The Self-Employed Life: Business and Personal Development Strategies That Create Sustainable Success

by Jeffrey Shaw

Overview

From the host of the wildly popular The Self-Employed Life Podcast comes a compelling guide for self-employed business owners, freelancers, and entrepreneurs, on creating a purpose-driven, heart-centered lifestyle..

To be self-employed means more than employing oneself. It’s putting your entire self into your business with a willingness to grow personally and to take action towards building the successful life of your dreams.

Small business consultant, photographer and host of The Self-Employed Life podcast Jeffrey Shaw believes we must develop ourselves personally first in order to increase our capacity for the success in business we want. Then all our hard work pays off!

What self-employed business owners need is both business strategies and personal development to reach and maintain that success. In The Self-Employed Life, Shaw offers a three-part ecosystem for success:

- Personal development: Remove limited thinking and establish forward-thinking mindsets
- Business strategies: marketing, business model, systems and other key tools for growing your business
- Daily habits: Efficient and effective habits to even out the ups and downs of being self-employed

This holistic approach will equip you over the long haul, beyond the mechanics of setting up and running a business.

Whereas Shaw’s previous book, LINGO, was about creating the secret language to attract ideal customers, this book is all about creating the environment to attract the business success and life you want—through thought-provoking questions, supportive coaching concepts, and actionable business strategies.

Jeffrey Shaw plots a path forward for self-employed and small business owners who know that a successful life is only limited by how big you can dream. He shows you how you can set up your environment to create the success you want. You may be in business for yourself, but you’re not in business by yourself

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781774580042
Publisher:	Page Two Books, Inc.
Publication date:	05/04/2021
Pages:	220
Sales rank:	350,243
Product dimensions:	5.58(w) x 8.48(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

How many people can say they’ve never worked for anyone else? Selling eggs door-to-door at fourteen years of age began a lifetime of self-employment. Now, as an experienced speaker and small-business consultant, Jeffrey Shaw helps self-employed and small-business owners gain control of their business in what otherwise seems like uncontrollable circumstances.

Drawing on his expertise as a renowned portrait photographer, Jeffrey shows business owners how to view business through a different lens and offers proven strategies for arranging the often chaotic pieces of life and business into a composition of sustainable success. From a very early age, Jeffrey read self-help books, hiding them from his family so they didn’t think he was weird. One of his favorites is The Power of Positive Thinking, by Norman Vincent Peale. Many years later, having the honor to photograph Dr. Peale and his wife, Ruth, was a career milestone. That portrait now prominently hangs in the entrance of The Norman Vincent Peale Center. Jeffrey’s portraits have also appeared on Oprah and CBS News, in People magazine and O, The Oprah Magazine, and hang at other prestigious places such as Harvard University.

Jeffrey’s TEDxLincolnSquare talk, “The Validation Paradox: Finding Your Best Through Others,” is featured on TED.com. He’s the host of the top-rated podcast The Self-Employed Life, author of LINGO: Discover Your Ideal Customer’s Secret Language and Make Your Business Irresistible and The Self-Employed Life: Business and Personal Development Strategies that Create Sustainable Success. Jeffrey is also founder of Voices of The Self-Employed advocacy group and creator of The Self-Employed Business School.

Jeffrey has three adult kids, and when he’s not traveling, he’s often hosting Waffle Sundays at his home in Miami, where friends old and new gather for homemade waffles, a mimosa or two, camaraderie, and genuine connection.

Read an Excerpt

I have always made marketing a priority. It has to be. It also has to be done in a way that feels good for you so that you stick with it. The good news is marketing has evolved to be much more aligned with the behaviors and desires of most self-employed and small business owners. Marketing has become much more honest, authentic and transparent. When you are your business, how could this not be a better way to market your business? Many people used to think of marketing as dishonest, manipulative and kind of gross. I mean, it wasn’t that long ago that tobacco manufacturers were marketing cigarettes as cool and glamorous, knowing full well they were killing people. Of course, similar manipulative marketing goes on today. But thankfully, consumers have a whole new standard. Minimally, consumers require honesty and transparency in marketing. If they find out otherwise, it’s all over social media. Rightfully so. Or if there’s a discrepancy between a brand’s public image and how they treat their employees, it’s not likely to stay a secret for very long. Decency is the minimum requirement in marketing today.

But we don’t want to meet the minimum requirement. To excel at marketing today, think about it as moving people, emotionally. Emotionally moving them from where they are, perhaps from being a stranger, to becoming a customer. Emotionally moving them from being unsure which of your products or services to choose, to being able to make a clear decision. When you begin to think about all your marketing actions and even sales actions as needing to emotionally move people, marketing and sales will never feel creepy again.

Table of Contents

Introduction Being Self-Employed 1

1 Why We Work for Ourselves 11

2 The Self-Employed Ecosystem 23

Part 1 The Self-Employed Ecosystem: Personal Development 39

3 Get Out of Your Own Way 45

4 What Moves You Forward 65

Part 2 The Self-Employed Ecosystem: Business Strategies 79

5 Embrace Hug Marketing 83

6 Create an Emotional journey 95

7 Build a Business Model of Multiples 113

8 Set Up Systems for Success 125

9 Develop Loyalty, Advocates, and Referrals 135

10 Spread the Word with Podcasts 149

Part 3 The Self-Employed Ecosystem: Daily Habits 167

11 Create a Steady Foundation 171

12 Create a What's Going Right Journal 179

13 Expand Your Thinking 187

14 Switch It Up 199

15 What's Next? 213

Conclusion A Beginning 233

Acknowledgments 237

Recommended Resources 239

Editorial Reviews

Jeffrey Shaw was the #1 rated speaker (out of 15) at our ProfitCon 2018 event. You have a powerful message, Mr. Shaw!”
—Mike Michalowicz, keynote speaker, author of Profit First, Clockwork, Pumpkin Plan and others

From the Publisher