The Genius Guide to Going from Doing the Work to Selling the Work

How to stop being the bottleneck in your own business without losing what made it good in the first place. Read time: 6 minutes.

There’s a moment that happens in every business when you realize you’ve built yourself a really expensive job.

You’re great at what you do, people want to work with you, you’re making decent money, but you’re also completely maxed out because you’re the one doing all the actual work. Every client deliverable, every project, every output runs through you, and if you stop working, the whole thing stops making money.

So you think, “Okay, I need to scale, I need to sell more, I need to grow this thing,” but the problem is you don’t have time to sell more. You’re too busy doing the work you already sold and can’t stop doing the work because that’s how you make money. You also can’t delegate the work because you’re the only one who knows how it needs to be done.

Welcome to the trap. You’re stuck between being the person who does the work and needing to be the person who sells the work, but you can’t seem to figure out how to be both or transition from one to the other without everything falling apart.

I’ve been there. Most founders I know have been there, and most of us handled it badly the first time because nobody actually teaches you how to make this shift.

So let’s talk about it.

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1. Here’s the thing you want:

You want to stop being the bottleneck in your own business.

You want to take on more clients, make more money, grow the thing you’ve built without working 60-hour weeks doing everything yourself. The goal is to sell the work, manage the relationships, bring in new business but have other people actually do the work you’ve sold.

Yet, you can’t get what you want right now because you’re stuck in the trap. Right now, your business only works when you’re doing all the work, and you don’t know how to extract yourself without quality suffering, losing clients, or losing revenue.

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2. Here’s how to do it:

I fucked this up the first time I tried it. I was running a consulting business, maxed out on clients, working insane hours, and I thought the solution was just to hire someone to take over delivery so I could focus on sales. Sooooo, I hired someone and handed off a client project. It immediately went sideways.

Not because the person I hired was bad at their job but because I hadn’t actually set them up for success. I’d built zero systems, nothing was documented; therefore, I wasn’t able to train them properly, and I definitely didn’t prepare the client for the transition. I was just like, “Okay, you do it now” and expected it to magically work.

It didn’t. The client was confused, the work wasn’t up to our standards, and I had to step back in and fix everything. I ended up doing more work than if I’d just done it myself in the first place.

Here’s what I learned from that disaster and from watching other people navigate this transition way better than I did:

You can’t transition from doing the work to selling the work overnight.

It’s not a switch you flip. You don’t wake up one day and suddenly become a salesperson; it’s a gradual shift that starts with freeing up time. Most people try to do it too fast, and it blows up in their face.

First, you need to accept that, for a while, you are going to be doing both, and it’s going to suck. But as you start building systems, hiring carefully, and intentionally managing client expectations, you start having more bandwidth to focus on taking calls, responding to inbound leads, following up with prospects, going to events, building relationships, etc…

The selling then happens naturally when you’re not drowning in delivery.

For me, the tipping point was when I realized I had 10 hours a week that weren’t consumed by client work, and I started using that time to reach out to people, take coffee meetings, write content, do the things that bring in new business. That 10 hours turned into 20, then 30, and eventually, I was spending most of my time on business development and very little on delivery.

Document everything you do.

This sounds boring and tedious; you don’t want to do it (nobody does), but if you don’t, no one else can replicate it. Every process, every template, every decision framework, every client interaction… write it down or record it.

I started doing this by just recording myself while I worked, like screen recording client calls or loom videos of me building decks or writing strategies, and then I’d have someone transcribe it and turn it into documentation. It wasn’t perfect, but it was way better than trying to sit down and write a manual from scratch.

Hire for execution first, not strategy.

The mistake I made was hiring someone and expecting them to figure it all out at once. What actually works is hiring someone to execute a very specific, repeatable part of the job while you continue handling strategy and client relationships.

For me, that meant hiring someone to handle slide design and formatting while I still did the content and strategy. Then over time, as they got better and understood my thought process and how I approached various things, I could hand off more. I didn’t start by saying, “Here, take over this entire client.” I started with, “Here, take over this one repeatable task.”

Tell your clients what’s changing and why.

Most people skip this, and it makes for an even rockier transition. Your clients hired you because they trust you, so when you suddenly hand them off to someone else without providing context, they freak out.

What worked for me was framing it as growth, not replacement. I’d tell clients, “We’re bringing on someone to handle [specific task] so I can focus more on [strategic thing that benefits them].” As a result, they didn’t feel like they were losing me or that they were less of a priority; they actually felt like they were getting more of me and higher-quality service.

You have to be okay with things not being done perfectly your way.

This is the hardest part, especially if you’re a perfectionist or if your personal brand is tied to the quality of the product. Someone else is not going to do it exactly how you would’ve done it, and you have to be okay with that as long as it’s good enough.

I had to let go of the details and focus on asking myself, “Does this solve the client’s problem and meet the standard we promised?” Most of the time, the answer was yes, and the client didn’t notice or care about the small differences.

Accept that your identity will shift, and it will be uncomfortable.

Nobody prepares you for this. When you’re the person doing the work, you know you’re valuable because the output is tangible, quantifiable, but when you transition to selling and managing, its less concrete. It might feel like you’re not actually producing anything at all even though you’re doing the most important thing for the business.

I went through a weird period where I felt guilty that I wasn’t “doing the work” anymore, like I was somehow less valuable even though I was bringing in more revenue, and the business was growing. That’s normal. You get over it.

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3. Here’s why it works:

When you’re not the only person who can deliver, you’re no longer the bottleneck, and the business can now grow beyond your personal capacity. The needle starts moving again.

Freeing up time allows you to focus on revenue-generating activities. Selling and closing deals is higher leverage than doing the work yourself. Revenue increases. You make more money.

You can take a vacation without your business collapsing. When the company can run without you, you actually have a business instead of a job.

You get better at the things that actually scale. Doing the work makes you good at execution. Selling the work makes you good at client relationships, positioning, pricing, business development… the things that actually grow a company.

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4. Now go:

This week, try this:

Pick one repeatable task in your delivery process, and document it. Screen record yourself doing it, write down the steps, create a template, whatever… just get it out of your head and onto paper.

Then ask yourself, “Could someone else do this with these instructions? If not, what’s missing?”

That’s your starting point.

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Start here if you only have 10 minutes:

Look at your calendar for the last month. How many hours did you spend doing delivery vs. selling? If it’s 90% delivery and 10% selling, that’s your problem.

P.S. The transition from doing the work to selling the work is awkward, often cumbersome, and uncomfortable, but once you’re on the other side of it, you’ll wonder why you waited so long.

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If this resonates, hit reply and tell me where you’re stuck in this transition. I read every response.

Writing from Austin, still learning to let go,

Alex