Why Traditional Business Models Fail Experts

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 this season of the Scalable Expert Podcast, I am thrilled that you're here. Hey, if you're new here, we help maxed out experts actually build a scalable business that grows beyond their time and attention. And if you have been here for a while, welcome back. Super thrilled that you're here. Hey, in this season I'm gonna talk a lot about the insights that I've gained while writing The Scalable Expert book. And so you're going to hear a lot of, sort of, that journey of each of the sort of, sections or steps of the book and how somebody goes from being a max out expert to a Scalable Expert as they grow and scale their business. And one of the things I wanted to just start with, in this season, is really looking at you as an expert. So often if you are an expert, you're a service provider, you have some sort of expertise that has led you to want to monetize that into an income source and make a bigger impact in the world, and so you start this business and you start looking at various business models that are out there. And one of the biggest insights that we've discovered over this time is that the traditional business model was never actually meant for experts. And I'm gonna dive a little bit into that and talk about like what is the business model that helps experts? Because here's the thing, so, a traditional business model is talking about how do you step into the business owner role and build a business that actually can grow and scale without you, right? Without your time and attention. You hire a big team, you, um, you know, have various services and products that you are selling to customers and the goal is, as you grow and scale, is to get yourself out of the business itself, right? So you've heard probably, like, work on the business and not in the business. And, um, and so a traditional business model is really around how do you put together that traditional infrastructure, the organizational chart? How do you have, you know, lots of, um, team and staff who actually help to deliver on the promise that you're making from a business perspective? And that's amazing and that's awesome. And sometimes if you are an expert, and you start a business, you actually, that's your goal is to become the owner of the business and not the doer of the business. But most of the time, when you are an expert, you love what you, what you do. You love your expertise. You have a passion for whatever the topic is. You have a way that you do things that you have grown over time, right? So if you're an expert, typically what happens is you love your, your expertise. You love to learn more, you love to be the thought leader, you love to be involved in what's happening. So take, like, if you're a physician, for example, and you have gone to medical school and you have done patient care and you have done all the research, maybe you're in the leading, leading research for whatever it is, you're, you, uh, specializing in as a physician. When you start a business around that, right, so if you are speaking or you have books or you have some sort of leadership, around your expertise, when you monetize that, you have to focus on actually building the infrastructure around the business, not really owning and, and continuing to, dive into the expertise around it, right? So there's sort of this back and forth that's happening. Same thing with, you know, being a service provider and you are providing a service for your customer. You love what you do. You love working with customers. You love keeping, kind of, on the forefront of what's happening in the field and so the day that you're told, well, okay, great, now you have to let that go, hire people to do that, and then just step into the business ownership role... most experts are like, well, that's not exactly what I wanna be doing, but that's what I need to do to grow and to not be burnt out because I'm trying to do all of the things. And so there's this rub that's happening uh, um, for the expert business owner. And, and so what we tend to do is that we hire people around, around us to support us in the work that we're doing, right? So if you are used to working with customers and, you know, whether it's a service, a one-on-one, whatever it is, you work with the customers and then you kind of hire people to take care of all of the behind the scenes things that are happening. And what happens with that model, and if you're in it, you know what I'm talking about is that you are the still in the, in the middle of the business and you have people around you, but you have to manage all those people. You have to, um, you are still directing their work because everything is happening around you who's actually serving the customers, and, and that's not scalable. So you take that traditional business model and you, you kind of try and, and put yourself into it. And, and it took me a really long time to figure out that as a business owner. I also wanted to be the expert, right? I was super interested in what was happening. I'll never forget the day when my team, 'cause at that time I had a large team and they looked at me and they're like, you can't do this work because the more you do this work, the less that we can do this work. And so we need you to step back. And I was like, okay, great. So I stepped back. And then I was like, well, wait a minute. Like I'm not doing what I love anymore. Right? So the business changed. So while it was successful, it changed for me. So then I started to do, other sort of things to help. And, um, and again, if you are an expert in a business, just trying to scale and you know what I'm talking about, like I was helping, which I really wasn't. So I had a look at like, why? Was I struggling with this? And, and how do I grow a successful, scalable business that really allows me to still do what I love, show up in the way that makes me still be able to offer the value and the wonderful things that I was doing, and also control my time and my attention because that is the, the rub, right, is doing all of the things, trying to run the business and be the expert and grow and, and, and, and, and, excuse me. So this, the, business model of the Scalable Expert is slightly different. And what it is; instead of trying to grow this team, that ultimately isn't gonna help you make a bigger impact in income around your expertise, it helps you build the foundation of your expertise and then you get to show up and provide value and help your customers in a way that is not driven by your time and attention. And that is where things start to shift. That's where your, where your zone of genius starts to take off exponentially, and you create leverage in your business instead of trying to create something that ultimately isn't gonna get you where you want to go. So as we dive into this, this season of the Scalable Expert Podcast, I'm gonna unpack what that looks like, how you do that, and the business model that's gonna help you to be successful as an expert that allows you to grow a business in a way that doesn't require your time and attention in the same way that it does today, so you don't burn out, so you don't end up in a situation where you're actually not operating in the business the way that you want to. So stay with me. Excited to share all of the different insights around the Scalable Expert brand and how we can help you get to that next place, stop being maxed out, burnt out, and really look at how do you deliver what you do best in a different way. So, that is what this season is gonna be about. If you are ready to really look at where are you today, how are you operating as an expert, and start to look at the shift to how you can show up differently and still control your time and attention I would love to welcome you in to taking a Scalable Expert quiz. In the show notes or on the YouTube notes, go and look at the link to the Scalable Expert quiz. I would love for you to take that, start to get a little bit of insight as to where you are in your scalable business journey, and and that will start to help you focus on the right things in this upcoming year. Alright, until next time.