"It depends" feels like the right answer. It sounds accommodating, flexible, like you're paying attention. But if you're an expert trying to build a scalable business, it's quietly costing you your authority - and your ability to grow.

In this episode, Tara kicks off a new series on how to package your expertise. She shares why leading with "it depends" signals a lack of methodology rather than abundance of skill, why your customers don't have as unique a problem as they think, and how applying a consistent methodology actually allows every customer to feel seen - without you reinventing the wheel every time.

If you're stuck in the trap of doing something custom for every single person you serve, this episode is your starting point.

Key Takeaways:

• "It depends" erodes authority and positions you as a worker, not an expert
• Customers feel unique - but their underlying problem usually isn't
• A consistent methodology lets you do your best work more often
• Packaging your expertise is not a marketing fix - it's a structural one

Tara Bryan is the creator of the Infinite Scale Method™ and host of The Scalable Expert podcast. She helps expert business owners, coaches, and consultants turn their expertise into a scalable business built on a signature framework and systems that deliver results without requiring more of their time.

Learn more at www.thescalable.expert and www.taralbryan.com

Ready to build a business your expertise deserves?

The Scalable Expert Audit reveals exactly where you are in the Infinite Scale Method and what to do next. Five minutes. Instant results. Take the Free Scalable Expert Audit →

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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 Bryant, 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, everybody.

Welcome to today's episode of the podcast.

I am so thrilled that you're here.

In this episode, I'm starting a series which is really talking about how do you package your expertise?

As the Scalable expert knows, in order to start growing and scaling, you really have to start looking at the way that you work a little bit differently.

So this episode is talking about the most dangerous phrase that you will have in your business vocabulary, which is it depends, right?

So when a client comes to you and.

And they say, well, what are you.

What do you do?

What do you.

What do you offer?

What.

What can you do for me?

And you say, it depends.

I can do the blah, blah, right?

Whatever it is based on what you think that they want or whatever they ask for, that becomes one of the most dangerous phrases that you have in your business.

Because when you lead with trying to just accomplish whatever it is that the client wants, not only do you get yourself into a little bit of trouble because they now will expect you to do everything, but it erodes your authority.

It erodes your ability to be the expert.

Think about it like when you go to the doctor or you go somewhere where you are seeking someone's expertise, you don't want them to say, well, it depends.

What do you want?

What do you want to have happen?

Right?

So if I go to the doctor and.

And I say, well, you know, I have this.

This problem, or whatever, and they're like, oh, well, it really depends.

It could be all sorts of things, like, what do you think it is?

And I can, you know, help you with all of those things.

You start to think about it and you're like, I don't know.

First of all, you don't actually know how to diagnose my problem.

Second of all, if you're saying that it could be, you know, that you could treat it a million different ways, then that's actually not helping.

Right?

Like, you could have looked that up, you could have done that on your own.

So it's a very same thing.

When you're an expert and trying to deliver services or products or offers or whatever you want to call them to your customers, they're expecting you to have the path.

They're expecting that you are going to help guide them and have the answers to the questions or the problem that they are trying to solve.

So the, the phrase it depends actually is doing less good than you think it is.

Right?

It's doing harm to your business.

So often we think, oh, we're being accommodating.

We have so much expertise, we could help anyone with anything.

I work with a lot of people and, and you know, we say, well, what's your niche?

What is it that you are a specialist in?

And they say, well, I can help anyone with anything.

And not only is that difficult from a sales perspective and a marketing perspective, but it's really difficult from an authority and a fulfillment and a scaling perspective.

Because when you can do everything, then you will do everything, right?

And then, so you're overwhelmed, your customer is overwhelmed, and at the end of the day, you're not actually known for the thing that you probably want to be known for, right?

People come to you and say, hey, can you do this thing?

And you're like, yep, I can.

And then it takes you down a path that leads to customization, leads to doing different things for every single customer that you have.

And eventually when you start to think about, well, how do I scale this past my calendar, how do I scale this past doing one on one or, you know, unique custom services for everyone that I work with.

You start to see that you're in an unscalable business.

You've created lots of things based on all of the things that you can do, but it's put you in a position where you're not actually getting ahead.

Right?

It may look like it from a really short term perspective and you're busy and you're, you're doing a lot of different things and that's really interesting.

But when you look at it from a business perspective and a growth perspective and really be being profitable and being able to lead with your expertise, the independence actually is doing the opposite of what you think it should be.

Doing.

So just think through that for a minute.

Because one of the biggest sort of objections or challenges I get to this when we talk about this, is that every customer has something a little bit different.

Every customer has a unique problem, a unique situation.

And so you have to accommodate every single customer.

And here is, here's where I want you to start thinking about this a little bit differently.

First of all, every customer thinks they're unique, absolutely 100%.

And they should feel unique when you work with them.

But that doesn't mean that their problem is actually unique.

If you were to look at maybe the last 10 customers that you have had, you may have helped them.

Do you know different things?

Again, when you say it depends, then it's all custom.

But overall, there's probably a method to your madness, right?

There's probably similar beginning, a similar middle, and a similar result or ending or approach that you use to the work.

And when we get stuck in the trap of calling everything unique or doing different things for every customer, then what happens is they start leading and we do not.

Which, you know, again, puts you in a position of being an order taker or somebody who is just doing whatever the customer is asking, that is a worker bee or a pay for service type role that is not leading with your expertise.

That's not going to put you in a scalable position in your business.

So.

But customers should feel like they are special and unique and have, you know, challenges that you are paying attention to.

Because it's not so much that their problem is unique.

What they're saying is, I want someone to be helping me, I want someone to be paying attention to me.

And if that happens, you can apply your methodology with your customers and they all feel like they're having a unique personalized experience.

But it's one approach that you're using instead of it depends.

I can do anything and I can do everything.

One of the things that I had to learn as a sort of beginning business owner was just because I can doesn't mean I should, right?

So if you're having the same challenge that I had back in the day where I was like, yes, I can do everything.

And you know what?

If I can't do it, I'm going to figure it out and I'm going to help you, that was great for being accommodating, but it was the fastest path to overwhelm and burnout that led me to ultimately create what I'm creating today, right?

Because I ended up in a situation where I was like, yes, I can do Everything.

And so I was doing everything, and I was helping everyone.

And instead of elevating my authority and my experience and my visibility, I actually did the opposite.

I actually was the person that everybody went to, but they didn't go to me for one specific thing.

And which was then became really hard to.

To build the business, to hire other people, to be able to have products and programs and offers that would scale beyond myself and my time.

And it starts with that mentality of, yes, I can do anything, right.

I remember back in the day when we actually had books and no access to anything else.

And it was like, well, I don't know how to do this, but I'm gonna dig in.

And I would have all of these books on my desk, and I would figure it out.

Cause that was something that I valued.

That's something that I still love to do.

I love to solve problems.

I love to figure things out.

But what I had to learn was that I can still do that.

I can still solve really juicy, fun problems for my clients.

I can pay attention to them, make them feel like they have.

That I'm helping them through their unique situation.

But when I have that methodology, when I have a constant and consistent way of helping people, all of the.

All of my customers, then what happens is I actually get to do my best work instead of trying to reinvent the wheel every single time, instead of sitting with that mound of books and trying to figure out how to work on this one thing.

And what that led to then was being able to have a scalable business that allowed me to do those fun, juicy extra projects that.

That tested my.

My expertise and my.

And.

And continued to hone in on.

On my skills.

But I also had a business that was growing beyond that, so it wasn't dependent on every single time I worked with a customer trying to figure out how to figure out what their needs were.

And so if you're in this position and you're like, well, wait a minute, like, I really like helping, you know, all of my customers with all of the different things that they.

That they have going on, a hundred percent.

I hear you.

I see you.

That is definitely a trap that I stayed in for a very long period of time.

But what happens.

And I will challenge this to anyone who wants to challenge me on this.

But what happens is if once you package your methodology, you start to lead with your methodology, what.

What the sort of consistent path is from.

To take somebody from point A to point B, right?

What's the problem they have and.

And consistently getting them to the result, what happens is you spend your time helping them overcome obstacles and hurdles along their path.

You don't spend all of your time reinventing the wheel or trying to figure things out or doing these one off random things that take you away from ultimately growing and scaling your business.

And so once you are helping people overcome obstacles and hurdles, you actually get to, to like really dial in your expertise.

You get to do those fun things that you really ultimately want to be doing with your expertise.

Right?

That's why you're an expert.

You are passionate about your topic.

You are passionate about the stuff that you get to do every day.

And when you sort of take care of the chaos of all the, all the things that could be and lead with your methodology, you actually get to do your best work more often.

That was one of the other big challenges that I had is I was like, oh, I wish I had time to, you know, name what it is, right?

I wish I had time to dig into this.

I wish I had time to serve at this highest level.

I wish I had time to do, you know, insert here.

But I didn't because I kept recreating things.

I kept doing.

Well, it depends on, I can do that.

I can create this custom thing.

I can do this.

Oh, this will lead to this other thing and that and this other thing.

And so instead of growing exponentially, instead of creating leverage, I just sort of created a lot of, a lot of things unique to every single customer.

And then there's the day they're customers, right?

So they're going to come and go and you have to have the next thing for them.

I remember I was, I built a, helped a client of mine build an entire system so that they had a streamlined sort of delivery and fulfillment system for their business as they were starting to grow.

And we helped, we helped them grow from concept to a successful scaling business.

But we got into that.

Well, yeah, we can do that.

Oh yeah, we can do that for sure.

We can figure that out.

Like, let's build that.

Let's do that.

Let's do this.

And they started sort of taking us on this journey where we, you know, had a retainer agreement and then that meant that they got whatever they wanted, right?

Whatever, whatever we could come up with.

Not because they were trying to take advantage of us or manipulate the situation, but because we were like, yeah, we can create this.

We can create something custom.

Let's, let's do this.

This is a nice challenge.

This is cool.

Let's, let's do it.

And then we would Go off and do that.

The issue with that is then you're seen as not only like the technical person and the support person and the person who can just do whatever it is that they're on a whim that they ask for is that you become sort of that extra pair of hands.

You become that, that, that service based or hourly in contractor and they start to see you that way.

Right?

Like they start to see you as like, well, you're just sort of there, you know, as not extra but there to help them with whatever.

Which is seen as more of sort of a worker.

Right?

An hourly, an hourly paid worker versus an expert or an authority who is leading, leading through their methodology and creating a business that, that expands beyond them.

I'll never forget I was working with, with that, that group at my, myself and my team and, and I was having a conversation with the owner and he was struggling with where to focus and where to put his, his investment dollars and whatever else.

So at the end of the day, what happened, it was a big long thing.

But what happened was on one of the conversations that we had, he's like, well, I mean, you're just basically a glorified administrator.

And I was like, seriously?

But what was powerful about that moment is that he was right.

Right.

We had put ourselves in a position where we were no longer a strategic advisor.

We were no longer in a position of consulting and helping build, move their business forward from a strategic standpoint.

We were in the weeds doing, doing activities and tasks that they were asking for.

So we had put ourselves in that, that position because we led with it depends, right?

Yes, we can do that.

And, and started to just sort of take on anything that they asked for.

So circling back into our topic for today's episode is really how do you remove that most dangerous phrase from your business vocabulary?

And it's really when you start to package your expertise and lead with your expertise instead of, instead of leading with how you can, you can just help them with whatever, right?

So the answer when they said, well, what, what can you do for me?

Right?

The answer should never be it depends.

The answer should be how you help them go from point A to point B, right?

How do you help them solve the problem that they have right now and get a result that they want in order to get to where they want to go.

That, my friends, puts you in a different position.

So if you do nothing else, just really reflect on that.

How often is that your answer when somebody asks you what you do or what your services are or what your offer is.

And I challenge you to really come up with an offer, an offer flow, an offer map, whatever you want to call it, that aligns with your signature pathway, your signature methodology.

When you can marry those two together, that's where you stay in a position of being the expert and the authority on your methodology, on the your expertise, and have it packaged in a way that really helps people go from where they want to go, from where they are today to where they want to go.

Once that happens, then the business starts to grow and scale in a completely different way than relying on you, your time, and your expertise.

So there you go.

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