From solopreneur to CEO: how to sustainably scale your business
From never designing a single pattern in 2010, to earning $25 million in the past 7 years with a team of 12+, Bonnie Christine is a solopreneur-to-CEO success story extraordinaire.
Bonnie Christine is an accomplished artist, pattern designer, and educator known for her intricate, nature-inspired designs.
As the founder of the Flourish membership, online courses, and tutorials, Bonnie has empowered thousands of aspiring designers to turn their passion into successful careers in surface pattern design.
Bonnie grew up with creative, entrepreneurial parents, and wanted that freedom and opportunity for herself, but her journey was far from a straight line to success. In fact, it took many years for her to shift her mindset from struggling solopreneur to successful CEO.
“What got me to where I am today won’t be what gets me to where I’m going next.” - Bonnie Christine
In this article, we’ll reveal how to transform your mindset from a "do-it-all" entrepreneur to a visionary leader. You’ll learn tactical ways to apply Bonnie’s SOS to Freedom Framework, including:
- The phases of business growth–including when to shift to the next phase
- How to find your “freedom number”, so you can delegate with confidence, and
- Tips for sustainably scaling your business—without losing yourself in the process
The assessment
How do you know if it’s time to scale your business to the next level–and let go of some control?
In the last 30 days, have you:
- Worn multiple hats in your business?
- Avoided being creative because of the day-to-day tasks?
- Worked outside of “work” hours?
- Dropped the ball?
- Had an idea but no time to take action on it?
If you’ve checked off almost all of these boxes…
Surprise! You may be an overwhelmed solopreneur. 😩
The cost of doing all and being all in your business is actually quite high:
- Limited capacity: You simply don’t have more than 24h/day, and therefore your growth is limited to only what you can finish.
- Lack of expertise: You can’t be an expert at ads, funnels, art, licensing, researching, financials, and more. And therefore you’re doing important things half-assed.
- No backup: No sick days, no emergencies, no vacations, which means going to bed with the world on your shoulders.
- Stifled creativity: When you’re consumed with the doing, you’re zapped of the imagining.
- Lowered impact: You can’t impact as many people as you could–if you would just outsource.
Most businesses die at this decisive phase–because they don’t delegate. They insist on holding tight to admin tasks and tiny processes–even when they’re staying up too late, missing soccer practices, and forgetting deadlines.
If you’ve reached the height of your time, impact, and effort as a founder–you’ll either:
- Burnout, give up, and get stuck… or
- Figure out a way to specialize, outsource, and scale your business–what Bonnie calls the SOS to Freedom Framework.
The goal
“When you obsess over doing the things only YOU can do, your business is going to flourish.” - Bonnie Christine
The mindset shift from “I need to do everything” to “I want to only do what I can do” is a big one.
And while some business owners are content to stay as solopreneurs and businesses-of-one, for many, the goal is to grow a sustainable business that supports their lifestyle. They don’t want to be doing everything and anything–they want to be making an impact where they’re most important.
In the Big Leap, Gay Hendricks calls this the Zone of Genius, which is where your greatest talents and passions intersect. Your zone of genius is how you can make the most impact in the world, and where you should be spending ~90% of your time as a creative entrepreneur.
The ability to spend more time doing what you’re good at and what you love:
- Frees you up from stress and prevents burnout
- Increases productivity and creativity
- Adds more joy to your life
Not only that, but by working in your zone of genius–and delegating everything else–you’ll achieve greater impact while maintaining work-life balance. (The dream!)
The playbook
Specialize-Outsource-Scale: SOS to Freedom
When Bonnie thought about entrepreneurship, she thought of her dad attending soccer games, picking her up from school, and being able to close down shop for the holidays.
So in her own business, she wanted to unlock time, location, and financial freedom.
And she’s not alone. That’s one of the main driving factors for entrepreneurs around the world: the flexibility to work from wherever they want, whenever they want, and not have a cap on their financial potential.
But in order to do that, she realized she needed to:
- Specialize (or find her zone of genius)
- Outsource anything not in her zone of genius
- Scale by expanding her business’ capacity
So how do you find out what your zone of genius is? Read the book, and think through what you do that your business hinges on.
Here are some of the things in Bonnie’s Zone of Genius:
- Thinking about her business (setting the vision)
- Creating artwork and patterns
- Creating original content, including podcasting and lessons for courses
- Leading her team
- Developing other creative entrepreneurs
- Being a wife and mom
Bonnie spends 90% of her time doing these tasks, and never outsources or delegates them.
Calculate your freedom figure
How do you figure out how much money you can afford to spend in order to outsource work?
You have to find your freedom figure.
Let’s work backwards using Bonnie’s steps:
- How much money do you want to make in a year? You can use either current income/revenue, predictions about future revenue, or your dream number.
Let’s do this example with $100,000/year. - How many hours do you want to work per week/year?
40 hours per week is about 2080 hours per year, so feel free to use that as a baseline. - To get your freedom figure, divide your income by your working hours to get an hourly rate.
If you want to earn $100,000 by working 2,080 hours per year, your freedom figure is $48/hour.
This means that if something costs you less than $48/hour to delegate–then delegate it immediately.
- Web designer wants to charge you $50/hour for a design? No, thank you.
- VA charging you $20/hour to lighten your administrative burden? Yes, please.
Free up your time and think like a CEO, so you can spend effort in your zone of genius. Because when you’re in your zone of genius, your business grows.
Bonnie’s example:
Bonnie hesitated to let go of control of small tasks for many, many years–almost a decade. For the first 4 years, she was doing everything in her business and working all the time, and her earnings broke down to about $9/hour. She wasn’t able to hire anybody for less than that.
Nine years into her business, she finally made her first hire, when she was earning $114/hour (or about $200+k/year).
As you can see below, outsourcing for the first time changed her business trajectory completely.
Now, in 2024, her time is worth $3,322/hour, and she has 12+ employees.
Create a voice guide
What’s the point of creating a voice guide? You get to document your brand personality and communication style that:
- Ensures consistency across all communication channels
- Sets clear expectations and guidelines for the team
- Creates a unified and identifiable experience for your audience
For Bonnie, it was a really hard piece to give away. “I would have argued for 10 years that how I wrote and responded to emails was what led me to success, so handing that off to someone else was the most vulnerable thing,” she says.
What should you include in a voice guide?
- Business overview–what do you offer?
- Communication personality–are you teaching, guiding, leading, supporting?
- Audience overview–who are you speaking to?
- Tone guidelines–how do we say what we say?
- Language and vocabulary standards–what do we say, and what do we NOT say?
- Grammar and formatting rules
- Visual guidelines–how do we present ourselves?
Creating a brand and voice guide gets the whole business’ external appearance off your plate and makes sure your team is aligned in terms of how to present it.
Circle Tip: Don’t overcomplicate it. Start with what you know. Ask what freelancers or contractors would need to know to help them create for you. Add to it over time!
Build an SOP Library
Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are “like Miracle Grow for your garden,” says Bonnie.
Any time you have a task that you do more than twice–create a SOP for it so that if you’re sick, a team member is sick, or that task needs to be offboarded to someone else, you already have instructions on how to do it.
The first SOP Bonnie made was “Uploading a zoom recording to her membership”, which is something she held onto for a decade before she handed it off. But then she gained back the 15 minutes that it took her to do this to do more meaningful zone of genius work.
So how do you make successful SOPs?
- Implement the "do it twice, document it" rule
- Include detailed step-by-step instructions
- Make SOPs accessible to team members
- Encourage team members to create their own SOPs
Start strategically delegating
“I want to be the first person to admit that this is terrifying. But all entrepreneurs worry about the same things: money, quality, care, guilt, hiring.” - Bonnie Christine
The best way to overcome your fear of delegating is to realize that “the world is full of insanely smart, heartfelt, creative and devoted people who don’t want the pressures of being an entrepreneur. They’re just waiting for you to hire them.”
Just because a task is not in your zone of genius, doesn’t mean it’s not in someone else’s.
So to start delegating, here’s what you need to do:
- Begin with tasks below your freedom figure
- Focus on:
- Administrative tasks
- Customer service
- Marketing implementation
- Content editing and strategy
- E-commerce operations
- Bonus: Consider personal life delegation (household tasks)
Bonnie’s Tip: Starting with a Virtual Assistant (VA) is such an easy win that can take a million little admin tasks off your plate–and help you focus.
The results
“I don’t think we should just survive, I think we should thrive. Because I believe you should be able to do what you love, AND be present with your family, have a wildly successful business, take 30 days off, have hobbies outside of work, and be creative.” - Bonnie Christine
What started as a dream for Bonnie, has turned into a multi-million dollar business that licenses patterns, prints-on-demand, is creating products from scratch, and teaches other creative entrepreneurs how to do what she does as she builds in public.
To the tune of $25 million in the last 7 years.
Her membership, which started at $5/month 12 years ago, has grown to 6,700+ members at $47/month, and is a seven-figure piece of her business by itself.
By delegating out tasks that weren’t related to her art creation, business direction and decisions, or her personal life, Bonnie increased productivity for herself and her team members, implemented a creativity cycle, and expanded her business.
Not only that, but now she can spend time with her young kids, take vacations, and trust that the business will not burn up in a pile of flames if she has to take a sick day.
And she’s compiled all the frameworks and templates that she used to get here in SOS to Freedom.
“We have to start acting like the future more successful versions of ourselves before we become them.” - Bonnie Christine
Key takeaways
- Success requires moving beyond the solopreneur mindset–because you will hit a capacity limit and that will impede your growth.
- Focus on tasks only you can do; delegate everything else.
- Documentation (voice guide and SOPs) is crucial for successful delegation.
- Quality systems and processes enable scaling without sacrificing quality.
- Personal life delegation is as important as business delegation. Getting house cleaning or kid pickup off your plate can mean extra hours every week.
- Invest in team members whose zone of genius aligns with the tasks you need to delegate away!
Books to read:
- The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks (zone of genius)
- Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell (time and energy audit)
- Clockwork by Mike Michalowicz (design your business to run itself)
- Free to Focus by Michael Hyatt (the freedom compass)
To hear more about Bonnie’s journey, check out the latest episode of Making Of: Bonnie Christine.
And if you’re looking for an all-in-one membership platform that’s built for creative entrepreneurs like you?
You’re in the right place.
Circle brings together your members, discussions, events, courses, and content—all in one place, under your own brand. Plus, you get access to our customer community full of handy resources and over 12,000 community builders on the same journey as you.
