Hey, I’m Lucas! Welcome to The Solo Operator, where I write for Christian professionals wanting to escape the 9-to-5 and replace their W2 income through solo-business ownership.

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I launched a new offer last week.

Crickets. lol

Actually a lot of folks were interested (you know who you are).

But no one has bought...yet.

So here’s what I’m changing to sweeten the deal for you:

As a reminder, this is a LinkedIn sprint where I work with you 1-on-1 to build a presence and system for building relationships + growing your business on this platform in only 7 days.
​
In one week, I work with you to:
​
1) Rebuild your profile (new banner, headline, bio)
2) Give you a personalized Loom review of your positioning
3) Build a 30-day content roadmap
4) Pull together 5 lead magnet ideas for your niche that will crush on LinkedIn
5) Hand-build a Sales Navigator lead list of your exact target audience
6) And write 2 custom DM scripts, one for cold outreach and one for new connections
7) Oh and a 60-minute call to deep dive on you, your business, and how LinkedIn can help drive revenue and real relationships
​
I run this same process with every retainer client I take on.

This time, my guarantee to you is:

Assuming you implement the system I teach you, I guarantee you will make back what you invested in 30 days or I work with you until you do. Simple as that.

I think anyone can go from zero to thousands in revenue on this platform in 30 days...if only they have a plan + system for getting there.

This is that plan + system.

So if you’re interested, reply to this email OR go to the link here.

PS - A question I’ve gotten a few times:

“Couldn’t I just figure this out myself?“

You could.

But most people who try end up with an ok-looking profile, a handful of posts, and no system connecting any of it to conversations or pipeline.

So if you’d rather skip the trial and error and just have it built with you in a week, here’s the link one more time.

Subscribe to The Solo Operator

By

A weekly note for Christian professionals wanting to escape the 9-to-5 and replace their W2 income through solo-business ownership.

Subscribe now

RESOURCES

• Find me on: LinkedIn

• Need a copywriter or fractional marketer? Let’s talk

• Grab my LinkedIn OS for solopreneurs (I built a six-figure biz with it)

• Launch a solo business + close your first client in 90 days → join waitlist

Hey, I’m Lucas! Welcome to The Solo Operator, where I write for Christian professionals wanting to escape the 9-to-5 and replace their W2 income through solo-business ownership.

Subscribe now

Last week, I came across this tweet:

And thought, “this is one of the better definitions of a fractional vs freelance I’ve ever read.”

I enjoyed it so much I decided to write about it on LinkedIn and - as I expected - the conversation it sparked was really solid.

So this week, I thought I’d share it here as this is a very pertinent conversation, especially for new or aspiring solopreneurs.

Freelance or fractional is a very common path to take as a first-time solopreneur. It’s basically the exact path I tell most people to take.

1. Take a skill you already have

2. Turn it into a productized service

3. Build a one-man business around it

The angle of the post was also geared towards “faith-based” orgs as I see this dilemma all the time:

Want to hire a senior role → Don’t have the budget to do so → Also demand that person to be full-time because “culture” → Build a JD for a senior person anyways → Get some “senior” person to take it on at a fraction of the price → That “senior” person get’s minimal results (because they don’t have the skills) and get burnt out / fired / quit → The org is back at square one.

Have seen this time and time again.

I do think more faith or mission based orgs with minimal budgets are coming around to the idea of fractional. I just spoke with a CEO of a big publisher about this last week and they are open as of recent which is cool to see.

But the nuance between fractional and freelance may be a little less obvious to some so here are my thoughts from my LinkedIn post:

The Main Difference

Hiring "Fractionals" just isn't as popular as I think it should be - especially in faith / mission oriented orgs.

They get a bad rap because most *falsely* assume "they are just a glorified freelancer."

I disagree:

Freelancers definitely have a place and I think most folks who label themselves "fractionals" are in fact just freelancing. They have a very minimal scope and are hired for a speciality of some kind. Fractionals are different.

When you hire a Fractional, you're often paying for a lot more expertise + time availability + a scope of work tied to high-level business goals. Not to mention, I see a lot of fractionals with direct reports, owning P&Ls, and even operating companies.

No way in heck is that the same as a freelancer.

Benefits to Going “Fractional”

With that definition - there are huge benefits to hiring a fractional instead of a full-time salaried employee. Experienced, senior talent is expensive, especially at a certain stage of business. A fractional-operator can come in and operate at a high level at a fraction of the cost + still have meaningful responsibility and ownership and impact.

I literally see it all the time.

Re: faith / mission based orgs. A lot would benefit from going the fractional route first. Could even do more contract-to-hire type engagements. A lot of these orgs are sub-$2mill operating budgets. So they simply can't afford higher end talent, even though they create JD's that a true pro should be owning.

A true fractional leader provides the expertise/experience + ownership to real results without the full price tag.

Should You Go “Freelance” or “Fractional”

The answer to that question lies in your amount of experience as a leader and driving results for a company. As well as your confidence in creating an offer that is more outcome oriented than deliverables based.

If you have the experienced and cred to operate as a higher-level, senior operator, than the fractional route could make sense.

I launched a new offer btw

TLDR on Veritas Copy: one of the things I do is I ghostwrite LinkedIn content. But a lot of folks I chat with aren’t ready for that or want to handle it themselves. Fair! The kicker though:

Vast majority of folks I talk to who say "yea I'll do it myself" never actually get active on LinkedIn.

So opportunities to build relationships that drive business never happen. They literally never get started and wonder why this platform doesn't produce the ROI they see others having. But this is a BIG mistake.

Think about it:

LinkedIn's entire business model is built around making its users money. People are here to make deals. Meaning... if your profile, content, and outreach aren't set up to be found and trusted by the right people, you're sitting on a platform built to make you money and getting none of it.

So to help more folks get the most from this platform, I put together a smaller version of that work I already do with my clients. I'm calling it, "The LinkedIn 1-Week Sprint"

In one week, I work with you to:

1) Rebuild your profile (new banner, headline, bio)
2) Give you a personalized Loom review of your positioning
3) Build a 30-day content roadmap
4) Pull together 5 lead magnet ideas for your niche that will crush on LinkedIn
5) Hand-build a Sales Navigator lead list of your exact target audience
6) And write 2 custom DM scripts, one for cold outreach and one for new connections
7) Oh and a 60-minute call to deep dive on you, your business, and how LinkedIn can help drive revenue and real relationships

This is the same process I run in the first two weeks of every retainer client I take on. I'm rolling this out as we speak, and am only taking 10 people through this round.

If your profile is basically a static resume with no system behind it, this is built to fix exactly that.

Send me a DM if interested and I’ll share more details.

—Lucas

Subscribe to The Solo Operator

By

A weekly note for Christian professionals wanting to escape the 9-to-5 and replace their W2 income through solo-business ownership.

Subscribe now

RESOURCES

• Find me on: LinkedIn

• Need a copywriter or fractional marketer? Let’s talk

• Grab my LinkedIn OS for solopreneurs (I built a six-figure biz with it)

• Launch a solo business + close your first client in 90 days → join waitlist

I’d much rather give, give, give, in hopes that you get value from my writing as well as get the results you are looking for in your future or current business.

Well today I do have something to give you that isn’t strictly more content.

TLDR

Did you know this?

After someone connects with you on LinkedIn, there’s a golden window where they’re WAY more likely to:

• Notice your profile

• Engage with your posts

• And actually respond when you reach out

And yet, most people don’t take advantage of it.

Instead, they accept the connection, post whenever they remember to, and never follow up with any outreach. So the connection just sits there.

As a result, new connections start to forget who you are.

And by the time you finally reach out trying to book a call, they barely remember connecting with you in the first place.

Can you see the problem?

Now, here’s why I care about this so much

At Veritas Copy (my agency), an optimized profile and plan for building their LinkedIn network is one of the first things I build for my clients.

I’ve built a lot of them.

And after a lot of testing, I’ve found the exact system, in what order, to build a profile, content, and outreach that turns into conversations and pipeline.

Now, my clients usually pay $2,500/month+ for ongoing work like this.

But I also understand that not everyone is in a position to commit to a retainer right away.

So for the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a solution.

And I’m almost ready to share it with you :)

It’s called “The LinkedIn 1-Week Sprint”

Here’s what you need to know:

• It’s a 1-week sprint where I work with you to build out your profile, content strategy, and outreach system for you, using the same process I use for my retainer clients.
  

• Enrollment officially opens next Monday, and I’m only taking 10 people through this first round.
  

• The first 10 people get it for $750. After that it goes up to $1,000.
  

So if you’d like to lock in the pre-sale offer, sign up below and use code “WAITLIST” (it’ll only work for the first 10 so go quick):

Click here to lock in the pre-sale pricing and get early access to the sprint.

Talk soon!

—Lucas

Hey, I’m Lucas! Welcome to The Solo Operator, where I write for Christian professionals wanting to escape the 9-to-5 and replace their W2 income through solo-business ownership.

Subscribe now

I follow an attorney out of Florida who posts on X. A little while back he put out a thread about the state of the average American household:

Oil was around a hundred dollars a barrel in July - right around $80 right now. Housing is still absurd. Prices have compounded something like 31% (so he claims, I believe it’s more) since 2020. Median household income in this country is hovering around $83k a year - I dug further into that number and that’s gross, not net, which is even crazier.

His line at the end is what I especially loved and want to focus on today,

“It’s hell out there for the average family. You have to wake up every morning ready to fight.”

I totally, wholeheartedly, agree with him.

Any Catholic would agree with that in the spiritual sense too. We know we’re in a war. That part isn’t new information and nobody’s going to argue with it. The practical version is what we’ve been slower to admit. Our parents and their parents rode the coattails of an incredible American economy for decades. Now, ordinary life for a family is filled with pressure and anxiety and stress that mostly didn’t exist a few generations back, at least not in the same way.

I want to be honest about where I’m standing when I say that. I live in Fort Worth and I make more than $83k a year, and it’s most certainly still a grind. I’m not writing this from the other side of the problem. I recognize that a portion of this that’s just a cross, and we all have to accept it and be at peace with it.

And although the causes of a lot of our “affordability” issues aren’t in our control, what we do in the face of them is in our control.

Just as nobody passively gets to heaven, so too nobody passively succeeds and flourishes in today’s society either. Both of them require you to go on the offensive, and I think most people are still playing defense and calling it “prudence”.

There is a kind of agency you and I must have to fight in the practical order though.

The stability is (and isn’t) real

Now, I don’t want this essay to turn into a knock on W-2s, that’s not my intention.

As a business owner my self, I recognize that anything can happen and I could be needing a job while I figure out how to keep my business alive. That’s okay. W-2s play a role and - if I ever needed one again - would let me stay in the game without all the risk of not having an income. Not to mention, I know plenty of good men who provide well for their families that way and I’m not interested in shaming anyone’s paycheck.

But I also think we have to take an honest look at what that arrangement actually is. Because the stability in W-2s is real in one sense - as I mentioned above - but certainly not in another.

Nearly every state in the US is an “at-will” state, and nearly every employment contract is written that way. Your employer can end the relationship at any point, for a reason that can be shaped to fit whatever they need it to fit. Labor law in the US at least favors the employer and it isn’t close. We’re the exact antithesis of Europe on this. It’s very difficult to fire somebody in France for instance and very easy to fire somebody here.

Then there’s the raise.

You’re hoping for 2% a year raise and most companies don’t even give that much. Set 2% against 31% of compounded price increases and run it forward 5 years and tell me what you’re looking at. This is the reality that the majority of Americans are facing, and we rarely talk about it.

But as a business owner, weathering that storm - although still very difficult and comes with its challenges - presents very different math.

Let’s say you have 10 clients paying you $1,500/mo. If you lose one client, that’s 10% of your revenue. It stings sure, but you tighten your belt, do more outreach, and replace the client. As an employee with one income to depend on, if you lose your job, that’s 100% of your income gone in a single afternoon. Losing 10% of something you own puts you in a better spot than losing all of something you don’t.

The stability we feel in a W-2 is mostly a feeling because of this. 2020 and the wave of layoffs we see across all kinds of industries have pulled the curtain back on that for a lot of people. But so many of us have short-term memory when it comes to these things.

“When your wants become your needs”

Before I make the case for having more / building a business / the need to generate wealth / etc…

I want to make the case for needing less, because otherwise, I’m just another guru telling you to “go make more money and that will solve all your problems.”

My father is a wise man and he had a way with these little isms. As a kid I rolled my eyes at all of them, but now that I am a husband, father, sole provider - I think they were gold. The one that stuck with me most is this:

“When your wants become your needs, you become confused.”

He’d say it tongue in cheek, usually to get a rise out of us when we asked for something ridiculous. But I think it applies to every one of us to some degree. Often we are trying to keep up with the Joneses without ever consciously deciding to.

And I’ll say this as somebody who works in marketing (which means I’m part of the problem). The average person sees a couple thousand advertisements a day. We all know what that’s doing to us. It increases the appetite for the thing, whatever it is, and it plants a completely fabricated desire, convincing us that thing is in fact, a need! We are walking around - at least partly - governed by that without even being aware of it.

So before you tell me $83k isn’t enough, be honest about what your definition of “enough” is.

I grew up in a farmhouse for the first 8 years of my life. I have five brothers, and all five of us shared one room. My sister was the only kid in that house with her own room. Between college and missionary life I shared a room with somebody until I was about 23. My boys are going to be stacked on top of each other too, and I think it’s good for them.

As I said, I’m not above it. I don’t think anybody else should be either.

Now that I have a family, that $83k per year is a real stretch. If we had to make it happen, we would. But now that my actual circumstances are different, the demands on me are different. What I could once make work, I now need to re-assess based on the reality of my situation.

My bigger point is we have to be honest about our situation + develop the right intentions before we make the moves that I suggest (starting a business, creating side income, building wealth, etc.) because the reality is, money will control us if we let it. Keeping up with the Joneses is at the heart of American consumerism and frankly, many of us Catholics champion it as much if not more than the rest.

And as much as money will control us, we still can’t make a tangible impact or be materially generous without it.

And yet… the money still matters

For three years I lived on $500 a month as a missionary. I was 19, I’d dropped out of college and spent the next six years below the poverty line. I didn’t clear $30k a year until well into my twenties.

I’d do it again. But I’m not going to pretend the money didn’t matter. It did. It always does, especially for anybody who wants to get married, raise a family, and live in an expensive world.

There’s an idea floating around Christian circles that being poor is a form of virtue on its own. My friend has been writing a whole series on his Substack about why that isn’t true, and I think he’s right.

(Here’s part 1 and part 2 of his series if you’re interested.)

My stance - and I think Nathan would agree - is that there’s no virtue in being poor because you’re incompetent.

Poverty freely chosen for a higher good is a real and glorious thing. I have a lot of respect for it because I lived it for six years, and the people I know who choose it aren’t being irresponsible. Often, God called them into it, to be more radically focused on Him. They’re preferring a higher good over a lower good, and there’s genuine merit in that that they’ll realize in Heaven only. On the flip side, it also isn’t bad to seek the lower good, assuming it isn’t sinful. It’s just better to seek the higher one.

But poverty you land in by default is a different thing entirely. It’s just poverty, and it limits what you’re able to do for anybody else. You can be spiritually magnanimous with nothing. You can’t be beneficent with nothing. Those are two different virtues for a reason.

Here’s the part that gets overlooked in my opinion. Having more is harder, not easier, spiritually speaking. The rich man who becomes genuinely humble and roots out his vanity and selfishness has merited more than the man who has very little, because the temptation was actually present and he overcame it by God’s grace. It’s easy to be humble - at least on the surface - when you don’t have that much stuff. Where there’s no temptation there isn’t much merit. Where there is, God looks at it differently and rightly so, will reward it differently.

So the road I’m describing is not the comfortable one, but the one with considerably more responsibility attached.

Leo XIII wrote about this when he laid out what a just wage looks like for a family. His principle was that a man should be able to meet the needs that natural law demands and then have something left over. He didn’t mean to have something left over for splurging on stupid stuff. His whole aim was for families to have more left over as a buffer against calamity and catastrophes.

His reasoning was that people living in scarcity get desperate, and desperate people do things they otherwise wouldn’t. On the charitable read: we act stupid when we are in a bad way. On the worse read: we stop acting like humans at all when we are in a bad way. That buffer, while it is also meant to buy some comfort, it’s more importantly allowing for virtue and stability to be possible in a household.

But, and here’s the kicker:

The vast majority of white-collar workers are in jobs that don’t make a just family wage, especially one that keeps one spouse home to raise and educate the children.

This means that in today’s world, as much as it sucks to say, we need to bear that cross and suffer more. Economically speaking, that “suffer more” is working outside of work, generating more opportunities, and owning something productive (i.e., becoming business owners.)

The command that belongs to us

A lot of “normies” will poo poo what I’m saying here.

They’ll claim this is vain or simply renounce it because it’s too much work. Or even worse, they’ll talk strictly about how “what we need is to become missionary disciples and disciple makers.”

I’m sorry, but that person especially is wrong.

Last time I checked, God explicitly gave two commands in the scriptures that apply to two different groups of people.

In Genesis, he told man to “have dominion” and to “be fruitful and multiply”.

Then in the person of Christ, he told the apostles - HUGE emphasis on the apostles, as they were bishops and priests, not lay men - to go and “make disciples of all nations”.

The first one belongs primarily to the laity. The second one belongs primarily to the clergy. Yet, we have this backwards almost everywhere I look. Faithful laymen pour enormous energy into the spiritual order, which is not primarily ours to run, and almost none into the temporal order, which is exactly what we were given.

Culture gets shaped, yes, by the spiritual realm (in part and to an even greater degree). Liturgy, prayer, fasting, etc. But it is always in conjunction with the temporal order as well. And that happens solely by people building actual institutions, owning companies, and directing capital. That’s been true for a very long time and it’s true now.

The bad news for us: The people building the temporal order right now hate you and me. They are actively against what you and I hold dearest. They hate God and they hate God’s creation. They want nothing to do with truth, beauty and goodness.

The good news for us: We don’t have to sit around and hope our religious leaders get it together and solve this problem for us (they won’t). We can actually do something in the practical order. One said thing is being entrepreneurial. The barrier is basically gone, we have very little excuses today, in large part because of the internet.

So to my very talented, and faithful friends reading this: Sitting on the sidelines and larping online, or acting like the Church will be restored strictly through some new “parish discipleship program” is doing nobody - yourself included - any favors. Take it from someone who used to run these programs - it won’t move the needle. Not even a tiny bit.

We have to wake up and smell the roses (oh how I wish it actually smelled like roses).

We have to think and act more practically than this. Yes, you’re taking on more, on purpose. Yes, it’s risky. But it’s worth it. In large part because you can do something good and useful for you, your family, and community with it.

Furthermore, the world doesn’t need more entrepreneurs driven by malice or vice. It needs people building who actually want to do some good with what they build, and who understand that profit has a capacity to shape culture and change lives rather than just bank accounts.

Fight we must (but not how everyone thinks)

Underneath all the affordability numbers lies a call to fight.

And if we aren’t approaching every single day ready for the battle in front of us, in the spiritual realm and in our ordinary daily life, it’s going to be rough going. I don’t know how to say that more plainly. I mean, it already is.

Being high agency and creating opportunity is one of the best ways to approach the economic and financial battles we all face today.

This can mean simply putting yourself in a position where you own more of your own production instead of depending on a bond fund not crashing over 30 years and a 2% raise you probably won’t get. The whole point is not being completely at the behest of someone - who may or may not hate you btw.

If you must continue to wear the “golden handcuffs” of W2 life, that’s okay and there is a time for it. But also, don’t be afraid to start building something that should those handcuffs get ripped off out of nowhere - you aren’t left scrambling, trying to figure out how you’re going to make your next month’s mortgage payment.

The fight is yours, and the ground you take, stays yours too.

So wake up ready for it. Carry some real sense that you’re fighting for your life and fighting for souls, because you are, and then go build something with that.

If this was useful, forward it to someone who’s been thinking about building something of their own.

— Lucas

Subscribe to The Solo Operator

By

A weekly note for Christian professionals wanting to escape the 9-to-5 and replace their W2 income through solo-business ownership.

Subscribe now

RESOURCES

• Find me on: LinkedIn

• Need a copywriter or fractional marketer? Let’s talk

• Grab my LinkedIn OS for solopreneurs (I built a six-figure biz with it)

• Launch a solo business + close your first client in 90 days → join waitlist

Hey, I’m Lucas! Welcome to The Solo Operator, where I write for Christian professionals wanting to escape the 9-to-5 and replace their W2 income through solo-business ownership.

Subscribe now

Welcome to Free Resource Friday!

I got a few goodies for y’all today that I’ve come across recently and one from a - new - friend who’s doing great work in the bookkeeping space.

Here we go:

The Tool I Use to Build Lead Magnets (And Even Host My Website for $20/mo)

You may or may not be a big AI fan, you tell me.

Regardless, I think there are legitimate use cases for it.

One of them is creating websites, landing pages, lead magnets, etc.

Virtually in seconds. No more dev or design needed. Seriously, it’s quite impressive what I’ve been able to build with these tools. But my favorite for this is Replit.

If you haven’t used it, I’d recommend doing it.

Especially if you’re shipping lead magnets, need to create a landing page fast, or even want to host and build your website yourself.

My website is entirely built and hosted on website. See it here.

Sure, custom stuff is dope and I’m a big believer in branding as moat for businesses these days.

But for us little guys who just need a 1-2 page website, tools like Replit will more than do.

Yes, the code above and here is a referral link, so if you try it out - you’ll get $20 to your account and so will I if you stay.

No pressure either way, but I had to share it. I really love the tool.

Pro tip:

Go to Claude or ChatGPT before you prompt Replit. Build the prompt you want to feed to Replit in one of those. Then go and start building.

You get a way better finished product, way faster that way.

Again, try it today.

If You’re Able, Productize Your Service (Example)

One thing I try to teach aspiring solos and hopefully it comes through in my writing is this:

When in doubt, turn your service offering into something “productized”.

Here’s what I mean:

A productized service is a standard service packaged and sold like a physical product. It features:

1. A fixed scope of work

2. Clear deliverables

3. A defined turnaround time

4. And a set price listed upfront.

Instead of custom pricing and custom proposals for each client, buyers purchase a predictable result.

This is all the craze right now in solopreneur land. The reason being a productized service is way easier to market (clear differentiation) and easier to scale (more predictable playbook and revenue). So if you have the skill to offer a service where this makes sense - then do it!

For example: Pagetear

This is a productized service run by a guy named Blake Emal. He’s the former CMO of Copy.Ai if you remember them early in the days of Ai. They were big on LinkedIn.

He’s turned his freelance copywriting business into a productized service based entirely around, you guessed: copywriting.

“But isn’t AI gonna put him out of business?”

Not at all. From the looks of it, he’s doing just fine.

If you are good enough at something, there will be demand for what you do, period.

His pricing is really smooth as well.

As a writer, only $4k for all this is bank-robbery. But when you add in the low up front / monthly cost compared to the value being added to the total LTV of the customer, the math maths pretty well I imagine.

Another good example of a popular productized service is Design Joy.

This guy does around $1.2 million in revenue every year as a one-person design studio.

So yea, there is something to this. Do it if you can is my suggestion.

Free Guide for Busy Mom’s and Dad’s

My friend Melissa Broughton, a licensed Accountant and Bookkeeping coach, has created a short 3-Step Guide for Busy Moms & Dad's to create Work life Balance — and it’s been helping a lot of people who feel stuck in the need to make money - want to be there for their family cycle.

The guide walks you through a few simple steps to determine what you want & need, create a plan, and take action — even when life seems to be testing every limit.

You can grab it free here.

It’s a quick read, but moms say it changes the tone in their homes almost immediately.

Subscribe to The Solo Operator

By

A weekly note for Christian professionals wanting to escape the 9-to-5 and replace their W2 income through solo-business ownership.

Subscribe now

RESOURCES

• Find me on: LinkedIn

• Need a copywriter or fractional marketer? Let’s talk

• Grab my LinkedIn OS for solopreneurs (I built a six-figure biz with it)

• Launch a solo business + close your first client in 90 days → join waitlist

Hey, I’m Lucas! Welcome to The Solo Operator, where I write for Christian professionals wanting to escape the 9-to-5 and replace their W2 income through solo-business ownership.

Subscribe now

Hey, thanks a lot for subscribing to The Solo Operator.

As I mentioned above, I’ve had hundreds of new subscribers in the last few weeks.

With that, there are many of you who might not be aware of my story or goal with this newsletter.

So today, I want to wind the clock back a little bit and give you the TLDR on what you can expect from this newsletter moving forward.

My origin

I am originally from Western North Dakota where I grew up on a reservation (no, I’m not Native American - that story’s for a different day) with my big Catholic family.

There have been a few themes looking back that were always present in my life.

One was entrepreneurship.

The first 8 years of my life I lived on our small family-farm operation. Around 1,200 acres and a hundred head of cattle or so.

My dad operated it while also teaching full-time. Even though I wasn’t aware of the in’s and out’s of the operation, it was very much so a full-fledged business operation.

Farming is no joke. And I come from a multi-generational farm family. So entrepreneurship runs deep.

Although my family is no longer operating the farm, my dad still operates a small oil-field service business and has for the last 20 years now. Same with one of my brothers, he runs his own construction business alongside my youngest brother as well.

The Wollschlager family has the entrepreneurship bug and it’s currently being scratched by multiple of my family members which is cool to watch.

The other theme is faith.

I was raised Catholic and still am today.

Even when I was being a heathen in my youth, God was faithful and always kept me in the orbit of the Church.

When I left for college, I got into a bad place really fast and essentially stopped practicing for 9-10 months. Over Christmas break of my freshman year at North Dakota State University, I knew college wasn’t for me and that I wasn’t living as a Christian should.

So I dropped out of college at 19. This was the best thing I ever did - both for my soul and my career.

As God would have it, I actually became a Catholic missionary upon leaving school (I know, crazy). Isn’t that what every college-dropout does??? No, just me?

Missionary years and early career

I’ve written about this time on LinkedIn a decent amount.

These 6 years were the best of my life. I was free, not hindered by worldly concerns and anxieties.

I mean, I only lived for the first three years on $500 a month. It was great.

And I’d do it again.

Then the desire to get married and have a family was brought into focus. I quickly realized I had just spent most of my 20s living below the poverty line while my peers were getting good jobs, buying nice things, and pulling ahead financially.

Or so I thought at least.

After 6 years, I left the missionary life, pursued my then girl friend (now wife), and kick started a career in marketing. My background is mostly in content marketing, but at this point, I’ve owned the full marketing stack. My last in house role was as a Director of Marketing for a faith-oriented holding company.

But eventually I knew I needed to go out on my own and build something.

I left my job in March 2025, jumped on LinkedIn with imposter syndrome and no real plan, and built my marketing business to six figures in less than 90 days.

My first client was someone I’d known for years - we actually worked together a few years prior - but never thought to sell to.

Turns out a decade of relationships is worth more than any funnel (who knew?)

My business + the goal of The Solo Operator

The business I eventually started was Veritas Copy.

Veritas Copy is a content agency focusing on ghostwriting for LinkedIn and email. I just helped a service business drive dozens of leads on LinkedIn and a couple million in pipeline… in like 30 days. Wild. So yea, I’ve had some success here and enjoy the work (if you need help on this front - shoot me a message for sure!)

This newsletter is now the other half of what I do.

Every week I write about the growth systems, strategies, and operator lessons behind building a solo business.

I’ve talked about everything from:

• Offer design

• Pricing

• Client acquisition

• Content systems

• Deep dives on solo-businesses

I also write about what it’s like to do this on your own.

The isolation is real. There are many weeks where things feel like they have stopped moving and momentum is hard to come by.

Not to mention, being a father and trying to build something without becoming someone I’m not. My faith is a big part of who I am and it will show up here when it’s relevant, but I’m not going to preach at you.

Who is this for?

There are two people The Solo Operator is for:

1. If you’re already running solo and trying to get to consistent revenue, I’ll give you the specific systems I’ve used and built for clients.

2. If you’re still in a corporate role or freelancing without structure and wondering if this path is even real, I’ll show you what it looks like from the inside and help you see that yes, businesses like this are very real — and very possible.

My goal moving forward is to show up and add value to you anyway I can.

I believe that a solo business is the lowest-risk entry point into entrepreneurship.

You don’t have to bet your mortgage or blow up your life.

All that is needed is for you to take the skill(s) you’ve spent years developing and package them into something people will pay for. Then get started.

Every week, I’m going to write about how to actually do this based on the things I’m doing in my own business and the lessons I am learning along the way. Because I too am putting into practice what I am preaching.

So yes, I’ll share all the good, practical stuff with you. Things like:

• How I think about building an offer

• How to package and price your services

• Simple ways to find clients and actually close them

• How to run a business by yourself without burning out

• Ways to increase revenue without needing to find new clients (i.e., upselling existing ones)

But I’m also going to write about the stuff deeper than just the tactics as well.

I know a lot of my readers are Catholics, Christians, or principled builders eager to get started or scale something of their own.

So I’ll share about my journey as a Catholic, a husband and father, what growing a business and a family looks like from my view, and more.

If any of that resonates with you, I’d love for you to stick around. Also, if you know someone who’s been sitting on the idea of going out on their own, send this their way. That’s how we start building together.

Share The Solo Operator

— Lucas

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• Need a copywriter or fractional marketer? Let’s talk

• Grab my LinkedIn OS for solopreneurs (I built a six-figure biz with it)

• Launch a solo business + close your first client in 90 days → join waitlist

Hey, I’m Lucas! Welcome to The Solo Operator, where I write for Christian professionals wanting to escape the 9-to-5 and replace their W2 income through solo-business ownership.

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This week’s solo business deep dive is with , owner of Go Somewhere, a credit card points consultancy that helps business owners get 2-10x more value out of points they’d otherwise let sit unused.

I’ve known of Colin for years through his content on LinkedIn and have admired his story and the business he’s built from a distance.

He has a true roll-with-the-punches story, and as a young and scrappy entrepreneur, so I know his journey to where he is today is packed with lessons and insights any of us could benefit from. Enjoy!

The van guy

In college, Colin found a way to get paid $50/hour cleaning university vans (yes, you read that right, $50/hr.)

A guy who’d graduated a few years ahead of him used to clean the school’s fleet of vans, the ones Ave Maria University (the college he went to) used for field trips and team travel, and mentioned the university was paying an outside shop to do it. Colin walked into the student life office and asked if he could take it over instead. They said yes!

He ended up making so much per van that the normal student worker hourly rate no longer applied. “We had to go meet with the CFO to put in a special Colin Stroud pay code,” he said. He became the highest paid student worker at the school, vacuuming out dead frogs and old McDonald’s fries between two dorms while hundreds of people walked past.

“I felt like I owned something, and I’d basically hacked the system,” Colin said. “It was hard labor, but it felt awesome.”

Married at 21, no idea what he wanted to do

Colin met his wife his freshman year at Ave Maria. She was two years ahead of him. They started dating that November, got engaged, and got married before his senior year, since she was finishing first and it made sense to stop waiting. They got pregnant almost immediately and their daughter was born before he graduated.

“I met this girl and she was the right one, without question,” Colin said. “It was 100% God’s will and the right thing to do. But I’m really young, dang it. That just seems young.”

He had no idea what he wanted to do for work. He didn’t declare a major until his junior year. Eventually, he picked accounting, then got into it with a professor and switched to business with one semester left. He talked to mentors, took career tests, tried to figure it out the normal way, and eventually gave up entirely.

“I just committed myself completely to Ironman triathlon training,” he said. “I was going to be physically excellent, and I’d figure out the career stuff later.”

He finished the Ironman, but never touched a bike again after that. It was time to focus on the career side of things with a wife and daughter at home. So he took the only job he could find, running insurance illustrations at a brokerage in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

He made $50k/year, worked under fluorescent lights, and sat on a team of twenty people doing the same task he was doing. He lasted about fifteen months. “That’s when I started really feeling it,” he said. “If I don’t make more money, we’re going to die. We need more money.”

The push that started it

In the fall of 2022, his wife quit her part-time marketing job. Money got tight. Around the same time, Colin watched two of his brothers-in-law and his own wife build followings on social media, all crossing well past 50,000. “They’re not smarter, better, or more talented,” he said. “So why can’t I do something like this?”

So he started posting on LinkedIn in the summer of 2023, just to write about something outside his job. “I had no agenda, no business idea,” he said. “I just wanted to write on the internet and do something that wasn’t my job.” In the middle of all this he took two development jobs back to back, one at a Catholic summer camp that turned out to be a bad fit, another at a pro-life nonprofit, and neither gave him a sense of a future.

He kept posting anyway.

“I was scraping the barrel for something to post about,” he said. “So I posted about points.” A few of those posts went viral. People started asking to get on the phone with him about their own points strategy. This is when he realized he should keep posting content about points (and maybe even start charging people for his time to consult.)

From $300 trip plans to $30,000 months

Go Somewhere started with two simple offers.

1. A sixty-minute strategy call to teach someone how points work and help them pick the right cards.
   

2. Or, for $300, he’d take someone’s point balance and find them a deal on an actual trip.

“I wasn’t advertising that I was an expert,” Colin said. “I was advertising zero to one. I’m here, you’re here. I can’t get you all the way up, but I can get you from zero to one.”

He made his first dollar from that in September of 2023. By January of 2024, he’d had his first $1,000 month.

The change that actually let him quit his job was narrowing in on small business owners spending $15,000 to $20,000 a month on their cards. More spending meant more points, which meant more value on the table, which meant he could charge more.

That offer ran $500 to $800, bundling the strategy work with trip planning into one package. He left his job in November of 2024. “I quit at about $8,000 in one month of gross revenue,” he said. “I was like, okay, that’s enough money.”

January of 2025 was his first full month on his own.

Since then, almost every month has cleared $15,000, peaking at $30,000 this past April. “I’ve never had a month where we needed to pull from savings,” he said, “but I’ve never had a month where I felt like we were the richest people on the planet either.”

“That’s what’s annoying with the internet,” Colin said. “People see the gross number and think you’re rich. When you actually look at the numbers, it’s a very conceivable amount of money.”

100% agree with that statement. ^^^

What $21,761 in a month actually looks like

Colin has started publishing his monthly revenue breakdowns, and he shared June’s with me.

• Business owner consulting: $2,300.

• His recurring $200-a-month community: $800.

• Brand deals: $9,200*

• Points research service: $5,000.

• Financial advisor webinars: $700.

• Credit card affiliate links: $2,900.

• And one client paid him $700 for two coaching calls on how to build a business like his.

Total: $21,761.

*Colin was clear that the brand deals number was inflated by one sponsor prepaying four months at once. Normally that line runs closer to $3,000.

The points research service now runs through three team members, dads working part-time in the evenings, managing around thirty trips at once through a client portal Colin built. “My goal is they’re paid around $40 an hour,” he said. “I think that’s relatively high, and pretty good.” Colin says the system could handle fifty trips at once with two more hires, though he’s not chasing that just to chase it.

His consulting margins run close to 100%, minus about $700 a month in business expenses. The points research service runs closer to 40 to 50% after paying his team. “I forget that’s good,” he said, “because I’m still a little bit in the creator business mindset, where you’re used to 100% margins.”

The $60,000 lesson that had nothing to do with the business

In 2025, a rental property Colin and his wife owned in Indiana developed major foundation problems, landed them in a lawsuit, and cost them their insurance. Then it flooded. Over seven months, they paid out more than $60,000 in cash they never got back, even after selling the house at a loss. It was close to every dollar of cash flow the business had generated that year.

“Part of me is like, wow, praise God, amazing that we were able to cash flow expenses that for the average American family would destroy them,” Colin said. “The other part is, we had $60,000 of cash flow at 25, 26 years old. That could have gone to a house, retirement, kids’ education, all the stuff you’re supposed to save for. And there’s zero dollars left at the end of the year.”

He’s careful to point out that the unpredictability didn’t come from the business itself. “It came from these random, crazy personal things,” he said, “that should never have happened.” Still, it’s the kind of year that shows you what owning something actually costs, separate from what it pays.

Would he go back to a W-2?

Colin says he could. He wouldn’t be devastated either way.

“If I had to, I wouldn’t be depressed at all,” he said. “I’d be like, okay, this is good. But it has to be the right fit for sure.”

He also doesn’t expect to be doing this exact business in fifteen years. “There’s basically no way I’m doing this in fifteen years,” he said. “But I’ll be doing something cool.” Points and media move too fast for that kind of certainty. His own dad didn’t find the thing he’d stick with long-term until he was 46 or 47, and he’s been building on it since. Colin figures if that ends up being his path too, he’s already ahead of it.

Where Go Somewhere goes next

Colin used to think affiliate links were scummy. He’s changed his mind.

“I don’t sell people on credit cards,” he said. “People are sold on credit cards by their friends, their family, the banks, and American culture. They come to me and ask which one they should get. I never convince anyone.”

His plan for the next few years is to grow two lines specifically, affiliate income and the points research service, each targeting $20,000 a month. “I do think there’s a $40 to $50k/month business here,” he said. “And I’ve hit $30k, so I’ve proven I can get close to it.” If the points business eventually fades, he says he’ll sunset it and go find something else. He doesn’t think that’s likely, but he’s not attached to it either.

I really do commend this attitude and it’s at the heart of what I believe about solo-ownership as well. Often, starting a solo-service business is the easiest path to entrepreneurship. That often means, you start out providing a service that isn’t your “forever” business. I’ve seen this many times before. And that’s okay.

If you want to do it forever, sweet. But also, once you cut your teeth in the business owner game, you quickly realize what is actually possible. Your risk tolerance changes and you become far more willing to take swings at bigger projects. That’s a huge benefit of these kinds of businesses in my opinion.

Just get started or you’ll never know what you’re capable of or what is entirely possible.

What he’d tell you if starting a solo-business

I asked Colin what he’d tell someone standing where he stood a couple of years ago, trying to figure out how to go out on their own.

“Start small with low expectations and high repetitions,” he said. “Anything over a long period of time compounds and can and should work. But if you have extremely high expectations early on, you’re just going to get disappointed.”

He didn’t make real money for a long time. If he’d expected otherwise, he thinks he would have quit.

This is great advice for anyone starting out or wanting to go solo. If you can keep your W2 alongside your side solo biz for a time to prove the concept, that is best. Patience is the name of the game. Prove that you can make money at this thing first and make moves from there.

— Lucas

P.S. Be sure to follow Colin’s day-to-day breakdowns and points content on LinkedIn.

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A weekly note for Christian professionals wanting to escape the 9-to-5 and replace their W2 income through solo-business ownership.

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RESOURCES

• Find me on: LinkedIn

• Need a copywriter or fractional marketer? Let’s talk

• Grab my LinkedIn OS for solopreneurs (I built a six-figure biz with it)

• Launch a solo business + close your first client in 90 days → join waitlist

Hey, I’m Lucas! Welcome to The Solo Operator, where I write for Christian professionals wanting to escape the 9-to-5 and replace their W2 income through solo-business ownership.

Subscribe now

Introducing: Free Resource Friday

So this is a new thing I want to start with this newsletter.

Every Friday (or just about every Friday) I want to share a free resource, tool, article, or something I’ve come across that has been helpful to me in my business. Might even throw in a few things for a good laugh too. Who knows.

Over the years, I’ve kept a folder on my Chrome browser of “stuff that’s actually helped.”

Tools, articles, other people’s frameworks, a podcast episode, you name it. But I rarely come back to these things, nor do I have a reason to go back — until now.

I want to start sending it to you instead.

This is a new email, separate from the Monday newsletter. As I mentioned above, I don’t have a hard and fast fixed schedule. I’m not going to force a resource out every week to hit a cadence. When I come across something worth your time, or when I’ve got a few things stacked up, I’ll send it. That might be weekly. It might be once a month.

If you’ve built something, written something, or found something that’s helped you run a solo business, I’d love to hear about it and share it here. Reply to this email and if it’s useful, I’ll feature it here for the rest of the list.

To get this started, here’s a free assessment a friend shared with me that is super simple, but really helpful.

Podcast Gear List

(From at Saint Kolbe Studios)

I’ve been on more and more podcasts since I’ve started my business. And as of recent, I am actively trying to get on more to get more exposure to my businesses.

Which means it’s time I update my podcast tech stack a little bit.

So of course I hit up my friend Joe at Saint Kolbe Studios a while back, seeing if he had any recommendations on set up for mics, headphones, etc.

He came through by sending me this gear list. It’s very comprehensive.

If you’re needing a new mic or podcast set up, this was very helpful and saved me many, many hours in research.

I Chronically Do This (Free Self-Assessment)

I used to think being busy all day meant I was making progress.

Turns out I was just avoiding the one thing that actually mattered.

Jennie Hays, the Execution Block Specialist, put together a free self-scan called Why You Keep Saying One Thing and Doing Another. It walks through the specific moments where follow-through breaks down.

I took it myself.

The line that got me was this one: “I have too much going on right now,” but what I actually do is stay busy all day while the important thing never gets touched.

That’s me, more often than I’d like to admit. I’ll answer emails, tidy up a doc, or reorganize a list, anything that feels productive, while the one task that would actually move the business sits untouched. It feels responsible in the moment. It isn’t. It’s just an easier way to avoid the hard thing.

Jennie’s scan is what made me name it. Once you can see the exact moment you swap the important work for the easy work, you can catch yourself faster next time.

The behavior isn’t really the problem. It’s just a signal of what’s underneath it.

Take the free self-scan here.

— Lucas

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A weekly note for Christian professionals wanting to escape the 9-to-5 and replace their W2 income through solo-business ownership.

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RESOURCES

• Find me on: LinkedIn

• Need a copywriter or fractional marketer? Let’s talk

• Grab my LinkedIn OS for solopreneurs (I built a six-figure biz with it)

• Launch a solo business + close your first client in 90 days → join waitlist

Hey, I’m Lucas! Welcome to The Solo Operator, where I write for Christian professionals wanting to escape the 9-to-5 and replace their W2 income through solo-business ownership.

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Imagine this:

Someone with a family, maybe a stay at home spouse and some kids.

Add in a mortgage, car payment, some student loans, on top of retirement to fund. There are a lot of money demands every month and the W2 isn’t providing the padding that it once was. The rate at which this person increases their salary isn’t coming close to the rate of inflation.

So naturally, they want to start making a bit more money outside of their job. They have a bit of margin, but also, the extra cushion would be nice.

The solution they land on is to start the good ol, “side hustle.”

Could be reselling or creating courses or maybe they opened an Etsy shop.

Let’s say they go the reselling route. They spend the next six months trying to build a side income flipping items from estate sales and reselling them online. They’ve never done retail arbitrage before. So everything is brand new: learning what sells, how to price it, how to photograph it, how to move it - all nights and weekends, on top of a full-time job.

Six months in, they’re making a few hundred dollars some months and nothing in others.

Eventually, this person calls it quits because “there’s no money in reselling” or some version of that.

We all probably know someone like this - heck, I have been this person.

Pick a random side hustle off a YouTube video or a friend’s suggestion just to find out because you had zero experience or idea what it entails, you never make a dollar or stall before you ever figure it out.

I think this happens because of two costs that the new “side hustler” isn’t taking into account when getting started.

Two Costs Get Paid At Once

Any new business / income stream carries two costs before it pays you anything.

1. Skill cost

You have to actually get good at the thing. Whether that is:

• Estate sale flipping

• YouTube / content

• Dropshipping

• Etsy

• Whatever

Anything takes reps, and reps take time. But often, the person I described above, doesn’t have a ton of time. And even if they do, they can’t crack the second cost.

2. Monetization cost

Even once you’re decent at the thing, you still have to figure out how to get people to actually pay for it.

• Who’s buying

• What they’ll pay

• How to reach them

• How to close the loop from attention to money

• How to get them to buy it over and over again

Most side hustle advice bundles these into a single cost, which is why it all sounds like a silver bullet. They’re two separate learning curves stacked on top of each other.

In my experience, most side hustles stall here. But there is a way easier and far more viable path to take for the average, W2 professional.

What I Actually Had Going For Me

When I left my job, I knew it would be a waste of time to build a business I knew nothing about before starting.

And time was something I particularly didn’t have much of with a wife and two kids at home depending on my one income.

Instead, I took the skill I’d spent almost 10 years getting paid to use inside someone else’s company and built a service offer around it.

→ I already knew how to write content that generates demand.

→ I already understood positioning, messaging, and funnels.

So I started there. I had already paid the “skill cost” so once I went solo, all I had to figure out was monetization.

Since I really only had the one learning curve to overcome, I was able to replace my income way faster.

I was starting with an offer built around skills that employers were already paying me for. This time, I wasn’t taking a salary for it. Instead this time I started owning my output.

Where Side Hustles Fit

Don’t get me wrong, I think side hustles have a place.

If you’ve got the time and the drive to learn something completely new, and you’re not in a rush, that’s a legitimate path.

Personally, I spent months, years actually, exploring the ETA space (entrepreneurship through acquisition).

I was infatuated with the idea of buying an existing business and operating it without having to start from scratch. The only problem was, once, I started looking at deals, talking to brokers, meeting sellers, figuring out financing - I quickly realized I was needing to learn like 10+ new skills just to get a deal done.

Then once I presumably got one done, I had to figure out how to operate that particular business. Nobody in that space talks about this enough, but it’s a real gap that most never think about beforehand.

Again, it’s a slower path, because you’re paying both costs with no head start on either.

If you’ve spent a decade or more getting good at something like marketing, ops, finance, sales, recruiting, whatever it is, you’re already sitting on a paid-down skill cost.

The only thing left is monetization, and that’s a smaller problem than it looks like from the outside.

I backed off the ETA route for the time being and resorted to starting something I knew I could make work. I recommend that every aspiring “side hustler” or solopreneur start here as well. To determine what that thing is, there is one main question to ask yourself:

“What have I already been getting paid to do in my current company that I could sell directly instead of through an employer?”

Finding What You Already Have

Companies ultimately only pay for four things:

1. More leads.

2. More revenue.

3. More time.

4. Less cost.

If you’ve spent a decade or more in a career, odds are you’ve built skills that land in one of those four buckets.

→ More leads looks like: content strategy, cold outreach systems, SEO, paid ads management, or building the kind of funnel that turns strangers into opt-ins.

→ More revenue looks like: fractional sales, email and lifecycle marketing, sales process design, pricing and offer strategy, or direct response copywriting.

→ More time looks like: fractional operations work, documenting SOPs, building out automations, fractional HR or recruiting.

→ Less cost looks like: bookkeeping, tax strategy, auditing a bloated software stack, or renegotiating vendor contracts nobody’s looked at in years.

That’s not an exhaustive list. The point is there are a lot of potential paths you can take, you just have to determine the highest leverage skill you’ve built in one of those buckets and go all in on it.

Here’s an exercise I’d do:

• Take fifteen minutes and write down every skill you’ve built that fits into one of those four buckets.

• Then rate each one 1 to 5. A 1 means you can technically do it but wouldn’t want to build a business around it. A 5 means you’re already good enough that you’d stake a business on it without hesitating.

• Whatever lands as a 4 or a 5 is where you start looking for an offer.

I created a simple worksheet to make it easier to reflect on the skills you already have. Grab one here.

The Five Steps From Skill to Income

Picking the skill is step one.

What happens after it is a straight line, even though it rarely feels like one while you’re in it. Here are the five steps to go from skill to income that I followed:

1. Package

You take the skill and turn it into a service-based offer. Think agency work, consulting, or coaching.

2. Position

You build the story behind that offer based on your background that makes someone trust you’re the right person for this particular problem.

3. Pitch

Then you take that offer straight to the people in your network (think phone contacts and LinkedIn connections) rather than a cold list or an ad account.

4. Perform

You get on calls with people who are interested, and instead of pitching them again, you run a conversation built around understanding where they actually are and what’s actually broken.

I use something called the Serve Call Method.

The basic framework is: start with the relationship, then the results they want, then the roadblocks in the way, then the resources available, then a clear recap of what happens next.

5. Profit

The client signs, and you’re on your way to replacing what your W-2 used to cover.

–

This may seem overly-simplistic, but trust me, it’s not.

These are the five steps I followed, and I know many others who have built very successful solo businesses on the back of something similar.

Based on the hundreds of conversations I’ve had with other solos or aspiring solos still stuck in their W2, one reason they never get started is they have no idea what they’d sell.

My suggestion: build a service offer around the skill(s) an employer has been paying you for.

— Lucas

Subscribe to The Solo Operator

By

A weekly note for Christian professionals wanting to escape the 9-to-5 and replace their W2 income through solo-business ownership.

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RESOURCES

• Find me on: LinkedIn

• Need a copywriter or fractional marketer? Let’s talk

• Grab my LinkedIn OS for solopreneurs (I built a six-figure biz with it)

• Launch a solo business + close your first client in 90 days → join waitlist

Hey, I’m Lucas! Welcome to The Solo Operator, where I write for Christian professionals wanting to escape the 9-to-5 and replace their W2 income through solo-business ownership.

Subscribe now

I’ve been talking to a lot of business owners and solopreneurs recently about using LinkedIn. If I were to guess, 80-90% of my leads and revenue for my ghostwriting business come from LinkedIn. It took a while, but once I realized how users actually found me + what they’re engagement with me looked like, it all made more sense.

I wrote a newsletter about this a number of weeks ago, but want to break this down a little more. This is a very simple framework that I think lies at the heart of success on the platform, even for folks not wanting to become a content creator.

This is by no means perfect, as I realize human beings are unpredictable creatures and claiming that I know with 100% certainty how they engage with something like LinkedIn can be a bit misleading or disingenuous. Thus why folks - including myself - has disdain for the average guru.

What I will say is this “framework” is more of a heuristic for thinking about the kind of experience you should create for your ideal client on LinkedIn. That is for sure something you can do, and once you get good at it, can see results with a high degree of certainty.

LinkedIn operates like a funnel

For the better part of two decades, marketing has been dominated by the image of “the funnel” to describe how prospects are led from not knowing your brand to buying from you.

Seeing LinkedIn in this same frame is also very helpful as the platform is built for all users to send other users down a very similar experience.

-> Content & comments generate impressions.

These are “eyeballs” and the kind of results you want at the “top of the funnel”.

But not all eyeballs are created equal as I’m sure you already know. This is where creating content for someone specific comes in.

Specific ICP = specific traffic.

Don’t go and blabber about random stuff like I tend to (that content never produces much in terms of immediate results, but the body of work can produce some of the desired outcomes, just in a more roundabout way.)

You’d be far better off writing niche, ICP specific content and engaging with other creators who share the same audience or tertiary audiences. This is especially the case if you are mixing connections + DMs into the mix. In this case, you need to rely less on maximum reach and can focus on quality of connections and conversations instead.

-> When a post or comment catches someone’s attention, they are more likely to go to your profile.

That profile is a landing page. Please for the love of all that is good, stop seeing it simply as a resume.

This is the “middle of the funnel.”

What results you want to see at this stage are:

• “Profile link clicks”

• “Profile views”

This means your content & comments are actually piquing people’s interest enough to see what you’re about.

From there…

-> The experience on your profile should be an extension of your content + comments + DMs

In layman’s terms:

Make sure your profile talks about the same things that you do in your content and comments and DMs. Consistency is the key here.

Side note:

There is nothing more confusing to a visitor or prospect than you mixing your messaging. This is the single biggest killer of momentum both on LinkedIn and marketing in general.

You gotta make it painstakingly obvious that you are for a very specific person + do it over and over and over again. Because the fact is, folks rarely buy the first time they come across you.

Thus, you have to be consistent so that when they have that pain that you solve, you’re the first person who comes to mind. But you only come to mind if you’ve “trained them” in a way to remember you as such.

Okay, tangent over. lol Back to your profile.

I’d recommend leading visitors to a single action, nothing more. This is the one thing you want them to do to establish a relationship off platform. That could be:

• a lead magnet

• book-a-call page

• a tool of some sort

The list is endless of what this “lead magnet” could be.

Again, the purpose here is to:

1) address a particular problem they have with a piece of free value and

2) capture that intent by getting their contact info / incentivizing them to take the next step.

That’s how a visitor becomes a lead, particularly from organic content. This works the same way if you’re sending connections + DMs.

People find you from content / comments / DMs → they go to your profile + make sure you’re legit → take action from there.

“But I don’t want to create content. What then?”

Fair enough.

Not all of us want to spend the time it takes to do the “content hamster wheel” well. I get it and don’t blame you if that is you.

If that’s you, then I’d recommend to start sending connections + DMs once those new connections accept your request.

A simple message framework you could use comes from a post my buddy shared a while back.

He said “this DM template has a 91% open rate for us over the last 12 months and it created 56% of our clients” so definitely steal it if you are needing an effective one:

Table stakes in sending only connections and DMs are:

• 20-40 connections to ICP per day

• 10-20 DMs to ICP / accepted requests per day

At 20 connections per day, that’s 100 per week. I believe 200 connections is about the ceiling for an individual profile per week before LinkedIn flags it for bot activity or simply shuts you down. So be sure to make those connections count.

If you want to mix in video DMs, I’d recommend looking into that as well. Since you aren’t creating content, this would really humanize your brand / outreach.

The basics of this platform really revolve around one thing:

You need to do some activity for your target buyer to find you.

It’s either posts, comments, DMs, or all three. You gotta pick your poison.

This is why LinkedIn is the GOAT platform for driving revenue

I know, big claim. But here’s why I stand by it.

Every user on LinkedIn is on the platform to do business.

Whether they:

• Want to learn about business / their profession

• Want to network for business / their profession

• Want to market/sell for business / their profession

It’s all entirely business oriented, which is really, really good news for you and me.

This means there is intent baked into simply being on the platform.

If you’re selling to professionals or businesses — which most if not all the solo-operators following me do — know that your ideal customer is already on LinkedIn.

You have direct access to them and you don’t even need to go scrape leads / buy a list to access them.

So take advantage of it!

If you’re needing help getting started on LinkedIn, want to chat content strategy / profile optimization, or even are looking for someone to ghostwrite for you → I’d love to talk with you. I’m offering free 30-minute sessions and also offer 1on1 coaching here as well.

You can book a call here.

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A weekly note for Christian professionals wanting to escape the 9-to-5 and replace their W2 income through solo-business ownership.

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RESOURCES

• Find me on: LinkedIn

• Need a copywriter or fractional marketer? Let’s talk

• Grab my LinkedIn OS for solopreneurs (I built a six-figure biz with it)

• Launch a solo business + close your first client in 90 days → join waitlist

Hey, I’m Lucas! Welcome to The Solo Operator, where I write for Christian professionals wanting to escape the 9-to-5 and replace their W2 income through solo-business ownership.

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is the oldest of eight kids. His dad runs his own business as a cabinet maker in Wisconsin. It’s the same business Silas got started in at the age of 8.

Today, Silas runs a recruiting consultancy for clean tech startups (he just rebranded - definitely check it out) and also runs , a newsletter and now a guild, around one unfashionable idea: entrepreneurship is a calling more than it is a wealth strategy. Outside of his business ventures, Silas is married and has a two-year-old at home and another baby coming in August.

I’ve known Silas for awhile now, as we both went through a career accelerator program called Praxis around the same time. When I learned he was Catholic, I knew we’d find ways to collaborate and stay connected. And we certainly have. He’s a great operator and faithful Catholic - one that a lot of aspiring solopreneurs and current operators could learn a lot from.

Like so many entrepreneurs I know - myself included, his particular path is one born out of fear and imposter syndrome, which is why I wanted him on the newsletter. We discuss this and:

• A breakdown of his recruiting business and how he’s disrupting the space (wanting to do away with HR departments entirely)

• How he started Catholic Founders and his vision it

• What integrating Catholic social teaching in his business actually looks like

And more.

Here’s the conversation with Silas Mähner.

Why he waited years to start

Lucas: When it comes to starting your business, a lot of the people I talk to since starting this newsletter, put it off far longer than they should. And usually, the reason comes down to a few things. Imposter syndrome, low self-esteem, worrying what other people will think. Fear of past failure. Or the golden handcuffs — giving up the salary and the insurance. For you, what was at the heart of not diving in right away?

Silas: I think it was fear of a certain sort. Fear of going backwards. I had this insecurity that my life had to be hockey stick growth, that I couldn’t go backwards. When Covid hit, right after I’d moved to New York, I was scared out of my mind to fly home and visit family. I was afraid that if I left, what if I never made it back to New York. It’s such a stupid thing to be afraid of. You can just buy a plane ticket. But when you grow up in the middle of nowhere with very limited self-belief, the idea that it’s as simple as buying a plane ticket doesn’t occur to you. You think, how could I ever do that?

I was afraid that if I went back to Wisconsin and failed, people would say, “I told you so.” Being the oldest, one of my core motivations is to help my siblings have their own self-belief, to be a landing place for them if they ever needed it. The idea that I might not make enough money to be secure for them was a real fear too.

One of my mentors finally talked me off the ledge. He told me to sit down and actually visualize the worst version of it. Running through my savings. Selling the house. Moving in with my parents. Then he asked me one question — “are you willing to do that?” The answer was obviously yes. Once I understood that, I realized the fear wasn’t death and destruction. It was more like, I might have to reset, and that might be embarrassing, but I don’t care.

Lucas: It’s totally fine to have egg on your face when you fail. The pain and the fear we feel about that, to your point, is really just pride.

Silas: It is. It’s only your pride that gets hurt. Maybe some people will look at you sideways, but nobody’s actually thinking “ha, you failed.” They’re thinking, “how can I help?” And honestly, they probably admire you more for taking the leap.

The “sign” Silas couldn’t ignore

Lucas: So what got you to pull the trigger? Give me the play-by-play of what happened.

Silas: I talked to two different mentors in one day, kind of by accident. Both of them told me the same thing — what are you waiting for, just start moonlighting, file your LLC. So I filed the paperwork that afternoon. Later that same day, on what I thought was a routine call, my boss told me the new CEO wanted me back at a desk I’d intentionally worked my way off of. I took it as a sign from God that it was time to take the leap.

Having just filed the paperwork, I spent the next three weeks doing business development — figuring out pricing, asking potential customers what they thought.

I signed three customers in three weeks. I’d been trying to sign new customers at my job for four months straight and couldn’t close a single one. That felt very divine to me. I resigned April 1st and launched the company May 1st, 2024.

Betting on being the cheaper recruiting firm option

Lucas: Walk me through your recruiting business. What do you do, how are you different, how do you price it?

Silas: It’s a recruiting consultancy, direct hire search, mostly for clean tech startups.

I started the firm with the intention of pricing half of what most other firms charge. Part of the reason I couldn’t close anyone for four months at my old job was that nobody would pay what traditional firms charge, so I lowered the fees, and that’s part of why I got so many more people once I went out on my own.

Say a startup is hiring a head of sales. They come to me, I find the candidates, convince multiple people to take interviews, pitch them on the opportunity, manage the whole process, get them hired. The company pays me 12-15% of the first year base salary. Most other firms are traditionally 20 to 30%. And we charge on base only, not on commissions.

Lucas: Did that pricing bet almost bite you early on?

Silas: It nearly ended the whole thing. About a month and a half in, I had a placement lined up. A week before the guy was supposed to start, he backed out and took another job. In recruiting, you don’t get paid until someone actually starts. I’d seeded the business with about $5k of my own money and wasn’t paying myself anything. At the time, just living off savings. I’d given myself six months — if it wasn’t working by then, I’d go get a job.

By month four, I still didn’t have enough lined up to make it to month six.

Then, on the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, I got a call out of nowhere from someone I’d talked to 7 months earlier about a completely different opportunity. He’d just become CEO of a joint venture between four automakers and needed to hire eight people. He sent me a bid five grand less than I would’ve asked, and I took it.

That one retainer basically was my entire first year of revenue. Not diversified, but the bills got paid. I ended up doing $139,639 that year, all for a short year that basically started in April.

Where the business is today

Lucas: What’s the business look like today?

Silas: At the end of that first year I hired an EA, at about 20 hours a week. This year the goal was $600,000 in revenue. We’re probably on track for $400,000 to $500,000.

Now, I’ve also got three recruiters, two full-time and one almost full-time, a full-time admin, a finance person who handles my P&L, invoicing, and payroll, and four or five part-time content people who help with podcast editing and design. About seven people total.

Last year, our second full year, we did $295,000, at about 60% margins after I paid myself, closer to 80% before. This year margins are down some, more like 40 to 45% after I pay myself, because I’ve taken on outside contractors who charge more.

The Costco model, and why he won’t raise prices

Lucas: That’s a pretty decent business for something that started solo. You’ve got staff now.

Silas: Even now I could’ve kept it a solo business with just an admin. Hypothetically I could be charging double what I charge, because I have a pretty niche skill set. If I’d niched down even further, I could probably charge more than the industry average.

Lucas: So what stops you from raising your prices?

Silas: Mostly an altruistic motivation. I got tired of watching early-stage startups fail to fill critical roles because they couldn’t afford a traditional recruiting firm.

I like the technology these companies are building, so I wanted to make it affordable enough for them. Part of my thinking is I’m trying to build the Costco model, but for recruiting — low cost, high quality. My goal is that by keeping costs down and margins healthy, I can eventually replace the talent attraction function inside a business entirely. Handle all their recruiting more effectively, for less than it’d cost them to hire two or three talent people and pay for the software stack on top of it. I kind of hate HR, if I’m honest, so I want to get rid of it.

Where Catholic Founders came from

Lucas: Where did Catholic Founders come into all of this?

Silas: The first seed of it was 2019.

I was in the world of startups by then, and I remember learning about the WeWork IPO that fell apart because of fraud, and thinking — “why does a company get to exist for ten years without ever being profitable?” My honest thought was, if Jesus were CEO of that company, it wouldn’t look like that. So I actually launched a biweekly newsletter around then called The Catholic Businessman, with a friend. But once I moved to New York, I didn’t have the time and put it aside.

I didn’t act on it again until the end of 2023. A friend and I scoped out doing a proper Substack publication. We set up the email, the Substack, the URL. Then the day I launched my company — Saint Joseph the Worker’s feast day, May 1st — I realized I hadn’t done anything to honor St. Joseph that day, so I published the first article that night. Used some AI tools to throw together a crappy logo just to get it out the door.

Here’s the part I still laugh about. I didn’t even have access to the email account tied to the newsletter, because my co-founder who was supposed to help me went AWOL and I couldn’t reach him. For over a year, I had no login. People were probably replying to me the whole time and I had no idea. It was a comedy of errors. I just figured God takes care of us.

The premise underneath it is that entrepreneurship is about co-creation with God. It’s creative in nature, so it comes from God, and doing it well is a godly act — caring for the people around you, making more out of the resources you’re given, not just financial ones. I keep coming back to the parable of the talents. The steward isn’t there just to make money for the master. And people forget, a steward is literally the opposite of an owner. You’re managing somebody else’s assets. The master’s in charge, and he has motives beyond revenue increase itself — providing for those less fortunate, taking care of the household.

Living out Catholic Social Teaching in business

Lucas: What does integrating the faith in your business look like day to day?

Silas: A few concrete things.

First, we pray before every meeting. I’ve only hired Catholics so far, and even if I hire someone who isn’t, I’m still going to pray before meetings. It’s my company.

Second, we pay based on each employee’s actual needs. I ask people directly how much money they need monthly to get by and take care of their family, not how much they’d need to feel rich. I pay that as a base, and if they’re a good fit, they get commission on top. I did the same thing for my one U.S. contractor — asked what his monthly expenses would be, added a couple hundred dollars on top, and checked the balance sheet to see if it worked.

Third, which is related to the second point, we run profit-first accounting. That means we’re always setting money aside even when things aren’t great. This last quarter was rough and I still paid out a bonus, completely discretionary, based on feel rather than a formula.

Fourth, I try to check in on my team as people, though I’m not great at it because I’m business-minded most of the time. I give them books to help them think bigger and grow personally and professionally. For instance, I gave everyone on the team a copy of “Family Fortunes” so they’d think in terms of legacy instead of just this month’s number.

And the harder one, honestly, is what happens when things go well. My instinct is to take credit. I’m trying to catch that and remind myself it all belongs to God, not me. It’s easier to feel that in the good times. Right now, wondering how I’m going to make payroll and pulling from my own savings to do it, I’m trying to trust that even if the business closed tomorrow, that would still be part of the plan. It’s a lot easier to say than to actually feel.

What would you say to the aspiring entrepreneur?

Lucas: What would you tell the corporate professional sitting where you were four years ago — Catholic, wants to build something on the side or get out of the corporate world entirely?

Silas: At a high level, if you don’t live up to your gifts, the world is a less complete place for it. By leaning into what you’re good at, the world becomes more like it’s supposed to be, and God gave you those gifts. Stuffing them down your sleeve under your button-up at a 9-to-5 is burying your talent. He doesn’t promise you’ll be rich, but He will be with you.

Tactically, you have to figure out the skill you already have that people will pay for. Figure out your real monthly expenses, whether that’s $5k or $10k or whatever. Work backward from there — how many customers do you need to hit that number, and how do you go get one.

I’d also recommend getting nine months of savings in place if you want to play it safe. Give yourself six months, all in. If it’s not working, you’ve still got three months of runway to go find a job.

And if you feel called to it, and you believe God will actually be with you, worst case scenario, you should still go do it. He’s calling you, even if you don’t succeed. Maybe you learn something either way.

— Lucas

P.S. I want to feature more solo businesses in this newsletter. If you’re clearing six figures or $20k/month in revenue and want to share what’s working, or if you know someone who is, send me an email at lucas@veritascopy.com or DM me on LinkedIn. I’d love to hear the story.

Subscribe to The Solo Operator

By

A weekly note for Christian professionals wanting to escape the 9-to-5 and replace their W2 income through solo-business ownership.

Subscribe now

RESOURCES

• Find me on: LinkedIn

• Need a ghostwriter or fractional marketer? Let’s talk

• Grab my LinkedIn OS for solopreneurs (I built a six-figure biz with it)

• Launch a solo business + close your first client in 90 days → join waitlist

Hey, I’m Lucas! Welcome to The Solo Operator, where I write for Christian professionals wanting to escape the 9-to-5 and replace their W2 income through solo-business ownership.

Subscribe now

It was late March, 2025. I had to scratch the entrepreneurial itch. I’d had it for years.

Finally, the situation was right for me to make the leap. I had the courage to finally jump and go for it.

And I had to make it work too — I had no backdoor options and no alternatives lined up. What I did have was:

• A stay-at-home wife

• Two kids under the age of three

• And I was the only person bringing in a paycheck

— all of which meant there wasn’t really a choice left to make. I had to figure it out.

Now I don’t say this because this is exactly how you need to start a business. Actually, I discourage it. For myself, it’s just the situation I found myself in, so I made the most of it and — thank the Lord — it didn’t break my family.

Everything below is exactly what I did in the first 90 days to replace my income and become a solopreneur. In today’s newsletter, I lay it out in very simple terms. Simple enough that you can do the exact same thing.

I’m sharing all of this because what I really care about is more people, more Christians, getting into business ownership and becoming successful entrepreneurs — in whatever way that looks like early on.

There is nothing like owning your own skills and means of production, and as a by-product, building wealth in a way that actually shapes the culture around you.

The business world needs better examples. It needs entrepreneurs who are virtuous, who have the heart to impact people, not just the means to make money off of them.

Before the steps, here’s what to skip (for now)

Most solopreneurs waste their early energy on the wrong thing.

• A perfect, flashy new website

• LLC paperwork (definitely get a biz bank account though)

• A logo and established brand identity

The list goes on.

There are so many possible rabbit holes to go down when you’re getting started. But they are just that — rabbit holes. Shear distractions that will keep you from doing the work that actually makes a difference and turns into revenue.

Don’t get me wrong, none of those things are bad.

At some point, they will become necessary. But when you’re just starting out, they just don’t matter. And if you spend your time on them, know that chasing it feels productive while it is actually stalling you.

In the first 90 days, the only thing worth your time is whatever actually replaces your income. Everything else can wait.

So here’s the blueprint I’d follow if I started from zero again.

Step 1: Pick a skill you already have

Companies only pay for four things.

1. More leads

2. More revenue

3. More time

4. Less cost

If you’re like me, you’ve spent a decade or more building skills that fall into one of those buckets, just inside somebody else’s company instead of your own.

So my encouragement for anyone wanting to start a business, but without the crazy amount of risk or startup cost is to start with what you know — your hard earned skills.

Here are some examples under each bucket just to get your brain thinking about what kind of service you could realistically offer.

More Leads

• LinkedIn ghostwriting / content strategy

• Cold email / outbound systems

• SEO and organic search strategy

• Paid ads management (Meta, Google, LinkedIn)

• Podcast guesting and pitching (as a service for others)

• Lead magnet and opt-in funnel design

• Community building for demand gen

• Video/YouTube strategy for B2B

• Sales development / appointment setting (fractional SDR)

More Revenue

• Email marketing and lifecycle systems (flows, campaigns, segmentation)

• Funnel building and CRO (conversion rate optimization)

• Sales training / sales process design

• Offer design and pricing strategy consulting

• Upsell/cross-sell system design for existing customers

• Retention and churn reduction strategy

• Copywriting for sales pages, VSLs, launches

• Affiliate/partnership program design

• Pricing and packaging audits

More Time

• Fractional operations / COO work

• SOP documentation and systemization

• Project management as a service

• Executive assistant / virtual assistant services

• Workflow automation (Zapier, Make, n8n builds)

• AI implementation consulting (prompting, internal tools, agent workflows)

• Calendar and inbox management systems

• Hiring and onboarding systems for small teams

• Meeting and communication audits (cutting the noise)

Less Cost

• Bookkeeping and financial cleanup

• Tax strategy for solo operators and small business owners

• Vendor and software stack audits (cutting redundant tools)

• Payroll and HR compliance for small teams

• Insurance and benefits brokering for small business owners

• Contract and vendor negotiation

• Energy/overhead cost audits for physical businesses

• Procurement consulting

There are more than what’s listed above, but that’s the point. There are so many different businesses you could start with the skills you already have, you simply need to think about them differently. The fact is, someone is already paying you for those skills. It’s now your job to pick one and sell it.

So here’s what you need to do from here:

Take 15 minutes, sit down, and write out every skill you’ve built that fits in those four buckets above. Then rate each one 1 to 5.

A “1” means you can technically do it but won’t love it. A “5” means you’re a pro, you’re confident, and you’d build a whole business around it without hesitation.

I created a simple worksheet to make it easier to reflect on the skills you already have. Grab one here.

Step 2: Create a simple service offer

Now, once you have picked a skill, take that skill and “package” it in a way that’s actually attractive to a business.

Here’s what I mean.

Don’t frame it around what you’ll do.

Instead, frame it around what changes for them — or in other words, a specific outcome they can expect and one that they actually want, meaning it is a real need, thus not having it is a pain point.

Let’s say you’re a marketer who wants to become a ghostwriter.

Instead of “I’ll write five posts a week,” try something like, “I’ll generate you a set number of leads from your social profile in 90 days, or you don’t pay me until I do.”

That’s a completely different offer, because now you’re selling outcomes instead of deliverables, and that’s what separates you from every other freelancer who’s commoditized themselves into the ground.

At this point, I’d spend another 10 to 15 minutes writing a few versions of this sentence.

“I help [type of business] get [specific result] in [timeframe].”

Take 10-15 minutes, open a doc or note on your phone and write that sentence. Send it to a few close friends via text, ask them “does this make sense? Does this seem legit?” Bonus points if you can send it to people in the industry you’re targeting. Refine it until it clicks for them.

If you want to dive deep into offers, check out this newsletter I wrote on how I re-did my offer. Should be really helpful.

Step 3: Go straight to your network

Now you know the skill you can realistically build a business around

+

You’ve framed it / packaged it in a way that is attractive to potential clients

(i.e., you have a specific outcome you’d get for them, one that they actually want and if they don’t get, will experience some pain.)

Next, you go straight to outreach. My suggestion:

• Skip the content.

• Skip the audience-building.

• Skip every activity that isn’t outreach.

At least for now.

And I know how this sounds coming from the content guy. But trust me, what you need is proof of concept. You don’t need an audience or vanity metrics on social media. All of those things matter and will come, but you can do a TON of damage without ever investing in them.

The fact is: I generated ~60 meetings in my first 45 days, all from my own network / direct outreach.

These were:

• People I’d worked with.

• Friends / kinda friends or connections.

• Family members and family of family members.

Basically → introductions from people who already trusted me.

That was more than enough to land my first 3-5 clients and completely replace my income. Again, I repeat, all without a website and going ham on content.

This is the biggest reframe that I want aspiring solopreneurs to understand. You can get really really far with only people who already know you + know what you are capable of. If you want to start a side hustle on the side of your job OR even launch into the deep and replace your W2 income, this is how I’d do it.

To do this well:

• Go to your contact list on your phone / connections on LinkedIn.

• Make a list of 50-100 people across both who might need what you offer or know someone who does.

• Then reach out. Send them a text or DM that is casual but very clear/upfront with what you’re doing.

The goal is to book coffee chats, get into text / LinkedIn DM convos, etc. The reason is these are settings that feel natural. And in the beginning, this is what will lead to the most wins, fastest.

My challenge to you if you want to go solo → do this for 30 days.

I guarantee you will have more calls than you know what to do with. You actually have a good chance to have your first client within that time too.

— Lucas

P.S. If you’re thinking about going solo but don’t know where to start or you’re stuck in your head with imposter syndrome, I’d love to help. I do free 30-minute strategy calls where we map out the skill, the offer, and the outreach plan specific to where you’re at right now. No strings attached. You can book one here.

Subscribe to The Solo Operator

By

A weekly note for Christian professionals wanting to escape the 9-to-5 and replace their W2 income through solo-business ownership.

Subscribe now

RESOURCES

• Find me on: LinkedIn

• Need a copywriter or fractional marketer? Let’s talk

• Grab my LinkedIn OS for solopreneurs (I built a six-figure biz with it)

• Launch a solo business + close your first client in 90 days → join waitlist

Hey, I’m Lucas! Welcome to The Solo Operator, where I write for Christian professionals wanting to escape the 9-to-5 and replace their W2 income through solo-business ownership.

Subscribe now

has 9 kids and a Lord of the Rings themed Zoom background, complete with hand-painted green dragons his mom picked up at a school auction.

Any guy with a ton of kids + is a big fan of Tolkien is my kind of guy! But the reason I wanted him this week wasn’t to discuss TLOR, rather his background in operations and systems building.

Danny spent his career rebuilding operating models inside places like Accenture, then walked away to build his own thing: a piece of software that acts as a self-serve fractional COO for small business owners.

Before that he was in the Army National Guard, then government contracting, then almost bought a business through an acquisition search, then finally landed on the problem that’s been staring every solo operator in the face for years. The Google Doc your consultant built you is going to die in a folder somewhere and get rewritten from scratch in three years when everyone’s panicking.

I brought Danny on to talk about systems and ops specifically for people running a business by themselves. Not the abstract version. The actual question every solo operator eventually has to answer: when do I build a system, and when am I just avoiding the work of figuring out if the thing even works yet.

Here’s the conversation:

Why he left consulting to build his own business

Lucas: Walk me through the background. What led you here?

Danny: I grew up outside DC, went to Notre Dame, met my wife there, and had to find a job fast right out of college. I ended up in government contracting almost by accident, through a high school connection who needed someone with a military background. I loved it early on. I liked being able to move the needle for a client when a lot of the people around me had checked out.

But I got disillusioned with government work fast. You could win with your client and still be steering a behemoth with a paddle. So I moved to Accenture, worked on bigger problems, and found the part I actually loved: not managing a system once it existed, but building one from scratch. A blank canvas.

Lucas: What is it about systems and operations that you enjoy specifically?

Danny: I used to write novels for fun, and I took world-building seriously. Everything had to connect. You couldn’t just drop something interesting into the story if it didn’t pay off somewhere else. Building an operating model is the same kind of problem. Every decision affects something else, and you’re constantly managing the human side of it too. Not just “does this make sense on paper” but “will an actual person want to use this.”

Once a transformation project was finished and I was just maintaining it, I got bored fast. That’s what pushed me toward building operations from scratch for new firms, and eventually starting my own consulting practice.

Why he built software instead of another set of Google Docs

Lucas: So how did the software come out of that?

Danny: I was writing process documentation for a huge operating model rebuild and thinking, these documents are genuinely great. And I already knew that despite that, nobody would ever look at them again. They’d sit in a SharePoint drive and get rewritten in three years when everything was on fire.

I started asking why that happens every single time. The answer I landed on: documents store everything as one unstructured blob of text. A share drive can’t help you find anything. A wiki has a different version of the same problem. If people search once and get a bad answer, they stop trusting the whole system and stop using it.

So I built a structured database that presents itself as a document. Easy to read, but actually built on who does what, what do they do, and where do they do it. That’s the whole structure underneath it.

Lucas: What does using the tool look like day to day?

Danny: It’s a self-serve fractional COO. You log in and see your processes on the front page, or sort by role or by system. Click into a role and you see every action that person owns across every process, and every system they touch. There’s an AI assistant that helps you structure what you type in, so you’re not stuck filling out a bazillion fields.

The goal is to replace what a fractional ops consultant does today: interview you, map your processes, build you a Google Drive full of docs, and then leave. Except what we leave you with doesn’t die in a folder.

Who it’s actually for

Lucas: Who’s the ideal customer?

Danny: Generally a founder under $10 million in revenue who’s at the point of either hiring their first ops person or hiring a consultant to help them get organized. We’ve had a single-person law firm with growth ambitions sign up. We’ve had a security franchise. The common thread is someone who’s decided they can’t or won’t keep managing operations purely in their own head anymore.

Lucas: What’s the pricing model?

Danny: $3,000 a year, or $300 a month with two months free if you pay annually. It’s free for one person on a workspace, no matter how much you put into it. We kept it simple on purpose. Once someone wants to run two businesses or two long-term engagements out of it, we’ve got plans to let workspaces talk to each other without cluttering either one.

Framework #1: don’t systematize what you haven’t proven

Lucas: What’s the difference in how a solo operator should think about systems versus a bigger team?

Danny: Both are ultimately fighting the same constraint: attention. Where do you spend your time. One is trying to grow past the point where everything runs through them. The other already has a team and is trying to bring on more people so it’s not all funneling through one person.

There’s a hierarchy underneath that. You need a skill people will actually pay for. That’s non-negotiable, and you can’t talk about systems until that’s true. Right behind that, and nobody likes saying this part out loud, you need some baseline financial subsistence. You’re not going to make good system-level decisions while you’re doing whatever you have to do to feed your family that week.

Framework #2: the value delivery chain in every business

Lucas: And once those two things are in place?

Danny: Then there’s a value delivery chain.

People hear about you, people express interest, people buy, you deliver, they pay. When I sit down with someone, we figure out where the actual constraint is. If you’re closing 30% of the people you talk to, that’s great, you probably need more people to talk to. If you don’t know what’s working yet, you’re not ready to systematize anything. You systematize your experimentation first. What am I trying, what were the results, repeat.

The number one mistake, and I still do this to myself, is treating everything like it needs a system before you’ve proven it works. You build a system on a substrate that isn’t working, and it’s not going to be a good system. It just means you’re procrastinating with better production values.

Framework #3: The Theory of Constraints

Lucas: How do you know when you’re ready to build a system?

Danny: Once you have a proven chain, meaning every link from attention to getting paid works with some reliability, that’s the decision point. Now you look for the actual bottleneck. Maybe it’s not lead gen. Maybe it’s delivery. You fix the biggest constraint, then you move to the next one.

That’s the whole idea behind the Theory of Constraints. Find the bottleneck, fix it, repeat forever.

There’s also a rule I steal from Google’s old 20% time.

Spend most of your time exploiting what’s already proven to work, but leave some room to experiment with what might work better. Just don’t let that experimentation eat the 80% that’s actually paying you.

Lucas: What about building ahead of time instead of reacting to what’s already working?

Danny: I’d be careful building what I call a “Notion cathedral.”

(Think all those “comment to get” lead magnets on LinkedIn.)

That’s just an elaborate system that you won’t actually get value from yet. That’s usually the smart, capable person telling themselves they can engineer their way out of needing to prove anything first.

If you have a process, map it out. Put it on a page instead of holding it in your head, because a page can argue with you. You’ll write down what you think you do and realize you skip a step every single time because you hate it. That’s information. You can’t get that from a plan. You get it from what you actually do.

Where AI actually fits in solo businesses

Lucas: Where does AI actually help with any of this, in your experience? Especially for solopreneurs?

Danny: I don’t think it’s thinking, philosophically. But it’s genuinely useful in the short term and can be addicting in a way that’s debilitating long term.

I catch myself asking a chatbot something when what I should actually be doing is sitting and thinking through it myself.

Where it’s actually strong operationally is automation with a clearly defined input and output. That’s not new, we’ve had that for twenty years. The reason it’s still not more common is that most people never do the boring work of standardizing what comes in. That’s most of the job. AI doesn’t fix that for you.

Using AI for strategy or creativity is a category error, in my opinion.

Using it for data processing and transformation once your process is already defined, that’s where it earns its keep. It’s a very fast intern. The moment you try to make it an employee, you’re underestimating how much of your actual work is undefined judgment calls that a computer can’t make on its own.

Where this leaves a solo operator

If you take one thing from this: don’t build hyper defined systems and playbooks before you’ve proven the thing actually works. This is the case for anything:

• Lead gen

• Sales

• Delivery

• Ops

• Finance

Map what you actually do, not what you think you do.

Find the one real bottleneck in your business as it stands today instead of trying to fix everything at once. And use AI on the parts of the business you’ve already made boring and repeatable, not the parts that still require your judgment.

Danny’s building this in public right now with a small number of early customers. If you’re at the stage where you’re about to hire your first ops person or bring in a consultant to untangle how your business actually runs, Danny is offering a free strategy call to walk through your systems + ops with you. You can book a call here if you’re interested!

— Lucas

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Two years later, he’s receiving inbound from LinkedIn, sponsoring Catholic conferences in Idaho and coming away with nine or ten new clients per event — all while building toward a $1 million a year income with a plan to cap his personal take at $200,000 and give the rest away.

In this week’s edition, I want to walk through how he got here, because there are a few things he did that I think most people trying to build a solo business should emulate.

Half the Job Is Marketing

Jacob told me that building a book of business as a financial advisor is roughly 50% marketing and prospecting. Probably more in the early years.

“I didn’t realize that there would be so much marketing,” he told me. “I just thought it would be all financial planning. That’s what I’m an expert at.”

His marketing coach, James Pollard, told him on day one: good marketing covers a multitude of sins. Jacob didn’t fully understand that at first. He does now.

This is true in basically every solo service business, not just financial advising. You can be excellent at the work and still build nothing because the work and getting the work are completely separate skills. The second one doesn’t come automatically from the first. Jacob figured this out early and built his business around it.

Most people figure it out after two or three years of wondering why nothing is moving.

How He Got His First Clients

The first three or four months were certifications: Series 7, Series 66, insurance licenses, while Thrivent paid him a small hourly rate to study. Then they started pushing him to prospect.

By the time six months had passed, the only real marketing he’d done was go through every contact in his phone.

He did what Gary Vee says to do when you start a new business: he went through every contact in his phone, hundreds of people, and sent them all roughly the same message.

“Hey, I just started a business doing financial planning. I’m willing to buy you coffee or lunch. I’m trying to meet with everyone I can. If you’re not interested, do you know someone who might be?”

He got a few early clients that way, though not many, and he’s honest that it was less a marketing strategy than a support play, people who already liked him showing up for him. Good for early momentum. Not something you can build a system around.

The first year was Chamber of Commerce meetings, in-person church stuff, saying yes to almost everyone, including people fresh out of college with $2,000 to put into a Roth IRA. He handed out his phone number instead of business cards, a small tactical adjustment he figured out quickly: give someone a card and they’ll never call, trade numbers and you can follow up.

He posted on LinkedIn once or twice a week and saw basically zero traction. He kept going anyway.

The (Almost) Client That Changed Everything

Pretty early on, a client referred Jacob to his grandmother. She had $2 million in investable assets.

Jacob sat down with her and, by his own admission, didn’t really know what he was doing yet. She didn’t become a client. But the meeting changed something.

He did the math. A client like that, paying him 15 to 20 grand a year, was worth hundreds of clients with $2,000 in a Roth IRA. The economics weren’t close.

So he set a new floor. He’d still meet with anyone early on because he had to, but the direction was clear: he needed to find clients with meaningful assets, and he needed to stop spreading himself across people who’d never be able to pay him what his time was actually worth.

Now his minimum is $100,000 in assets, though he prefers $250,000 and makes exceptions for clients in their late 20s and early 30s, especially ones with equity compensation. Idaho’s largest employer is Micron, and a 30-year-old engineer there pulling in $100,000 a year in restricted stock units is exactly the kind of person worth sitting down with.

For anyone who doesn’t meet the asset threshold, he doesn’t just send them away. He charges a flat financial planning fee instead, somewhere around $2,000 a year depending on complexity.

Two Niches, One Business

Jacob does two things that most financial advisors don’t, and they work together.

The first is faith-based investing.

About a year and a half ago, he met the CEO of what he describes as the largest provider of faith-based ETFs in the world, based out of Idaho, and learned about the 2021 USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) investment guidelines, which advises Catholics how to think about the companies they own through their portfolios.

Some companies get screened out entirely: the ones tied to abortion, human trafficking, or pornography. Others stay in, but get pushed from the inside through collective advocacy instead of a walkaway boycott.

He gave me a specific example: Costco was considering stocking mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in medication abortions. A group of Christian and Catholic financial advisors organized, signed petitions, and warned Costco they’d be screened out of faith-based portfolios if they went through with it. Costco didn’t. They still haven’t.

The second niche is demographic.

He started sponsoring the Idaho Catholic Men’s and Women’s Conferences for around $500 a booth, and from it, pulled nine solid new clients from the women’s conference alone, with a couple more from the men’s.

(If you were wondering, yes, 12 new clients a year from two $500 booths is an extraordinarily good return on marketing spend. More of that please.)

Put those two things together, a faith-based offer backed by real guidelines and real corporate wins, aimed at very specific rooms like Catholic conferences and Catholic LinkedIn groups, and you stop competing with the other thousand financial advisors in town who are all saying the same thing.

The LinkedIn Long Game

Jacob was posting on LinkedIn for two years, with 100 connections and no traction. Today, he’s getting inbound leads every month from the platform.

He told me his outbound from two years ago was embarrassing. He was leading with what he does instead of what problems he solves. He gave me the example of how he starts conversations via DM outreach today:

Instead of saying “Hey, I’m a financial planner, do you want to work with me?” he learned to say “I work with Christian business owners, and we save them around $5,000 a year in taxes, usually within three meetings.” One of those gets a coffee, while the other gets scrolled past.

The content’s been mostly family and faith so far, though he’s thinking about adding more business posts. Currently, he is sitting at one or two posts a week now and figures five or six would speed things up significantly.

(Side note: I concur. Increasing your amount of anything on LinkedIn gives you way more shots on goal which means a higher likelihood of your ICP seeing your stuff.)

But the compounding is real. He said it himself: you put in the work for a year and a half and then it starts working. The platform doesn’t reward impatience.

(This is a great place for a shameless - but not so shameless - plug. Want my LinkedIn operating system + breakdown of the daily five in a format you can bookmark and come back to? You can grab it here.)

The Routine He Built Around It All

Jacob goes to Mass at 8am every day before starting work at 9, and he doesn’t work Sundays. He doesn’t work 12-hour days anymore either.

He told me about how he drew inspiration from St. Isidore, the patron saint of farmers (which is also my dad’s patron saint, fun fact.)

Legend has it Isidore showed up to work later than everyone else every day, and his guardian angel would be out plowing the fields in his place, the work always somehow getting done on time. Jacob treats that as genuine permission to trust that doing things in the right order produces better outcomes than doing more things faster.

His scheduling is structural:

• Tuesdays are in-person meetings, mostly with older clients;

• Thursdays are virtual;

• Monday, Wednesday, and Friday go to financial planning work, applications, and tax returns.

Twice a year, in October and April, he blocks two weeks for what his firm calls, “surge meetings.” They pack in 50 to 60 client meetings in that span to cover everyone in his book. The other 48 weeks are all prospecting.

The reason for surge meetings is pretty simple, and honestly is a solid idea. Most financial advisors scatter their client meeting time across the whole year, which means they’re never fully in prospecting mode. Jacob compressed all of it into two concentrated blocks so he could treat the rest of the year as a dedicated pipeline-building season. Could be a good practice for any advisors/consultants whose model operates similar to financial advisors.

–

I like hearing how other solos and business owners in general structure their day / week. I think how you use your time reflects what you value most. Jacob very clearly values his relationship with Christ and the sacraments, something I deeply admire.

If you’re able to build your day like Jacob has, great. Do it! If not, that’s also okay. Your day doesn’t need to look like the next person. We all simply have to take stock of our lives and know what our duties are and build around that. From there, it becomes very clear what we are to do and where we can be generous with our time.

Where He’s Going

His current goal is $5 million in new assets under management per year. He’s on pace to do $10 million this year and is starting to recognize the original number as a ceiling he set too low.

Here’s roughly how he gets there, in his own words:

• The market doubles about every seven years, so somewhere between seven and ten years out, the math lands him around $1 million a year in income.
  

• He and his wife want to cap their own take at $200,000 once they get there.
  

• They already give away 10% of what they make. Everything above that $200,000 mark, they plan to give away too.

He’s also planning a Catholic business conference in Idaho, probably two years out. There’s nothing like it in the Northwest. (For reference: The Napa Institute event in California runs $3,000 to $4,000 a ticket, and he wants to build something more accessible. I don’t blame him, and think there is a legit opportunity here.)

Talking with Jacob, I learned that financial advising has a brutal washout rate: roughly 90% of advisors fail within their first three years.

There’s a saying in the industry, Jacob told me: the hardest $40,000 you’ll ever make, but the easiest $400,000 once you’re past it.

I loved this as it applies to a lot of what we talk about in this newsletter, not just financial advising. The early years of any solo practice are genuinely hard in ways that don’t get easier by moving faster. They get easier by making good decisions early, building the right habits, and trusting that something is compounding even when you can’t see it yet.

Jacob hasn’t been doing this for 20 years. He’s two years in and already past a lot of the inflection points that stop most people. If you’re a financial advisor just starting out, definitely worth following Jacob or even reaching out directly — he’s building a great business and I have no doubt he’s gonna hit his goals.

If you're a Christian business owner or solopreneur making $150k+/year and want help navigating your financial decisions and taxes, you should schedule with Jacob.

— Lucas

When I started my solo-business, I had big goals in mind for revenue and wealth-building. I knew going out on my own was risking to start, but provided the most upside in the long run.

Once I started hitting the revenue goals I had for myself, something felt off. I always imagined what that income could mean for me, my family, our ability to save, invest, etc. Before I ever had it, it was all I thought about.

(Now, I’m not rich, nor am I making crazy amounts of money. But as someone who made no more than $30k/year through most of my 20s as a missionary, what I make now is dumb in comparison.)

To continue my thought above… Once I started hitting those revenue targets, I quickly realized it was never enough. It was always, “okay, now what’s the next goal? $50,000 a month, $100,000 a month?” Always more was the only answer I had.

Another thing I quickly learned is it takes:

• a lot of discipline

• lots of grace

• prayer

• virtue

…to rest once I reached a goal and to not simply want more for the sake of more.

That’s the tension that I want to spend some time on in today’s newsletter.

Something I don’t see a lot of conversation around, especially amongst Catholics or Christians broadly speaking — is the notion of poverty of spirit, especially as it relates to wealth building and money and business.

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you want to:

• get out of your job

• build a business

• have more control over your time and wealth

Awesome! Those are good things. But we have to stop and analyze and really take account of ourselves. We must ask, “What is my disposition to possessions, to money and wealth?” Because if we don’t, we will go about it in a way that consumes us. In the end, if that happens, we truly do risk losing our soul.

Everybody can fall prey to this. We all have our vices. Maybe avarice isn’t the vice for you, but that’s not to say it couldn’t still crowd your heart.

The constant anxiety and grasping for more that the world, especially internet culture, draws so many of us into — it creates what you could call “feverishness”. It’s a few steps beyond just anxiety. Again, I don’t want to be misunderstood at the outset of this newsletter. Building wealth, increasing your salary, creating better means for your family — those aren’t bad things in themselves. But when we do them in a way where our passions and desires become disordered, so much so that we do so anxiously and feverishly and without a lot of thought, we’re being dominated by our emotions rather than our intellect ordering them.

This then increases the likelihood of creating a relationship with money and wealth and possessions where we are actually the ones being dominated, versus we being the ones exercising dominion as we are called to.

Who is Francis de Sales?

To guide this newsletter, I want to glean some wisdom from a Bishop from Geneva in the 15th, 16th century, right around the time of the Reformation. His name is Francis de Sales. For my Protestant readers, you probably have no idea who that is, but for the Catholics in the audience, you’ll definitely know who he is.

As Catholics, we call him a Doctor of the Church. He was a very holy, saintly man, but also a great bishop, scholar, and theologian. He’s known as the “gentleman’s saint”, but also as the Doctor of the Church for the laity, because of his articulation of the faith in a way that was very accessible to the layperson. He had a way in his writings and in his preaching of making the moral teachings of the Church, but also how to live the Christian life, very accessible to the everyday person who isn’t a priest or religious. A lot of spiritual writing up to that point was very much for priests or people living a consecrated life. He made the teachings of the faith explicitly articulated for lay people.

He has a beautiful passage from his great work, Introduction to the Devout Life, on poverty of spirit in the midst of wealth. If you have the book, it’s in Chapter 14. It’s just a couple of pages, but there are a handful of points he makes that are very helpful for navigating how to, as a Christian, approach wealth in the world. Especially because I haven’t taken any vows of poverty. I’m not a missionary (at least any more), I’m not a priest. I’m somebody who has to depend on the economy, live and work a job, provide for a family, pay a mortgage, pay taxes, all of these things.

If that’s you too, this will be hyper relevant to you and I hope it helps.

Rich in Spirit vs. Poor in Spirit

He starts by quoting Matthew 5, verse 3: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

First things first, no, Our Lord was not saying that all Christians must be poor. Poverty of spirit does not demand that we have no material wealth. Actually, quite the contrary, BUT, with a bit of nuance.

On this beatitude, Francis De Sales comments on the meaning of this verse:

“Woe then to those who are rich in spirit, for their portion will be hell. He is rich in spirit whose heart is in his riches, and whose riches fill his heart. He is poor in spirit who has not riches in his heart, nor his heart in riches.”

He goes on to share an image, one of the halcyon — a bird very common in Greek legend. He gives the image of how it builds its nest in the shape of a ball, leaving only one little opening at the top, and so strong and impenetrable is it that when the waves of the sea surround it, no water ever enters. “Always rising on the waves, the birds remain open, and in the midst of the sea, as lords over it.”

He likens this to how our heart should be to worldly riches.

Open only to heaven and impenetrable to riches and earthly things. If you possess them, we must preserve our heart from loving them. “Let it rise above them and be poor in the midst of wealth and master of its riches. Beware of losing the spirit of holiness in the good things of this world, but let your heart always be the superior — not in them but above them.”

This is such a constant battle. One that I feel acutely in my life every single day. There are so many forces vying for not just our attention, but to impress upon us in such a way that they shape and manipulate what we desire. And if we desire the thing they want us to, then they, in a sense, control us.

We live in the world, we can’t escape this battle. And as it pertains to earthly, material riches, we have to know ourselves and approach them in a way that we remain “lord over them.” That looks different for every person. If you are someone who gets carried away in your work — and I know a lot workaholics — knowing yourself would mean you have to go out of your way to temper the hours you put in so you can attend to your other duties in life. This could mean setting a limit for how long you work everyday and even how many nights per week you choose to work. This might seem silly, but it’s real. You must know yourself and act accordingly.

The last image De Sales gives that I think puts a bow on this part of the conversation nicely is that of an apothecary, and how they keep poisons for various uses.

“But just because they keep poisons in their shops does not mean that they themselves are poisoned. Likewise, we can possess riches without being poisoned by them — but only if they haven’t taken such a deep root in our heart that they become what we cling to.”

The Vice “Nobody Admits To”

I’ve met many avaricious people I my life. People wholly consumed by money and possessions.

On the flip side, I have met virtually zero avaricious people who openly claimed they were driven by this vice.

Francis De Sales makes this observation as well:

“No man who is truly avaricious actually owns that he’s avaricious. Nobody wants to claim the fact that they’re so narrow-minded and have such narrowness of heart as to say that outright.”

De Sales goes on:

“Men excuse themselves on the plea of providing for their children, or on that of prudence and forethought. They never have too much, but always find some good reason for seeking more. And even the greatest misers not only will not confess their avarice, but in their consciences, they do not believe themselves to be avaricious, for it is as a burning fever, which, as it grows stronger, is the less noticed by its victim.

Moses beheld how fire from heaven burnt a bush without consuming it. But the profane fire of avarice consumes and devours the miser without burning him. For amidst the fiercest lusts, he fans himself with an imaginary and delicious breeze, and believes that insatiable thirst is but natural and rightful.”

This is why I’m writing about this. Avarice is one of those vices that is easy to disregard and claim you don’t have. Or to say, “oh, but it’s a natural thing, I have to have possessions and riches to live.”

But going back to my point about knowing yourself — you and I have a limit.

The near occasion of sin for each of us is a little different, but each of us does have that point where we are knocking on the door step of a particular thought or act we shouldn’t think/commit.

De Sales goes on:

“If you desire eagerly and anxiously that which you have not, though you may say you do not seek to acquire it unjustly, you are still really avaricious. If a man longs anxiously and earnestly to drink, albeit he desires water only, he gives undeniable proof that he is feverish.”

I don’t think a lot of us modern people appreciate just how feverish we all are, in large part because of how modern life is constructed, but also because of how the internet operates. Short form content, quick fix, lots of scrolling, lots of consuming, feeding the dopamine. It keeps us coming back over and over again. That is a perfect definition of feverish activity. It makes us continue to feed that “I need more, need more, need more”, without us even realizing it.

The other thing I think this does to us is it opens the door to envy.

We see people who have success that we want and it makes us want the thing they have in a very disordered way. This envy leads to jealousy and this jealousy creates hostility and resentment. I’ve noticed all these things even in myself. We have to be on guard against envy and jealousy and be thankful for what it is that God has given us at each step, and really temper those passions to want more than what we’re given at a given moment.

The Litmus Test

De Sales writes:

“A great way to know that you are feverish is if you’re very strongly attached to what you already possess, and if you’re absorbed in those possessions.”

And I think another way you could translate possession would be work, social media accounts, businesses, what have you. If they fill your heart and engross your thoughts constantly and fill you with anxious fears lest you lose them.”

I heard a great little anecdote from a priest one time.

He was asked: “how do I know what my predominant fault is?”

(Quick side note: In the Catholic tradition, we understand the predominant fault to be the main vice that underlies all of the vices a given person tends toward in their life.)

This priest answered:

“Reflect on what is the last thing you tend to think about before you go to bed, and the first thing you think about when you wake up in the morning.”

I did that for myself. And for a long time, it was increasing my income and growing the business. This is still a struggle if I’m being honest. I think it will be for as long as I decide to build businesses and wealth (so all my life I guess.)

Feverishness, avarice, the needing to expand and grow more — all were dominating my thoughts and mental space without me noticing, let alone ordering my activity to the glory of Our Lord.

My encouragement is to work on this awareness and order all things to Christ. This is the only way I know for you and I to be at peace — the kind that Christ alone can give — in the midst of the world.

De Sales says:

“You cannot take great delight in anything without it engrossing your heart more or less. And nothing so well tells our love for what we lose as our grief for its loss. Therefore, do not let your desires for that which you have not assume a definite shape, and do not fix your heart on that which you have. Do not be overpowered by such losses as you may meet with. And then you may venture to think that although you are rich in fact, you are not in spirit, but that being poor in spirit, you are blessed, for the kingdom of heaven is yours.”

The Right Path Forward

If you’re a Christian reading this, you - most likely - live in the world.

With that, it’s a moral imperative for you to contribute meaningfully to it, which means in one sense to build wealth and generate income to sustain yourself and those entrusted to you. And not just simply to get by.

I believe it was Leo XIII, who said that the employer ought to provide a living wage that was not just enough to get by, but was enough for the head of the household “to live very comfortably.” So it’s not wrong, even as far as the popes are concerned, to want to build enough wealth to where you’re not simply living paycheck to paycheck.

Francis de Sales actually comments that in the rightly ordered sense,

“It’s a great happiness and a great joy to a Christian to be rich materially and also to be poor in spirit.”

The path I talk about in this newsletter isn’t wrong. It isn’t for everyone, but it isn’t wrong. My only suggestion and encouragement would be to take stock of who you are, what your vices are, and then chart the path for how YOU are meant to build wealth without becoming so engrossed in it all that “you gain the whole world and lose your soul.”

De Sales says if you are to increase your means and possessions, you “must do it not only with justice, but also with gentleness and charity.” Gentleness is the virtue that counters the feverishness, anxiety and over-eagerness in our daily pursuits. While charity is love of God for God’s sake, and love of neighbor for God’s sake.

Whatever you build must exist to support and orient yourself toward a life lived for Christ. If it doesn’t, then it’s taking away from that.

When I was a missionary, I always told the missionaries I supervised: “You have to be smarter than you are virtuous.”

It’s really easy to overestimate our virtues and underestimate our vices. Which is why we have to be keenly aware of our pitfalls and where we fall short before God. The worst we could do is become disillusioned, which only leads to being misled and even worse - losing our soul.

This game of business ownership will consume you, and there will be times where you are consumed by it. But what St. Francis de Sales would say is what I will leave with you: “take heart.”

I firmly believe there is a path for you to still live in peace in the midst of building a business and wealth. But it means embracing poverty of spirit, being humble, and going about your business with great gentleness, be keenly aware of the forces seeking to destroy your soul at every turn.

I pray you, according to God’s Holy Will, become, as Francis De Sales says, “rich in substance and poor in spirit.”

—Lucas

Before You Go…

1. Want my LinkedIn operating system + breakdown of the daily five in a format you can bookmark and come back to? You can grab it here.
   

2. I’m putting together a coaching program around building a solo service business. If you want to be the first to know when it opens, join the waitlist and be the first to learn more when it drops.

Derek eventually crashed on a buddy’s couch and picked up a remote sales job with an Airbnb property management company. When COVID hit and shut down travel, he lost the job and the business model was killed in about thirty days. From there, he did the only logical thing and decided to start his own property management company. He grew it to 75 properties and $750,000 in revenue over the next three years.

Burned out at the height of it, Derek made the decision to hand it off to his two partners as he discerned God wanted him to take a job in ministry of all things. That’s what led him to Young Catholic Professionals — all for about half the salary. But as Providence would have it, he met his wife Kylie there, and eventually launched a coaching company with her called Beyond the Veil.

—

In today’s Solo Biz Deep Dive, I’m featuring Derek McMonagle, the CEO and Founder of Beyond the Veil Coaching and a genuinely great guy. I wanted to start by giving the cliffnotes version of his story because I think it really humanizes the journey that someone takes to getting to success, especially in business. Derek is a super talented and gifted guy - especially in sales and building businesses. He’s done both successfully at a high level for a long time, yet not without a lot of trial, error, and prayer.

If you’re thinking about going solo or you’re trying to grow something already, definitely tune into Derek’s story and the ins and outs of his business. Not only is his business model super common and relatable to a lot of first time solo founders (coaching), Derek’s process of launching, iterating, and scaling connected a lot of dots for me as we talked. Hope you enjoy!

What led to starting Beyond the Veil

The origin of Beyond the Veil goes back further than his time at Young Catholic Professionals (YCP).

When Derek was working at the Phoenix Suns years, someone there told him he had a gift for motivating people, and that people would pay him to do it for them. He didn’t act on that feedback right away, instead filed it away for a rainy day. Well that rainy day came, all when COVID took out his remote job in 2020, and he decided to post an Instagram story offering free coaching to five people just to see if there was anything there.

Short answer: There was.

Very quickly, Derek had five turned paying clients, which turned into a real enough thing that Derek decided to build around it. He called it the DMAC Method, which tells you most of what you need to know about the first version of the business.

It all revolved around his name. He was showing up at clients’ homes at 4:00 a.m. to work out with them, running brainstorms throughout the day, making himself so central to the delivery that the business and Derek were essentially the same object.

That’s not a knock on how he built it. Most solo operators start that way, myself included. You build with what you have, and in the beginning, what you have is yourself. The problem comes later, when you realize the thing you’ve built can’t run without you being there for all of it.

Derek told me “the Lord took that version of the business away from me.” Gradually, not all at once. Clients left. His energy drained. Finally, he heard in prayer that when he was ready to build something that wasn’t about him, it would come back.

But before that next version could take shape, he needed to meet the person he’d build it with.

Day one at YCP, Derek met his now wife, Kylie. She grew up around entrepreneurship and had a love for Tony Robbins type personal development in a way Derek hadn’t. They hit it off immediately.

However, It took about a year and a half of working together at YCP before the timing was finally right. They got married earlier this year. The reason I’m giving you the inside scoop on their relationship is because the coaching company practically grew out of it.

Initially, they both pitched a podcast idea to YCP in August of 2025. It got turned down. But that same weekend, separately in prayer, they both came back with the same thing: the Lord wasn’t calling them to a podcast, but to build a coaching company.

They took that as a clear enough signal and got to work.

Their first two clients came providentially — a woman Derek had met at the Seek conference the year before reached out out of nowhere saying she felt called to work with him, and a real estate agent named Nick who Derek had sat next to at a dinner a month earlier texted asking if Derek would coach him. Neither of them had a company yet. Those two clients gave them the funds to register the business, get the branding built, and actually start.

Now, Beyond the Veil is building on that initial calling by serving a larger, more developed mission: helping Catholics in sales and professional life perform at a higher level, close without manipulation, and develop a prayer life that actually holds up under the pressure of building something.

The thing I love most about their model is how intentional he and Kylie have been about integrating their values as Catholics into the practice. They pray at the start and end of every coaching call. St. Michael the Archangel is the business’s patron saint. And if that’s not the kind of thing you’re looking for, Derek will tell you that upfront and point you somewhere else.

The Business Model

Beyond the Veil runs on four tiers, which is more structure than most solo coaching operations carry. But talking to Derek, each one makes sense because each tier is really aimed at a different person at a different stage.

(See the stack here on his website.)

• The entry point is $199 a month, built for freelancers and people just getting started.

• $550 a month is the Scaling with the Saints program.

• $1,500 a month is the Virtuous Closer, which is the flagship, aimed at people who are already selling and want to get better at it without feeling like they have to adopt a negotiation playbook that doesn’t sit right with them.

• They also do custom packages for B2B sales teams.

One of the more interesting structural decisions Derek made was extending contract length.

He used to run 90-day engagements. The math looked fine until he realized he was spending as much time reselling as he was delivering, which is a treadmill solos don’t want to get stuck on, at least not for too long. Every time a contract ended, he was starting from scratch on that client relationship, convincing them again, resetting the revenue.

He and Kylie pivoted and moved to a 6 to 12 month agreement. This pivot stabilized everything at once: the revenue, the relationship, and the amount of mental energy he had left over to actually coach well.

Don’t sleep on a good offer

This is a big learning I want to really unpack because I see a lot of solos falling into it - myself included. If you have only a few small and mid tier offers (sub $1k/mo or one time type stuff), you are knowingly or unknowingly playing the volume game. You will always have to have a full pipeline if you hope to keep revenue numbers up OR be able to stack enough ongoing retainers at a smaller price point and hope you can manage dozens of clients.

Don’t get me wrong, the model can work. Think about CPAs or financial advisors for instance. But as a coach or service provider, switching the offer to a high ticket offer gives you the chance to:

• Build a model that scales without playing volume

• Serve less clients at once, but go deeper with them

• Make more money by providing a better service to fewer people

Now the goal isn’t purely profit. That’s not the point I’m making. Rather, think very critically about your service model and the subsequent offer you create to package the service. If you want something that scales and doesn’t crush you in delivery, a high ticket offer is most likely the way to go.

If you’d like help crafting your high ticket offer, I am offering coaching sessions to solos just starting out or trying to rework their current model. Send me a DM and I’ll share more details.

Okay, back to the deep dive!

Where He Finds Clients

57% of Derek’s business comes from LinkedIn. But that number took a while to build. He spent the first 6 to 12 months posting every weekday and getting almost nothing back, which is a stretch that weeds out most people.

He stayed with it though and is reaping the rewards now. Testimonials started coming in → Client results became content → And at some point, the inbound became consistent enough that he stopped needing to manufacture urgency on sales calls.

The other 30 to 40% comes from referrals: people from YCP, connections through Catholic Founders (s/o Silas!), and referral partnerships. That last one has opened up B2B work with small financial services firms he wouldn’t have found through content alone.

A few investments he made that didn’t amount to much:

• He also spent $12,000 on a program called Closers.io, which returned zero sales calls and zero revenue. He’s honest about it. The knowledge was useful, he says, but it didn’t deliver what the program implied it would.
  

• He ran a cold email campaign with a collaborator that also produced no direct sales, but left him with a list of 50,000 hashed emails of Catholic real estate and insurance agents he’s now using for Meta ads retargeting.

I’ve had a few of those experiences myself, where the thing doesn’t work the way you hoped but produces something you end up using later in a different way. It doesn’t make the investment feel good at the time, but it’s worth noting that not every dead end is actually a dead end.

The bigger lesson here is: you have to pay to play this entrepreneurship game.

Even if ROI doesn’t look how you thought it would, the majority of your growth will come on the backend of you investing something, somehow. Either directly in the business, in yourself, or in someone else. It’s held true in my business so far and in almost every biz owner I know as well. Food for thought.

Their Daily Routine + Sales Process

I love to learn about how other solos structure their days and steward their time. Most of us get into this game because we want the ability to really own our time and structure our schedule around our values. I’d say Derek and Kylie do a pretty good job at this.

They wake up and start their day individually in prayer, then they go to daily Mass, spend time in adoration, and finally hit the gym. They make sure they do all of this before a laptop is opened. It runs about four hours most days.

(Now, I unfortunately can’t run a routine like this. I have three kids under four and have different responsibilities. I say this because you have to do what works for you and your state in life.)

In addition to me loving to learn how others structure their days, I share their routine because it directly explains something unusual about how Derek sells, and I think that connection is worth drawing out.

Derek doesn’t use manipulative tactics on sales calls.

• No pressure frameworks

• No artificial urgency

• No Chris Voss negotiation moves designed to engineer a yes.

His belief is that “every person who finds their way onto a call was sent there, and if it’s a genuine fit, it’ll close.” If it’s not, he’d rather say so than force it.

This doesn’t mean he doesn’t do outreach, or follow up or track his numbers. He does all of that. It also doesn’t mean that their prayer life is a replacement for any of that work either.

Rather, what it does, from what I can tell, is give him the internal stability and conviction so he doesn’t feel compelled to manipulate a deal across the finish line just because he wants the revenue. I think this speaks to Derek’s high level of integrity and is a principle I’d encourage every solo operator to embody.

As business owners, it is super easy to give into a scarcity mindset. And modern sales tactics were created to counter that mindset. However, there is an abundance of opportunities out there. If you’re just starting out or really concerned about how you’ll find and close clients, God will provide. Do your part and trust in Him. It will happen, so long as you are holding up your end of the bargain (i.e., actually putting in the effort!)

What He’d Tell You to Do First

I asked Derek what he’d tell someone going solo to get right before anything else. He didn’t hesitate:

“80% of your success as a solo founder is in the offer.” If the offer doesn’t connect with the right person around the right problem, nothing downstream fixes it. Not your sales skills, not your content, not how good you are at follow-up. You can be excellent at all of those things and still get nowhere if the offer itself doesn’t land.

I’ve heard versions of this in most of the conversations I’ve had for this newsletter, and I believe it more every time I hear it. My own business took a meaningful turn when I stopped trying to be good at everything and got clearer on exactly what problem I was solving and for whom. It’s not a glamorous insight but it’s probably the most important one.

The second thing Derek mentioned was follow-up, specifically that most people do far less of it than they think they do.

He’ll sit with a client who says outreach isn’t working and find out they contacted five people. Five. His own process runs 21 days:

• a LinkedIn message on day one

• a follow-up on day five

• a video message on day eight

• a voice note on day ten

• a phone call on day fourteen

• and a closeout email on day twenty-one.

Most people stop at day one or two because it feels like bothering someone. His experience is that most people don’t have enough follow-up data to even know what too much looks like.

I started doing these features because I wanted to show what solo businesses actually look like from the inside, not the polished version people share on social media but the real decisions, wrong turns, and gradually-figured-out-things that most of these businesses are actually built from.

Derek’s story has all of that. A property management company that almost didn’t survive its first year, a coaching brand he had to let go because it was built for the wrong reasons, a ministry job that paid less and led to his wife and his actual calling. He’s 23 clients into a business that didn’t exist a few years ago, building it with the person he’s married to. They’re trying to construct something that can outlast either of them and if you knew Derek, I’m pretty confident he’ll do it.

If you want to connect with Derek, find him at beyondtheveilcoaching.com.

He’s also offered all Solo Operator subscribers a free two-week trial on any of his coaching programs. If you’re interested, send him a DM on LinkedIn and tell him I sent you.

— Lucas

Before you go…

Those calls turned into 5-6 closed deals. A few were 1-3 month projects, while the others were ongoing retainers that were enough to completely replace my W2 income in under 90 days.

Now I know how that sounds.

And I get it.

I don’t like that guy/gal on LinkedIn either. But it actually happened, and honestly, the reason it happened has almost nothing to do with what most people would guess.

Before I get into the system I used to do this, I want to dispel a few misconceptions about what getting results on LinkedIn actually looked like for me. First, here are the things I wasn’t doing.

Here’s the truth

Re: Organic content

In the first two months of my business, I wasn’t doing a ton of organic content.

I started posting consistently in May/June of 2025. Once I did, I had a few posts go “viral” in those early months. That felt really good and got me a ton of exposure, all from content that had nothing to do with the service I provide.

The kicker was they led to basically zero business, at least in the short term / “inbound leads are flowing” type of crap that a lot of LinkedIn gurus push. What they did lead to was people who eventually became clients OR introduced me to future clients.

Re: Paid ads

I wasn’t running ads nor have I ever run ads to generate leads for my business, particularly on LinkedIn.

I know a lot of folks starting to play around with what is called “thought leader ads” where you basically take best performing posts and amplify them with spend.

At this point, this doesn’t make a ton of sense for me to do both from a budget perspective, and I honestly couldn’t handle the leads from ads at the moment. I am a one person team after all. But I will say, that ads make a ton of sense to ensure you are getting content in front of the right person versus the pray and spray method that is largely happening with organic content.

I digress.

My situation when I got started on LinkedIn

The reality was, when I got started in this solo game in March 2025, I had:

• a mortgage

• two kids under 3

• a stay-at-home wife

• and about 90 days of runway after leaving a full-time role.

I knew that if I was going to bet on myself and make up the income I needed to support my family and keep my wife at home, I needed to block out all the noise and focus on a single offer and single channel to drive business.

So I took stock of all the skills I had built over the years helping build other companies. I focused particularly on skills that fell in these four buckets:

1. Generate leads

2. Generate revenue

3. Save time

4. Save money

A lot of my skillset falls into the first two buckets, specifically on the marketing side of the house. So that’s where I started. Why recreate the wheel, right?

(If you’re wanting to start a side hustle or go full solo, analyze your own skills and determine which ones fall into the four buckets about. That is what you should build your service business around.)

Also, the bigger reason I focused here is these four things are what every company really cares about. And if you want results fast, you have to ensure what you offer is aligned with what companies want. (As much as it pains my heart, it’s just a fact that I don’t have the power to shift at the moment.)

If you don’t, you’ll spend a long time educating the market on a commodity that may or may not work. That just wasn’t a bet I could take at the time.

Once I zeroed in on the skill I could sell, I took that to the immediate network I’d been building for a decade. The good news was I never really put my network to use either. Hence why I didn’t feel the need to rely entirely on organic content to work right away. I knew I had years of relational capital built up that all I needed to do was:

1. Reconnect via text / coffee chat

2. Present a clear enough value prop / offer

3. Let people who already know me either hire me directly or refer me to someone in their network.

Why am I blabbing about all this?

I know a lot of solos needing leads yesterday, or current W2’s wanting to start a business but are afraid and worried about how they’d find clients. I share all this because this is exactly how I’d get started if I was in your shoes.

Out of this approach, I developed a very simple five-step routine. It’s the same routine I run every day on LinkedIn for about 45-60 minutes.

Here’s how to approach LinkedIn for maximum results

The most useful way to think about LinkedIn that I’ve found — and the one that makes everything else actually work — is to stop seeing LinkedIn as a feed and start seeing it as a funnel.

Here’s what I mean:

1. Your content generates impressions. Those are eyeballs, the top of the funnel.
   

2. When something catches someone’s attention, they go to your profile. That profile isn’t a resume, but a landing page, which makes it beginning to middle of the funnel.
   

3. From there, you’ve got whatever single action you want them to take: a lead magnet, a book-a-call link, something specific and relevant to the person you most want to work with. That’s your opt-in.

That’s how a visitor becomes a lead.

To connect this back to my story above, particularly how I wasn’t relying on content to drive awareness in the beginning. Maybe you don’t want to rely on content, okay. You definitely need to be sending connections and DMs once they accept your request.

I’ll get into this more in the next section, but suffice to say, you need to do some activity for your target buyer to find you. It’s either posts, comments, or DMs.

Pick your poison.

Think about it this way

99% of people on LinkedIn are on the platform for business reasons. Whether they:

• Want to learn

• Want to network

• Want to market/sell

It’s all entirely business oriented, which is really, really good news for you and me.

This means there is intent baked into simply being on the platform. So if you’re selling to professionals or to businesses, your buyers are already there. You have near-direct access to them.

So take advantage of it!

Here’s love your “Profile” needs

Before any of the tactical stuff, your profile needs to actually work as a landing page.

In super simple terms, this is what you need to do:

• Banner image: one line, who you help, what you do, the outcome. Make it clean, make it pop. The goal here is to stand out and drive your ICP down the funnel (i.e., scroll your profile.)
  

• Headline: make it about your ICP, not you. You don’t need to be cute, or make it all about your title or your company name. Without being cheesy, make it about the transformation you offer and for who.
  

• About section: this is critical real estate. This is your chance to tell your story, how it connects to the problem your ideal client has, and how they can work with you. Don’t sleep on this, actually write it in your own words and make it personal so folks have a chance to connect with you before they even reach out.
  

• Featured section: another section that I see very little people taking advantage of, even really big accounts I follow. This is where you can include a lead magnet link or a book-a-call link, pointed at one specific action.

Okay, now onto what I call “The Daily Five”.

The Daily Five

Once the profile is functioning as a funnel, the system comes down to five activities. I call it “The Daily Five”. You can run through all of it in 45 to 60 minutes. It covers both inbound (posting and commenting) and outbound (connections, DMs, and moving people off the platform).

1. Post content

My rule of thumb is 5x per week for maximum results.

You want to build familiarity and a top of mind effect. By the time a buyer actually reaches out to you, they’ve typically seen you six, seven, eight times in the feed.

That compounding takes time. The only way to build it is to show up.

Now, there are four types of content worth cycling through:

1. Personal stories that resonate with the most number of people (this is your top-of-funnel reach)
   

2. Case studies and specific wins with real numbers (these don’t always get the most likes, but they’re what drives inbound — people see proof and reach out)
   

3. Market education that positions you as an expert rather than just another vendor, and honest real-time content about what you’re working through, what you’re learning, what’s actually crossing your desk.
   

4. An honest / vulnerability / personal posts. This can be about what your pipeline looks like or what you’re figuring out as a solo operator will outperform polished thought leadership almost every time. Or it could be about family, marriage, some random story in childhood. Whatever it is, people like content that hits on universal principles.

(Note: If five posts a week - or any posts per week really - sounds like too much to start, begin with comments and work your way up. More on that in a second.)

2. Commenting

I recommend 10 substantive comments a day.

I know it sounds like a lot, but it’s genuinely the most underrated activity on the platform and the first thing most people deprioritize.

A good comment drives a lot of impressions, often more than the posts themselves. (Comments can account for more than half of someone’s total profile views in a given week. I’ve seen this firsthand and I believe it every time.)

The rule I hold myself to is if a comment couldn’t stand alone as its own post, it isn’t substantive enough.

So here are three approaches that work well for this:

1. Rephrase the main point in your own words and add some nuance

2. Expand on one specific part of what they said and take it somewhere new

3. Politely disagree and explain your reasoning

Another thing I’d do as far as commenting goes, find 5-10 creators in your industry or adjacent to it, follow them consistently, and engage with their stuff. And don’t use AI to write your comments. It’s obvious to anyone paying attention, and it’s one of the fastest ways to damage your credibility on the platform.

3. Send connections

Send 20 connection requests a day, and don’t add a note to the request.

The reason being is notes actually reduce your acceptance rate. People on LinkedIn have been pitched in the note enough times that they see it coming and decline.

Send without a note, and you get more accepts. I’d target direct buyers, referral sources, and people whose audiences overlap with yours.

4. Send DMs

Every time someone accepts a connection request, send a short, customized message.

You don’t need to nor should you send a pitch right away. Just focus on starting a conversation.

The easiest way to do this is to find something on their profile you can personally connect around: somewhere they’ve lived, something they’re working on, a shared experience you can connect around.

I was a missionary for most of my twenties and traveled a lot, so there’s almost always something on someone’s profile I can genuinely pull a thread on. People want to talk about themselves. If you have a lead magnet that’s hyper-relevant to them, you can mention it, but ask if they want it rather than just sending it over.

Start the conversation before you ask for anything.

5. Move DM conversations to email / book a call

This is the step most people skip, and it is definitely the most important one.

If someone isn’t converting on their own — booking a call, opting in — you need to drive it yourself. Ask for their email. Better yet, get their phone number and move to text. I get people’s phone numbers now. That’s almost entirely what I do once a conversation gets warm.

Once you have someone’s number, you have direct access to them, and that kind of access is worth a lot.

What to Expect

Now, I’d be lying if I said everyone is guaranteed the same results with this approach. It completely depends on your target market, their use of the platform, your content/messages/etc.

So take all of this with a grain of salt and keep in mind that nothing is a silver bullet. This approach simply increases your chances of seeing results.

Now that I’ve caveated this thing to death, here’s what you can realistically expect:

The first 30 days

This period is all about you building the habit.

You’re going from a cold profile to a warm one. Don’t expect much from the first month. That’s not a bad sign. This is a pay to play game. And you’re either paying in dollars (i.e., ads for instance) or your own time and sweat equity.

Days 31 to 90

During this phase, you’re doing the work but the signals aren’t quite there yet.

Most people will definitely start to see some small wins. A few DMs that go somewhere. You’re starting to piece together what resonates and what doesn’t.

BUT… this is also where most people quit. They’ve been doing the thing for weeks and nothing dramatic has happened, so they conclude it doesn’t work and stop.

Don’t be that person.

Days 60 to 90

You are starting to have real data.

• You notice which posts drive DM requests versus just impressions.

• You notice which DM openers actually get replies.

• Your writing gets better, thus the algorithm gets used to your content and starts distributing it to more people.

• Your network compounds.

This is the phase where winners on any platform - especially LinkedIn - are born.

The people who stick with it long enough to build a real body of work are the ones who win.

LinkedIn can work for you, but…

I wasn’t perfect through those first 90 days. There were stretches where I fell off the routine. But showing up more times than not is the goal, not perfection.

To be even more frank, if you want to see real, substantial results from a channel like LinkedIn, you must be committed for the long term. LinkedIn, and organic content in general, is a long-term play. This isn’t get rich quick.

Now again, that doesn’t mean you can’t see results fast like I did. It just means you can’t expect results if you come on the platform and act like things should click right away. That attitude is what breeds the shady, sketchy, salesy activity we all hate.

If you’re a solo operator selling a professional service to other professionals and want a channel to go all in on – you should be on LinkedIn.

If this was useful, forward it to someone in your network who’s building solo.

— Lucas

Before you go…

P.S. Want my LinkedIn operating system + breakdown of the daily five in a format you can bookmark and come back to? You can grab it here.

P.P.S. Would you get value from having someone who has built a solo business walk you through, step-by-step, how to do it? If that’s you, I’m building something to do just that. If you want to learn more, reply to this email or send me a DM and I’ll share more details.

That was the first time I really felt the real world application of the saying, “It’s not what you make, but what you keep.” And once you experience it, you don’t want to go back.

The reality is that there are two sure things in this life: death and taxes. For the sake of this newsletter, we’re going to focus on the latter. Because most solo operators are treating tax strategy like a chore to get through once a year rather than a system to think about deliberately.

There’s a real difference between those two things in terms of what you actually walk away with.

Recently, I talked with someone who spent years at Goldman Sachs. Then one day he left to go out on his own. His name is JT Ryker and he runs ThriveSolo, a tax and financial strategy practice for solo operators that puts a lot of emphasis on a more holistic approach to tax and financial prep.

He had a lot of great tips and advice to share so keep reading if you’ve wondered what you should be doing about taxes as a solo operator.

Why Most Solo Operators Are Flying Blind on This

JT’s take on the tax industry is pretty direct.

About half of all paid tax preparers aren’t licensed, meaning they can’t legally give you tax advice. In other words, they can only fill out the forms for you. Also, most of the CPAs who are licensed are approaching retirement. While the ones still operating are often running a volume game: low prices, high client load, no real bandwidth to talk to you.

The number one complaint JT hears from people who already have a CPA is “I can never get a hold of them.”

So if you’ve felt like you were just getting your taxes filed rather than getting any real guidance, that’s probably an accurate read of the situation.

Before You Do Anything Complicated

One of the most useful things JT said was this: don’t overcomplicate it early.

When you’re just starting out, your job is to get clients and do good work. There will be a time for entity optimization and retirement account strategy, and that time is not day one.

But there are a few things worth doing immediately, regardless of how early you are.

1) Open a separate bank account for the business.

You don’t need an LLC to do this with most bank options. You can open a business bank account even if you’re operating as a sole proprietor.

JT said this is consistently one of the biggest headaches he deals with as a tax person when clients mix personal and business transactions. It makes it nearly impossible to figure out what’s deductible, and it creates a mess that someone eventually has to sort out. So don’t make the mess to begin with and keep business / personal separate.

2) Set aside about 25% of your income for taxes and make your quarterly estimated payments.

When you have your own business, nobody’s taking taxes out for you. Most people aren’t paying too much in taxes. Rather, they’re paying all of it in April at once, which is its own kind of shock.

Smooth that out. Federal and, if your state has income tax, state as well.

3) Track your expenses from the start.

JT uses an app called BIPS (bips.com) — it categorizes expenses and gives you a clear P&L without the overhead of full bookkeeping software. I use the free version of Expensify (I have a past experience with it so just started. It integrates with my accounting software well enough.)

You probably don’t need a bookkeeper early on, but you do need to stay organized. And in the beginning, staying organized is enough.

The S-Corp Conversation (And When to Actually Have It)

If you’ve spent any time in solo operator or freelancer circles, someone has told you to become an S-Corp. And it’s not wrong advice, exactly.

The strategy is a good one:

You pay yourself a salary as an employee of your own company, and whatever profit is above that salary isn’t subject to self-employment taxes. For someone making good money, that can be meaningful savings.

But JT said he’s watched a lot of people rush into S-Corp status and end up spending more than they save. Once you elect S-Corp treatment, you’re:

• Running payroll for yourself

• Your accountant is likely going to charge you significantly more for business returns (JT charges $1,500 minimum for an S-Corp return versus $750–1,000 for a Schedule C return)

• And the IRS looks more closely at your situation because they know it’s a lever people try to use.

His rule of thumb: don’t even consider it until you’re at around $100,000 in profit.

Below that $100k threshold, in most cases, the added costs and complexity eat whatever you’d save. It also varies by state. Some states penalize S-Corps or ignore the election entirely, so what works in Texas might not work in Florida or California.

And once you do convert, there’s a nuance worth knowing:

Your salary amount affects how much you can contribute to a Solo 401k, for instance. If you set your salary too low to minimize self-employment taxes, then you inadvertently cap your own retirement contributions. JT said this optimization exercise gets real once you’re at multiple six figures.

Retirement Accounts: What to Prioritize and When

JT’s advice here was pretty simple and very helpful as I am working through this personally. He said, “Start with the easiest thing.”

For most solo operators, that’s an IRA. Anyone can open one and it works at any stage.

• You can contribute up to $7,500 per year for 2026 if you’re under 55.

• If you’re working with a tax planner or financial advisor, they can help you figure out whether Roth (pay taxes now, withdraw tax-free later) or pre-tax (reduce your taxable income today) makes more sense for where you are.

For solo business owners specifically, JT almost exclusively recommends Solo 401ks once the math justifies it. The main reason is higher contribution limits and more flexibility. The 2026 max for a Solo 401k is $72,000. A SEP IRA has the same ceiling, but only allows employer contributions — no employee contribution side — so in practice you can often get more into a Solo 401k earlier in your growth. Solo 401ks also allow loans (IRAs don’t) and carry stronger legal protection.

His practical guidance: If you want to contribute more than $7,500 a year, it’s probably time to open a Solo 401k. Until then, an IRA gets you to essentially the same place with less friction.

He also mentioned a company called Carry (carry.com) for setting up Solo 401ks. He has his own there and I checked it out as well - seems like a nifty and solid option. One detail worth knowing: if your Solo 401k plan includes an automatic enrollment provision, you can qualify for a $500 tax credit per year for three years. Small but worth knowing.

HSAs are another one people consistently under look.

• If your health plan qualifies you, max it out.

• You can carry the balance forward indefinitely, and once you hit 65 you can use it for non-medical retirement expenses too.

• This makes it essentially another tax-advantaged retirement vehicle on top of everything else.

The Home Office Deduction Most People Are Missing

JT said this is consistently the most underutilized deduction he sees for solo operators who work from home. If you regularly and exclusively use part of your home to run your business — calls, admin work, client meetings, whatever — you can deduct it.

The simply way to do this:

• Multiply the square footage of your dedicated workspace by $5.

• The actual expense method takes what you spend on mortgage interest, property taxes, utilities, and insurance, and prorates it based on what percentage of your home you use for business.

It’s usually the more powerful option, but it requires actually knowing what you spend on those things.

Most people who miss this deduction do qualify for it. They just haven’t been tracking their expenses, which is why JT’s advice to simply know your numbers and tell your tax person what you spend is really important as they’ll report it correctly from there on out.

One general principle worth taking with you:

The IRS test for business deductions is “ordinary and necessary.” If an expense is ordinary and necessary for your business, you can generally deduct it. But JT said he sees more people over-claiming than under-claiming. When in doubt, assume you can’t deduct it and ask. A haircut is not a business expense. Most things that are genuinely business-related are.

Who You Actually Need (And Who Can’t Help You)

The last question I asked JT during our conversation was one I personally have wondered and didn’t really know how to think about it:

What’s the difference between a CPA, an enrolled agent, and a bookkeeper, and when do you need which one?

1. A CPA is a general-purpose accountant whose training covers audit, tax, compliance, and general ledger — a broad accounting education that isn’t exclusively focused on tax.
   

2. An enrolled agent (EA) is tax-specific, essentially the tax portion of what a CPA covers.
   

3. A bookkeeper has no required credential and handles categorization and record-keeping, and the quality varies widely depending on who you hire.

For tax advice specifically, you need an EA or a CPA. They’re the only people besides tax attorneys who are legally authorized to practice before the IRS and offer tax advice. If someone is giving you tax strategy and they’re not one of those three, JT says be skeptical.

For early-stage solo operators, you probably don’t need a bookkeeper at all. Use an app, keep your business and personal accounts separate, and stay organized. Hire a bookkeeper when the volume justifies it, but again, you probably don’t need to worry about that until that time comes.

—

As a solo operator, one thing I wish I paid more attention to early on (and I’m starting to think and plan more for) is understanding how the tax code actually treats business owners versus employees.

Because the fact is, I could have structured certain things differently. Most people default to the standard employee setup and never ask whether there’s a better way. And if they do, it’s not necessarily too late, they’ve just missed a lot of opportunities to optimize for more tax savings.

As a solo operator, you don’t have to default to anything, especially when tax, financial strategy and even business designation is concerned. That’s actually one of the more underrated - but really nice - advantages of building your own thing.

If you want to talk to JT directly, you can send him a connection + DM on LinkedIn and tell him I sent you.

— Lucas

A few things before you go…

1. Want to know where your funnel is leaking? I’ll map out your entire email and funnel strategy — what to build, what to fix, and what to do first — at no cost to you. Let’s map it out.

2. I want to feature more solo businesses in this newsletter. If you’re clearing six figures or $20k/month in revenue and want to share what’s working, or if you know someone who is, send me an email at lucas@veritascopy.com or DM me on LinkedIn. I’d love to hear the story.

I recently got on a call with a guy who cleans dryer vents in Austin. He built his business to $100K in 12 months with 200 Instagram followers, 30 total videos, and $5/day in ads.

• No viral moment

• No local SEO strategy

• No sales team — purely solo.

I love this because it’s as clean funnel as it can get. Also, this approach is entirely characterized by one thing: the refusal to overcomplicate things.

If you’re trying to get traction in your home service business or have ever wanted to start one yourself, this is how I’d start getting customers on day 1.

I pulled his entire system apart. You can get the playbook below.

(NOTE: These solo business playbooks are a paid featured for paid subscribers only. If you’d like access to these moving forward, you can subscribe for as low as $8/month.)

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