If you’ve built your business by being capable, independent, and self-reliant, this episode might put words to something you’ve been feeling for a while.

Doing it alone often works in the early stages of business.

You figure things out, make fast decisions, and rely on yourself to keep everything moving. That independence can feel empowering, and for a time, it is.

But as the business grows, the complexity grows with it. And at a certain point, self-reliance quietly becomes the bottleneck.

In this episode of The Solopreneur CEO Podcast, Carin and Marcia talk candidly about why going it alone eventually stops working, even for very capable solopreneurs who are doing many things “right.”

This isn’t about needing more motivation or another strategy.

It’s about recognizing when the way you’ve been operating no longer fits the stage you’re in.

Listen to the Episode

In this conversation, Carin and Marcia take a closer look at how isolation shows up at higher levels of business and why it creates invisible pressure for solopreneurs who are already carrying a lot.

They discuss how decision fatigue builds when there’s no sounding board, how over-availability often creates dependency instead of support, and why unclear structure quietly drains both founder energy and client confidence.

You’ll also hear why many solopreneurs mistake this stage for personal failure instead of recognizing it as a leadership transition. When you’re holding the vision, the decisions, and the responsibility alone, even small choices can start to feel heavy.

This episode is about leadership, sustainability, and understanding why support and perspective aren’t luxuries at this level, they’re infrastructure.

What We Talk About In This Episode

• Why doing everything yourself works early on but breaks down later.

• How business growth increases complexity and mental load.

• The hidden cost of carrying leadership in isolation.

• Why over-availability often creates more problems than it solves.

• How unclear structure leads to burnout for founders and clients.

• The difference between real support and constant access.

• Why environment and perspective matter as businesses mature.

Key Takeaways

• Self-reliance has a ceiling as businesses grow.

• Isolation increases decision fatigue and emotional load.

• Over-availability can undermine both client outcomes and founder sustainability.

• High-touch support is created through clarity and structure, not constant access.

• The right environment makes sustaining CEO-level leadership easier.

Continue the Conversation

If this episode made something click or helped you feel less alone in what you’re carrying, you’re invited to join our Solopreneur CEO community.

It’s a low-noise space for solopreneurs who want thoughtful conversation, grounded support, and a better way to lead a business that works without burning out.

Episode Transcript

Solopreneur CEO Show Episode 4: Below is the full transcript of this episode for those who prefer to read or want to revisit specific parts of the conversation.

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Marcia:

Welcome back! In the beginning of business, I would spend a lot of time networking, and then it got to the point where networking took a back burner and I wasn't really in any masterminds. I was in the cave working on the business and working with clients and building and doing all of that by myself. And it was okay, until it wasn't.

We’re going to talk about the importance of having community and working with other people. I think anyone that's reading this, might be craving some community.

In the last blog, Carin said, “What got you here won't get you there.”.

It's okay to be in cycles where you're doing things on your own. It just depends on how you work best and if you're in a launch season, if you're in a creation season, if you're in an optimization season, that kind of thing. But if you're coasting and sailing smoothly, that's when things can get a little deafening with the silence. Where you start to question things. And that's when it can be really beneficial to have people that you can talk with and just be in relationship with.

Carin:

Yes, this is definitely one of our favorite topics. What I've noticed, both in my professional career, my full-time job as a chief of staff, and in my business, serving clients and all the things with solopreneurs is how important advisory and consulting is. For 20 something years in a huge organization of 15,000 people alongside an executive, leading that large of an organization there's no way that the executive can do it by themselves. They have to rely on the literal senior advisors. That's the title that they have. And then of course, me as a chief of staff, I'm the number one advisor trying to help steer and guide and influence and help the vision translate into the action that they want to see.

Solopreneurs don't have all that, right? We don't have a team of senior advisors or a chief of staff. We need that type of support. We need advisory service. We just do. Whether it's a mastermind or a membership that you're a part of where it's like peers or whatever it is. Or you hire a consultant or a coach.

The echo chamber of building in a cave is real and you will keep telling yourself, you should be able to figure this out on your own.

STOPPED HERE

You're the expert in whatever thing that your business provides to the customer, but there's so many other things. Like it's mind blowing. There's so much to running your business. We're not talking about starting it.

You've already started, you've done all the startup, right? The launch has happened and the rocket ship is in the air.We're headed to the moon. So now you're running and there's so much involved in that. Running your business is a lot.

And when you're like “I should be able to figure it out on my own, I should know these answers.” or “Why would I need to hire someone to tell me X, Y, Z?”

Or just the blind spots that you don't even know you have. You don't know what you don't know. That's a real thing. Like, you literally don't know what you don't know yet.

There's a lot of layers to it that we're going to get into. A lot of vulnerability that sometimes comes up a lot of. It can open old wounds from childhood.

It's a whole thing. But at the end of the day, for you to really see your vision translate into the action and actually have a business that matches what you want your business to be and the lifestyle you want to have, you just cannot try to white knuckle it yourself. You have to find the right support to help you bring that vision to life.

Marcia:

I'm glad you brought up the childhood trauma. I don't want to classify all solopreneurs as having trauma in their life, but I think that when people take the path to be a solopreneur, it's because they've been burned in the past. They were the person in the group project that kind of took the project by the reins and they're like, you can't do it right so I'm gonna do it myself. Oh my god, this is kind of dark, but I remember seeing a meme and it was like, I want all the people from my group project to be pallbearers at my funeral so they could let me down one last time.

Carin and I have talked about this before. We're in a day and age now where you can systematize your business in a way where you are the only full-time employee or whatever. Where you're the main honcho. And there is a way to do it that is profitable and will not burn you out. So you can do that but we are humans. We're humans running a business and we need to be in community with other people. That doesn't mean that you have to hire a team. You don't have to start an enterprise. But you need to have a sounding board.

That's why there's therapy. That's why there's coaching. I offer one-on-one mentorship where it's a retainer and there's check-ins and whatever can come up. We can talk about your personal life, your professional work, whatever it is that you feel like you need support in.

It's so helpful because if you have a pig in the pipe that's blocking the water from flowing, you're not going to be able to maximize your energy and effort and get the returns that you need. Because you're going to have something that's swirling around in the back of your head where you could just bring it to a group of people or your coach or your mentor or whoever, and just say, "Hey, I need a little bit of help with this, I just need to process it", and you'll be able to move forward.

Regardless of why you became a solopreneur, you do need to have people that are there to support you and to also share with you their experiences so that you're not feeling alone. Because trying to do it all by yourself, it's not plausible. You'll drive yourself crazy. You will have the tornado of the swirl of doom or the tornado of doom just constantly spinning in your brain.

And that's not good.

Carin:

Yeah, that's the worst use of your energy. You need that sounding board because it's high stakes. Let's not sugarcoat it, right? It's very high stakes. The decisions you have to make about your business and in your business are high stakes.

What offers you're going to put out there, what structure you want to create, what systems you want to put in place. This is not small potatoes. You could fall into overthinking, you could fall into worst case scenario, catastrophizing all that stuff, and you again, won't see your blind spots because that's why they're blind spots. You're not seeing them. And so having an outside voice or a place to bounce those ideas and just talk it through, a place to have a mirror reflect back to you where you have done this before or where you actually are doing what you said you want to do, but maybe you just weren't looking at it that way. There are so many benefits of having a community or advisors or some other person who is able to help you see what you're not seeing and help you carry some of what you have to carry as a solopreneur. And it really isn't about letting people into your business necessarily.

I think sometimes that can hold people back, which is why I love, love, love, love that we have an NDA in our society because you can come in and you can just breathe and you can let it all go because you know that if somebody wants to whisper about your stuff outside of these virtual walls that you can sue their butt off, you know? So that's good. No one's going to do that because they don't want to get sued. So I love that we have that protective layer. However, I don't think we need it because we attract the right people. Thankfully. But it's there just to give that extra layer of comfort because you need a place where you can just dump it all, let it all go, share your thoughts in real time.

Things that are half-baked, things that you're not sure if it's a good idea or terrible idea. You can share your stats, go into your system and show things in the back end. A place where you can really get to the nitty gritty and not just talk about fluffy surface level stuff. Because that's not helpful when you are at the altitude running a business that's already doing a certain level of income. And so when you're at that level, the type of advice and consulting you need is way different than what you needed when you were starting or when you were trying to figure out your messaging. You're past all that, you've done that. You know who you are, who you serve, what you offer, all that stuff, right?

It's so important and you have to find the right place to be able to do that because again, you cannot stay surface level or it's not helpful. An example is learning that the average conversion rates are 2%. I don't care about average. Let's go into my system, let's go look at my stats and look at my conversion rate and let's get to it.

We're not trying to talk about general things.

You just have to find that place where you can do that and have that type of support to be able to make decisions faster. If you want to boil it down to the bottom line, it is you have to decide things and you can't be stewing, swirling, overthinking. You have to make those decisions. You have to move forward. Money loves speed. So the longer you wait, the longer you swirl, the money is flying somewhere else. 'cause they are still spending the money. The people you want to be buying from you are buying from someone right now. So if they're not buying from you, that means they could have been, but you're still swirling and overthinking so they didn't get the chance.

These decisions have to be made quickly. But you also want to have some sort of internal assurance that you are going in the right direction with this decision. That's why having that sounding board, or having that community is just so essential to get you to where you want to be.

Marcia:

The crowdsourcing in our society is amazing because everybody is of the same mindset that we're all trying to optimize the offers that we have that are working plus trying new stuff. We have a member who's going all in on Pinterest right now, and so we're looking at her conversion rates and she's sharing stats with us. And we can make suggestions like, have you thought about this. Or provide insights and different lenses for her to look through.

In our recent coaching call, we had somebody talking about attending her first ever retreat. I was like, “Oh my God. Carin, you go first.” So she was sharing her pointers. Then I shared my pointers, and then we had another member join in as we were getting through the call, we were like, Hey, you know, so and so asked about this.What is your advice? Because this member she's done retreats. Like we knew that. She basically validated what both Carin and I had said.

It's asking these questions and saying, "I'm about to do something I've never done before, what can I expect?" And so you have a group of people who can say, “this is what I've experienced in the past. This is what to look out for. This is what you can prepare for”. I found that to be really fun to hear all of what we were saying, it was all in a similar vein.

That's making good CEO decisions, her going on this retreat. Her knowing, okay, I need this for my business, for the connections for some personal time away to not have to deal with all of the home domestic type stuff. You know, it's a heavy time in the United States right now, so it's like anytime business owners can have an opportunity to be in a container, like a safe, warm spot with other people who are on similar journeys, I’m a huge proponent of that.

I like that you said that it's giving people the opportunity to take away the overthinking and the spinning out and the, “I need time to process this”.

No, you need to make a decision.

Leila Hermozi did a post about this recently where she said, you hustle and hustle and hustle, and then there's a switch that has to be flipped where you go from hustling to being strategic. And she's like, every single morning I wake up and I feel bad that I'm not the first one at the office working with people. But she's like, that's not how I'm going make the best strategic decisions because I need my brain to be in a protected space. I need my nervous system to be regulated and I need to not be dealing with a lot of input and a lot of energy from other people and a lot of bs. She has a big employee base or whatever but it's still comparable to how we are as solopreneurs.

If we allow all of these external things to come in, it can affect our decision making. But when we know “I need to make a decision about this”, you can have that sounding board or that advisory group that's saying like, this was my example, this is my situation, this is what happened to me, and then get some good feedback and then take it from there.

Carin:

When you think about someone like Leila, who has a huge company, right? Like totally huge. But it wasn't always like that, right? I'm sure along the way they started scrappy and that's the thing that hustler that's in us, the hustler that we just naturally are. Especially as a solopreneur, it can be hard to quiet that or make the switch, right? Because that's a whole different skillset. It's a whole different mindset, but you still need the hustler too when you're a solopreneur. So it's, it's hard and that's why you need places where you can just brain dump all of that and just talk it through, see that others have similar experiences, like Marcia said, oh, this is what I went through. This is what I dealt with, and have a place to come to a decision faster.

I think if there's anything that you take from this, I want you to think about what decisions are you making? How long is it taking you to get there? How much overthinking, swirling, tornado of dooming was happening? Did you have places where you could consult or get advice? Just think about that and then I'm not gonna sugarcoat it, if you are feeling like you don't have that support, our Success Secret Society is definitely worth checking out.

We would love for you to apply because that's exactly what we built it for. It is not a place where we're going to throw you into a 100 video course or give you a whole bunch of assignments. It's literally, let's talk, let's work through, let's get you where you want to be, what are you facing, what are you wrestling with, where are you trying to go with this?

And then let's help you get there faster. I love the membership that we're growing and I think for anyone who is like, I know the right room is important, I don't have that right room now. Then you have found your people and we want you to apply.

Marcia:

It's such a special place. I'll give you a little bit of the format, in case you're wondering. Um, we do have two Zoom meetings a month. We do the first Wednesday at 12:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, and it's an hour long. That's the hot seat coaching. We record those and then put them in the group so people can watch it.

But that's more like the strategy, the nuts and bolts of business. And then the third Wednesday at 7:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, we do reflection and intention setting. So that one's a little more nervous system regulation. We do some breathing exercises to start it out 'cause it's the end of a long day where you've been making all your decisions and doing all your work and putting out all your fires and everything. So you get to join us at 7:00 PM and it's more chill, you know, no zippers or buttons allowed.

Just kidding. We don't tell you what to wear. That one is more where we just say, "okay, how do you want to enter the next month? Were you able to achieve what you wanted to? But also just how are you doing?". Those ones tend to get more personal, so we don't record those and share those.

We also have a form that's available 24/7. If any member is not able to attend anything, they submit the form. They can say if they want us to address them or if it should be anonymous. And then we will go through the question live in the call and then provide that answer. If you're struggling with something and you need guidance, then we always encourage you to ask the question because there might be other people who are struggling with that too. Again, if you want to be anonymous, you can be anonymous.

Then we have the community. And all of our members get access to things like the Solo CEO retreat kit where you can take yourself on a three day retreat. They get access to our quarterly workshops too. But basically all the stuff that you see, if you're a member, that's included.

We recommend checking it out: www.SuccessSecretSociety.club