The Freaks Shall Inherit the Earth: Entrepreneurship for Weirdos, Misfits, and World Dominators

9Are You a Solo or Small Business Owner?

As with Chapter 7, if you're not running a solo business or not a small business owner, feel free to skip this chapter. If you're just curious, then I won't stop you. Read on, superstar.

The Solo Business Owner Origin Story

There are a few ways that freaks end up running their own business. Maybe your story is like one of these scenarios.

• You got sick of your day job, so you quit and launched your own project.
• Your work was outsourced, so you started something.
• You had a day job, launched a side project, and quit the day job once you made enough money to feel stable.
• Somehow you accidentally started a business.

All of these are possible. Maybe you had a variation of the above. And if not, how'd you get into this mess?

My own story has a few shifts. I left my telecom job and started working with entrepreneur Jeff Pulver. A year after we started, things didn't quite work out; we were too soon to the market. I then moved to working with Stephen and Nick Saber at CrossTech (now The Pulse Network). While there, I launched my own group, New Marketing Labs, as a division of their company. Not too long after, I started Human Business Works as my own stand-alone business. Somewhere along the way, I sold New Marketing Labs into the larger Pulse Network operation, and ran HBW full time.

What's great about how I did what I did was that there was always a salary built into it all. This allowed me to earn money and helped me understand how to compensate ...