You Hired Help. You’re Still the Bottleneck.
The Real Reason Your Team Doesn’t Deliver Like You Do
We talk about the need to package your expertise a lot in this space, because it truly does affect every area of your business.
Getting your methodology out of your head has to happen before you hire anyone, and skipping that step is exactly why hiring rarely fixes what you think it’s going to fix.
I hear the same story from experts constantly. You get busy with customer work, so you hire people to help fulfill it. And then something unexpected happens: you’re still the center of everything.
Every person you brought on is still depending on you to be the point person, still checking with you on how things should go, still needing you in the room.
You’ve added headcount, but you haven’t actually gotten out of anything.
The Hiring Trap Experts Fall Into
The traditional advice is simple: you’re busy, so hire someone.
But there’s a version of hiring that goes deeper than adding support, and that’s hiring for actual customer fulfillment.
That’s where I want to spend some time today, because I lived this one myself, and it taught me something I wish I’d known a lot earlier.
My Agency Story: Top Talent, Same Problem
In my agency, I hired genuinely excellent people. Top instructional designers. E-learning developers. Graphic designers. Specialists, not generalists, which meant it was expensive.
And I needed every one of them to go out, work with customers, and make it match what we did as an agency.
We had a rough methodology. I needed them to use it and make our customers happy.
It sort of worked. I was able to hire very talented people who did good work.
But here’s the problem: because my approach to things was slightly different, because the way I saw the work was still mostly living in my head, I had to package it before I could even hand it off.
That was the first real lesson. Before I could hire anyone effectively, I had to create the SOPs, the methodology, the project management system, all of it, just so someone else could see what was happening in my brain.
If I had known that back then, I could have skipped hiring all those people first and just built the methodology instead.
My life would have looked completely different than where I actually ended up: sitting on my couch in tears, burnt out and overwhelmed from running an agency that, from the outside, looked like it was doing great.
Why You Can’t Hire Out What Isn’t Packaged Yet
Even after I packaged what I could, the people I hired still did things their own way. Employees adopted my approach but adjusted it. Contractors did the same, just differently every time.
Nothing ever matched exactly, because the methodology wasn’t tight enough to hold its shape across five or more people working the same large project.
That’s the part nobody tells you about hiring: you can’t hire the work out to someone without spending the time getting it out of your head first, the same work I break down in How to Package Your Expertise Into a System That Scales.
And once you’ve done that work, you don’t just get to hire more easily. You get to decide how you actually want to deliver it, in a way that might not require nearly as much overhead as you think.
Because overhead compounds. The more customers you take on, the more complexity you create, the more high-caliber talent you need just to keep up. You never leapfrog ahead. You just maintain a heavier and heavier structure.
And when everyone on your team is doing their own version of “the way we do things,” it becomes almost impossible to give your customers a consistent experience, which means it becomes hard to know they’re actually getting the results you promise.
What Has to Happen First: Building Your Expert Authority System
If you’re an expert who’s gotten busy enough to start hiring, and you haven’t yet gotten your methodology out of your head and package your expertise into something someone else can actually consume, you’re going to churn through people.
Not because they’re bad hires, but because you’ve never defined what you actually expect.
That’s not a criticism.
It’s just what happens when experts, understandably, don’t want to hand off their expertise before they’ve made it tangible.
None of this requires you to outsource your expertise. It requires building it into something visual and tangible first: something that shows the path from where your customer starts to where they end up, clearly enough that it works even when you’re not in the room.
That’s the whole job of your Expert Authority System, Engine 1 of the Infinite Scale Method.
What Is the Expert Authority System?
Get the methodology out of your head. Name it. Structure it into something people, your team and your customers both, can actually see.
I felt this every day running my agency. Great customers. Great team. Twenty-plus years of expertise.
And I was still pushing a boulder up a hill, because I hadn’t made my own methodology tactical enough to hand off the journey, the same consistent journey I want every customer to go through.
Without that, nothing scales without heavy effort from you and everyone around you, and that’s exactly the road to burnout.
The Choice You Get Once It’s Out of Your Head
Once your methodology is out of your head and packaged, everything changes, because now you have a choice.
You can decide whether to hire and focus your energy somewhere else in the business, or stay fully in the expert seat and bring in help for marketing, sales, or operations instead.
Either way, you get to choose where you land, instead of the business deciding for you.
This is the flip that separates a Scalable Expert from someone still trying to grow like a traditional agency.
Instead of hiring people purely to fulfill the work, you build a business that can deliver at scale, with guidance, resources, and tools already in place.
Then when you do hire, you’re hiring people to guide customers through something that already exists, not to invent new solutions from scratch every time. That’s a fundamentally different, and far more scalable, role for a team to play.
What This Means for You Right Now
If you’ve hired people to help with customer work and it still doesn’t feel right, and if you know your customers can tell the difference in quality between what you personally deliver and what the rest of your team delivers, this is why.
Your methodology probably isn’t out of your head yet, at least not fully.
Before you hire your next person, or if you’re already managing a team that doesn’t quite match what you’d do yourself, take the time to get your methodology out of your head and into a real, tangible structure.
That single step is what makes hiring actually work, and it’s exactly what the Scalable Expert Audit is built to help you see. Find out exactly where your business stands right now, and which engine is creating your ceiling.
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:
Expert Authority System | Hiring the right way | Package your expertise | Founder-dependent delivery | Infinite Scale Method
Highlights
- Why hiring people for client fulfillment doesn’t get you out of the center of your business
- Tara’s agency story: top talent, real revenue, and still burning out because what only she knew was still stuck in her head
- Why you have to get your expertise out of your head before hiring can actually work
[00:00:00] Tara Bryan: 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.
[00:01:04] Hey, everybody. Welcome to today’s episode. What I want to talk about today is part of the expert conundrum that we all have as experts, and that is traditional advice of just, you know, like hire someone to help you.
[00:01:17] So, typically what happens is you start to get really busy with client work, and then you hire people to help fulfill on the client projects, or you hire people to sort of help during the process. What happens when you hire people to support you is that you still become the center, and then you’ve got all these people who you’ve hired, who are still depending on you to be the kind of the point person with that client. And so you’re still sort of in charge of all of the work that’s happening, which if you’ve done this, you know that that’s a very challenging business model because you never get out of the center of sort of running all of the things.
[00:01:59] And so the next level of hiring is really like, how do you hire somebody who can actually do client fulfillment, right? So if you’re maxed out on client fulfillment and you’re like, “Okay, I’m gonna hire some people to help do client work.” So in my agency I hired really top designers to, to do the instructional design and in some cases, e-learning development, and graphic design, and all the things, right? So I had to hire a specialist for this, so it was a lot more expensive than hiring, more of a support role.
[00:02:32] But I needed the person I hired to like go out and help these clients. I need you to, to, to do your thing and go out there and make them happy, right? Like, make it match what we do as an agency, use our… we had sort of a rough, methodology that we used, but go and, and just, like, make the customers happy.
[00:02:56] And it sort of worked, right? I was able to hire some very talented people. But the problem is, is that because the expertise, because kind of the way that I approach things was slightly different, and it was all in my head, I still had to package it in order to, to share it with the people that I had hired, right? And so it was interesting when I first went through this, this first iteration of, you know, okay, I have to package my expertise and I have to put it into some sort of format that someone else can see what’s happening in this brain. And, and so that was the first thing. So I- I have to create SOPs, I have to create, this methodology and this project management system and all these things so that I could hire these people and then put them into my system.
[00:03:42] First of all, if I would’ve known that I could’ve just bypassed hiring all the people and just created my methodology and packaged it right, then my life would’ve been completely different, than, you know, eventually sitting on my couch in tears because I was so burnt out and overwhelmed by running my agency at the time.
[00:04:03] But I didn’t know that, right? So I, I went through and I did all of that, but I still hired really top talent. And so of course when you hire top talent, you know, they’ve got their own way of doing things and so they would adopt my, my approach, but it just never quite exactly worked because, it still wasn’t, it still didn’t match, right?
[00:04:22] Like I had, I would hire, in some cases I had employees, in other cases I had contractors, so it was just slightly different every single time. And so it was very difficult to scale because, just of the way that it was structured. But the irony of the whole deal, like I said, is that, I had to capture and get my methodology out of my head for my team, and we needed to apply it consistently to all the clients so they knew what was happening project to project, employee to employee, and everything was consistent.
[00:04:58] We were working on very large projects, so in most cases it took up to five people, maybe more, to work on all these projects. So we didn’t really have the ability to have one person be working on a full client project. So we had, we had to all agree on how we were gonna run things.
[00:05:19] But the challenge is, is like you can’t hire, you can’t hire the work out to somebody without actually spending the time getting it out of your head and into some sort of methodology. And if you could get it out of your head and in some methodology to hire a team, you can actually use it to package it in a different way so that when you hire a team, obviously it’s easier, but you can deliver it to your clients in a way that may not need all of that overhead in your business.
[00:05:51] Because what happens is as you grow overhead and you grow clients, right, you’ve gotta maintain that, and you don’t ever really leapfrog from a profitability standpoint because the more projects you get, the more complexity you have because you need more team. And in my case, because of the agency that I had, I needed more, high caliber talent. So you kinda get into that, that business model cycle where you’re not leapfrogging outside of that because it’s still too complicated.
[00:06:25] Plus, if you have everyone in your business doing their own thing with your clients, it’s very hard to then, provide your clients with a consistent, experience so you know they’re getting results.
[00:06:37] Okay, so that’s a very typical scenario that a lot of people find themselves in. If you’re an expert and you found yourself in that position of like you’ve gotten busy and now you start to hire people, ’cause that’s the traditional advice, and you hire someone and you’re like, “Okay, go, go and take care of this,” and they’re like, “What? What do I do?” And so you have to spend time training them, and you have to spend time managing them, and you have to spend time doing all of the things. If you are doing that and you have not yet gotten your methodology out of your head into something that someone else can consume, then you’re gonna continuously churn through people because it’s just gonna be frustrating for everyone, and they’re never gonna meet your expectations because you haven’t defined what they are, right? I mean, let’s be honest. But this is, this is a normal part of what happens. Because we’re the experts, we don’t necessarily wanna outsource our expertise, right? What we wanna do is we wanna help clients at the highest level and be able to grow our business at the same time, and that doesn’t actually require you to outsource your expertise.
[00:07:48] It requires you to do things a little bit differently in your business and start to build some systems, and a scalable business model, that may or may not have employees or, team to it. And so what I wanna do is just like spend this time just sort of shifting your thinking on this, that regardless of whether or not you’re gonna hire people or you’re gonna take on more clients or you’re trying to figure out how to get all of this out of your head into something that can be packaged into a product or a book or a certification or an online program, or even a one-on-one service, you have to go through the activity of getting your expertise into a format that other people can see.
[00:08:35] It has to be tangible, it has to be visual, it has to be something that people can look at and be able to see how to go from point A to point B, right? The problem they have to the result that they desire without you being in the room. If you can do that, then you know that you are able to start to grow and scale your business .
[00:08:57] Otherwise, it’s gonna be like pushing a boulder up a hill, which is what I felt almost every day of the agency was I was like, “Why isn’t this working?” Like, we have clients, I have great people on my team, I have the right level of support. I have, 20-some years of experience being the expert at doing this, but yet we’re still sort of rolling that hill, or that, the boulder up the hill.
[00:09:24] And it was because I wasn’t able to make that, my methodology, as tactical and tangible and physical as it needed to be so it could be completely done, we talked about this on the last one, the, the journey, right? Like a consistent journey for every single customer. I wasn’t able to articulate that, like get it out of my brain enough that I was able to create that journey that somebody else could then walk somebody through that journey from point A to point B.
[00:09:58] And so it never quite took off and scaled without all of the effort from me and from the rest of the team, which led to burnout, right? Like, we were doing great. The agency was doing great. If you were to look at it from the outside, you’d be like, “She’s got the revenue, she’s got the profit, she’s got the customers, she’s got a team, she’s got a, an office building,” like all the things. But inside the agency itself, I was trying to figure out how to make it, at the level that everyone could be successful. And, and it was that journey piece that was missing, that consistent journey of what are all the things that need to happen so that, at the end of the day, we were creating that amazing product, and experience for our customers.
[00:10:45] So very first thing with that expert authority system is really, really getting that methodology out of your head because even if you wanna hire, you can’t hire until it’s out of your head appropriately. And then you have choice, right? You can look at it and say, “Well, do I wanna hire this and focus on a different part of my business, or do I want to live in the expert role in my business, and I want the help in marketing or the help in sales or the help in something bookkeeping or something else,” right?
[00:11:14] Where are you gonna land in the business so that you are able to keep your expertise role but be in a position where your business is growing and scaling beyond your time and attention? Because that is the magic, and that’s the game that we’re trying to play as experts in a business, is that it is just slightly different than, traditional businesses that are just trying to grow and scale and exit.
[00:11:42] And so, I invite you to just think about that for a moment, because you may be in that position where you’ve hired people to help you do the work because you’ve got so much work, right? If you’re a graphic designer and you have so many clients who want graphic design that you now have hired other graphic designers, and, you’re kinda challenged with like, “Yep, they’re good,” or, “They’re fine, but they’re not doing it the way that I want it done or the way that I know that my clients feel that it matches their brand,” or whatever, right?
[00:12:18] There’s just something that’s just not working exactly right, and it’s because you’re trying to outsource your expertise. You’re trying to outsource something that is, your intellectual capital, and kinda you just have a nuance, a different way, a different approach of doing it that’s very difficult to outsource.
[00:12:36] And so one, make it tangible. Make it possible for not only your team but your customers to be able to see the journey, to see the path, and to be able to go through it, but also for your team. And then, you know, determine when you hire a team, what makes the most sense ’cause it may not just be hiring helpers to help you fulfill on-client projects.
[00:13:04] And that is the flip that we make as Scalable Experts, is we’re actually looking beyond the service. And so instead of hiring people to fulfill on the work, we’re gonna, we’re gonna build a different kind of business that allows us to do scalable delivery and then show up and provide amazing guidance and resources and tools and, and whatnot for our customers so that when we do the fulfillment, it’s a lot easier because all of the things are already there. So you’re hiring people to help guide them on the journey, not to make up new stuff.
[00:13:45] So that is the job of engine number one, system number one, Expert Authority System, which allows you to get your methodology out of your head, name it, put it into some sort of package or tangible structure that helps people be able to see it even when you’re not in the room. Once that happens, the game starts to change, and you have something that you can take and then give that out, give that to team, give that to your clients, or use it for growing your business. So once that happens, you start to change the way that you’re showing up in your business.
[00:14:22] All right. So if you love this episode, give me a rating, share it with your friends and colleagues, would love to hear from you. In the show notes is my information so if this is a journey you’re on, if you’re struggling with this, if you’re just like, “Ah, I just wish somebody would open my head and get all the stuff and make it make sense,” give me a shout, would love to talk to you about that. And, until next time, enjoy.
