The Expertise Trap: When Your Signature Skill Becomes Your Biggest Bottleneck with Jeremy Enns

Building expertise that only you can deliver is the dream. It's what every consultant wants a skill so unique and valuable that clients seek you out specifically. But here's the catch. When your entire business depends on your personal expertise, you've also built yourself the world's most sophisticated track. Welcome to Calm is the New KPI, where we solve for calm one KPI, one bottleneck, one business at a time.

Imagine this. You're known as the expert in your field. Your work gets rave reviews. Clients tell everyone about the value you provide. But every week, you're staring down the same crunch, that same energy drain, the same bottleneck that keeps you from growing your business in any other direction.

That's exactly where Jeremy Enns found himself. Jeremy helps business owners turn their podcasts into actual marketing and revenue engines through deep dive audits that reveal not just what's wrong with the show, but why it's happening and how to fix it. His audits are comprehensive, insightful, and absolutely transformative for his clients. They're also sort of eating him alive. Jeremy delivered 53 audits last year and nearly burned out in the process.

Each audit takes about ten hours of deep listening, analysis, and synthesis, work that generally does require his unique pattern recognition skills and deep expertise. He's tried raising his prices. He's cut his capacity in half. But he's still trapped in this cycle where Friday afternoons mean scrambling to deliver promised audits while other parts of his business sit on the back burner. In this live diagnosis, we're pulling apart Jeremy's workflow and business model to figure out how to preserve what makes his work valuable while also designing for more calm.

We're looking at the business design lever of the Calmer framework here, specifically how to structure services that scale your expertise without scaling your exhaustion. All right, Jeremy. So your bottleneck is related to your audit process that is part of your overall client services. But can you describe for us what that audit process looks like and what the current problem is with it?

Yeah. So the kind of bigger picture of my business is I work with primarily business owners, some content creators on their overall marketing strategy, but usually we start off with the podcast side of things. The way that I do the audits, they're really in-depth. They're really thorough, but I always kind of came in after having been through coaching experiences as a a customer and just feeling like the coach or consultant didn't quite get the full picture of my business. And so I was like, okay.

It's hard for me to say do these tactics to grow your show if I don't know that the show is inherently growable, which was something that happened when I did courses and cohort based courses where it's like, here's all the tactics. Here's all the things you need to know. And then people would be like, why isn't this working? And then I started, you know, doing some more digging, actually listening to episodes and realizing, oh, there are some things that will always make this show hard or impossible to grow until you fix these internal things. So that's the kind of preface for the way that I do these audits now.

And like I mentioned, I really work with people on, like, sales, broader marketing, email marketing, but we always start with the podcast. And I feel like the podcast is often indicative of issues elsewhere in the business. But also people, it's kind of at arm's length, so people feel like they can tinker with it without tinkering with like the core of their overall business positioning or anything like that. The way that it typically works is somebody signs up to work with me, and I add their show to my queue. As of right now, I'm usually booked out, like, four to six weeks in advance.

And so there's a bunch of stuff that they can kind of work on in the interim until I get to their audit, and then they're they come up in my queue. I listen through usually, like, three to five or six episodes of a podcast. That can be three to seven, eight, nine, ten hours sometimes. I'm going until I feel like I understand the show, and I feel like I understand what the problems are, and I stop taking notes. I'm very envious of people who do landing page audits because you can do that pretty quickly.

And in, like, ten minutes, you can scroll through and be like, okay. I understand the positioning problem, the headline, the whatever. Whereas with podcasting, like, in a long form medium, to understand that you just need to spend so much time with the thing. And so phase one is kind of me listening, taking notes. The addition to phase one is then going looking at, like, the show packaging.

So cover art title, description, episode titles. That I usually do separately after I've kind of listened through everything. And then I kind of organize my notes and I hit record on Loom type video and basically, like, talk through my notes, which usually they started out around an hour. They now typically land between, like, one and a half and two and a half hours long, the recordings. And so they're kind of, like, very, very exhaustive, and they speak to a lot of low hanging fruit and then usually, like, the bigger picture, deeper problems with the show that also often open up all kinds of questions about the business and the how the show ties into the and probably your, larger marketing strategy ties into your product offerings and all these other things.

And so the feedback is phenomenal, and a lot of people find it both a blend of overwhelming and also, like, very clarifying as to why things weren't working. But there's certainly a lot of time that goes into it on my part. Usually, I can get to one a week as I feel like where my mental bandwidth is, but the reason it becomes a bit of a bottleneck is even doing one a week doesn't leave me a ton of mental space to focus on other parts of my business.

So when you are doing the audit, talk to me about how that works. If you're doing one each week, what does the workload break down as?

Yeah. So if all I was doing was audits and I wasn't trying to to work on my business at all in any other way, it would be perfectly fine. Of course, that's not really how business works. And so usually, like, the actual listening process is fairly enjoyable. I listen when I'm going for walks.

I'll often, like, on a Monday, listen while I'm, like, gone my way to go write in the morning, and then I'll go take, a three hour walk afterwards and just, like, listen to a bunch of episodes. And then I'm like, okay. I've got a good sense of this. And then sometime later in the week, Thursdays often, I'm, like, sitting down the computer, then going through all the cover art and the packaging. That's where it begins to feel a little tedious for me, and it needs to be done because that's a huge part of what gets somebody into a show.

But it's actually it's the stuff like sitting down at the computer and analyzing it. That is just a little bit less fun, a little bit more work feeling. And also then I'm starting to feel like up against the clock because, like, I wanna get this done by Friday, but I also know how long it takes to, like, get my notes in order and then also two to three hours to record the thing, which usually is the last thing on a Friday afternoon happens. Like, I'll hit record at, like, 4PM and be done and and shipped off by, like, 7PM my time in Spain. And so that's the kind of flow of how it it typically looks in a week.

Do you have a goal for number of clients you want to get through? Is there an ideal cadence?

Yeah. So there's there's a a few interesting parts to this. So we're recording this mid twenty twenty five. August 2023, I rolled out a beta version. I got 10 people to go through this, and it was $2,500 for the year.

It included the audit. The audits were smaller back then. They had not yet expanded into what they are now, but they were still very in-depth. And then there was quarterly one on one calls plus access to my community stuff, whatever. I launched the product with the goal of it being a $10,000 a year program.

I'm gonna ramp up to that. So I did that. And then at the end of the year, I did a price increase campaign saying, basically, the price is going up to $7,500 for the year instead 2,500. I didn't know how much demand there would be, but I got, like, 40 people signed up, which was a great infusion of cash, and it created a huge backlog, which took months to work through. And so that was good in many ways because I didn't feel any pressure then at the new price to sell.

And so that was nice. But then it was just that's where I felt, like, the burnout of, I told everybody, like, okay. You get added to my queue in the order you sign up. But, you know, people still they're just friendly checking in and I still have to tell them, yeah, you're like four months away from getting your audit. And I got married in the 2024 and so I was taking time off for that.

And so there was a time when I was trying to through two a week just to try to, like, get through as many of these as possible before I can, like, go off for my wedding and honeymoon and not have to think about these. Essentially, at the 2024, I'd done 53 audits. So just over an average of one a week, but there was vacations in there. There was probably a total of six weeks that I didn't work, seven weeks maybe. So there was a lot of weeks where I was actually doing two a week, which was where burnout was, like, really a present thing or the risk of burnout.

And then after that coming into 2025, I was like, okay, that, I definitely don't want that. The way it kind of structured the $7,500 a year is there's an initial upfront fee of $3,000 and then a continuation fee. That was for the first three months, the audit and the follow on, and then a continuation fee. If you're happy we keep going at $650 a month. Coming into 2025 I was thinking, okay I want to do fewer audits so how does that look in terms of the overall fee and the initial upfront fee?

And so I raised the price to $4,500 for the first three months, same monthly continuation price, and said, okay, I'd like to do half of this. So I'd like to do an audit every other week on average. So 26 for the year. Right now, 2025, it's actually exactly on that pace. I've done something like 13 or 14 so far in the June and have a couple more booked for July.

And so things are, like, good on that front. The way things end up going is that there's still stuff comes up, so it ends up being oftentimes one a week for a two month stretch because there's vacations or conferences or other things. And so I'm still in my mind kind of like, really, it would be nice to do one a month and just charge even much more for them. And then that becomes a matter of, you know, all these other sales and marketing and communicating the value of it. The other than counter argument to that is talking with my sales coach.

She does a little bit on the kind of op side, I suppose. And she was saying, you know, like, yeah, if my boss I'm an employee and he's saying, you know, I think, you know, we could be bringing in all this extra revenue, but I just wanna do less. And, like, I we have the capacity to do one of these a week, but we're only doing a month and limiting it to that. I'm a little bit as an employee, a little bit like, is this kind of make my situation tenuous or the business? And so I'm kind of, like, juggling both of these.

I can see that argument, and that's a kind of, like, business maximalist view potentially. And there's more of a lifestyle business on the other side where I'm like, yeah. If I can just do one a month, that's great. And so I'm kind of stuck in between these two things of, like, they take a lot of time, they get great results, but also the financial side of things.

Okay. Talk Talk to me about current team. Like, who you have on your team as a resource? What are their roles? What's their areas of expertise?

Yeah. So I have a assistant who does a whole bunch of kind of different things for me. She's at around ten hours a week right now, and she does a lot of back end podcast uploading. And after coaching calls, kind of getting those uploaded in the right places, that type of stuff. Research for all kinds of various projects, like very kind of jack of all trades or Jill of all trades can do a bunch of stuff.

I would say, like, she's a very creative person. I think a little bit less so maybe on the, like, marketing, copywriting, things like that. All the creative work is mainly me. She can prep things and is getting a lot better. I'm training her on a lot more, like, automation and stuff like that.

She's not an expert in that, but is interested and curious and all of it. And then I've got a video editor who's mainly for podcast stuff and other various video things, but that's a little bit more sporadic because I do kinda seasonal shows. So he'll be very engaged with things when I'm doing a season of a show and then not really doing much when I'm out of season. So very small team right now.

Which direction feels more natural to you in the I wanna stay small and have a really nice life versus feeling the impetus to grow for the sake of some other goal, whether that's more money or more team or whatever?

Yeah. Definitely stay small. You know, you hear of the type of business that's like a maybe a like one full time employee and the founder can be a, you know, mid 6 figure, some even 7 figure, like, low 7 figure business. And then you're getting into, generally, I think more contractors, maybe a couple employees. But I'm like, yeah, I would like a highly profitable small team business that requires me to work, like, twenty hours a week or something like that, and anything above and beyond that is my choice, I think I'd become less attached to the idea of growth.

Have you ever tried to train someone on your process other than client? Like, I know you've done a lot of, like, workshops and training. You have a lot of IP out there about how you think and what you do. But have you ever tried to train somebody to be you?

This gets to the real crux of this issue because I've talked to many people about this. People say a few things very commonly. The first thing people say is like, well, can you split up the audit so you only do a part of it? And then other people will say, can you train somebody to do it? I think training is probably more likely an option.

I have not tried that, and I'll talk through both routes as I've thought through them. So the first option of breaking up the audits, I think part of the magic of the audits is that there is a synthesis of everything. It's not like if I audit the show and somebody else does the cover art and packaging and titles, then they can't really speak to like, oh, well, this isn't really what this episode is about. Like, the title is not a good hook for what the show is. It's all just connected.

And so that's where I have often thought, I don't think that that is actually really doable. And so that's why I've kind of discounted or leaned away from that in the past. In terms of training someone, this is where I'm, like, very aware that there's at least the potential for hubris, if not certainly outright. But I had not really seen many people in the podcast world who can do what I do. I think there's a very unique skill in being able to see what the person is trying to do and see who the person is behind it.

Because, like, podcasting is a so there's such a part of the human that needs to come through. And so it's not just technical. It's not just, like, follow steps. It's like, I see what you, Susan, are trying to do at the show, and I can see your personality, and I can see how you're thinking about this. And then I can see how this could be expressed in a show and how it's currently being expressed in a show.

There are a few people who could do this really well, and mostly they run, like, big agencies or work with, like, big brands and get paid lots more than I do to develop show ideas. And so I think it's trainable to some extent, but I think it takes a very unique set of skills on the, like, human empathy, pattern recognition, technical podcast, deep understanding of how that works and psychology, I'd ended up in this somehow place of being able to synthesize all these things that are just embodied in me. And then I'm like, where would I even start with finding that person who can do all these things well, who could also, like, I could subcontract to or could be an affordable option as well. That feels like the sticking point.

So I would agree with both of those things. I think my brain tends to work similarly to how your brain works, which is we kind of intake a lot of information and see connections where other people don't see connections. And that is a skill set that I don't know that you actually can train into something. Like, your brain kind of either sees connections where other people see none, or it doesn't. And so I think splitting up the analysis, I agree, really weakens the ability to get a really solid understanding of what the business is, what the podcast is supposed to be, what it's supposed to do.

So I would think if you were going to train somebody on how to do this, probably your best scenario would be to get somebody very early in their career who thinks in systems. Right? And doesn't have any bad habits. And you train them over, you know, a long period of time, five years or whatever, where they are, you know, digging into all of your IP and learning it, like, in-depth and shadowing you and listening to every audit you do and what you're looking for. And we're listening to all the podcast roasts to understand how you think about cover art and show packaging and all of those things.

I agree with you. I do think it could be done. It's definitely not gonna be a fast process.

Yeah. So my initial thoughts are that it feels like a very long runway of investment in this person to the point where they are even capable of starting to generate income for business. Now they could be doing other things that might be helpful within the business, and this is one of their background training things that's possible. It still feels like kind of a cost center that had just whatever that

Oh, for sure.

That's the first thought, which, know, not that that's the wrong decision. Like, the longer term you look, the more appealing that decision is. The second thing is then, okay, investing in that person and helping them develop a very high value skill set, what's then keeping them here after three years? They get these skills and, you know, maybe by that point, I'm personally charging 10 x what I am now and can still feed them work at my current rate that they might not have the client pipeline, or maybe they don't wanna be an entrepreneur. Those are the two things that come up to mind first for me.

Yeah. So I would think about it as a, you're either looking for somebody who really has absolutely no interest in running their own business. They just love podcasts. They wanna be in it all day, and this could be the dream job for somebody. You convince them to continue to work with you via really good compensation, and they get to do work that's really fun.

And maybe there's some sort of potential equity play. You know, you could think about it almost like an exit strategy of this is the person that you are training to eventually exit your business to is one approach, but it also could be just somebody that that's what they love. And you're like, hey. You can live anywhere in the world, and you can work flexible hours, and I'm gonna pay you a living wage. That buys a lot of loyalty.

And in the case that we're talking about, I think it's a pretty intellectually stimulating job. Like, it's both creative and you're always listening to new shows. So if you're looking you know, this is one where I would lean heavily into recruiting, like, neurodivergent folks who have high pattern recognition skills, lots of focus on special interests Yeah. And specifically filter for that kind of personality. Not necessarily the technical skills because that can be trained, but somebody who is genuinely, intellectually interested in this kind of work.

Yeah.

I think in the immediate term, I think you have come to the same conclusion I come to, which is you are kind of the only person that right now can do this, and also that's a huge value. And as much as I am not a huge proponent of like, just raise your prices. Mhmm. In this case, I think that's the direction. Because as somebody who's been through the process and has been podcasting for five years and gone through many similar kinds of solutions for how do I fix my podcast.

Right? Like, I know I know the content's good. I know the topic is solid. I know the packaging is pretty weak. I don't think that's true now.

But Yeah. That's based off of our work together.

Yeah.

But I've sort of known in my gut what the problem was, but I didn't know what to do about it. And I think that is the value of the audit and the follow on engagement is, cool. I can tell you that the problem with my show has been the packaging. That doesn't tell me what to do about it. It doesn't Mhmm.

And you having your specific skill set looking at my show is the value. And I don't think without spending a lot of time training somebody else, there's a way to get around that. Yeah. And so then I think the way you solve the capacity issue is do less, charge more, because it is inherently very valuable, and you are a limited resource.

Yeah. This is the most appealing path forward to me and also the most elegant in many ways. Then, of course, it creates a sales and marketing problem, which is getting a little outside of your, like, operational zone of genius. But I would be curious seeing as you run your own business and do all this stuff and like to nerd out about it. You have lots of

I'm like, I had out with a lot of marketers these days.

So my question to you is as somebody who's been through it and who also understands all of what we're talking about here, what am I missing in terms of communicating about the value of what I do?

I think you're underselling because for people like you, sometimes it's hard to realize the exact unique skill set that you have. No one else in the world probably right now can do what you do offering. And every time I'm in a room that you're not in, and somebody is talking about podcasting, your name always comes up. So I think you've done the work to build the reputation as the expert. So I I don't think there's anything in terms of packaging or positioning or talking about the offer that doesn't communicate the value.

Because I think for the people that you wanna work with, we already know who you are. We know the value. I don't think there is a problem there. Have you pitched it to people? And they're like, I don't get the value?

No. I think it's there is a gap in expectation from so what's interesting is people will sign up for it, and then when they get the audit, they'll be like, oh, I didn't realize this is what I was getting, which is a bit interesting where it's like my messaging is strong enough to sell and to get the sales, but there is a gap when people get the audit and they're like, oh, like I thought I was gonna get value. I got like 10 x what I thought I was gonna get. And so there I'm

like will agree with that. Yes. Will agree with that.

That's more where I'm like, how do I communicate that? I think part of what I'm wondering is like, it it's hard to say, like, I'm the only one who can do this because that's my statement. There's some things that you can't know until you experience it. And so that's where I'm like, what do I need to do to make this more visible? I think, like, one thing is just asking past clients, would you be okay if I shared your full audit with my newsletter?

Absolutely my first thought is

Yeah.

Because you're right. I I did expect you to be able to solve my problem. When I came in, I knew that you would look at the show, and you'd be like, oh, clearly this is what you're supposed to do. Like, that was my expectation of the value from the audit. What I did not expect was to have that feedback be a super specific and really felt immediately actionable.

Mhmm.

I didn't expect it to then trickle down to my business. Like, we are changing things that are building different fundamental structures in my business. I the mean, part that I love is that that makes it very efficient. Right? There's less work for me.

It actually enables my business to be calmer in the production of my podcast, and how it works in my ecosystem to make things like, that was completely unexpected. I also did not expect the video to be, like, an hour and forty five minutes or whatever. Like, when I was like, oh, cool. The audit. And then I, like, hit play.

And then I looked at the time, and I was like, I'm gonna have to come back to like, I have to actually, like, set some time aside to interpret this. So I do think sharing audits, whether that's in the newsletter or whether it's part of the sales process or even it could be its own channel. You know, it could be a YouTube show. It could be a podcast. Because I do think there is value in seeing how it happens.

And this is something that, like, you and I have talked about for my own work is the showing doe telling. Because sometimes when you are like even though you are known as the expert, you're the podcast guy, like, your name always comes up. It's also difficult to communicate what that is, particularly to people who haven't been around for long enough to know that you're the guy. Like, somebody might tell them you're the guy, but then it takes a while for them to realize, oh, I'm reading the newsletter. I'm checking out the workshops, and I'm seeing how it works.

And, he is the guy.

Yeah. That's good to get your validation of that because that has felt like a likely most probable, like, path forward in terms of, like, raising prices. And the necessary step before that is building demand and communicating value, I I think, creates more demand, less availability, and higher perceived value obviously allows me to charge more. That actually feels like the easiest approach here.

I think it's the easiest. The only thing to think about is it works most of the time in most markets. Also, you might find a ceiling because of your particular customer where they are doing podcasting, but a lot of the times that's podcasting for the purpose of selling their services or their course or something else. They're not actually making money directly from the podcast.

Yeah.

Which means you might run into a ceiling, and then, you know, you may need to pull in one of the other strategies. Yeah. But I think you have a lot of you you likely have a lot of room Yeah. Particularly if you might think about structuring it not opposite the way that you're structuring it right now, but where you have a decent chunk of change upfront for the audit and kind of onboarding. Mhmm.

If you start hitting ceilings, you can shift some of the pricing to the monthly pricing and probably get your ceiling a little bit higher.

Yeah. So let me present one other thing I've thought about. I've already started doing this a little bit, and I wonder if there's more opportunity. I used to also do, like, a basic website audit, so homepage, podcast page, show notes. Then I realized, like, those don't tend to be the priorities for most people.

It's kind of, like, outside of what they signed up for, so they might not even really take my feedback to heart. And I also saw a little bit people would get preoccupied with the website, and I'm like, hey. You probably don't have enough traffic. Especially for shows that have website traffic, a lot of times they're way underutilizing their website. It's like, this could be a way to get more people in the show.

But I essentially punted that to say, we will talk about this if and when it becomes a priority, but we're starting with the podcast. My sense is now that the current version of the audit, which you went through, is everything's tight and tied together, but my other thought has been, are there ways of spacing out even any of those components into a, first, we'll focus on this, and then two months from now, we'll focus on this. Or do you feel like, no, this all felt like it needed to go together?

I actually think that is an interesting approach because one of the results of how comprehensive it was, was I did feel a little bit overwhelmed at like, oh man, I like I I have a solid show, but like there's so much work here. So I think you could potentially split it into I mean, kind of what natively has ended up happening with our work together is there was the show itself.

Yeah.

And then how does that show impact the business Yes. Piece? So the first thing we worked on was like, hey. Yeah. I probably need to rename my show.

If I rename my show, I have to do new cover art. I'm gonna play around with the format. And a lot of that can, I think, be done independently without necessarily figuring out upfront how to integrate that in the business? So I think you could split those pieces off for sure. And it seems like a lot of the time when you are working on a new show, there are, like, fundamental issues with the show because that's kind of your your whole thing is that if your show's not growing, there is something that is an issue because shows that are growable grow.

Yeah.

You have to fix whether that's, you know, the content or the topic or the packaging. And so I think that is one where it would feel less overwhelming. It's one where I was coming into it. I was I had a pretty solid hypothesis of what was wrong. You came to some of the same conclusions, and then there were other ideas that we've been working on.

But I guess we're what, like three, four months into it? Yeah. And now we're starting with, what do I need to build in my business to now connect this very solidly growing show to actual business outcomes? To me, that felt like two phases, really.

Yeah. It's interesting because, like, the audit is the bottleneck in my business, but the there it's part of this larger thing that I I'm also sorting out. Because I really started in the podcast specific. Like, that's what we worked on. But I always like, I have at least as much experience in podcasting with, like, course creation and business and email marketing.

It's just not how I'm positioned. But, like, I can speak to all of those things and, like, client services and whatever, like, as good as most consultants in those things. I always hate the positioning of, like, the all in one marketing solution. So I'm, like, staying away from that. There's probably a way to frame that, but, like, podcasting is the front door, so we kinda start there.

But I've been thinking about, like, how to communicate the flow to people in onboarding even before the audit, speaking to, like, here's the world of things that we can and will work on together. We're gonna start here. And then, like, almost using touch points, like, framing the audit when I start recording, saying, like, okay. We're talking about the show here. If there's issues with the business that come up, we will work on that together.

But right now, we're focusing on this, and then, like, almost wrapping up the audit and saying, like, okay, so here's what I'm seeing with the show. We're gonna do our follow-up call next, and it could be that everything here we talked about is not actually the most important thing to work on, and we'll come back to that next month. Does that feel like that's helpful seeding that?

So I thought it was very helpful, like, hey, here's the realm of things we can talk about. We're gonna do it in the order that makes sense for where you are, where your business is, what your goals are. I think the unique value that is really powerful for me, and I think for a lot of podcasters who start a podcast, almost nobody starts it with any consideration for how it fits into their business. Yes. No.

Or how they're gonna make money for like, that's a universally known problem with podcasters is that like, we love podcasting. Like, that's so much fun. And also consistently forgetting to tell people that we sell anything.

Yes.

Or take that into consideration when we are designing our show. I don't think you need to be an all in one, but I think the unique value is your ability to tie the podcast to the business. Because that's that is a universal problem. We talk about discovery being the problem, but actually the problem is that nobody knows how to make money from their podcast. Yeah.

And because of who you help, you are uniquely positioned to be able to make that connection for people in a way that is filtered. And a lot of the times I say that like, when we as business owners are building services, we try and throw everything in. Right? Like, wanna present all of the value. And you have a lot of stuff that people can pull from the courses and the different areas, but it doesn't feel overwhelming.

It feels like a pick and choose, which I think is the ideal because the one of the benefits then of working with you is you point them to the thing that is important to them, and you are serving as exterior prioritization

Yeah.

Filter. Right? Like, when you point people in a direction, they go full bore in the direction because that's how most entrepreneurs that's just our how our brains work. But there is something very powerful as a consultant to being able to filter. Here are all the possible things that you could focus on.

Based on my expertise, do this next. Because so much of being a business owner has to deal with that overwhelm, that decision fatigue. We're constantly trying to prioritize and figure out what's the next most important thing. That's really the power of working with any coach or consultant, I think. Is having somebody be like, yeah, don't pay attention to that stuff over there.

That doesn't matter right now. Just ignore that. Go do this one thing. I think is very powerful and very valuable and something that you have positioned well. And I think there is the possibility to just break out the work from the audit into a more phased approach.

Yeah. I, I have a, like, personal inclination or, like, moral objective, it feels like, to give people all the answers, which I know is not the most helpful thing many times. But I also feel like with a lot of the stuff that I talk about, people just have not thought like like you said, and they don't know even how to think about like, they need external reference points. But I I do wonder if part of the audit that gets trimmed back is, like, pointing out the problems but not trying to solve all of them. This is kind of, like, where the crux of it is for me.

There's a lot of things in episode structure that could be tightened up for most shows pretty quickly. But, also, there's things about the format and the sequencing of your episodes that probably is dictated way upstream by, like, the show concept, which is the much longer term heavier lift project that doesn't really have a timeline, but is more important. It's like once you get the concept right, that may just dictate what your episode structure should be and how you should do your intros and what types of topics you should have on the show. But it's kinda easy to point to a few low level things that actually might be distractions. And so maybe there's something of saying like, okay, there's some issues here, and here's a couple things you can do to, like, make your intros tighter or to do this.

We're gonna come back. There's we're gonna talk about these other things related to your content strategy, but I'm not gonna give you any suggestions now because those will be dictated by other things we need to focus on first. And so maybe there's a bit like pointing to some potential problems and saying, let's just put these over here. We're gonna work on this big thing first, and then we'll come back and go deep on this stuff later.

Yeah. If you're gonna try and cut stuff out of the audit process, I would not cut the content intake part. Right? Like the part where you are absorbing whatever the show is. Because that's what you need for how you're gonna advise people.

Yep. But I do think you could make the actual, like, delivery

Yeah.

Shorter. It doesn't have to be an hour. It could be, here's the most visible problems, and you know where people are gonna get stuck on that. Like, you've done this a lot of times. You know that, like, if you're saying, hey, you have a concept problem.

You know you really can't do much else until they decide on what is the concept now. And then you're going into, okay, let's take the episode. Let's engineer the episodes. Let's figure out how this ties in. But maybe the piece to shorten it is the here's your top priority right now, and we'll get into the rest of it later.

Because you you still see all of the other problems, but some of the choices they're gonna make after the audit will then impact the next most logical step. And so being able to just shorten your time of, I see all these problems. I know they exist. I know we're gonna deal with them at some point. But prioritizing not everything that you're seeing, but what is the next step could shorten it.

It doesn't necessarily you you kinda have to make notes for how you're gonna hold the rest of the information that you come to for later. Because right now, it's all in the audit. But I think you could certainly get the main points in thirty, forty five minutes. Give them something actionable to work on between then and the next call. So a lot of the times with clients that I work with where we're doing like an intensive model or I even on my own services where I'm delivering something in an intensive model, you really have to think about where do people need pauses?

Where do they need time to marinate, time to think, where I'm gonna hit them with something that then's gonna go, my brain hurts. I don't know what to do with this. I have to step back. Like, thinking more strategically about where to build in pauses and where to build in some breathing room can be really powerful both in terms of like the results people get because then they don't have to deal with the I now all have all of this stuff that now is on my plate that I have to figure out how to implement and I don't have time to implement it. And I have a client call next week and now I don't have time to think about that whole overwhelm that happens when we as service providers are like, here's all the things.

Everybody feels compelled to do something about that. And I think you actually do have an opportunity to think about where should there be a pause. What parts are gonna take them longer to either think about or implement if you really have to change the whole structure of a show? That's gonna cause an existential crisis. Yeah.

And I think you have the opportunity to think about that. What goes into the audit versus what goes into the rest of the work? And I would think about how do you shift that? Because we're talking about the audit, but what this actually is is for the most part, like a year long coaching program with you where the audit is just kind of the kickoff. And so you have the opportunity to really spread that work out and not necessarily front load it.

That could be another tool for reducing at least the actual work that goes into the audit. You know? Yeah. Maybe this is maybe there's a second piece halfway through the year where you're like, cool. Now I did this.

We're not gonna do a coaching call, but I'm gonna record the second piece of this for you. You watch it. You Right. Have time to think about it, and then we'll talk about it.

And the other thing that I I've thought about in the past that this plays into is it's useful in terms of retention. So after that first three month period of, like, are you in for the rest of the year or not? There's kind of a, like, a optional if you're just like, this is not the fit for me. They just have so much that they need to do, and often the audit has maybe even actually shown them that. And so they're kind of like, oh, like, I'm not I can't expect to increase, like, the amount to pay for for this immediately.

On my part, I view that as more of a marketing targeting problem.

Yeah. Because you don't want those people using up your capacity. I also might consider not giving people the offering.

Mhmm. Yeah.

And just sell it as, it's a year long program. Here's how much the cost is. You can do monthly payments if you want. Like, I think that is really important in today's economy and uncertainty. Nobody's nobody's really walking around with, you know, tens of thousands of dollars just sitting in their pocket ready to plop down.

But one of the ways you could kind of filter out those people who aren't quite the right fit and not quite ready to work with you is to not give the off ramp. Right? Because that requires a higher level of commitment. You're gonna get people who can actually afford the whole thing. And I don't love doing it, but sometimes price can serve as an effective filter for the stage and maturity of businesses.

I would think about maybe shifting pricing structure as you're thinking about raising prices and being a more effective filters. About two.

This has been so helpful.

What Jeremy and I worked through wasn't just about audit optimization. It was about recognizing when your unique value is also your biggest constraint. We focused on two key levers from the Calmer framework. First, business design. Jeremy's challenge isn't that his audits aren't valuable.

They actually deliver incredible results. The challenge is structuring that value delivery in a way that doesn't require him to be the bottleneck. And sometimes the reality is that there really is some expertise that simply can't be delegated. Second, we looked at the margin mindset lever and using efficiency not just to cram more in. Jeremy's path to bigger margins means doing less, charging more, and spreading the delivery of his insights across time instead of front loading everything into one overwhelming audit.

The core insight here is that when you have truly unique expertise, the solution isn't always to scale it through other people. Sometimes the calmer path is to embrace that limitation and design your business around it. So fewer clients, higher prices, better boundaries. If you're having a similar struggle here's a few paths for you to consider. You could think about potentially phasing your service delivery.

If you're delivering really comprehensive services that might feel a little overwhelming to you and your clients you could consider taking your most intensive offering and try and identify a natural break point, something where you could pause or maybe slow down delivery. Maybe it's after the diagnosis but before the solutions or after the foundational fixes but before the advanced strategy. That pause can give both you and your client time to breathe and it often leads to better results. You might also consider not front loading all your most valuable insights. So if you look over the course of your service delivery are there pieces that could be moved further out in the process or potentially spread out?

Sometimes the best most valuable service design it's not giving everybody everything up front it's giving them what they need when they're ready for it. Thanks for listening and remember sometimes the calmest thing you can do is stop trying to scale everything and start designing around your actual constraints.