Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always had a complicated relationship with labels. The world runs on categories, and even when you’d rather skip the whole thing and just focus on the work, the label question has a way of showing up.
How you think about your business structure shapes how you talk about it, how you price your work, and honestly, how you feel about the choices you’ve made.
Running a small, intentional business, I started wondering where I actually landed. Am I a solopreneur? A microbusiness? And what happens to that identity when you bring someone in to help? Does that change things?
So, I did a little digging to sort it out in my own head.
The labels and what they generally mean
Here’s what I found when I went down the rabbit hole:
A solopreneur is someone who runs their business entirely on their own. They are the business: the strategy, the delivery, the client relationships, all of it. No employees, and in the purest definition, no ongoing team. That said, using an independent contractor occasionally, say a web designer for a project or a bookkeeper a few times a year, doesn’t disqualify you. Contractors aren’t employees. There’s no payroll, no ongoing management, no organizational layer. They’re a tool that helps you do your work, not a sign that you’ve become something else.
A microbusiness is a broader category. Technically, the distinction comes down to payroll: a microbusiness has at least one person on staff as an employee. Definitions vary on how many, but microbusinesses are generally considered to have fewer than 10 employees, sometimes far fewer depending on the source. (The U.S. Small Business Administration uses 1–9 in their research.) In practice, many people use the term more loosely to describe any very small operation where the owner is still doing the core work, even if no one is formally on payroll. Either way, a microbusiness is still personal, still small, still built around the owner’s expertise.
The lines between the two are blurry, and that’s okay
Here’s my take on it…most people operating in this space don’t fit cleanly into any one box, and that’s fine. I’m a good example of that.
Technically, I’m a microbusiness. I have a small team on payroll. They help me expand my capacity and keep things moving. None of them are full-time, and we don’t have set office hours. We have a lot of flexibility around when and how we work to get projects done. By the SBA’s definition, having employees puts me in microbusiness territory.
But I also identify as a solopreneur, because every bit of the strategy, the client relationships, and the delivery is on me. My team helps me do the work well. They don’t drive it.
So which am I? Both, honestly. And you know what? Knowing the technical difference is useful, but in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter all that much. Both labels point to the same underlying choice: being small on purpose. That’s the thing that unites them.
What defines this kind of business isn’t headcount. It’s who drives the work. If you’re still the one holding the client relationships, doing the core thinking, and delivering the primary value, you’re operating in solopreneur or microbusiness territory regardless of who helps you along the way. Bringing in support to extend your capacity is not the same thing as building an organization.
The label that matters most
In my opinion, more than solopreneur or microbusiness, the label worth claiming is intentional. Whatever your structure looks like, if you’ve built it on purpose to serve the life and the work you want, that’s the thing to stand behind.
If you’re still sorting out whether staying small is a legitimate long-term strategy, I wrote about that in Small on Purpose: Why Staying Small Isn’t Settling. Spoiler alert: the data backs you up, and you don’t have to defend your choice to be small to anyone.
Figure out the structure that works for you. Build it well. Call it whatever you want.