Inside A One Person Business - An Interview With Simon Rodrigues
Join Ellen as she sits down with Simon Rodrigues, a successful one-person business owner who leveraged his Unique Contribution for strategy and storytelling, to make the move to Mexico and create a six-figure income whilst working with brands he loves.
How do entrepreneurs get started in launching their own one-person business?
Inside our brand new series Ellen Donnelly, founder of The Ask, sits down with successful one person business owners and teases out the strategies and stories, so that you can apply them to your own entrepreneurial journey.
In this episode Simon Rodrigues and Ellen discuss:
Simon’s decision to leave full time employment as a startup Chief of Staff and pursue a self-directed path,
How changing his thinking about his career from a ‘ladder’ to ‘portfolio’, opened doors when first starting out, and his advice for those of you who are doing the same
The early choices he made around accepting any and all work to then refining his focus, and standing for a very particular type of work
How Simon has gone on a journey from trading his time for money (hourly rates) to creating a service he can productise and built assets around, and how this is an evolving journey
The choice to start a newsletter about LATAM tech, reaching 3k subscribers, and how this serves his consulting work
Read on for the full transcript.
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Ellen Donnelly
Hey, Simon, thanks so much for joining us on the one person business interview series. How are you doing?”
Simon Rodrigues
Yeah, doing well. Thanks. Thanks for having me.
ED: Yeah, excited to learn more about SableWorks. Obviously, I come at this interview from a unique perspective, having coached you at the start of your journey where you were a chief of staff in employment. And it's such a joy to see where you're at now. Remind me where you're calling from today.
SR: I'm in Mexico City at the moment. I spend about 80% of my time here now and the rest back in London.
ED - Yeah, so I'm in London. That's where we met. But obviously, being self-employed, you've been able to move around the world. So I'd love to talk a bit about that today. But let's start by telling everybody what SaberWorks does and how you landed at this proposition for your one person business.
SR: Absolutely. So SaberWorks is the name of my consultancy right now. It's a one man band. And what we do is we help early stage startups, typically around seed series B, at the intersection of strategy and storytelling. So that can comprise a number of things. I'm a management consultant by training. I was the chief of staff at several early high growth startups. And so when I left, I saw that really there was a need, particularly at the early stage, to help work with some of these companies on this intersection of strategy and storytelling. What does that mean? Strategy is a very fluffy word, and so is storytelling. But what's interesting is when you unite the two of them, every single business needs both of them from day zero, both understanding who you are, who your customers are, and how you can reach them in the most compelling way.
And frankly speaking, because stories are so sticky and it's the way that the human brain engages best with information, unifying those two means that I can help startups with everything from their fundraising pitch all the way through to the way they think about translating their high level vision into an annual strategy, all the way to doing white papers, reports and content for them.
So I came into it really by saying, look, at first I have this particular skill set. Not everyone begins this way, but these are the things that I can do by virtue of my training. Where can I plug myself in?
And after having a number of different engagements with different clients, some in fintech, some in edtech, et cetera, some products doing pure strategy, others doing things like content production, I could go back and say there's actually a niche here where I can help you both figure out what exactly it is you're trying to crystallize about your value proposition and then making that material so that you have case studies, blog posts, white papers, a go to market strategy to go and implement that.
ED: Got it. So it's very much about honing in on what that early stage startup needs in order to communicate their value proposition and your Swiss army knife of skills. Tell me a bit about the services that you offer, how do you leverage your time or your services in that respect?
SR: Absolutely. So I think what's interesting about this particular problem space is that early stage startups are just chaos by nature. And so a lot of the exercise is trying to put a bit of structure around the great ideas that the co-founder or CEO at C-suite have, but making that something tangible enough that you can start to see traction and iterate as you go. So one of the pieces of work that I do is to come in and look at a company's value proposition. What does that mean? You can break it down really simply into what problem do you solve, for whom, how and how is it differentiated?
These four questions are incredibly simple, but also incredibly powerful. It can lead to really impactful conversation, particularly with founders and oftentimes more of their marketing and sales teams with some linking it back to products to say, you probably have an idea, you have some customers, you have some traction, but have you stepped back to think about what it looks like in terms of the customer archetypes, the way you describe that to them and how you could be weaving this story together to tell one really cohesive story about what the company's mission is, how that's inspirational and relating that very tangibly to all of the different products and features that you have. That's one piece on the value proposition side.
The second major piece that I will do is to then come in and do something that frankly doesn't need a full time person all the time, which is something like a strategy roadmap. The reason that it has a few different names that it can go by is that some people think of this as coming in and doing goal setting or strategy workshops or OKRs. Really, for me, it's all about saying, ‘let's have a few impactful conversations to come up with a structure and a system that you can implement over the next six to 18 months that help to get your startup from where it is today to what those often super ambitious milestones are’.
That often aligns with a fundraising timeline. So there is a bit of added pressure because, again, we're talking about loss making businesses. And the reason that that can be super high leverage is that number one, you don't need someone full time often to just come and do strategy; so it's a skill set or a problem area that you can carve out of the business and very, very tactically, and it's useful to have an expert.
And number two, when it comes to doing strategy, it often helps to have a third voice in the room who could either ask questions or also just facilitate the conversation amongst people who are already in the team. It's something that because startups are so lean is often sometimes lost. Larger corporations will do these type of strategy days and retreats and things. You don't often need all the bells and whistles that those come with, but just having a neutral party in the room to stimulate a conversation in the right way can be very valuable. That's the second bucket.
And the third bucket comes down to your content production, which is a variety of things. My favorite pieces of work are doing meteor reports and white papers with clients that help to establish their expertise and credibility in their sphere. One of my past clients, Wiser Funding, and I got to do a really cool report where they have a credit algorithm that's their proprietary approach to helping companies lend safely and scale safely. And so they apply their lending algorithm to the financials of the top 16 clubs in the UEFA Champions League.
I'm a football fanatic, so I came in and wrote with them and really helped them see the bridge between how their credit algorithms could link to why some of these clubs were doing so well on and off the pitch. So that's a really fun example. Other examples sometimes look at content strategy and distribution strategies around taking a value proposition, translating it into something that users care about and just trying to come up with some engaging content to say, how can we reach people and maybe inspire them while also teaching them about your product in a way that feels a bit more honest and authentic and genuine?
ED: Amazing. There's so many cool, exciting projects. I know we've spoken a lot about some of the work that you've got involved in and hearing you speak, you come across so knowledgeable and clear about what you offer and why it works. But perhaps for somebody watching this thinking, ‘I'd love to do that, I'd love to work with startups, I'd love to do storytelling, I'd love to do strategy’, but they're maybe still in employment, they're not even self-employed yet. Tell us a bit more about the starting steps. Like what happened when you first thought about doing this? How did you leave your job to do this and build up that roster of clients and all these incredible case studies?
SR:
The thing that I stumbled upon by accident is that I would first advise moving away from thinking about your career as a series of steps on a ladder and to start thinking about it as a portfolio with things that you can point to in the past.
Anyone who, say, works in design or even in marketing in some cases will probably already be thinking in this way. I find it happens less with operations, strategy, product professionals. And the reason that I say that is that your first goal while you're in full-time employment, if you can afford to, is to try to take on one or two side projects that you can do without needing to rely on the income that can be the first data point you have that lead to a tangible piece for your portfolio. Because the beautiful thing about portfolios is that once you have them, they're your greatest asset when it comes to selling and building new business. But when you don't have them, getting that first piece can be the toughest part. So in my case, there was a Series B FinTech that needed some content writing done with really simple blog writing work, but they needed someone to do it. And I thought, I need to build up a portfolio doing this. So I'll write some blogs for them and get that wheel spinning. It gave me not only a piece or two for my portfolio that I could then point to, but also gave me confidence to say there's a different selling process.
This is a different way of thinking about the way I spent my time. Let me start to understand what that's like. So I had one client at that point which gave me the confidence. At that point, I made the decision that I was going to leave. And I think in my individual case, there are some people who launch into the freelance world or the business building world and say, I know exactly what my mission is, this is the thing that I want to bring into it. In my case, I thought I want to go solo, there are many different things that interest me and I have a growing portfolio.
How can I start to get pieces of interesting work to basically get little data points about what I think is going to be the most meaningful, the most impactful, and then one day the most monetizable and the most scalable? So I went from having that one client to then basically saying, I'm going to be going solo, I'm open for business. I got lucky with some of the clients that came to me.
But one of the things that I would also very much recommend is for anyone starting, try to join one to two really high leverage, high impact communities.
That could be a freelancer community. That could be an industry group. If you want to be a fractional professional then join the community for those fractional professionals, because they can often be amazing places to both find out what others are doing and also to understand where the demand is. One of my early clients, which was ghost writing an ebook, came to me through one of these communities that I had known of and actually another piece of work ended up parlaying itself in a completely different sphere because of that.
So the two main lessons are start with a portfolio, start with communities. And if you think in those two lenses, that will really help you to get over that first hump of fear, which I think many do have in getting over the first hurdle.
ED: Yeah I love that advice, especially borrowing from the world of design or art. Where having a portfolio is like day one of the graduate career path, whereas if you've just been in a more generalist role, or like you said, operations or strategy, you don't think of it in those terms, but being able to pick it apart and say, actually, I can do this, I can do this; these are the building blocks. I remember when you were working with that BTB FinTech and you thought ‘I don't just do block writing’, but look at the doors that are now open. So I bet you're so thankful for just taking what you could in those early days of building an income on your own terms and not coming from your paycheck; that is such a journey in and of itself. Like it's a skill that you learn in addition to the skill of the thing that you're offering your clients. So looking at you now and knowing that you can kind of post six figures in your business and that's in such a short space of time, it's such a transformation and it's such a compelling case study for anybody watching.
So let's actually flip the script and talk about things on the other end of the spectrum, which is not how do I find my first client and can I make enough money? But I've actually got too many clients, too much variety that I don't know what I stand for. I don't know what my thing is. How have you dealt with that and where do you stand now? And we're going to use the expression unique contribution because that's what this is about.
SR: Absolutely. So, yeah, I think the first thing to say is in my case, I definitely took the approach of saying yes to all pieces of work until I could afford to say no or I wanted to say no. So that's one thing coming at it when you get to a place of enough security to be able to start moving more towards your unique contribution. Again, I lean on this idea of a portfolio of work where if you can pause and look back at all the pieces you've done and we've even done similar exercises back in our coaching before I had left full time employment.
It's quite a simple exercise, make a list of all the things you've done, come up with two of the three dimensions that matter to you, whether it's how impactful the work felt, how energizing it was when you did them and how much you learned in the process. I think those are probably three simple factors that anyone would care about. And then to just rank them and to try to come up with an idea of why.
Let's say you have 10 different projects and you can go back and say these were the three that scored the highest on this. Well, that's a really good signal that you should probably follow the things that make you feel fulfilled, feel energized and feel like you're learning.
That's maybe not always the case. Maybe sometimes it was because you actually loved the client, even though you didn't feel that engaged with the work itself, but you at least begin to build a map for yourself and think of this portfolio now as a preliminary data set about you and your own customers. I'm in the process of doing the same thing now. And I think many freelance and solo business owners will try that. This is a constant process, I think, for many of us in order to figure out who is my ideal client or workis, need to start by saying..this is where I've added the most value and it's given the most to me based on these pieces of work.
Then figuring out, okay, fantastic, how can I start to tweak and shift my brand positioning both in the way that I talk about myself, my values and what I stand for, and then in the way that I talk about my own service or product suite, whatever stage you are in the productization journey.
And so in my case, what I'm starting to learn is, you know, I initially started by saying, great, I'm a guy with a brain and a laptop, and these are all the different things I can do. Hey, my stand's open, I'm a bit of a handyman. Seth Godin, I believe, yes, the marketing guru. this is his idea where you start off and you're a handyman, right? People call you up because they know you can do a good job on a number of things and you're convenient, but to go from being a handyman or a handywoman to your unique contribution, which is understanding, hey, before I could fix sinks, do the electrical wiring and also lay drywall. But now I'm really just going to focus on making not only beautiful drywall, but painting beautiful walls in your house. And that's all I'm going to do. And you can begin to on your LinkedIn, on your website, gear the type of work you've done towards shining a light on how good you are at building and painting these walls or whatever it is.
In my case, that's moving towards the direction of saying there's this unique linkage of strategy and storytelling, which I'm still working on the vocabulary of, which is really impactful for early stage businesses, particularly in these injections of really intensive focus on short-term engagements in a freelance way, which can often be more impactful than just having the same team that's always in it, thinking about it in their mind. And eventually I'll be working towards saying, how can I productize this into not only taking case studies, but building IP around it, building a community and building an environment where I can help you guys for thinking through some of these things, which not only have the double benefit of saying number one, I've now codified what I think so that when I work with a client, my time is more leveraged, they get more value. I can increase my rates and add more value, but also I can post these on my website, give these things away. And it's great for brand awareness, great for brand building and building inbound because ultimately that shift from moving from handyman to professional. It's about moving from saying, I'm going to take any inbound that comes my way to know I'm going to have my little corner of the universe and I'm going to shout out about these things that I know. So when people hear strategy and storytelling, they come to SaberWorks, but they think of Simon and that's how you move. So it's having that unique contribution that allows you to stand out in minds so that somebody knows when they should come to you as opposed to ironically, when you're always available, you're almost, you can, it's easy to fade into the background because no one knows exactly what it is that you do. And if they have a particular problem, they want a particular solution. If you have a general problem, then it can be a bit trickier.
EB: What I love about what you're talking about is this transformation from borrowing my time and I'll do whatever you need doing to, hey,I productize the package, what I know works for your businesses and what I know I'm really good at and here is codified in your words. And that not only leverages your time, but it also ensures that the people who are choosing that are choosing that way of working because they've chosen you, you know, based on what you've learned. What I see a lot of founders or whatever the word you want to use for them do is hear advice, like have your offer, have your package, have your pricing, know what you stand for before they've done any of that previous legwork. It's so hard to pick from a void. And that's the thing I help people do is like find out what makes you unique, what you're really good at, how you work, why you work, and then how you market yourself, all of those things can be done in a way that's very used so that you can stand out even before you have a really tight niche. So on that note, is there anything you've chosen to do from a marketing perspective, a networking perspective that's helped you get where you are today that maybe you wouldn't have known you would have done? Like, I know you've got a newsletter, for example.
SR: Yeah, it's a really good point. So from a marketing standpoint, one thing that I've done, mostly as a side project, when I moved to Mexico City, I launched a newsletter called Technopoly, which is an English language newsletter covering the weekly news in the technology and VC space. It's a very fast growing space, you know, in the space of 2020, 2021, venture capital investment tripled from five to about 15 billion dollars. We've had a correction. So it's not quite as large as what it once was, but long term it's growing.
And I saw that, from my side, I wanted to write, I wanted to get involved in this space because it makes sense for the type of work that I do. And I'm interested in it. And at the same time, there was a pretty clear gap in the market for something short and sharp weekly that everyone could gather around. So I launched that. And that has been just a phenomenal tool for networking within Mexico, but also around the region of loads of readers in Brazil as well. So getting to chat to them online, virtually have plans to take trips at some point in the next couple of years to go and visit some of them.
And while that was a large time investment, it was a great way to build a completely organic following. Now there's about just over 3000 followers. We just cracked recently. And so to have this community of people who are reading every single week is a great way to say, I want to go to the excellent founders, others who are building their own agencies, talk to VCs that frankly, without having that newsletter in place, my visibility is much, much lower than it would have been otherwise. So a newsletter is a great way to do it. There's a number of ways to build newsletters and there are things that I do differently, things I can think about in the future and what I haven't done yet, but if I could do is, and we'll be doing very soon is on things like websites, what I often find to be the most impactful is being super clear about the work that you've done in the past. And I think some of the websites that have, for example, case studies on them and really crisp descriptions of what their problem spaces are, tend to work the best, they grip me the most, they grip some of my clients the most, because one thing that I've come to learn is I started this by saying, here's all the things I can do. These are all the solutions and services I bring.
Oftentimes the best way to sell is not to sell a solution. It's to listen and understand what the problem of this particular client is. And eventually you listen to that so many ways and you deliver your own solution in a bespoke way that you can say, okay, I now have seen the same problem five times, fantastic. How do I solve for that problem in a particular way?
And on websites, if you can describe the problem really well…why do humans love looking in the mirror so much? There was a famous study that put mirrors in the same room as chimpanzees and they spent hours staring in the mirror, right? Like not that humans are chimps, but the idea is we love to see reflections of ourselves in the world. We feel understood. We feel listened to. So if you, on your website can talk about the problems that you solve, then you've got someone who's saying, yes, that's me. Yes, that's me. You build dispense, you build intention, you build a lot of goodwill. And by the time you give what the solution is, everybody's waiting for it.
It's like, okay, great. you've seen me, you've taken me on the show. It's supposed to just say, I can write you a blog post, I can write you a white paper, I can do a strategy workshop. It's like, no, the problem is you need to get from A to B. Your brain is in chaos and you need someone who can help you make sense of it. Here's how we might do that very different sales process. And that's definitely the direction I want to go towards.
ED: Amazing. I think if a listener can't take the advice from a strategist and storyteller at this point, then who can they take the advice from? Like that just puts it into perspective, right? You've been around the houses. You've helped with the business, go around the houses. People still didn't talk about the problem enough, even though we're told all the time, like start with the problem, everyone's so, as you say, keen to sell their solution, my AI powered X or my, whatever platform. And it's like, well, what's the point of this? Who cares? And where's that mirror back to them? So love that analogy. We're coming up to time. So let me ask you how people can find you, how you work with individuals or businesses that might be watching.
RS: Absolutely. So you can find me on LinkedIn is the best way to do it. You can also find me on Twitter. The way that I like to work with clients is quite simple, most of my clients are extremely time poor founders, and so I understand that you need to get up speed really quickly. So it starts with a 30 minute conversation where my goal is really just to try to understand as much about the problem space of your universe, whatever it may be.
And then I have a conversation about what it is that you think you need and what I might be able to bring to the table. Because I have big, several examples of case studies and templates that I can bring oftentimes that some of these conversations end by saying, great, here's a case study or here's an article. You can go and implement this yourself. That's, you know, I don't feel like you need me. And other times it's the way of saying, okay, well, these are the three things we can do, let's have a discussion there. Um, I'm flexible in my, in the way that I do work. So there's whether it's fixed fee or sometimes some people like to do more of a time bank mentorship system. But really it starts with a conversation and that's where I like to begin and end with the person on the other side of it.
ED: Well, we had one of those exact moments when we were catching up over a beer and I was telling Simon about what I needed for the ask. And then I was like, wait, this is what you do and the client became the consultant in that case. So yeah, great working with you, you know, fine. So I'm, I know that you've, you've said so, so I can say it again
ED: Thank you for your time today, and we'll stay in touch.
SR: Thanks very much, Ellen. Take care.
