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You are 100% confident you COULD grow your business more… but the second you imagine more clients your stomach flips because delivery already feels maxed out. If that’s you, you’re dealing with structural fragility, and once you see it, you can fix it fast. In this episode, I, Deirdre Martin, will walk you through a simple, structured way to decide your next best move for scaling (without risking quality or burning yourself out): create capacity, install decision lanes to break the founder bottleneck, and repackage your services so you stop trading time for money. You’ll leave knowing exactly what to do first in the next 30 days… and why doing nothing turns your business into a stamina trap.

For the full list of timestamps, key takeaways, and all resources mentioned, visit the full episode page here: https://deirdremartin.ie/blog/what-to-do-next-to-scale

Want to talk to Deirdre about scaling your business? ⁠⁠Click here.⁠⁠

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Quick question and I want you to answer it honestly.

If you got five new clients this month, would you be absolutely buzzing?

Or would your stomach flip flick excitement about the revenue, but

then flop because you've no idea how you would deliver it without

everything in your business feel like it was literally going on fire.

And by the way, if your stomach flocked, that's not an indicator

of stress or anything like that.

It's typically a signal of structural fragility because if your first reaction

is it's the new clients, but your second reaction is, holy shit, how would I cope?

You've got some structural challenges going on behind

the scenes in your business.

That's actually great news, my friend, because structure is fixable.

So stay with me because by the end of this episode, you'll have a

structured way to decide the next best move for scaling your business.

Whether that's hiring, getting outta the founder, bottleneck,

or repackaging your service so you stop trading time for money.

Now, this is for the founder whose business is already working.

And the next step is to take your business to the next level.

But that next level feels weirdly difficult to choose,

and you're not in chaos.

You've done the chaos before and you can handle any chaos that comes your way.

This is different.

It's that okay, I've done pretty well.

I could nearly do this in my sleep stage, but what now

stage, if you know what I mean.

So it's those questions that are cropping up, that are keeping me awake at night.

Do I hire, do I need to market more?

Do I need to start doing paid ads?

Do I change what I'm selling?

Do I change my pricing?

Do I build a team?

Do I stop doing delivery and hire somebody else in to do the delivery for me?

And if I stop doing delivery.

Who does it and what does that mean in terms of quality and do I

wanna risk my reputation on that?

My current clients and that and all of the things, these are questions

that come up so often with the clients that I'm working with.

And the frustrating part about asking all those questions is,

you know, you're totally capable of more and you fricking are.

That's what makes this stage so irritating.

You've got like this incredible untapped potential in your expertise

in your business, and you can feel you're underusing that potential

because the busyness of the business is consuming your attention.

And here's the thing, if you don't choose your next move deliberately, the

business is going to choose for you.

It's gonna pull you back into the weeds with delivery.

It's gonna pull you back into being the decision maker about every little tiny

minute detail that needs a decision.

It's gonna pull you back into being the person that.

Everybody in the business depends on, and you don't want that.

So this whole episode is going to be anchored on one question,

and I'm gonna keep coming back to it time and time again.

And that question is, write it down if you want.

What is the next best move that creates capacity and growth for

you in your business without breaking your client delivery?

Okay.

Good question right now if you get clarity there.

What will happen is you'll stop spinning at the crossroads that you're

at in terms of which direction, and you'll know which direction to take.

By the way, if we haven't met yet, hey and welcome.

I'm Deirdre Martin.

I help consultants and service providers scale with neuroscience backed

business and mindset strategies without sacrificing their health or the people

that you love most in the world, right?

We're gonna into three.

Moves in order, and then I'm gonna give you a simple rule to

decide which one to take first.

So the move one.

If you're doing all of the delivery, this might surprise you to learn, but your

next move usually isn't more marketing or paid ads or anything in that direction.

I've had so many clients who are service providers come to me and

they're ready to grow, and they already have regular referrals coming in.

They have repeat clients.

They have a good steady income coming in, and that's a great

sign because your work is.

Working, right?

You're getting results for your clients.

They're achieving success.

What you promised them in the first instance.

They're accomplishing that and that's why they signed up with you.

They're now advocating for you, and that's fricking cool and well

done if that's you, by the way.

And you know, sometimes we don't stop and celebrate those things often enough.

So just tell me, give yourself a pat in the back if that's you right now.

But, and unfortunately there is a but.

Referrals have a downside.

They can keep you busy enough to avoid building a proper growth engine

because what happens is they're coming in but you are not being proactive.

And when that happens, marketing becomes the thing that you should do, but never.

Properly do or never get really intentional behind it because you're so

busy delivering, managing, answering, fixing, thinking, and by the time you get

to content you're like, oh no, not today.

Right?

And this is where I see so many founders go wrong.

They think the answer is, I need to be more visible.

I need that.

But hold on, if you're already at capacity.

More visibility just creates more pressure.

It creates more fixing, thinking, managing, and all of the things.

So for a lot of founders, the next best move isn't marketing.

It's actually finding a way.

It's like clearing that fog to create capacity for yourself and your business.

And this has come up.

Recently with a good few clients one was constrained because of time and

personal commitments, and was close to max capacity, but not ready for visibility

until capacity had been created and the other was completely on the other end of

that, a founder doing all the delivery.

Referrals feeding the business until recently and for years, the business

was stable, but growth felt unclear because there was no bandwidth left for

anything that actually moves it forward.

They had no capacity to market.

They had no capacity to create the visibility and to build additional demand.

So the first move for them was to hire a VA and to outsource some of

the admin work that they were doing.

It's not glamorous or sexy, but it's really fricking smart.

And my founder who did that, they got back 12 hours a week.

So super quickly because admin is like a sneaky thief and you find

yourself doing it all the time 'cause it's just a thing that you do.

But usually it's not one big thing.

It's that drip, drip, drip of tiny little things that keep you really busy, but

also keep you in that reactive cycle.

The next hire that that founder made was a contractor, somebody that could do some

of the delivery and behind the scenes.

So the client didn't necessarily need to be aware of that, but then

this person has the potential to come and be client facing as well.

And this is where things got really interesting because that

capacity, then that extra space turned into momentum for my client.

And within two weeks of having more space, they quoted for

five proposals over five days.

And previously that might have been a month's worth of stuff that came in

all off the back of referrals only.

And because they weren't drowning anymore, they had the capacity to be out networking

that led to speaking engagements.

It led to visibility and credibility without having to be online every day.

And that's where those proposals came from.

So if this is sounding any way vaguely familiar for you, I want you to do

a quick little self check right now.

I want you to just reflect on this.

If five new clients landed this month for you, would you be really, really

excited or would you be panicking?

If you're panicking, your next best move is to create that type of capacity.

Full stop.

And here's a tip I give my clients when they're trying to create capacity.

Grab a pen for this pause if you need to for a few days.

Track everything you do in your business, all the emails you

send, who you're sending them to.

The types of emails they are like are they just setting up meetings?

What are they?

CRM management follow up with clients delivery.

Whether it's admin, that your admin delivery, whether somebody is at

x stage in their journey with you, and this is what has to happen then.

And you know, what does that look like?

Marketing?

Maybe blogs or articles, newsletters, social media content.

Whatever it might be.

Do you need to create that?

Could somebody else create that?

Finance your invoicing, checking your banks, matching the stuff between

your bank and your finance stuff.

Sending out invoices, following up on unpaid invoices, right?

All of those things.

Track everything that you're doing.

And then on a piece of paper, just draw a line down the center to create

two columns and on the left side, right at the top, what can only I do?

And on the right side, call it what someone else could do with an SOP.

Now one of my clients, we were looking at this actually only yesterday, and she had

done it with an Excel sheet and she had just listed all the things and she had

her two columns up at the top for only I could do or I could delegate this, and

she just put an X as she was going through the stuff in each column so that she

could see visibly what she could delegate.

The next step in terms of creating capacity for her is

hiding in that second column.

So if that's you, that's where there is an opportunity for you, but also in this

very space when you're at that crossroads.

There's an identity edge that I've seen crop up with so many clients

as well at this stage, and that is.

If your self-worth is tangled up in being the one who does all the things

all the time, growth is going to start feeling like you're giving up something.

But if you go ahead, you're not giving up quality, you're just

literally changing the model.

You're changing your operating model in terms of how you

work, and that's totally okay.

So next is what happens when you create that capacity, but you still feel like

everything roots to you or through you.

And this is the best part.

I think that this is the part where I see founders say, I

hired help and I'm still busy.

I totally get that because you've hired help, but all the

decisions still route back to you.

You have to maybe approve things because you've guardrails in place or

people are coming to you with questions saying, what do you think about this?

Am I doing this right?

All that sort of stuff.

And there are tiny little micro decisions and there are things that

those people are escalating because they don't know what decision is

right for you and your business yet.

So everything still needs your brain.

Ugh.

And you're not imagining how exhausting that is.

It is.

Literally, there's a name on this.

It's called a management tax, right?

And interestingly, the American Psychological Association explains task

switching, which creates an extra cost.

It's like a switch cost.

So every time.

You reorient to answer those questions or make those micro decisions and it

distracts you from what you're working on.

Your performance drops.

Compared to staying on one task and literally seeing it through

to completion, and also this one status is worth hearing because it

explains why your day feels shredded.

Harvard Business Review reported knowledge workers, so people who are service

providers, consultants, coaches, all the people listening to this show, they.

Toggle on average, guess how many times?

This number is nuts.

I'm like, oh, I nearly like to track this for myself.

On average, we toggle between apps about 1200 times a day.

What?

1200 times a day?

That's costing almost four hours a week, just reorienting between

tabs and apps and stuff like that.

That's nuts.

So yeah, no wonder, some days it feels like.

What did I actually do today?

'cause you're so busy just switching between apps.

Hyperfocused.

Oh my gosh, hyperfocused.

That's what we need.

So when your day becomes constant micro switching, you feel busy,

but you don't feel effective.

Oh, that's so me, that genuinely.

And then you start thinking you need more discipline, more productivity hacks.

Willpower, all those things, but no, you don't.

What you actually need are lanes.

So the next best move here is to create decision lanes, not vague

delegation, not on this lane.

It's things like if it's under X amount, you decide if it's a repeat

problem, document the solution, and propose the standard, then

you only have to approve it once.

If it impacts scope, draft the message and then say that you'll greenlight

it within a set window, right?

If it's not urgent, it goes into a weekly review meeting that you have

with that team member, so it stops hijacking your random Tuesday mornings.

So here's another quick self check-in I'd love for you to do.

On a scale of one to 10, how often do you get interrupted for

decisions someone else could make?

If the rules or standard operating procedures were clear.

Now, if you're above a six, you don't need another system.

You simply need clearer leadership design.

You need to set some boundaries around your availability, but

also set expectations around what other people are empowered to do.

And now let me call this out, that this is particularly useful for foundries

around the a hundred K to one millionish.

Stage where proof and demand are there, but delivery and decisions

still depend on you because if you're trying to land your first consistent

clients, this isn't your stage yet.

You don't have other people probably working for you.

And this isn't really relevant just yet, but it's useful to have this one in the

bank for later on once you're there.

And here's the identity piece that I see at this stage for founders.

If you're overly available, whether to clients or team or even your

fricking family, sometimes you teach people to overly depend on you.

And I had this with another client where he had an office and he used

to sit in the office with his team.

Every phone call, every conversation, he was getting sucked into

it and he didn't realize it.

But what he was trying to do was to control every single outcome.

And even though he thought he was helping, he was actually

stripping away people's autonomy.

And really pissing them off to be frank.

And he was giving away his power, his capacity, his time.

And when he realized this, when I coached him through it, the solution was to

work from home a couple of days a week.

And the difference was profound.

Like yes, it took him a little while for the team to adapt because they were so

dependent on him, but him too, to be fair.

He was like, oh my God, what do I do in this time?

Like when I'm away and I'm like, this is your business development time.

This is your time to work on your business and not in it.

Fast forward, I wanna say two years later now his business runs

autonomously without him and he's now set up two or three other business.

Right.

So once you've got capacity in lanes, then you can move into the money model

because when income feels a little bit lumpy or clunky, founders tend to clinging

a little bit harder, bold tighter.

They stay on like all of the time.

And then what happens is it reinforces the whole cycle.

And this is where I say, stop.

Trading time for money as your only option because if you bill by the

hour, your income lives and dies by your calendar availability.

It's simple maths.

Let's say you work 40 hours a week, you've got 10 hours of admin, that's 30 hours

that you are available for delivery.

If you're only charging per hour for that, your ceiling is capped.

You've literally built a job for yourself.

So the next best move to scale is repackaging.

Offers retainers, but focused on clear outcomes.

And again, so many clients, when we look at their revenue generation

streams, the result is often moving from hours to retainers.

So income is steadier, delivery is clearer, and delegation stops

been a guessing game because the work now takes a shape.

Retainers force clarity around what's included, what isn't,

what are the boundaries, what the definition of done look.

Like what gets delivered consistently.

And when you have that, you can bring in a contractor and your contractor

can sometimes deliver way fucking better and faster than you can.

And that means the client service improves, you get better testimonials

and the quality improves.

And hey, before you know it you're laughing, right?

Your business is profitable.

And here's what I would love to you to reflect on now,

self-checking number three.

If you took a month off, would your revenue keep coming in or

would it pause with you while you're off enjoying your break?

If it pauses with you, there's no shame in that, none whatsoever.

But boy, that's fucking great information and I'd love for you to write this down.

What outcome do I deliver repeatedly and how do I package

it so it's not priced by the hour?

I'm telling you there's a way.

If you haven't figured that out yet, maybe we need a conversation.

But there is definitely a way, and you don't need the perfect answer today,

but you definitely need to start thinking like the CEO of a scalable

model and not like a human time sheet.

Okay, so let's put all of this together.

If you don't choose the next move deliberately, you're going to default

to what you know, delivery, delivery delivery, client delivery, right?

And over time, that has a cost.

Financially, your revenue caps, because your capacity caps.

Mentally and emotionally, you're always on.

Even when you're off leadership wise, your team can't truly step up

because you are still the central hub holding everything together.

Probably a lot of it lives in your brain, but here's the deeper consequence.

Most founders never say out loud, but I've seen this happen.

If you don't fix this, now you build a business that depends on your stamina.

And stamina is not a scale strategy and that's why this matters because

the alternative isn't a dramatic burn it down reinvention of your business

or your life or anything else.

It's literally a sequence.

It's create capacity first, hiring that VA or contractor and look at what

can you automate, eliminate, delegate, and maybe even get your VA to help.

Apply that right?

Then create lanes, so decisions stop coming back to you.

And that means empowering people.

And then look at repackaging, so you stop trading time for money and your

income starts to become a bit steadier.

Now if you need proof, this isn't theoretical.

That client who hired that VA and contractor, that move for them created

12 hours back per week, which turned into five proposals, quoted in one week

instead of a month, plus speaking gigs.

Plus, the founder finally had bandwidth to be visible in the right rooms.

Now you know the way, you don't know what you don't know.

Well, here's the bit that I see founders don't know that they don't know,

is that when they are at that scale crossroads, this is where they get caught.

They struggle to scale because implementing growth strategies whilst

being full-time in delivery is brutal.

There's just no capacity and it makes you feel stretched and overwhelmed.

And that's where having some support can help you change that speed.

So if you're sitting there thinking, yeah, this is exactly my stage,

then stop trying to solve it alone.

Book a call with me.

We'll identify your next best move in 30 minutes or less, and

I'll tell you what to do first.

So you stop wasting weeks trying to pull the wrong lever.

Click the link in the show notes to book your call today

and if you want to know why the tiny decisions keep pulling you off track,

just listen to three ways to reduce founder decision Fatigue today.

The link is in the show notes as well.

Okay.

I always give an action step as we wrap up each episode.

So here goes this one, pause and pick your next best move.

Is it creating capacity?

Is it deciding on lanes or is it repackaging?

Pick the one that if you did it in the next 30 days, would make

everything else easier for you.

Write it down.

Put a date beside it.

Stick it on your laptop, your computer, whatever.

Make it real.

Make it visible and tell people as well so you really commit to it.

Okay.

Full recap.

If you're doing all the delivery, your next move is capacity, not more content.

If everything routes back to you, your next move is lanes, not more effort.

And if you're selling hours is your only option, your next move

is packaging, not more time.

So share this with one founder who's doing well.

Keep saying, I don't know what to do to get to the next level, or

I don't have time, or whatever.

And if you haven't done so before, please do me a favor.

Please rate reviews as.

Subscribe to the show wherever you're streaming from today, and until next

time, keep mastering your business.