Why “What Do You Do?” Still Trips You Up (Your Methodology Is Stuck In Your Head)

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, your impact, and your income. All right, let’s get started.

Hey, welcome to the Scalable Expert Podcast. I am so glad that you’re here. In this episode, we’re gonna talk about that moment when you walk away from a prospect or a potential partner disappointed because once again, you didn’t nail your elevator pitch.

You’re probably an expert business owner who’s been doing this for many, many years, helped hundreds of people create real outcomes, but you still hesitate when someone asks exactly what you do.

Not because you don’t know what it is. I mean, let’s be honest, you see it more clearly than probably anyone else in the room. The challenge is that what you do is complex and layered. Because of your expertise, you can adapt to each new customer that you have.

So you give a version of the answer that you think that person will hear, and watch the other person as they sort of nod politely without exactly getting it. You know that moment and that nod. You’ve probably seen it 100 times. I know that I have. And every time you walk away frustrated that you didn’t explain it better.

So today I wanna reframe that thought for you because the problem is not the explanation. The problem is the amount of tangibility that you’re sharing, and those are solved completely differently.

So you may get a referral from a customer, and they show up without context on the call. The person who referred them said that you are extraordinary and wonderful, but they couldn’t tell them exactly what you do or who you help.

I had this happen to me once as well, and I knew that I had to sit down and do a little bit more work. So the new person shows up with a vague description of what they’re looking for, and you spend the first call trying to figure out what it is and whether or not you’re a good fit.

The website that you’ve built doesn’t say quite exactly what you do. You keep rewriting it, but it still feels a little bit off, because every time you try to describe the methodology, the description is smaller than the actual work that you’re doing.

Or maybe you create a custom proposal that’s every single time is different. There’s no standard. There’s you, there’s the customer, and there’s what you figure out together.

And here’s what you may be thinking underneath all of this. “I’ve been doing this for years. I know what I do. I see it clearly when I’m in the room with a customer. I just can’t seem to make other people see it the same way.” That thought is keeping your business exactly where it is.

Because the problem is not that you can’t explain it. The problem is that the methodology has not yet been built into the business because it still lives inside of your head, and everything that lives only inside of you is the ceiling that has been built into your business.

Okay, so what does a ceiling actually look like? When we talk about that, what does that mean? The most valuable thing that you own is the method that’s in your head. That’s the thing that’s unique to you that no one else can run. It’s not a compliment. It’s a ceiling description. But when the methodology lives only inside of your head, every customer outcome requires you personally.

The business can’t create transformation without you in the room. The referral cannot describe it accurately without your help. The proposal can’t be scoped without you. The delivery can’t happen without you. This is not a skill problem. It’s a tangibility problem.

The expertise exists. It just hasn’t been made into a strategic business asset that lives within the business rather than solely inside of your head. The day the methodology becomes tangible, three things change immediately.

The sales conversation changes, the referral conversation changes, and what the business can do in any given moment changes. That’s what step one and step two produce. Okay, so let’s talk about what tangibility actually means. Tangible doesn’t mean simplified. It doesn’t mean making the work smaller. It means making the work visible. Tangible means a customer can see the journey before they invest. They can see where they currently are, see where they’re going, and see what happens at each stage.

Tangible means a referral can describe what you do accurately enough that the person arrives already convinced. Tangible means another capable person can guide a customer through the methodology without you filling in the gaps from instinct at every moment. The last one is the test. Not whether you can explain it, whether someone else can use it. That is the difference between an expertise and a strategic business asset.

All right, so let’s talk about step one, which is the power of one. One ideal customer, one core problem, one clear result, one signature methodology that the business leads with. This is the commitment to making tangibility possible.

You cannot make general methodology tangible, only specific. The key to making your expertise tangible is to clearly identify each one of these core factors.

So this is usually when I get a, “But Tara”. Because you are an expert, and experts can genuinely help a wide range of customers with lots of problems, committing to one feels like narrowing, but it’s actually focusing. Focusing is what makes the methodology visible, and what is interesting is focus is one of the hardest things for those of us in expert businesses to commit to, step two is making that expertise tangible. Your job then is to extract the pattern. Most of what an expert does follows an eighty percent pattern. The order, the questions, the moments when the shift occurs, that pattern is the methodology. It needs to come out of your head and into a structure. Then you can start to organize it into a signature pathway.

What does the customer have at the end of each stage? What problem does each stage address? What is the transformation the journey is designed to create? A named methodology is a strategic business asset. Giving it a name makes it tangible. Giving the stages names gives it ownership. Ownership creates authority.

Make it physical, something that the customer can see, a visual, a document, a framework. It makes it sellable, teachable, and eventually embeddable.

So use these two steps of the INFINITE SCALE method as you start going through this journey to creating your expert authority system.

This is when you start to go from everything in your head and helping a wide range of customers solve whatever problems they come up with, to you being able to lead through your methodology, which starts to shift your business into having strategic business assets instead of just showing up and helping all of the customers that you have, or want, with your expertise.

All right. Hopefully you loved this episode. If you liked it, give it a rating, share it with your friends and colleagues. And if you’re watching on Youtube hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode.