That is the key thing. I was a 1 person consulting/contracting shop for years and it 100% put limits on my income. But they were limits I was happy to accept.
If you are interested in trying to grow, I'd think of 1-2 tasks you can cleave off and hire someone to do part time. Have them be:
- not critical path
- async
- checklist oriented
You'd be surprised at the number of folks that would be willing to help you out. And you'd learn something about whether you feel comfortable outsourcing such tasks.
I felt this way at first when I was doing my lead generation. I documented the process and brought on someone from the Philippines. I then ran into a similar situation where there were a lot of questions that I couldn't spend my time on. So, I built a GPT to help answer questions and to build another me to help them. This was simple and saved a ton of time.
Reflect on the tasks you are doing and pass off the work that you don't want to do first. Start small and continue passing off more work. You can hire a virtual assistant for $5-8 an hour, and it's beneficial to have some basic support. I also helped motivate someone who needed work.
It doesn't take much effort, let me know if you have questions on the tools and documents you would need to support something like this. I can share what I used.
Just accept another person to be an adult, and help you in increasingly good ways and communicate well. Or fire them if they don't
I have a pleasant little workflow maintaining a content-based website. I'd like to hire help, but offloading work to a first employee feels like more effort than just doing the work myself.
How do I transmit 7 years of tacit knowledge, principles and best practices to someone else so that they do good work? How do I teach a writer to use my elaborate static site generator setup that was never designed for other users?
Then comes the paperwork, and the inherent difficulty of working with other people instead of having full control over everything.
So far, I have just accepted that my work has a limited scope, and that as long as I'm satisfied with my income I don't need to change that.