Why Expert Service Providers Struggle To Delegate Marketing

Welcome to the Well-Built Business Podcast. I'm Chelsea Forer, systems strategist and founder of the Well-Built Business Method. Now, I'll be honest, operations isn't the flashiest part of entrepreneurship. It's not the thing people usually want to focus on.

But it is what will keep you in your zone of genius and away from burnout, especially if you are a service provider, business owner. But if you've hit a point where you realize structure, clarity, and clean systems are what actually unlocks sustainable growth, you're in the right place. Each week we talk about what it takes to build a business that supports your life, not one that constantly drains it. I'm really glad you're here.

Let's dive in. So this is an episode introducing the first pillar of my well-built business method in greater detail. If you missed episode one, I went over the six pillars of systems that make up the complete like body of work, of how I see systems, the different nuances and areas of your business that can be systematized. You might not have even thought about areas that I covered in episode one.

But time and time again, the one that people want support in creating a system around first is marketing and visibility. Now, I feel this is because for most experts and business owners, given the opportunity, this is the first thing they would love to actually get off their plate, right? It's often the thing that we know it has to happen. We need to have more eyeballs.

Seeing what we're doing, or more listeners, right on podcasts, listening to what we're doing to grow our audience, to nurture our audience, and to help ideal clients step into our world and know what offers they could be working with us in or how to book a session, right? All those things. So the marketing and visibility needs to be there. And there, this is probably the area of systems where there is the most hype and the most opportunity that you are probably seeing where people are pitching you, right?

Either through their just like marketing and social media, or maybe some cold pitches as well of, Hey, I could take this off your plate, right? Like how as soon as you put out a YouTube video on a new cha new channel, there is someone messaging you saying, oh, I saw your channel. I could optimize it and this is what we could do. So there's always people, experts, freelancers, who are going to point out that one thing they could solve for you and your marketing and visibility could change everything and Right.

And it's very exciting. It can be very much a shiny object. And for myself, and I would say most of my clients. It's where Too early or too I'm gonna say immature of a hire.

Not that the person you would hire would be immature, but that your systems haven't quite matured to be ready to be taken over by somebody else. That's where a lot of times people feel burned and they feel like I'm just not good at hiring. Or maybe you're too nervous to even be hiring out anything around visibility and marketing for a couple reasons. One, you might not know how to systematize and delegate two, and this is really common.

You're worried that nobody else will be able to capture your voice or care about your work as much as you do, and make sure that. Like you need to be represented with integrity in your marketing and visibility. A hundred percent with you on that as well. And the third one, and I'm gonna share a specific story that kind of spurred the brainstorm for this episode today.

A third one is that it can just be so hard to find someone who's going to have the same work ethic or work as quickly as you. Because you are the heart, you are the pulse, you are the entire knowledge bank. Of your business. And that's incredibly challenging to ask someone to just hop into and work as quickly as you.

Okay? So I want you to stay with me on this episode, whether you actually have someone that you're working with in marketing, and this is gonna help you tighten up just thinking about some of the challenges that you might be facing to normalize it. And then over the course of the next couple episodes, I'm gonna give you some solutions. But I also want you to start thinking about this, even if you are the one doing all of your marketing and all of your visibility.

Because here's the truth, I want you to step into fully that when you are creating systems, it is just as important to systematize for you, for yourself as a solopreneur to make things more efficient. More systematic, right? And so that eventually if you get to a place where you do want to bring someone in, you can train them on what you've been doing. Now, before we dive into marketing and visibility challenges specifically, I'm gonna share just an ethos that I personally have.

And I truly believe it has served me well. When I was, if you don't know this about me, I was a full-time attorney. So in 2008 I graduated from law school and I practiced law full-time. And my first job was with a fairly large regional law firm up based out of Maine.

And I had some offices in Massachusetts, New Hampshire. I was working in the Portland, Maine office and there was one partner there who really took took attention to me wanted to foster me in getting my feet wet and knowing how to work all of a sudden in this law firm setting, right? So I was 24 years old when I graduated from law school and was sworn into the bar and I was assigned. Assistant who was actually older than me, not by much, but she was older than me and she'd been at the law firm for I think at least a decade.

She was a lovely, great energy. Such a great match for me. I had never a day in my life delegated something to anyone. And the partner said, what's really important, you can look at Morgan was her name.

You can look at Morgan and know oh, she knows our system. She knows our filing, naming functions like she's been here for a decade. I can really lean on her, which is great. But he said, never delegate something completely to her that you don't know how to check the work.

Very quickly and make sure it's being done correctly. Because at the end of the day, it is your name going out on that. And especially in the law, that can definitely have big ramifications. But I have taken that to heart in how and why I create systems in my business.

Because if it's something that I'm gonna do repetitively and it's not. Something that I really feel like I can, or I'm ready to either 'cause I don't wanna pay the money or I just don't feel like it's the right thing to hand off to someone, then I want to be as efficient as possible in how I am using my time doing it. And if it's something I think I might wanna hand off soon, then I for sure want to be as meticulous as possible in documenting exactly what I want done. And if it's something that I'm like, I might eventually, oh gosh, when my business is doing.

A certain milestone, like I might hire someone to do that part. And even if I just have some brainstorms around what that job description will be in the future, I will have a place to put that. Okay. But I wanna bring this back to the marketing and visibility because I truly believe it's one of the hardest areas of your business where you are an expert, you are a service provider, you're the person that people.

Want to look at your marketing and then you, and feel like they match, right? Like that integrity, maintaining your reputation, just making sure everything is to a standard that you care about. This area of your business will shine a light on the gap in systems faster than anything because if anything's off. You're not gonna be able to delegate or things are not gonna be able to get faster, and you're just gonna be frustrated.

Also, just like underlying theme here is that most of my clients do not enjoy the marketing side of running their business like I want you to think right now, if you could just be in your zone of genius serving clients, holding space for sessions, running workshops, running retreats, whatever your zone of genius offer is. If you could just do that and people would continually show up and you didn't have to put your name out anymore, right? Endless wait list. Would that make you happy for most clients, myself included, because I am treating my business like an operations client right now.

I would love that. I do not, I'm not someone who like wakes up and feels like, oh my gosh. Creating for Instagram is my creative outlet. I've just never felt that way.

I do enjoy podcasting. I like yapping into a microphone, but when I really think about it and when I can be of service, when I can be in session or working with someone or hosting a VIP day or auditing their systems, I know that's where I can make the biggest impact. And so it's what I enjoy the most. Now I wanna circle back to this story that kind of inspired jumping into this system pillar first.

So this morning I opened up TikTok, just distracting myself from doing my yoga practice, if I'm honest. I did hit play right after though, but I'm glad I opened TikTok because I got introduced to the story. So there's a woman who I follow on TikTok. Her name over there is Mars Gurley.

Her name is, I don't know if she says it, Liza or Liza. She's beautiful. She's a mom over in the uk. I've bought some courses from her recently.

I'm exploring adding on a new income stream into my personal brand that I run and she's got some great, yeah, just some great stuff around Tech UGC and different things around content creation. Anyway, side note. So on this video, she was basically sharing that she had to let someone go from her team over the weekend, and she was sharing very transparently why. So she I'm just observing of her business.

She runs a paid membership for women who are looking to get into these specific types of income streams. As a content creator, she has digital products, so I believe she sells all of them through stand store. She then gets hired by clients to do tech UGC and to create content and she does Amazon influencer program, all kinds of really cool things. And she, like me, fits her business activities into the time when her kiddos are at school and really tries to stick to those parameters, right?

So she's very busy, she's clearly seeing some success. She's very transparent and so she was saying, I know I should be doing emails. I know I should be turning my better videos into blog posts. I know I should be posting on LinkedIn.

She feels like her ideal audience could be over there, but she doesn't really have time to also be intentionally posting there. So she specifically said, I was hoping that someone could come in and just take care of those things for me to take a little bit of that load off. Have you ever felt that way? And then she specifically went into part of why she was a little.

A little bit disappointed that this didn't work out. She said, I move really fast. My standards are really high because I've built everything on my own. I felt that to my soul.

I am very fast. I am a generator. I like, I have a photographic memory, so there's certain things that I don't need to create systems for me, but I know that I need to, if I'm gonna bring anyone else in, or even add more things onto my plate to make things faster. So she was saying, I realized it's quite hard to have someone come in and work at the same pace that I work at now.

Whether it's the fact that you know you're very fast, or whether it's the fact that you just know your authentic voice, and in marketing and visibility, how many times have you said It is just faster for me to write my email than to train someone else on how to write an email in my voice or, I've really mastered how I create scripts for my videos that convert. And like what if there was a big dip in engagement if I asked someone else to help, even though I really need to get something off my plate.

So regardless of specifically what platform or what task it is that you know that it would be great to get off your plate. In the next episode we're gonna start talking about some of the specific systems. Like what are some of the softwares or tools or things that you could just be. Exploring and noodling on a little bit to think about is there a pain point that I'm hearing Chelsea say there's a solution to?

Now I'm gonna be very honest. In the episodes where I talk about tools and systems and potential solutions, I am not gonna be flooding you with a hundred options or 15 things you gotta sign up for. I'm gonna be talking specifically about if this is a problem you face, this is a solution that I have found it might be worth looking into. So this is not gonna be like a masterclass of teaching you how to set up Trello versus Notion versus Clickup, but I might pose, do you have a content calendar somewhere that is hosted where your team member can log in?

So we're gonna be talking about some of the things I'm actually. I think in the following episode gonna do a case study because right now I'm volunteering with my son's outdoor school to help set up all of this marketing and visibility infrastructure kind of from the ground up. And with her permission, I'm going to be sharing some of what we've been putting in place and how the founder is feeling as some of that is just like coming off her plate very rapidly, which is really exciting to see.

So for today, I just want you to be aware if the marketing and visibility feels like it's a real challenge to create systems around, you're nervous about hiring it out now or in the future, or you've been burned if you tried to, but you didn't really feel confident in how you were handing things off. If you're feeling like this woman who is sharing, like it's so hard to find someone. Who can work at my pace. Alternatively, someone who can work in your voice like that can be a very real challenge, especially if the work that you do is derived on your body of work, your expertise, your knowledge, right?

It's really hard to just translate that in a quick brief, right? If you were selling, I'm just looking at my favorite water bottle. I'm obsessed with awa. Water bottles and if that's what you were selling, you can write up a product brief so quickly okay, what we're selling is, a 32 ounce stainless steel water bottle.

You can, advertise that it's lead free. It's got a straw, it doesn't leak like the features are so easy to rattle off. It comes in these colors, right? It fits in your cup holder.

But when you are an expert and you're a service provider and you are selling. Being in a transformative experience with you. That's where it becomes very challenging to think about systematizing anything. Without it losing the essence of who you truly are and how you want to magnetize your ideal client.

So make sure if you have not already subscribed wherever you're listening to this, please do I will be dropping next week's episode, and we're gonna be looking more at the how to solve some of these things. But for today, I just want you to start thinking about what challenges are you feeling either in implementing the plan that you currently have for marketing and visibility for your business? What recurring issues are coming up? What's taking way longer than you think it should, whether you're doing it, or a virtual assistant or an online business manager?

Are there a couple things that you're already identifying you would love to solve? If you are listening to this and you're like, Chelsea, I am taking notes. I'm super clear. This was the reminder I needed to reprioritize.

Fixing the operations in my X, Y, Z, right? Love that for you. If you feel capable and now motivated to go finish something in supporting your operations, I love that. And if you're sitting here realizing that this is opening up a lot of questions for you, and you really need some guidance in the area of business systems and operations so that you truly can build a more sustainable experience of running your business, that's where I come in.

So if you are a solopreneur, needing clarity and wanting some support on how you make decisions, how you decide what your top priority is, how you set goals for your business, how you start to create action plans that are gonna realistically fit into the time that you have to run your business, all of that is what we do together in a rooted VIP day. We blend a portion of the time being dedicated towards energetic clarity and the rest of the time together, like I am your operations person, so let's figure this out.

We do that over the course of a half day VIP day. You get beautiful deliverables, business plan Canva, like all these really cool things. Hit your inbox a couple days after our call that you can then run with. If you have a team or complexity, you have some of these systems half built out, or you have some pain points that you're really seeing, maybe a virtual assistant is not performing how she used to, and you're wondering like could a system and some documentation like better supporter?

I'm not sure right. For any of those reasons. If you wanna identify your highest return on investment system to be overhauling and really improving, that's what a business systems audit is. We look at every one of the six system pillars of the well-built business method.

We identify the top two that would be the best return on investment. To buy back your time or to save you money. And we make a short plan of what would need to happen to improve both of those top priority systems. So if you are needing someone to really bounce ideas off of, make sure that you are allocating your personal time to fix these things, or where you're gonna hire someone to fix these things, to put it in the most appropriate kind of corner of your business.

That is a business systems audit. So if either of those is of interest, of course there's some links down below in the show notes. You can reach out to me, we can even have a conversation about which would be more appropriate based on where you're at. And as always, I hope that you got a ton out of this episode, even in and of itself, and we'll be back next week to further the conversation around marketing and visibility infrastructure.