I’ve been thinking a lot about the architecture of my own business this week. Not simply what I want to sell next or how much I want the business to earn, but how I want it to work when it becomes bigger than it is today.
One question keeps coming back to me: where do I actually need to be present for the value to exist?
It’s an important question for anyone building a business from years of experience because the most obvious thing to sell is often access to yourself. You know something valuable, someone has a problem you can help solve, and they pay for your time, experience and judgement. Consulting, advisory work, coaching or another form of one-to-one work can be an excellent business, and for many people it’s a very sensible place to start.
I have no problem with selling time. Sometimes your presence is precisely what makes the work valuable. What I would question is whether your presence needs to be involved in everything you sell, particularly if one of the reasons for building the business was to have greater control over your time.
A good business can still create the wrong working life
Imagine you’ve left a senior career with twenty or thirty years of experience and built a consultancy around what you know. You have five clients paying $2,000 a month, giving you a $10,000 monthly business with relatively low overheads and no large organisation to manage.
That can be a very good business.
But the revenue number only tells you part of the story. Each of those clients may require meetings, preparation, follow-up, emails, deliverables and access to you between scheduled conversations. Alongside the client work, you still need to find future clients, market the business, handle administration and make all the decisions that come with running it.
If you want to grow from $10,000 to $15,000 a month, the obvious answer is to add more clients. That works, but it also means adding more meetings, more preparation, more communication and more claims on your time. At some point, the relationship between revenue and your personal capacity becomes difficult to ignore.
There is nothing wrong with that model if it’s the business you intended to build. You may love working closely with a small number of clients and have no desire to build anything larger. If the economics are good and the work gives you the life you want, I wouldn’t change it simply because someone on the internet told you that everything needs to scale.
The problem is when you wanted greater freedom over your time but built a business where growth steadily takes that freedom away.
Leaving employment gives you more control over your calendar. The business model you choose has a great deal to say about whether you get to keep it.
Your experience is not one indivisible product
One of the things I’ve been looking at in my own business is the assumption that everything I know needs to be delivered in the same way.
It doesn’t.
There are parts of my work where my direct involvement matters enormously. Someone isn’t paying me because they need another piece of information they could probably find themselves. They’re paying for what happens when I listen to their particular situation, ask questions, challenge assumptions, recognise patterns and apply my judgement to the decisions in front of them.
In that kind of work, removing me in the name of scalability would make the offer worse. My presence isn’t an inefficiency in the model. It’s part of the value.
But I also have knowledge that doesn’t become more valuable because I explain it privately to one person at a time. Some of what I’ve learned over the years can be structured into a process. Some can be taught to several people at once. Some can become a framework or tool that someone works through independently. Other parts may work best in a group, where people benefit not only from what I teach but from seeing how others apply it.
I’ve found it useful to separate those things rather than looking at thirty years of experience as one large body of knowledge that can only be accessed by booking time with me.
The point isn’t to remove yourself from your business.
It’s to be deliberate about where you belong in it.
That distinction matters because leverage is sometimes talked about as though the ultimate goal is to create a business that barely needs you. I don’t want that business. There are parts of my work I genuinely love doing, and there are places where I know my judgement makes the work better.
What I don’t want is to be required everywhere simply because I never stopped to decide where I was actually needed.
Let the problem determine the offer
This is also why I don’t think the answer is to look at your business and decide you need a course, a membership or a group programme because those formats supposedly scale better.
The format comes later.
Start with the problem you’re solving and what someone genuinely needs in order to solve it. If they need knowledge and a clear process, they may be perfectly capable of moving forward without direct access to you. If they understand the principles but struggle to apply them to their own situation, some access to your judgement may make an enormous difference. If the problem is highly individual and depends on context, difficult choices and interpretation, a high-touch offer may be exactly what they need.
Only once you understand that would I decide how the work should be delivered and what role you need to play in it.
I’ve been applying that thinking to a gap in my own business recently. The temptation when you can see a gap between two existing offers is to invent something to fill it. Decide on a price, choose a format and create another product.
I’m resisting that.
The more useful question is what problem remains for the person at that point. What do they need next? Can I solve it by giving them better information or a stronger structure? Do they need teaching? Do they need my judgement? Would they benefit from working alongside other people at the same stage?
Until I understand that, I don’t know what the offer should be.
That may sound slower than simply creating another product, but I’d rather have a deliberate gap in the business than fill it with something that has no clear reason to exist.
Build the model deliberately
If you’re building a second-act business from substantial experience, I think it’s worth looking beyond the question of what people will pay you for. There is another question sitting underneath it: what kind of business will produce the working life you actually want?
If twice as many people wanted to buy from you next month, what would happen? Would your working hours need to double? Would every new customer require another meeting in your calendar? Would you immediately need to hire someone else to create capacity? Or have you built parts of the business that can serve more people without requiring proportionately more of you?
None of those answers automatically tells you that the business is right or wrong. A small, premium advisory practice can be an excellent second act. So can a business built around intellectual property and teaching. So can a combination of self-directed products, group work and selective high-touch access to you.
What matters is whether you chose the model because it supports what you want, or whether you simply started selling the most obvious version of your expertise and kept adding more of the same.
For many of us, building something of our own is about more than replacing a salary. We also want greater choice over the work we do, the people we work with, the problems we spend our time solving and how much space work occupies in the rest of our lives.
Your business architecture has to support that ambition too.
Your experience gives you more options than selling access to yourself. Some of it may become intellectual property. Some may be taught. Some may be delivered to several people at once. And some of it may be valuable precisely because you are sitting in the room.
The strategic work is knowing the difference, and then building accordingly.
Because your second act shouldn’t accidentally recreate the working life you wanted to leave behind.
Talk soon,
Pia
“Design backward from the life you want rather than forward from the thing you already know how to sell.”
That’s what this opened up for me. After more than 20 years of selling expertise primarily one person at a time, I’m realizing how easy it is to mistake the delivery model for the value itself.
Really good piece, Pia.