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Scaling Your Business Without Drowning in Day-to-Day Operations with Laurie Stirling [Ep 70]

I recently sat down with Laurie Stirling, who was just named Business Leader of the Year for her work helping creative entrepreneurs scale their businesses. After 20 years in the entrepreneurship game, Laurie has seen it all – from running her own six-figure graphic design business to coaching 50 entrepreneurs at once during COVID (while hiding under her duvet between calls because the pressure was so intense).

What struck me most during our conversation was her practical, no-nonsense approach to scaling. There’s no cookie-cutter formula here – just real strategies that work differently depending on your unique business and personality.

How to Know When You’ve Hit Your Ceiling

According to Laurie, there are clear signs when entrepreneurs are hitting their upper limit:

  • You’re completely maxed out on time
  • Your work-life balance is suffering
  • You’re missing important family events
  • Your health is deteriorating
  • You’re staying up late trying to catch up on work

Sound familiar? If you’re nodding along, you’re not alone. The good news is there’s a way through it that doesn’t involve cloning yourself (which, as Laurie points out, probably wouldn’t work anyway – could you really work with another you?).

Strategic Scaling: It’s Not One-Size-Fits-All

“We only have so much time in the day, but the truth is we can actually buy back time,” Laurie explains. “It’s knowing what time to buy back.”

This is where many entrepreneurs get it wrong. They think hiring someone will automatically give them their time back, but it’s more strategic than that. You need to identify which areas of your business to delegate first.

Laurie breaks down business into five key areas:

  1. Brand awareness (being the face and building audience)
  2. Nurturing your audience (marketing)
  3. Conversions and sales
  4. Delivery
  5. Cashflow management

As a solopreneur, you’re handling all of these. But when you start delegating, you need to choose which is your weakest link and which you’re willing to let go of first.

Finding Support That Actually Works

Here’s where Laurie’s advice gets really interesting. Rather than hiring “another you” (which is expensive and potentially problematic), she suggests a few different approaches:

1. Find a complementary personality Look for someone with 70-80% of your skill set but a complementary personality style. This is often a perfect fit for a COO or OBM role – someone happy to be behind the scenes keeping things moving while you focus on being the talent.

2. Train someone up You don’t need to transfer 20 years of experience to a team member. Extract the most important pieces and train someone who already has complementary skills. This could be a current team member or someone from elsewhere who wants to grow in your industry.

3. Delegate pieces to specialists Instead of finding one “golden unicorn,” delegate specific functions to different people with specialized skills – finance, copywriting, design, etc.

The key is to follow your bottlenecks. If marketing is your biggest constraint, hire help there first. Once that’s running smoothly, you can experiment with other areas.

Creating Stability When Your Income Is Unpredictable

One of the biggest challenges for creative entrepreneurs is managing the feast-or-famine cash flow cycle. Laurie shared a brilliantly simple approach that can transform how you handle money in your business:

“All the income that I make in January, I don’t spend it until February.”

This one shift gives you clarity about exactly how much you have to spend each month, rather than guessing and potentially overspending. It might take six months to build up that one-month buffer, but it’s worth it for the peace of mind.

Other financial stability tips from Laurie:

  • Use percentage-based income allocation (like the Profit First method)
  • Build a separate emergency buffer for unexpected expenses
  • Take a consistent wage even in abundant months
  • Plan cash flow around your known launch/campaign schedule
  • Always have a backup plan if launches underperform

The Power of Decision-Making Frameworks

Perhaps my favorite insight from our conversation was about decision-making. When you delegate to team members, you’re not just delegating tasks – you’re delegating decisions.

“You can give them almost like bumpers in a bowling alley,” Laurie explains. “Don’t go too far. You can go this far with the decision, but don’t go over this line. Come to me when you get there.”

Creating clear frameworks for how decisions should be made empowers your team to move forward without constantly checking in. It’s the difference between spending your entire day reviewing other people’s work versus having time to focus on growing your business.

Getting Started: Your First Step

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the potential ways to scale, start simply:

  1. Identify which of the five business areas is your biggest bottleneck right now
  2. Consider which scaling strategy makes most sense for your situation
  3. Create a framework for how decisions should be made in that area
  4. Start implementing your “one month ahead” budgeting approach

Remember that scaling isn’t just about hiring people or changing your business model. Sometimes it’s about becoming the recognized expert in your field and raising your prices. Sometimes it’s about shifting from one-to-one to one-to-many delivery. And often, it’s a mix of several approaches.

The key is finding what works for your unique business, personality, and goals.

Curious about what’s holding your business back right now? Laurie has created a quiz to help you identify your current bottleneck and get personalized recommendations for scaling. Take the bottleneck quiz here to get started on your scaling journey.

Want more practical strategies for scaling your business? Tune into my full conversation with Laurie Stirling on the Beyond the Systems podcast.

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