteristics, but what do you think is the most important? Resilience?
Elaine: I would say get into the ring. You know, I said I liked martial arts. It takes a lot of courage to step out there and let people criticize. You have to have a thick skin in entrepreneurship. And I think anything that you can do to develop that, you know, write a blog, put yourself out there, share things on social media, speak, and there are going to be people that are jealous of you or critical armchair quarterbacks. And you have to toughen yourself up to do anything to write a book. There are going to be people who criticize the title of the book who have never even read it, who hate entrepreneurship, and who don't think anyone should have a business. I have to put them out of my mind because that's not my people. That's not my tribe. But sometimes it gets to you. And I think one of the most important things is to train yourself not to go down the pit, you know, with people that want to drag you down. Most people will cheer for you and applaud your courage. But there's always going to be those people, for some reason, they stick in your head more than all the people who say nice things. So anything you can do to just get in the ring, toughen yourself up, and realize it doesn't matter what they say, right? If you believe in it, and the people you trust believe in it, that's where having a brain trust is important to like your people who would be very honest with you. But when they say they like it, and it's good, and it's done, you can trust that they're giving you the truth, and they're not soft peddling it, then you can go out into the world with confidence. And I mean, if you wait for everybody in the world to approve of what you're doing, you're never going to get that approval. And you'll just miss out on life, you'll never be able to do anything. So I guess that's what I would say.
Glasp: Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Yes. So I think time is running out, and I want to ask you since our audience is, as I mentioned earlier, aspiring founders, or writers, aspiring writers, newsletter writers, bloggers, and content creators. So what advice would you give them? Let's say to both aspiring founders and aspiring writers if you could add more. You already shared many advice and lessons. But if you could add, you know, one or two more things to both of them.
Elaine: I would say don't try to be the same as other successful people. I'll give you an example. Like with Tim Ferriss, so many wannabes tried to write similar books to him. Don't try to be someone else. Everybody's got some unique pocket of genius. And you may not know what it is. But the people around you know, the things that you are very interested in, what your most interesting ideas are. And if they don't know, it's time to expand your network to other people. It could be a writing group, or it could be an entrepreneur's group. But you want to figure out your unique differentiating factor. It might be that you have an interesting life story, that you came from a different part of the world than the market that you're going into. It could be you have a very unique voice, like if you're a writer, maybe you write very differently from other people. But you want to be different and figure out what your area of difference is. And then find the common ground with your audience. Because whether you're running a business or writing a book, it's really about the recipient. It's not about you. I mean, you do want to have something you want to say. And you want to really refine that message so that it's sharp, which can take some time to really get super clear on what you want to say. But then you need to meet them where they are and think about, okay, you know, what is interesting about this whole thing? Like when I'm doing talks or writing about the million dollar one-person business, it's really about the person who has a job that they don't like. They want to get out of it. And they're like, can I make enough money if I start my own business? No, they're not going to make a million dollars in most cases, because we're saying it's about less than 1%. But what if they made $500,000? Would they be happy with that? Probably. That's very achievable. And I think more people will be at a million if they learn from each other. But it's about them. It's not about me. I'm the conduit to the information because I'm an experienced journalist. And I know what questions to ask. And I know how to check people out and verify things. But it's really about them and their dreams. So it's putting it into language that resonates with them. And that could be the marketing for a product. Like if you made a board game or something, why would they want to play this instead of Monopoly? What is it about it that's so much fun? That's your job as an entrepreneur to get that across to them in the packaging and the font that you choose on the box. And that's the fun of it, right? It's like experimenting and testing and putting it in front of people and not taking it personally. Just keep on learning from the world.
Glasp: I see. Thank you. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for the great advice. And also, this is the last question. And since Glass is a platform where people share what they are reading and learning as their digital legacy, I want to ask you this question. So what legacy impact do you want to leave behind for future generations?
Elaine: Well, I would like to help people to ignore the gatekeepers in their life that are telling them they cannot do something. There are a lot of gatekeepers that get a lot of power out of being the person who decides if somebody can pass go, you know if somebody is allowed to do something, but the gatekeepers we had 10 years ago are not the same people we have now. So be your gatekeeper. You decide if you're ready and do the work. Make sure that what you're putting out into the world is the best that you can do. Make sure that it's excellent. And make sure you put the time into it. Sometimes entrepreneurs have a bias to action. And so sometimes writers do to put it out there when it's ready. Don't wait too long, but make sure it's polished and the best that you can produce. And then don't listen to the gatekeepers, you find a way to make it happen. And you decide what your fate will be. You can't have total control over that only, you know, the universe or your higher power, whatever you believe, but you can have an impact on what your journey is by taking that attitude, not waiting for approval from somebody else.
Glasp: Beautiful. Yeah. And thank you again. Thank you so much for all the insights and sharing your experience with us.
Elaine: Well, thank you both. You asked such thoughtful questions. This was so interesting and fun. And, you know, the work that you're doing is so important, bringing people together and helping them with their development as future entrepreneurs or current entrepreneurs. It's it's really, really important. I mean, the power of podcasting. Wow. And, you know, these online programs, just broaden the world for so many people. So thank both of you for what you're doing.
Glasp: Thank you so much.
