Have you ever thought about becoming self employed and have concerns about taking on and retaining good staff? Are you thrown by those who tell you about the nightmare of staff sickness, maternity leave, employee benefits and taxation? Many budding small business owners are often faced with the same worries, which often lead them to feelings of inertia and condemning themselves to never escaping the rat race.

However, good news is always just around the corner. Here's some for you: you can start a business and make a success of it without ever having to take on a single employee. An article by Jim Hopkins in USA Today discussed the rise of the microbusiness, which numbered 20 million in the USA alone back in 2006. That's 20 million people making it in business without the headache of employing anyone else. How do they manage it? Here are a few ideas to get you thinking like a solopreneur.

Strategic partnerships

Bringing in a partner is a resource often overlooked by the first-time entrepreneur. Take the example of a Bob the Baker who makes the most wonderful cakes in the world. Bob knows his cakes would be a hit all over the country and needs to work out how to sell effectively on line. So, he teams up with a Winston the Webmaster who also happens to know how to use the internet to market very effectively. This partnership works quite simply because two people, who each need the skill the other possesses, have come together to produce an income. Bob cannot sell the cakes without the skills of Winston and vice versa. Any employees? Not necessary. Theirs is a simple partnership and they decide to split the income fifty/fifty. Is it not better to have half a successful business than own a failure in its entirety?

Outsourcing

The baking business is booming now, Bob is busy making all those lovely cakes and Winston equally so updating the website and promoting them. Orders are pouring in from all over with as many as 20 emails a day. Is it now time to take on an office administrator to deal with this? What about someone to help bake the cakes? What about someone to look after order fulfilment and some of the more tedious website tasks? That makes three new employees, right? Wrong. All of these jobs can be outsourced or, in other words, contracted out. A VA (virtual assistant) can take on the job of taking in and responding to the emails, another baking firm could be contracted to make the fillings for the cakes, yet another VA could be used to manage parts of the website.

Franchising/licensing

The business has grown phenomenally in its first year and the cakes are amazingly popular. There are now no fewer than 6 contractors involved, all looking after various aspects of the day to day running of the company and still nobody is employed. Bob and Winston, however, are feeling the burn and would like to take a little more of a back seat. But how do they start doing less without having to take on staff to manage the business? Sell licences for people to take on an identikit business of their own, running it in exactly the same way as they do. By creating a licence or a franchise for the business the owners not only create substantially higher revenues from their original idea but do so by stepping out of the business to manage the franchise operation, still without employing anyone!

It sounds so simple, does it not? Business really can be as simple as this with some thought and planning. Obviously there is hard work, talent and determination involved in getting through each of the steps but the end product really is achievable without the need to wade through the red tape associated with taking on permanent staff. Any more excuses to not go for it?