Carly Ries
After hundreds of episodes of The Life-First Solopreneur, hosts Carly Ries and Joe Rando realized they had never answered listener questions on the show. In this first Q&A episode, they tackle three of the most common questions they hear from solopreneurs in the LifeStarr community.
How should a solopreneur structure their week with kids or caregiving responsibilities?
Start with the non-negotiables of family life, then fit work into the pockets that remain. Carly blocks out school drop-offs, dinner, bedtime, appointments, and workouts first. Then she looks for open windows, which might be early morning or after the kids go to bed.
A few strategies that help
- Match your work to your energy. If you’re a morning person, wake up early instead of working late.
- Batch similar tasks, like meetings or interviews, then take a break.
- Tell clients your hours so they know when you’re unavailable and why.
- Break your own rules only with intention. Joe works roughly 8 to 6 but holds one evening session a week to serve members who have day jobs.
How do you set boundaries with clients without losing them?
Decide on your boundaries intentionally, communicate them clearly, and stick to them. Joe recommends defining your working hours and response times (for example, replying to email within 24 hours) and putting them in writing, ideally in your contract.
Frame boundaries as a benefit to the client. A rested, focused solopreneur does better work than one answering messages at all hours. And avoid making exceptions based on mood. If you answer a call at 7.30 p.m. once, clients will expect it again. If your business genuinely involves after-hours emergencies, make that a defined, agreed-upon service, possibly with an extra fee.
Finally, diversify your income. With only one or two clients, it’s hard to hold firm. Joe recalls a past startup that had just two customers, and losing either would have ended the company. More clients or more revenue streams give you the freedom to part ways with clients who won’t respect your terms.
Why do solopreneurs feel guilty when they’re not working?
Work guilt usually comes from an old employee mindset that ties hours to worth. Carly once worked at an agency that expected 45 to 50 billable hours a week, regardless of output. Many solopreneurs carry that mentality into their own businesses.
To move past it
- Name the source. Is it money anxiety, an old boss’s voice, or comparison to hustle culture?
- Define what “done” means for each day.
- Treat rest as a performance tool. Your best ideas rarely show up while you’re checking email. Daydreaming and downtime fuel creativity.
- Return to your why. If you started your business for freedom and never take it, the business is winning, not you. Carly and Joe call this the ownership trap.
One caveat. If you genuinely enjoy filling your time with work, that’s fine too. The key is choosing it intentionally rather than out of guilt.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the ownership trap?
The ownership trap happens when a solopreneur starts a business for freedom but ends up working nonstop, letting the business control their life instead of supporting it.
Should client boundaries go in a contract?
Yes, especially for retainer clients. Writing down hours, response times, and emergency policies prevents confusion about what was agreed.
Is it okay to work early mornings or late nights as a solopreneur?
Yes, if it fits your energy and protects the family time or priorities that matter most to you.
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EpisodeTranscript
Carly Ries: Ever feel guilty for taking a Tuesday afternoon off or answered a client email at 9PM and instantly regretted it? Well, today we're doing something we've never done in hundreds of episodes. We're opening up the mailbag. I share how I fit a business around school drop offs, bedtime, and an occasional 4AM wake up call. Joe explains how to set client boundaries that stick and why having only two customers once nearly gave him a heart attack.
We tackle the guilt that creeps in when you're not working, plus a sneaky problem we call the ownership trap. Grab your coffee and let's get into it. You're listening to the Life First Solopreneur, the podcast for those in pursuit of a life first business. I'm Carly Ries, and my cohost Joe, and I spend every episode with solopreneurs who are proving there's a better way to run a one person business and experts who are helping make it happen. We like to say life first, then business.
So let's get right to it. Joe, we have done hundreds of these episodes now between the interviews and these soundbite episodes. And I realized we help solopreneurs all the time, but we've never actually done a q and a on the show, have we?
Joe Rando: I don't remember that.
Carly Ries: Me neither.
Joe Rando: I guess not.
Carly Ries: We talk to people in our community all the time. We talk to people on social all the time, random emails. And I was like, maybe we should gather common questions that we get from people that we answer in our office hours and in our paid tier, in the community, like just written with members. One, so that people can kinda see what we talk about in the community, but two, just to help our general audience. Do you mind if I ask the first question?
Joe Rando: Take it away.
Carly Ries: I'm gonna ask it and I'm gonna answer it. So it's gonna be the Carly show for a second. One of the questions we get a lot is what's the best way to structure a week when you have kids or caregiving responsibilities?
Joe Rando: That's a good one for you because my kids are almost your age.
Carly Ries: Yes. And you also have grandfather duties sometimes. So weigh in whenever you want. But I do have to structure my week around my kids. And basically, this is me, but I've also heard this from other solopreneurs, is I build the week around fixed points of family life first. Then I fit in my workouts that I have to do. And then I fit in my work. And it's not like a leftover thing or anything, but I have to take my kids to school. I have to make dinner for my family.
Like just those basics. I have to get my workouts in. So I start with the non negotiables. Like I said, appointments. Bedtime is huge for me. Getting them up in the morning is huge for me. And then I look at my day and I'm like, okay, where are the pockets? And sometimes, honestly, those pockets are at five in the morning or at 09:00 at night after they've gone to bed so I can get all the work done that I need to. But I make sure I don't miss out on these key things that are so important to me and why I started a life first business in the first place. Now, I also say match your work to your energy level.
So I say 09:00. That's if like, I have to get something done. I'd rather wake up at 3AM than work at nine PM.
I'm the same way.
Joe Rando: I'd rather get up early.
Carly Ries: Our community manager is the complete opposite, and I don't know how her brain works. But if I see that I had to go volunteer... Like, I'm volunteering at the school for this, or this is happening, or there's an appointment, or whatever, then I will sometimes get up as early as 04:30 to get this stuff done. Because those are my priorities. Like, I need to get the work done, but I don't want to miss my kid getting a medal at school or something.
The other thing is like, Joe, you and I have quite a few meetings today, or a few interviews. And so I'll do the interviews and try to batch them, and then take a little break, from there. So batching can also help. And tell your clients your hours. Joe, you know that I can't do a meeting between 09:30 eastern AM because I'm dropping my kids off at school.
So you just kinda let people know. Keep people in the loop. Be honest. And that's how I do it.
Joe Rando: And, you know, Everything you said makes sense. And beyond that, for me, I have a rule of like eight to six, but I'm actually breaking it one day a week now, because of the office hours that we're doing. We need to kind of help people that are trying to work around having a job. So I actually have a meeting once a week on Tuesday that goes from six to seven. It's an onboarding thing that I'm doing with Stacy, and it's just, sometimes you have to say, okay, these are the rules, but here's a reason to break it.
But it's, you know, a very specific reason. And it's one day a week. And it's intentional. That's the thing. It's not just, oh, the rules that I made don't matter. It's, okay, here's a reason to break this rule one day a week, and we'll see how it goes. And if it doesn't, honestly, it doesn't fill up, I'm probably gonna change it. We get it back into my normal schedule.
Carly Ries: There you go. Well, so speaking of your schedule and boundaries, another question that we get is, how do I set boundaries with clients without losing them? Joe, do you want to speak to this one?
Joe Rando: Yeah. It's pretty simple, honestly. The first thing is to develop the idea of the boundaries that you want to have. Be very intentional about the rules that you want to enforce for yourself, because if you do it willy nilly, if it's based on your mood that day or week, then it's not going to feel good to your clients. So you set up kind of how it's going to work.
My example is that, I work eight to six, sometimes it's nine to six, sometimes it's eight to five, sometimes it's nine to five, you know, but it's in that range always. And with the one exception I mentioned a minute ago. So the idea then is to kind of set those things and then be very intentional about telling your clients how that works. What the rules are. I'm going to answer emails within twenty four hours, or I'm going to check emails twice a day at these times, whatever it is that works for you.
I will not be reachable in the evening. So you start as you mean to go, and that makes it much easier. And some people get nervous to say, Oh, you know, they'll think I'm not treating them like they're important, but you can frame this that your ability to serve them is a function of your ability to be rested, alert, and fully functional. And if you're responding to people at all hours and never having any downtime, you're not going to do a very good job, because you're going to burn out. So it's something that you just need to have, it needs to be a policy and not just a notion, right?
You need to be formal about it. Probably write it up somewhere, have the clients, you know, if it were me, and our relationships are a little different than some people where they have somebody paying them a lot of money every month. You know, it goes into the contract so that nobody's questioning whether that was the deal. As I mentioned, the idea of making it clear that by having those boundaries, you're gonna do a better job for them.
You're gonna be there and aware and fully attentive because you're working within these boundaries. And an important one is don't break the rules. So if you have these rules and then it's like, well, I don't mind answering the phone at 07:30PM because I'm just in a mood where that's fine tonight. Well, then they're gonna expect that next time.
So probably not a great idea. Just make the rules the rules, stick to the rules, unless there's an emergency or a crisis. You know, if there's something like the kind of business that you have where there could be some crisis at 09:00 at night, then you might need to have some way of dealing with that, but maybe it involves an extra payment or something, but it should be, again, intentional. It should be agreed upon and think it through and put it into the deal, so to speak. Just make sure too, because one of the things that happens a lot, and sometimes it's okay, but if you have two clients, it's a lot harder to take a harder line, to speak, protect yourself, than if you have eight or 10.
So it can be risky to have very focused sources of income where, I remember my last startup at one point we had two customers. And if we lost either one of them, we were gonna go out of business and it was not a fun place to be. So it's one of those things where you try to diversify, get more clients, or maybe it's a different product that you sell or something, but, to diversify that income a little bit so that if somebody becomes unwilling to follow the rules, you have the power or the ability to kind of part ways and move on and find someone that better fits your product offering.
Carly Ries: I agree. Actually, let's do one more for today. And I'm gonna wrap it up. I feel like we've kind of been alluding to things around boundaries.
So this is kind of in that realm. A question we get is, I feel guilty when I'm not working. How do I get over that? And I would say that guilt usually comes from an old employee mindset that equates hours with worth. I remember I was working at an agency one time, and if I was not working more than forty hours, they'd add hours to me so I could be between forty five and fifty billable hours. And that was like, I'm still doing a lot of work. Why are the hours equated to this? It's driving me crazy.
But you need to remember, as a life first solopreneur, you built the business to escape that. So you need to rewire your brain a little bit. Set new rules. And first, name where the guilt comes from. Is it money anxiety?
Is it that old mentality in your head from an old boss? Are you comparing yourself to other people that are part of the hustle hustle culture, which is really easy to do? And then like we're saying, define done for the day. Remember, you went out on your own. You created a life first business so that you do have those breaks. And rest is a performance tool. We had a guest on yesterday and he said one of the biggest things he does is he lets his mind wander and and play.
Joe Rando: He called it daydreaming.
Carly Ries: He daydreams. Thank you. I was trying to think of the word while I was talking and I couldn't. But daydreaming, and that really is a performance tool for your business. Your best ideas rarely show up when you're checking emails. Take that downtime and know it's okay. And then again, go back to your why. If you started this business for freedom, and then don't give yourself freedom, then the business is winning. Not you, and we call that the ownership trap.
Joe, we have so many of these questions. I think Got 15 of them. So why don't we spread these out over the next two episodes? There are so many to dive into.
Joe Rando: that's fine. I do want to say one thing about the feeling guilty thing.
I never had a job where I billed hourly. So I never had that experience of, if I didn't do a certain number of hours, the company wasn't making money. And I still had that whole thing, the not working thing was really a big problem for me when I was younger. And I gotta be perfectly honest, it's still there. It's a tough one for some people depending on how you're wired. I've gotten a lot better, but you know, there is something, You know, this weekend I had family in town. It's like, I'm not gonna lose that time. I've got my kids living in other parts of the country, and when they all come here, it is like, no way, I don't care if the house is on fire, I'm spending my time with them.
Carly Ries: Yeah. Getting them out of the house.
Joe Rando: Well that too, yes. But you know, it's just one of those things where you have to kind of come to terms with it in your head that, there are things that are important besides work.
Carly Ries: And I do want to do give a caveat. Some people just enjoy work so much that they want to fill their time with it. That is fine too. Just don't feel guilty about it. Like, I went to New York a few weeks ago on a trip, and when I was on the plane, I was working. And not because I was like, oh, I feel like I need to get this done, but I was really enjoying what I was doing So I filled the time with it. So, feel free to fill your time with work, but just don't feel guilty about it, I guess is what I'm saying.
being
Joe Rando: intentional. Again, you define that life you want, and then you make it happen.
Carly Ries: Absolutely. Well, listeners, like I said, we have many more to get to. So the next few soundbites over the next two weeks are gonna be these q and a episodes. If you have any questions, join Lifestarr Intro. If you aren't a member, come into our community, ask the questions.
We will see them, and we might consider adding them to the show
Joe Rando: How much does it cost?
Carly Ries: Oh, it's Free! You guys, it is free to So there is no reason not to do it. We'll include the link in our show notes. It is Lifestarr Intro. There's Community, you have access to an academy of courses and videos and everything, and just awesome awesome people.
So be sure to do that and ask us a question. Subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform, including Apple, Spotify, and YouTube, and share this episode with a friend, and leave us a five star review. It really, really helps us spread the word to other one person business owners. And we'll see you next time on the Life First Solopreneur. You may be going solo in business, but that doesn't mean you're alone.
In fact, millions of people are in your shoes, running a one person business and figuring it out as they go. So why not connect with them and learn from each other's successes and failures? At LifeStarr, we're creating a one person business community where you can go to meet and get advice from other solopreneurs. Be sure to join in on the conversations at community.lifestarr.com.