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 The Solopreneur Life | Passive Income | Home Business

Featured Solopreneur Laura Brandenburg: “You Need To Be Self-Aware”

  • By Larry Keltto
  • 14 Sep, 2010

This is “Featured Solopreneur,” an ongoing series that gives all of us a glimpse at how other solopreneurs operate their small businesses. Click Here to read more Solopreneur Success Stories.

Laura Brandenburg

Name of solopreneur:
Laura Brandenburg

Name of business and city:
Clear Spring Business Analysis; Denver, Colorado

Web sites:
Bridging the Gap and Clear Spring Business Analysis

Type of business:
Independent consultancy, social media site

When did you officially go into business?
September 2008

Why did you start your own business?
At the time, I wanted to build my career in business analysis by accumulating diverse project experiences. I saw independent consulting as a means to broaden my perspective. I am a driven individual and I was a bit jaded by seeing the investments I had made in my jobs help build significant monetary benefits for executives with whom I didn’t always see eye-to-eye. I figured I owed it to myself to see if I could leverage that investment for a more direct personal benefit.

What was the best thing you did when you were starting up your business?
I set up a blog. The blog, Bridging the Gap, is now the cornerstone of a new business model. My vision for Clear Spring Business Analysis is to help organizations realize their best ideas. Bridging the Gap supports this vision by helping business analysts become leaders and advance their careers. It’s important that members of my community become more confident in their next step. We are a relatively new profession and under constant scrutiny as to our role and value. Because of this, each individual business analyst has a big weight on their shoulders. Bridging the Gap is about giving each business analyst the help and support they need to grow and take on leadership positions within business analysis.

What is a mistake that you made that you have learned from?
Early in my blogging career I assumed I had to answer every e-mail and respond to every question individually. As my blog and readership grew, this became impossible to sustain. I’ve learned that I can still be personal and responsive using some automation and support tools. I’ve had to shift my focus to enable my blog to grow. While I still listen carefully and craft content to meet the needs of my readers, not every e-mail is individually written. I learned to balance responsiveness with sustainability.

What is your biggest current challenge in the business and what are doing to try to solve it?
There are so many! I try to tackle them one at a time. Right now I am learning how to effectively market both my products and other high-value products to my community. While marketing my products has come naturally to me, converting on third-party products has proved more of a challenge and something I want to overcome. There is so much great work out there in our profession and I want to help my audience find the best possible products to advance their careers.

A second challenge for me is around building a scalable mentoring practice. My vision is to help individuals with their careers, and while I find this rewarding, the sales and fulfillment process can be quite consuming. I’m currently experimenting with different business models, practices, and processes to find the right approach for my business.

What are your goals for the rest of the year?
With recent product launches, my community and lists have been growing very quickly—more quickly than I’ve ever experienced before. I’ve already hit a few of the traffic and registration goals I set for 2010 and am on pace to exceed nearly all the others. For the next few months I will be focusing on making this growth meaningful and sustainable by tightening my tribe. I have some initiatives in mind to encourage collaboration and celebrate individual successes.

I am working on a new product, an online course to help business analysts optimize their job search process. What I’ve found in my resume evaluations is that many members of my community lack focus in their job search and do not know how to appropriately market their qualifications. This leads to burnout and excellent business analysts left unemployed for long periods of time. I want to help people find positions they are qualified for by helping them showcase their skill sets in ways that recruiters and hiring managers will appreciate.

Finally, with my recent focus on The Promotable Business Analyst, I’ve let a few of the more gnarly details of blogging slide. I’ve got a long list of little things to do to tighten up the site, e-mail marketing, and how I’m involved in social media.

Where do you want to be with the business in five years?
If I could answer the question, “what will you be doing this time next year?”, I’d consider myself an insightful person! Truth be told, this journey has continued to surprise me at every turn. While I don’t know the specifics, I do know that this time next year I’ll be helping business analysts on their career journeys. I want to be in a position where I can live solely from my income helping business analysts so I can pick and choose my project work. In five years, I imagine I’ll be continuing to build on this mission but I can’t pretend to know what life has in store for me over that long of a time frame.

What are your main software programs?
MailChimp, WordPress, MSOffice, GoogleDocs, TweetDeck, Windows LiveSync, QuickBooks

What’s your advice for aspiring solopreneurs?
Get out and talk to your customers. And listen. My business model and career direction changed several times in my first year as an independent consultant. It was by talking to people and listening to what they needed and would pay for and then meshing that up with what I could deliver that I found a solid direction. I had to let go of a lot of ideas I was excited about simply because the marketplace wouldn’t support them.

It’s also important to experiment. I started writing “How to Start a Business Analyst Career,” my first eBook, simply because I had a bit of extra time on my hands. I had no idea this would be the foundation for me turning a blog into a product and set me up for other product releases.

Finally, make strategic decisions to automate and outsource. I spent the first 14 months sending my eNewsletter via an Outlook/Word mail merge with a manual sign-up process that I managed in an Outlook contact list. Looking back, I would have saved a lot of time choosing an e-mail provider early on, but I also probably would have chosen a provider that didn’t meet the longer-term needs of Bridging the Gap. When I shifted to MailChimp, my subscribers started to grow exponentially and I opened up all kinds of new e-mail marketing opportunities. I still think I did this at exactly the right time and made the best possible decision about the product. Sometimes delaying the obvious decisions is strategic.

Similarly, decisions to outsource are also strategic. I chose my bookkeeper because she was also strong in social media. Because of this, I’ve been able to leverage her virtual assistance capabilities to help sustain the business. It’s been possible to take small steps so I can learn how to outsource and not put myself into a position of negative cash flow.

Underlying the above advice is the reality that as a solopreneur, your personal and professional growth constrains the growth of your business. You need to be self-aware of your own abilities and limitations to keep the business growing but not beyond your control. I think this is a primary difference between solopreneurs and entrepreneurs.

Are you glad you became a solopreneur? Why or why not?
Yes, definitely. It’s given me the freedom to pursue my own career direction and broaden my experiences not just within my profession but also by building a business. You really can’t underestimate what you learn when you go into business for yourself.

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