Why Jack-of-All-Trades Experts Never Scale

Hey everybody. Welcome to season three of the Scalable Expert™ Podcast, the show for established expert business owners who are maxed out on time and ready to find the scalable impact of their work. I'm your host, Tara Bryan, founder of The Scalable Expert™, and creator of the Infinite Scale Method™. If you've built a business around your expertise, but feel stuck in the time-for-money trap, this podcast is your path forward. Each week, I'll share stories and strategies and shifts to help you step into a new, scalable business model by declaring your authority, packaging your expert framework, and streamlining your offers and systems to ultimately become a scalable expert, because it's not about working harder, it's about building smarter. All you need is one signature expert framework and you can deliver an infinite amount of ways to be able to scale your business. Alright, let's get started. Hey everybody. Welcome to today's episode of the Scalable Expert Podcast. I'm thrilled that you're here. Hey, in this one I wanna talk about one of my clients, I'll just call her Chris. And Chris is a service provider who is trying to shift her business to being more scalable. And one of the biggest advantages that she has is that, as an expert, she loves to solve all of the problems, right? Her clients come to her and they are thrilled because anything that they have, she can jump in and solve their problems. She can figure it out and she does a great job and she provides insights that they wouldn't even think about themselves. She loves the work and her clients love her, they stay, they refer her, everything is great. The problem is that Chris is exhausted, right? Chris loves the work that she does, but she's so bogged down in the minutiae of sort of the other administrative things that happen with clients that she isn't able to show up as her best self every single time she has a client, right? So the client comes in and maybe they need a project done, and so there are times when, if you have ever worked on a project, right, you know that there are times that you're coming in and offering your best and highest, level of yourself and your skills, and there are other times that are just sort of, like, you're going through and doing the things that you need to do as part of the project, but they're not actually targeted in terms of your zone of genius. So that's sort of the struggle that she's in, right, is that she's trying to do everything from top to bottom in a project and she's not really ever able to show off her expertise, right? There are glimpses of it but the clients don't actually see it because there's so much more involved in the project. Now, she has a choice. She could hire people to actually do all of the work, right? She could hire project managers, she could hire people to do parts and pieces of the project, and then she comes in and just does her thing, and she's tried that before. But here's the problem is that she ends up like just managing them and then doing everything else, and trying to grow and build the business, so she gets more clients and then there's just more complexity that she's trying to deal with. And she really just has this wish in her head, like, if I could only just show up and do my thing and then leave and have clients really value me for that and not for all the rest of it, that then she could actually grow and scale a business around her true expertise instead of, you know, trying to do everything and all the things for her clients because, in fact, she just shared with me a story the other day where it's like she was working on this project and they really loved that she did some graphic design work right? Like she created some, some graphics that she knew would support the project that she was working on, and they loved the graphics. And she's like, well, that's great, like, I'm glad that you love the graphics, but that's not really like the reason why you hired me. And, and so then she gets just secretly like, not resentful, but just secretly like, well, wait a minute, I think they've lost the reason, like they've lost my expertise. And so again, like all of these things are sort of going on in her head and she wants, to do things differently, she wants to show up differently, she wants to spend most of her time actually being an expert and being out in this space as an authority in this expertise, and less about kind of the minutia of like, doing graphics or doing project management or, um, even some of the more technical parts of the work. And so she's sort of at this crossroads of like, well, how do I do that? And so one of the things that she has been trying to do is just put more offers out there, right? Like, oh I can do this, or I can do that, or I can do this other thing, which is great, her clients love that, but then they want her to do all of the things, and again, it just distracts from what she's trying to do. So when she came to us, one of the things that I helped her focus on was, okay, so the goal of becoming a scalable expert isn't actually to have an expertise in all of the things, the goal is to focus on what problem you are solving better than anyone else, that your clients also have a desire to have solved, right? So they have a problem and they're looking, actively looking, for a solution, and you can come in and solve that problem. And once you can do that, focus on that one problem, the solution and, and the sort of the bridge from the problem to the solution, that is where you become the scalable expert because you can package that into something then that moves you from the doer of all of the things, the expert in all of the things to leading your customer from the problem they have to the solution that they desire, because you have the path that is gonna help them get there. And honestly, the fastest path, right? Like when you are an expert, you have the experience to help them along their journey like no one else. And once you package that, once you own that, then you can start leading from that path and not from the doer of all of the things. So your value stops being, how can I be the one-stop shop for everybody? To how do I help lead them down this path that they are trying to, trying to get to? Right? So they're trying to get from, from point A to point B. Once you do that and you commit to focusing on that, that is where you can start to scale your expertise in a completely different way. So when you show up, once you've packaged that, once you have that path, then when you show up, you are able to show up and help them overcome obstacles and hurdles along with our path in a way that highlights your expertise because you can see it so much better than they can as they're going on the journey. And that allows you to grow and scale and leverage your expertise without the complexity of all of the other things that go along with building a service-based business building, that infrastructure around you being able to be the one-stop shop for your clients. So I challenge you, and this is what happened with Chris, is challenged her to just stop for a moment and look at the consistent path that she uses to help her customers around a specific problem. And once she was able to do that and see that, like, you know what, 80% of her clients that she was working with had the same problem and she more or less took them down the same path to solve that problem, once she saw that, then she was able to start shifting the way that she showed up, even with her current clients that she had. Instead of saying, well, how can I help you today? What can I do to make your life easier? She actually was able to say, here is how I can help you get the result that you are looking for, and even that language change, changed the relationship that she had with her clients, so they started to look to her for the path, instead of like, well, can you just be here from eight to five and help us with whatever it is that we need help with, and you know, then we'll pay you by the hour to do that. It shifted the way that she showed up with them and it gave her a different level of confidence in how she was showing up to be able to help her clients and new clients as they came in. It eventually started to shift the way that she was spending her time. So if you are in that place like Chris and you're just like, you know what? I can do anything. And, I love to do all of the things to help my customers, whatever it is that they need, my value is in how much I show up and help them, I want you to just think about like how much time that's taking up for you and how much energy that's taking up for you to show up for all of your clients in whatever way that they want you to show up, right? Or every time you get a new client, you're starting over from scratch, right? You're repeating everything that you're doing for every single customer, and I want you to just evaluate how much time and attention that's taking for you. And think about if you had one way that you were helping your customers go from the problem they had to the result that they were looking for, what that would free up for you in terms of just even capacity to, to know when to show up and when not to show up or when to take a new, fun, shiny project or not take a new, fun, shiny project. You know what I'm talking about? The one that sounds really good, that's new and, and sort of flexes your expert muscles, sometimes is not gonna help you get to building a scalable business, right? It may be fun, but it sort of takes you off script so that you can't actually grow exponentially in your business. And so just think through that, in terms of what you're doing today, and if you're like Chris and you're just like, I love what I do, but I'm burnt out and I'm exhausted and I really feel like there's a different way to help customers that help my expertise grow and scale, then start thinking about that and what is that path that you have or that you can see around your expertise. I promise you other people won't see it. They won't be able to see it because they don't have your expertise. So there's a path that you can see that no one else can see. Try and uncover that. I would love to hear your journey around this and if there is a path, or if you can see that path, I would love to hear about it. In the show notes, you will see that my contact information is there. You can schedule a discovery call, we could talk through that. I also encourage you to take the Scalable Expert Quiz. It helps you find out where you are in your scalable journey, and, and it's a very easy quiz, that allows you to start moving in that direction. So, until next time, thanks for listening to the Scalable Expert Podcast. If you love this podcast, I would love it if you would tell a friend or colleague and give us a rating so we can continue to design and develop awesome episodes for you each week. Alright, until next time.