If you’ve been trying to figure out how to package your expertise, the first thing you need to do is remove a phrase from your business vocabulary – and it might be one you use every single day.
“It depends.”
It sounds flexible. Helpful. Like you’re being thoughtful and accommodating. But if you’re an expert building a business, “it depends” is one of the most dangerous phrases you can say – and most people don’t realize the damage it’s doing until they’re deep in the weeds, overwhelmed, and wondering why the business isn’t growing the way they expected.
This is the first in a series on packaging your expertise. And this is where it starts – not with building a program, not with picking a niche, not with a marketing funnel. It starts with understanding why leading with “it depends” has been holding you back.
Why “It Depends” Feels Safe (But Isn’t)
Think about the last time someone asked you what you do, or what you offer, or how you could help them. What was your answer?
If it started with “well, it really depends on what you need” – you are not alone. Most experts answer this way because it feels honest. You do a lot of things. You can help people in a lot of ways. You want to make sure you’re meeting them where they are.
The problem is that from the outside, that answer doesn’t signal flexibility. It signals that you don’t have a defined methodology. And when someone is looking to hire an expert – someone to guide them, solve a real problem, get them a specific result – “it depends” is the last thing they want to hear.
Think about going to a doctor with a problem. You describe your symptoms, and they say, “Well, it really depends. It could be all sorts of things. What do you think it is?” You would immediately start looking for a second opinion. Because an expert who can treat everything with equal confidence is an expert who hasn’t developed a precise methodology for anything.
Your customers feel the same way when you lead with “it depends.”
When Everything Is Custom, You Are Always the Product
Here’s what happens when you build a business around accommodating every request: you become the business model. Not your methodology. Not your system. You.
Every new customer means a new custom engagement. Every new engagement means you have to be fully present, fully in it, and personally driving every result. The moment you step back – even slightly – things start to fall apart.
Why Experts Don’t Package Their Best Work (What It’s Costing You + How to Start)
This is what I mean when I say “it depends” is a scaling trap. It doesn’t feel like a trap at the beginning. It feels like opportunity. You’re busy. Customers are getting results. Revenue is coming in. But when you look at what you’ve actually built, you start to see that you haven’t created a business – you’ve created a very demanding job that only works when you’re doing all of it.
Fortune 500 companies build systems that function without the designer in the room. The methodology is documented, repeatable, and deliverable by design – not by the founder’s personal presence. That is what packaging your expertise actually makes possible.
Your Customers Are Not as Unique as You Think
One of the biggest objections I hear when we start talking about packaging is this: “But every customer is different. Every situation is unique. I have to customize.”
And here’s what I want you to sit with for a moment: your customers feel unique. They should feel unique. Making every person feel seen and paid attention to is absolutely part of excellent service. But that is different from saying that their underlying problem is unique.
If you look at the last ten customers you’ve worked with, I would bet that the problems at the core – the real structural issues underneath all the surface-level differences – are remarkably similar. There’s probably a similar starting point. A similar set of obstacles. A similar path to a result.
The reason it doesn’t look that way is because you’ve been letting each customer’s specific circumstances define the engagement. Which means you’ve been solving the surface problem for each individual person instead of applying a methodology to the underlying one.
When you have a defined methodology, something interesting happens: your customers still feel like they’re getting a personalized experience – because your full attention is on helping them move through their specific obstacles – but you are not reinventing the wheel every single time. You are applying proven thinking to a familiar problem. That is how you do your best work. And that is how you scale.
The Real Cost of Saying Yes to Everything
I want to share something that happened earlier in my career because I think it illustrates this better than any framework can.
I was working with a client – my team and I had a retainer agreement, and over time, the engagement evolved into whatever they asked for. Could we build this? Yes. Could we create that? Absolutely. Could we figure out this other thing? Sure, we’ll make it work.
We were genuinely good at solving problems. We loved the challenge of it. So we said yes.
What we didn’t realize was that with every yes, we were repositioning ourselves in that customer’s mind. We stopped being strategic advisors. We started being an extra pair of hands. And one day, the owner of that business said something I’ll never forget: “I mean, you’re basically a glorified admin.”
It stung. But he was right. We had put ourselves there. Not because we lacked expertise – but because we had led with “it depends” instead of leading with a defined methodology and scope. We had made ourselves so flexible that we had become invisible as experts.
That moment changed the way I think about this entirely.
You Are Not the Product – Sell Your Expertise, Not Yourself
What It Looks Like to Lead with Your Methodology Instead
Leading with your methodology doesn’t mean being rigid or turning away customers who need something slightly different. It means that when someone asks what you do, you have a clear answer: here is the problem I solve, here is how I solve it, and here is the result you can expect.
It means you stop asking “what do you need?” and start saying “here is what I know works.”
Your customers still get your full attention. They still feel like you’re meeting them where they are. But you are guiding the engagement – not following wherever their requests happen to lead. That puts you back in the position of the expert. The authority. The one who has the path.
And when you are in that position, something else happens: you get to do your best work. You’re not spending your time and energy figuring out how to solve a problem you’ve never seen before. You’re spending it helping someone move through a process you’ve refined over years. That is where your real expertise compounds.
The Packaging Problem Is Not a Marketing Problem
I want to be very direct about this because it is one of the most common places expert business owners get stuck.
If you have been trying to solve this with better marketing – a new offer, a better funnel, a stronger message – and it still doesn’t feel sustainable, the issue is not the marketing. It never was.
The packaging problem is a structural problem. And you cannot market your way out of a structural problem.
When you package your expertise – when you identify the consistent path you take customers through, name it, and lead with it – the marketing becomes almost obvious. Because now you have something specific to talk about. Something people can actually understand, remember, and refer others to.
This is the starting point. Not the finish line – the starting point. And it begins with a simple decision to stop leading with “it depends” and start leading with what you know works.
If you’re ready to take that first step, start with the Business Audit. It’s designed to show you exactly where your business is structurally – and what it would look like to build it around your methodology instead of your availability.
Our Host
Tara Bryan is on Instagram | Facebook | Linkedin
Website is: www.Taralbryan.com
Hey, it’s your host, Tara Bryan. And I am on a mission to help more business owners learn to infinitely scale their businesses by leveraging the power of online without sacrificing the customer experience or results.
I like to geek out on all things business strategy, marketing, interactive digital and user experience. This podcast is all about what is working, lessons learned and actionable tips to create and grow a thriving online business.
Join us each week as we dive into different strategies, tactics and tips you can apply immediately to your business.
Key Topics:
How To Package Your Expertise | Scalable Expert | Signature Methodology
Highlights
- “It depends” as a scaling trap – why it signals a lack of methodology
- The difference between customers feeling unique vs. having a unique problem
- Leading with methodology = doing your best work more often
[00:00:00]
Tara Bryan: Hey, everybody. Welcome to today’s episode of the podcast. I am so thrilled that you’re here. In this episode I’m starting a series which is really talking about how do you package your expertise. As the Scalable Expert knows, in order to start growing and scaling, you really have to start looking at the way that you work a little bit differently.
So this episode is talking about the most dangerous phrase that you will have in your business vocabulary, which is “it depends”, right? So when a client comes to you and they say, “Well, what are your… What do you do? What do you offer? What can you do for me?” And you say, “it depends”. I can do blah, blah, blah, blah,” right? Whatever it is based on what you think that they want or whatever they ask for. That becomes one of the most dangerous phrases that you have in your business because when you lead with trying to [00:01:00] just accomplish whatever it is that the client wants, not only do you get yourself into a little bit of trouble because they now will expect you to do everything, but it erodes your authority.
It erodes your ability to be the expert. Think about it. Like, when you go to the doctor, or you go somewhere where you are seeking someone’s expertise, you don’t want them to say, “Well, it depends. What do you want? What do you want to have happen,” right? So if I go to the doctor and I say, “Well, you know, I have this problem or whatever.” And they’re like, “Oh, well, it really depends. It could be all sorts of things. Like, what do you think it is? And I can help you with all of those things.” You start to think about it and you’re like, “Hmm. I don’t know.” First of all, you don’t actually know how to diagnose my problem. Second of all, if you’re saying that it could be treated a million different ways, then that’s [00:02:00] actually not helping, right? Like, you could have looked that up. You could have done that on your own.
So it’s the very same thing when you’re an expert and trying to deliver services or products or offers or whatever you wanna call them to your customers. They’re expecting you to have the path. They’re expecting that you are going to help guide them and have the answers to the questions or the problem that they are trying to solve.
So the phrase “it depends” actually is doing less good than you think it is, right? It’s doing harm to your business. So often we think, “Oh, well, we’re being accommodating. We have so much expertise. We can help anyone with anything.” I work with a lot of people and you know, we say, “Well, what’s your niche? What is it that you are a specialist in” and they say, “Well, I can help anyone with anything.” And not only is that difficult from a sales perspective and a marketing perspective, but it’s really difficult from an authority [00:03:00] and a fulfillment and a scaling perspective. Because when you can do everything, then you will do everything, right?
And then so you’re overwhelmed, your customer is overwhelmed, and at the end of the day, you’re not actually known for the thing that you probably wanna be known for, right? People come to you and say, “Hey, can you do this thing?” And you’re like, “Yep, I can.” And then it takes you down a path that leads to customization, leads to doing different things for every single customer that you have, and eventually, when you start to think about, “Well, how do I scale this past my calendar? How do I scale this past doing one-on-one or unique custom services for everyone that I work with?” You start to see that you’re in an unscalable business. You’ve created lots of things based on all of the things that you can do, but it’s put you in a position where [00:04:00] you’re not actually getting ahead, right?
It may look like it from a really short-term perspective, and you’re busy and you’re doing a lot of different things, and that’s really interesting. But when you look at it from a business perspective and a growth perspective and really being profitable and being able to lead with your expertise, the “it depends” actually is doing the opposite of what you think it should be doing.
So just think through that for a minute because one of the biggest sort of objections or challenges I get to this when we talk about this is that, every customer has something a little bit different. Every customer has a unique problem, a unique situation, and so you have to accommodate every single customer. And here’s where I want you to start thinking about this a little bit differently.
First of all, every customer thinks they’re [00:05:00] unique, absolutely, 100%, and they should feel unique when you work with them. But that doesn’t mean that their problem is actually unique. If you were to look at maybe the last 10 customers that you have had, you may have helped them do different things. Again, when you say “it depends”, then it’s all custom. But overall, there’s probably a method to your madness, right? There’s probably a similar beginning, a similar middle, and a similar result or ending, or approach that you use to the work. And when we get stuck in the trap of calling everything unique or doing different things for every customer, then what happens is they start leading and we do not.
Which puts you in a position of being an order taker or somebody who is just doing whatever the customer is asking. That is a worker [00:06:00] bee or a pay for service type role. That is not leading with your expertise. That’s not gonna put you in a scalable position in your business.
So customers should feel like they are special and unique and have challenges that you are paying attention to because it’s not so much that their problem is unique. What they’re saying is, “I want someone to be helping me. I want someone to be paying attention to me.” And if that happens, you can apply your methodology with your customers and they all feel like they’re having a unique, personalized experience, but it’s one approach that you’re using instead of “it depends”. I can do anything, and I can do everything.
One of the things that I had to learn as a sort of beginning business owner was just because I can doesn’t mean I should, right?
So if you’re having the same challenge that I had [00:07:00] back in the day where I was like, “Yes, I can do everything. And you know what? If I can’t do it, I’m gonna figure it out, and I’m gonna help you,” that was great for being accommodating, but it was the fastest path to overwhelm and burnout that led me to ultimately create what I’m creating today, right?
Because I ended up in a situation where I was like, “Yes, I can do everything.” And so I was doing everything, and I was helping everyone. And instead of elevating my authority and my experience and my visibility, I actually did the opposite. I actually was the person that everybody went to, but they didn’t go to me for one specific thing. And which was then became really hard to build the business, to hire other people, to be able to have products and programs and offers that would scale beyond myself and [00:08:00] my time. And it starts with that mentality of, yes, I can do anything, right?
I remember back in the day when we actually had books and no access to anything else, and it was like, well, I don’t know how to do this, but I’m gonna dig in, and I would have all of these books on my desk, and I would figure it out ’cause that was something that I valued. That’s something that I still love to do. I love to solve problems. I love to figure things out. But what I had to learn was that I can still do that. I can still solve really juicy, fun problems for my clients. I can pay attention to them, make them feel like they have, that I’m helping them through their unique situation.
But when I have that methodology, when I have a constant and consistent way of helping people, all of my customers, then what happens is I actually get to do my best work instead of trying to reinvent the wheel every single time, instead of [00:09:00] sitting with that mound of books and trying to figure out how to work on this one thing.
And what that led to then was being able to have a scalable business that allowed me to do those fun, juicy extra projects that tested my expertise and continued to hone in on my skills. But I also had a business that was growing beyond that. So it wasn’t dependent on every single time I worked with a customer trying to figure out what their needs were.
And so if you’re in this position and you’re like, “Well, wait a minute, like I really like helping all of my customers with all of the different things that they have going on.” 100%, I hear you, I see you. That is definitely a trap that I stayed [00:10:00] in for a very long period of time. But what happens, and I will challenge this to anyone who wants to challenge me on this, is that once you package your methodology, you start to lead with your methodology, what the consistent path is to take somebody from point A to point B, right? What’s the problem they have, and consistently getting them to the result. What happens is you spend your time helping them overcome obstacles and hurdles along their path. You don’t spend all of your time reinventing the wheel, or trying to figure things out, or doing these one-off random things that take you away from ultimately growing and scaling your business.
And so once you are helping people overcome obstacles and hurdles, you actually get to really dial in your expertise. You get to do those fun things that you really ultimately want to be doing with your [00:11:00] expertise, right? That’s why you’re an expert. You are passionate about your topic. You are passionate about the stuff that you get to do every day. And when you sort of take care of the chaos of all the things that could be, and lead with your methodology, you actually get to do your best work more often.
That was one of the other big challenges that I had is I was like, “Oh, I wish I had time to,” you know, name what it is, right? “I wish I had time to dig into this. I wish I had time to serve at this highest level. I wish I had time to do,” you know, insert here. But I didn’t, because I kept recreating things. I kept doing, “Well, it depends. I can do that. I can create this custom thing. I can do this. Oh, this will lead to this other thing and that and this other thing.”
And so instead of growing exponentially, instead of creating leverage, I just sort of created a lot of things unique to every [00:12:00] single customer. And at the end of the day, they’re customers, right? So they’re gonna come and go, and you have to have the next thing for them.
I remember I helped a client of mine build an entire system so that they had a streamlined delivery and fulfillment system for their business as they were starting to grow. And we helped them grow from concept to a successful scaling business.
But we got into that, “Well, yeah, we can do that. Oh, yeah, we can do that. For sure, we can figure that out. Let’s build that. Let’s do that. Let’s do this.” And they started sort of taking us on this journey where we had a retainer agreement, and then that meant that they got whatever they wanted, right? Whatever we could come up with, not because they were trying to [00:13:00] take advantage of us or manipulate the situation, but because we were like, “Yeah, we can create this. We can create something custom. Let’s do this. This is a nice challenge. This is cool. Let’s do it.” And then we would go off and do that.
The issue with that is then you’re seen as not only the technical person and the support person and the person who can just do whatever it is on a whim that they ask for, is that you become sort of that extra pair of hands. You become that service-based or hourly contractor, and they start to see you that way, right? Like, they start to see you as like, well, you’re just sort of there to help them with whatever, which is seen as more of sort of a worker, right? An [00:14:00] hourly paid worker versus an expert or an authority who is leading through their methodology and creating a business that expands beyond them.
I’ll never forget I was working with that group, myself and my team, and I was having a conversation with the owner, and he was struggling with where to focus and where to put his investment dollars and whatever else. So at the end of the day, what happened was on one of the conversations that we had, he’s like, “Well, I mean, you’re just basically a glorified admin.”
And I was like, “Seriously?” But what was powerful about that moment is that he was right, right? We had put ourselves in a position where we were no longer a strategic advisor. [00:15:00] We were no longer in a position of consulting and helping build, move their business forward from a strategic standpoint. We were in the weeds doing activities and tasks that they were asking for. So we had put ourselves in that position because we led with “it depends,” right? “Yes, we can do that.” And started to just sort of take on anything that they asked for.
So circling back into our topic for today’s episode is really how do you remove that most dangerous phrase from your business vocabulary? And it’s really when you start to package your expertise and lead with your expertise instead of leading with how you can just help them with [00:16:00] whatever, right? So the answer when they said, “Well, what can you do for me?” Right? The answer should never be, “it depends.”
The answer should be how you help them go from point A to point B, right? How do you help them solve the problem that they have right now and get a result that they want in order to get to where they wanna go? That, my friends, puts you in a different position.
So if you do nothing else, just really reflect on that. How often is that your answer when somebody asks you what you do, or what your services are, or what your offer is?
And I challenge you to really come up with an offer, an offer flow, an offer map, whatever you wanna call it, that aligns with your signature pathway or signature methodology. When you can marry those two together, that’s where [00:17:00] you stay in a position of being the expert and the authority on your methodology, on your expertise, and have it packaged in a way that really helps people go from where they are today to where they wanna go. Once that happens, then the business starts to grow and scale in a completely different way than relying on you, your time, and your expertise.
So there you go. If you loved this episode, please give us a rating, please share it with your colleagues and friends, and we will see you in the next episode.
