#solopreneurs

#solopreneurs

Over eight years of writing for travel publications, Kim Magaraci developed a passion for domestic travel. She learned that travel tips online couldn't compete with those destinations you could only discover by word-of-mouth. So, when she founded her travel business, KGM Travel Design, in 2024, she hoped to emphasize personal relationships with vendors and customers and avoid using AI, despite her experience with it.

I've worked for myself for nearly a decade, and in all but one of those years I've earned more than the U.K. average salary. Some years it's been a little more. I'm naturally frugal, and even during the rockiest stretches, there's always been enough to cover the basics-plus a safety net if I ever truly needed it. Yet I worry about money constantly, gnawed by the sense that I'm only one missed invoice from financial collapse.

At Gusto, we recently studied nearly 25,000 owner-only businesses. To focus on sustained business activity, we specifically looked at businesses that stayed open for at least five years and paid themselves during 75% of the months or more that they were on Gusto, indicating consistent business engagement. Our research showed that these folks-who I'll refer to as established solopreneurs-were running real, sustainable, and growing businesses across every corner of the economy.