Want to scale your business? Work with Deirdre to make your first 100k month/year by creating your uniquely uncopyable brand strategy, story, offer, experience and more. 

The Expert Trap: When Growth Kills Scale

Some lessons don’t come from strategy; they come from being humbled. I thought scaling meant hiring more people. Turns out, it meant letting them go. In this episode, I’m telling the unfiltered story of how I went from 7 team members and cashflow chaos to 4 people, 1 focused offer, and my best year in business. You’ll hear the exact reframe, structure, and tough decisions that helped me swap growth for genuine scale. If you’re a service-based founder who’s exhausted from “doing all the right things,” this might just be the reset you need.

For the full list of timestamps, key takeaways, and all resources mentioned, visit the full episode page here: 

https://deirdremartin.ie/blog/expert-trap-growth-kills-scale

Want to scale your business? ⁠⁠Click here.⁠⁠

Follow Deirdre Martin’s Socials:

⁠⁠LinkedIn ⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠YouTube  | ⁠⁠Millionize

You know that moment when your business looks successful on paper, but you're

quietly panicking behind the scenes?

Well, that was me earlier this year.

I had a seven person team, five offers and a brand that looked scaled, but then

I lost a big client, got hit with a health scare and suddenly realized I'd built a

business that was growing but not scaling.

So I did the unthinkable.

I scaled back and it turned out to be the best decision I've ever made.

People love to say that scaling means hiring.

Add more people.

Build a bigger team.

That's how you grow.

And that's exactly what I did over the past few years.

I built my team up.

It looked like success.

We were growing, clients, were happy I was finally doing CEO things.

But here's what no one tells you.

The bigger your team, the more energy you spend managing instead of leading.

Every decision rolled back to me.

Every fire, every wobble, every AI blip, you name it, it looked like

freedom, but it felt like chains.

And somewhere along the way, I bought into a new belief that you're not a

real CEO until you have a big team.

Wallop, that one got me because my version of success had quietly sneakily

shifted from being one about peace and purpose to payroll and perception.

And what's even more nuts is that that's the exact reality I'd said when I started

my business that I wanted to avoid.

And it's the reality I help my clients avoid.

But then this year everything came to a head.

I lost a major retainer client around the same time I had that health

scare that forced me to slow down.

And honestly, that scared me more than the bank balance.

Studying neuroscience meant that I understood what was happening to my

parasympathetic nervous system when I was hesitating to make decisions

when I felt like I was frozen and couldn't decide what was the best

path forward gonna be for my business.

And while that was happening, before I knew it, the numbers

were sliding and not upwards.

They were sliding down fast.

And I realized something that literally made my asshole pucker, and that was the

longer I kept paying my full team, the sooner I was gonna run outta cash and

the higher the chance that I wouldn't be able to pay myself and pay my bills.

Now, the logical part of my brain knew what had to happen, but

my ego wasn't having any of it.

It told me, Deirdre, you've worked too hard to shrink your

team or your business now.

So I did what I teach my clients to do when they're stuck in a state of fear or

resistance, and that is, I used a positive psychology reframing technique on myself.

I sat down and I broke the situation into four parts.

Number one, what are my beliefs about this situation?

Number two, what are the consequences, both positive and negative,

of keeping things as they are?

Number three.

Are these beliefs actually true?

Or is this just my brain's old patterns trying to protect me?

And number four, finally, what action will I take?

How will I move forward from the situation?

For me it was, if cashflow isn't at X per month by the 31st of July, I need

to make cuts no matter how hard that is.

And that last part was key because giving your prefrontal cortex

a hard deadline forces clarity.

It stops the limbic system from literally running the show and

making decisions on your behalf.

And I was 100% transparent with my team about this as it was

unfolding from April to July.

They were doing exceptional work.

They deserved honesty.

And I'll tell you that part was brutal because these

weren't just resources to me.

There weren't as contractors, there were people I cared about, people

who'd helped me build this business.

And I kept thinking like, what if I can't get them back later?

What if this is a step backwards and I'll never make it back here,

but the truth was holding on longer outta fear was the step backwards.

So I followed through July.

I hadn't hit the revenue cash flow monthly that I wanted to hit, so I

scaled back from seven people to four.

And guess what happened?

It's been my best year in business, yet I doubled down on one core offer.

Instead of juggling five, I used the tool.

I now teach in Millionize to identify my cash cow, the one core offer that could

truly scale and really be profitable.

And then when I executed on that, I've had my best quarter ever.

My Millionize Mastermind is literally oversubscribed.

People are going onto my website, filling in the application form for the wait list

and are literally like when the doors are open, next, I'm getting messages

asking me this, like, what the fuck?

That's like a huge shift, right?

Now letting people go this year and scaling back my team doesn't mean

I'm never gonna hire anyone again.

It just means i'll be way more intentional about how revenue flows,

what's actually scalable, and where I really, truly want to spend my

energy and my resources because.

Scale isn't about adding layers, it's about creating leverage.

And personally, I feel lighter, more present, and more me.

If we haven't met yet, I'm Deirdre Martin neuro strategist, offer architect, and

the founder of Millionize Mastermind.

I help service-based founders like you break out of the expert trap

where your brilliance becomes your bottleneck, and build businesses that

you can scale without burning you out.

And if that's where you are right now.

Well, this episode is definitely for you.

So let's talk about the three shifts I made that changed everything from how

I structure my business to how I define success and how this can work for you too.

Because the truth is doing more isn't scaling, it's just busier

fricking chaos with a nicer title.

Okay, the first point I wanna make is that.

I want you to stop calling it scale when it's literally just more work.

Most founders hit a ceiling and think, I'll just hire my way

out, but without structure, that help just multiplies your chaos.

And I learned that the hard way.

My team was incredible, truly, but even with the autonomy to drive forward.

And to leverage our well structured systems and processes.

Everything still ran through me and that's not scale, that's

survival with the payroll.

And what I tell clients to do is that when they're at that scale level, they need

to make a really scary, hire decision, which is to hire people for where they

want to get their business to not for where their business is at right now.

Because when you hire people for where you want to get your business to, those

are decision makers in your business.

But I didn't have decision makers in my business.

I had task takers, so what I had to do was the opposite of what most people do.

I paused growth and I focused on profitability.

Before staffing, I documented everything that drove real profit.

I stopped paying attention to any metrics on social media or any of those things.

I wasn't paying attention to one-off wins where somebody would hire me to do

a strategy day or a training workshop or whatever, and I really started to

look at the things that could generate a lot of cash but weren't consistent,

repeatable results and started to like park those and not work on them so much.

And that became the foundation for going back to what my model was two years ago.

Determine your core one or two offers, productize them, ensuring

that they're clear, outcome driven, and scalable offers.

It wasn't easy.

The expert part of me wanted to keep fixing things myself, but that's just

the dopamine loop talking that rush of quick wins that tricks your brain

into thinking busy equals productive.

Oh my God, our brains lied to us so much.

And if this is resonating with you, I have a little suggestion for you.

Block off 90 minutes in your calendar and call it a CEO Clarity session.

Write down every offer or service that you sell, and circle the

ones that create real profit.

With minimal handholding, because that's where scale can really start.

And then I wanna caveat here that in two of my recent strategy days,

both of the clients thought that the thing that was scalable in terms

of their offer actually wasn't.

Okay.

Point number two, climb the ladder.

When I looked at my offers, I realized I was trying to scale everything.

And that's why nothing was really working very well.

That's why I wasn't really scaling any one particular thing.

So I built what I call the ascension ladder, right?

And that ascension ladder, it works really well.

Once you're really clear on your core ip, there's ways that you can leverage that.

So step one of looking at this is what is that core productized service, the

thing that's repeatable, predictable, where there's a fixed fee, where it's easy

to deliver and it's specific outcomes.

Step two is looking at leverage services.

That's one to many.

So programs, group programs, workshops, trainings where you can help multiple

people at one time, and it could be even in one hour or 30 minutes.

And step three was to look at my digital assets.

That's the dream layer.

It's like you create it once and you sell it often.

So when I map, this offers against my ladder.

One stood out and that was my cash cow, the one I could deliver

efficiently with high impact.

And that had strong margins.

And that focus changed everything it helped me sharpen my message.

It helped me improve my client delivery.

But best of all, my profitability soared.

And at the end of the day, we're all in business to be profitable.

Right.

But what was most interesting is that since I became more hands-on,

again, my client retention hit 100% and that told me something important.

Scale isn't just about systems, it's about presence.

If you want to get your messaging right around that one, scalable offer.

By the way, go and listen to episode 121, how to write a brand message

that attracts high paying clients.

Point three, redefine success before it redefines you.

Now for me, this one's personal.

Since scaling back, I noticed other things slipping my weekly storytelling

email, my podcast consistency, my posting schedule on LinkedIn, and even how

often I post a newsletter on LinkedIn.

But here's the difference.

It's intentional because I've redefined what success looks like.

Now.

Success includes the mornings where I spend riding my horse midweek, because

it's winter, it's dark by four 30, and I would much rather be out in

Ireland when it's bright and wet and windy than dark and wet and windy.

And then it means I'm finishing work still at a reasonable hour

to have dinner with my family.

So I don't feel like I'm behind.

I feel like I'm aligned.

And that mindset shift came from positive psychology too.

Focusing on what's working, not what's missing.

Because when you wire your brain towards the progress that you've

made, instead of pressure to achieve, you end up building resilience.

And that's the neuroscience of growth, the neuroplasticity that lets you

reprogram what success even feels like.

So.

I have an action for you to take.

Here's what it is.

I want you to ask yourself, what season of business are you actually in right now?

And because maybe it's not a season to expand, but maybe it's a season

to stabilize and both are valid.

So from today, from listening so far, here's what I want you to take away.

Scaling isn't about adding more people.

It's about removing what no longer serves you.

Structure creates freedom, and sometimes the most strategic move is stepping

back before you can step forward.

So here's your next step.

Grab the revenue stream prioritization matrix at www.DeirdreMartin.ie.

Forward slash revenue stream.

It's the same matrix that I use to find my cash cow and rebuild my cash

flow and confidence from the ground up, simpler, stronger, and more profitable.

And it's the same one that brought to light for two of my Millionize clients

in strategy days that they were actually focusing on growing the wrong offer.

If this episode resonated, please do me a favor and share it with

one founder who you know is teetering on that edge of burnout.

The one who needs permission to pause before they push.

You've got this lead, like a CEO, not the busiest expert in the room.

And until next time, keep mastering your business.