What It Really Means to Be an Expert | Ep. 443

One question I get all the time is whether the person I am talking to can be considered an expert business owner, which is just a business owner who has turned their proven approach, or signature IP, into an income-generating business.

A lot of times, there’s a belief that they aren’t quite an expert yet because there is still so much to learn and experience.

They say things like, “I will call myself an expert when I have 20 years experience, when my book is finished, when I have one more certification, when I have been on a bigger stage, or my following is bigger, or I stop feeling like someone out there is further along than I am.”

If you’ve ever told yourself some version of that list, this episode is for you.

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. All right. Let’s get started.

Welcome to the Scalable Expert. I am Tara Bryan. Over the last two weeks, we talked about choosing the one problem we’re solving first, and then how to shift your expert business so that your calendar is not the thing delivering for you.

And I hear a version of the same reply every time. “That makes sense, Tara. I don’t think that I’m really an expert yet.”

And I want to take that seriously because it’s not a small thing. When you don’t see yourself as an expert, you hold everything close. You customize every piece. You show up one-on-one for whatever the customer wants, because that feels safer than saying, “Here’s the path, and here’s how I’m going to lead you.”

And your business stays exactly as big as your calendar.

So today, I want to talk to you about what it actually means to be an expert. I think the definition most of us carry around is wrong, and it’s costing us a lot of time and money.

Here’s how I define it. An expert is someone who can see the fastest path to results clearly for someone else based on an approach that has worked over and over again.

That’s it.

It’s not the number of hours you’ve worked. It’s not the number of years that you’ve been in the field or in school. It’s your ability to command your topic, to look at where a person is today, see where they want to be, and say what comes first, what comes next, and what to leave alone. Notice what is in that sentence.

Someone else, a path, an approach that has worked. Nothing about how long you took to earn it.

Here’s a quick test. Can you finish this sentence? Most people start here, they get stuck here, and here’s what I do about it.

If you can, you are not waiting to become an expert, you are already doing the work of one.

What is missing is saying it out loud in a clear order and on purpose. So let me be clear about what your expertise is not.

It’s not how many years you have been in the field. Twenty years, thirty years can be one year of experience repeated twenty or thirty times. And a person with three years who has paid close attention and seen the same pattern across their customers can often see the path more clearly than someone who has simply been around.

It’s not a book. A book is a container. It can be a beautiful one, but it is a way of holding what you already see. It is not what makes you able to see it.

It’s not the credential, the stage, or the follower count. Those can be proof. They are not the source. The source is that you can see the path and that someone else can follow it.

The proof is in your last five customers. Here’s where I see the proof, and it almost never is where people look. So look at your last five customers. Think about them for a moment. However different they feel on the surface, I would be surprised if you did something completely different each time for each one of them.

Underneath the custom details, you probably started in a similar place. You asked a similar set of questions. You walked them through a similar order. You steered them away from the same mistakes.

That repetition is not lack of creativity. That repetition is your approach.

I remember when I owned the digital learning agency, and I started to change and adjust the common industry model based on the actual pathway I knew worked for my team and my customers.

The minute I shifted and owned the pathway, everything changed. Instead of asking customers how we could help, we guided them along our signature approach. They hired us for our expertise, not for our ability to provide hourly help. Even our pricing models got more accurate, and while other people had overages and change orders, we were able to deliver on time and on budget every single time.

Customers want results, and they wanna hire experts for their expertise, which means that they want you to lead through your expertise. I think a lot of experts forget that or don’t see it. They say, “I’m an expert. How do you want to use my expertise?” Versus owning their approach.

This is the difference.

Now let me say the harder part, and I’ll say it with care.

When you only customize the work or you only show up one-on-one for whatever a customer wants, that’s not owning your expertise and it’s not showing your body of work either. That is a confidence and clarity problem. It is not an expertise problem.

Here’s what I mean. When every customer gets something different, you are the only one who can see the whole route.

It lives in your head, and the customer has to ask for the right things, and you hand it over piece by piece. They can’t see where they’re going, and neither can your team, and quite frankly, neither can a system.

Customizing everything is not expertise. It is the path living in your head, handed out one piece at a time, and it feels generous. It feels like great service. But so often what the customers wanted most was not more options. They wanted someone to say, “Here’s what I do in this order, and here’s why.”

Consider this. Two practitioners with the same skill. The first one tells the new customer, “We’ll t- tailor everything to you.” Every kickoff is a blank page. The customer arrives unsure and a week later is still unsure of what to ask for.

The second says, “Here are the first three steps everyone I work with takes, and here’s where we adjust it for you.” The customer leaves with that first conversation able to say exactly what happens next.

The second one isn’t less personal. She’s more clear, and the clarity is what lets her customers feel guided and lets the work be shaped into something that can be delivered without her in every single session.

This just happened to me when I tried to hire an interior designer for a house project. One tossed a customized proposal with a billable hourly rate, and that proposal basically said they could do a whole list of services, and we just pay them by the hour.

The second proposal we received had a five-step process for how they work with their clients, with a specific deliverable outlined at each step. They also said they bill us by the hour, but they’re clearly defined parameters, so we knew exactly where they were leading us through the process.

The first one felt super risky because it felt like giving them an open checkbook, and the second one felt like they knew their process and they followed it, which gave us more confidence.

Do you see the difference? Sometimes we mistake what we can do with what we should do for our customers.

So I want to be honest about two things. First, owning your expertise does not mean claiming you can help everyone with everything. Expertise has edges. The experts who stand out to me are very clear about where theirs begins and ends

Second, seeing the path clearly does not mean the path is finished. You’ll keep refining it. I’m still refining mine. Clarity is not perfection. It just means someone else can follow it today.

So your exercise today is to take about 15 minutes, I call it the same three steps test. Pull up your last five customers. For each one, write down what you did first, what you did second, and what you did third.

Now look across all five. Circle every step that shows up more than once. Those repeated steps are the spine of your approach.

Then finish this sentence in writing, “Most people come to me here. Then they get stuck here, and the first three things I would do are…”

That sentence is the beginning of your signature pathway, and it is the beginning of owning your expertise out loud.

Here is what I want you to hold onto from this episode. You don’t have to wait. Expertise is not a finish line you cross at year 20. It’s your ability to see the path for someone else. If you can do that today, you are further along than you think. And once you can see the path, you can package it, and once you package it, it can be delivered in a way that does not depend on you being in the room for every step.

That is the work that we’re going to keep building together here and what we do at the Scalable Expert if you wanna see where your business stands right now, take the free Scalable Expert Audit. It’s 10 questions in about 3 minutes. The link is in the show notes. I’m Tara Bryan, and I’ll see you on the Scalable Expert Podcast next Tuesday.