DIY Is Smart Until It Becomes Your Bottleneck

DIY can be incredibly smart in business.

In fact, most entrepreneurs have to DIY in the beginning.

You learn your audience. You figure things out. You stretch your budget. You wear a lot of hats because that's what it takes to get your business off the ground.

But there comes a point where DIY quietly shifts from being resourceful to becoming expensive.

Expensive in time.

Expensive in growth.

Expensive in stress and overwhelm.

And sometimes the hardest part is realizing when you've crossed that line.

In this episode, we're talking about when DIY makes sense, when it starts holding your business back, and how to decide what's worth learning yourself versus what's worth getting help with. Because while learning new skills can be valuable, there comes a point when doing everything yourself may be costing your business more than it's saving.

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Transcript

When DIY Stops Being Smart

Carrie Saunders 0:00

DIY can be incredibly smart in business, especially when starting out. You learn your audience, you figure things out, you stretch your budget. But there comes a point when DIY quietly shifts from being resourceful to becoming expensive. Expensive in time, expensive in growth, expensive in stress and overwhelm. And sometimes the hardest part is realizing when you've crossed that line. So today we're talking about when DIY makes sense, when it starts holding your business back, and how to decide what's worth learning yourself versus what's worth getting help with. Let's dive in. Struggling to turn website traffic into real sales, you're not alone and you don't have to figure it out all yourself. Welcome to Smarter Online Business, the podcast for course creators, coaches, and e-commerce entrepreneurs who want their websites to convert visitors into buyers without the tech overwhelm. I'm your host, Carrie Saunders, a website strategist and conversion expert with over 20 years of experience. Each episode delivers simple, proven strategies to help you generate more revenue and make your website your smartest sales tool. Welcome back to the show. Today we're talking about when DIY stops being resourceful and starts being the hindrance to your business. With over 20 years helping other businesses grow their e-commerce stores, uh WordPress websites, you know, course creators and coaches services. I've seen so many times when people still continue to try to DIY it themselves when that's really actually costing them a lot more money than they think. It's kind of similar to the analogy of people letting you know that you need to hire a VA or some sort of assistant because you're doing the too low or cheap of tasks, I guess would be one way to say it. You're doing the tasks that aren't helping build your business up. They're just, you know, administrative tasks that need to happen and are very important in your business, but there comes a time when you aren't the one that should be doing this. It's similar to DIYing your website and DIYing your technology. Now there are times when DIY is smart, when you have budget realities that you just need to DIY yourself. There's some caveats to that we will talk about though. Um, it is great whenever you're learning your business and trying to figure things out. It's great when you're still trying to understand your audience and when you want to validate ideas before investing heavily into something. So some good examples of DIY is writing your own content so it sounds like you, learning your customer, basic website updates, simple email marketing, recording podcasts, videos, and testing offers. So DIY becomes powerful when it helps you understand your business better. So you just need to know that. But we also need to know when that's that time to switch and stop DIYing everything. And one way we can think about that is you know, DIY itself isn't necessarily a problem, but the problem is when it quietly becomes the bottleneck, when you doing things yourself is creating a bottleneck in your business. So then let's

The Warning Signs You Crossed Line

Carrie Saunders 3:11

talk about that. How do we know when we've crossed that line? How do we know when DIY stops becoming smart? And we've hinted to it a little bit. And some of the warning signs are everything takes way longer than it should. When you tell yourself, I'll just figure this out myself, and suddenly eight hours disappear. I know many of you have talked to me about this, telling me about how many hours you put into learning a system or trying to do a system when, you know, if you'd had somebody else do it who knew the system, they probably could get it done in about an eighth of the time, maybe a quarter of the time. So when everything takes way longer than it should, that's a warning sign. Another warning sign is you're stuck in constant overwhelm. I know this is something that is easy to happen. It happens to me sometimes, but you can be stuck in constant overwhelm. You may be listening to too many tutorials on how to do things. You might have too many tabs open. Yes, my husband's gonna laugh if he listens to this episode. I you don't even want to know. I have hundreds of tabs open, but that's not just from that's not from just DIYing it. That's from my brain, just that's how it works and how I operate at the moment. I am working on this. Also, decision fatigue. I see this a lot with our clients, um, especially those who I see seemingly be in tech overwhelm, that can really make their decisions really hard. They just get such decision fatigue because they're trying to figure out all these things that they don't know that well. Another sign is your business stops moving forward. Your launches get delayed, uh, content gets delayed, offers get delayed, your e-commerce products get delayed putting up on your website or adjusting them to make sure that they are, you know, up to standards, current standards. So your business stopping moving forward is another sign that you might be too far into the DIY weeds and you might need to start hiring some help. Another one is you avoid tasks because they feel too heavy. This one is huge. It's something we see a lot. I see a lot of other business owners procrastinating because it just feels too heavy. You avoid these tasks because it feels just way too heavy. And sometimes DIY turns into procrastination disguised as productivity, too. This one's super sneaky. You think you're getting stuff done, you're learning this new system, um, but you're really kind of procrastinating on the things that you can do best to move your business forward. And then the last one, you're afraid to spend money even when staying stuck costs more. This one I surprisingly see in some really successful people as well. So don't feel like, you know, this is limited to any specific, you know, level or stage of business that you're in. I see this throughout even the most successful people. You're afraid to spend money even when staying stuck costs more. Strong emotions can resonate here. You can really, some people are just really afraid to spend that money. And sometimes they don't realize, you know, paying a developer so much an hour to get this work done actually frees up me to service my clients for maybe you charge twice that or three times that, or maybe you have a group service so you can get in a good number of people into your uh group coaching or whatever you might be doing. Um, if you're an e-commerce owner, you may be, you know, changing things in your admin and getting things worked out and trying to figure out whatever's going on in your e-commerce store when you could hire somebody and it might take them like maybe an hour to fix it and figure out what's going on, whereas it's taking you five and you could have used those five hours to perfect your product description, put up new products, um, do your natural sales and things like that. So we need to be thinking about what is it costing us? What are we not doing because we're DIYing? When you get to these points where you feel like you might need to be beyond the DIYer and have help, what are you not doing that you could be doing if you weren't trying to DIY this? Just to recap this section, saving money and protecting growth are not always the same thing. Sometimes we do need to spend that money to help our business grow overall. It's really a really hard thing to do. I, you know, I get it too. I've been there as well. Even though we can do our own websites, sometimes we need to take the time and money to hire somebody else to do it so we can focus on our customers and focus on our core offers.

The Hidden Costs Of Doing It

Carrie Saunders 7:44

So then let's talk about some of the hidden costs of DIYing it, because it isn't necessarily money, is the biggest cost. Most of the time, the biggest cost is your time, your energy, your momentum. That's very important. Your momentum can get stalled, and your mental bandwidth, which also then ties back to being able to service your clients, whether it's e-commerce or service-based clients. That can really, really hinder you there. So some examples of things you might be doing that are DIYing it that maybe you should consider pulling off your plate is trying to become an SEO expert overnight. I'd love to encourage all my audience listeners to understand the basics of SEO and work towards, you know, having some decent SEO on your website. But once you get big enough, you probably don't want to be doing that yourself. You probably want to hire an agency so that you can work on your things. Um, another thing is I see people spending weeks debugging technology and debugging how to do something when it would save them so much time, mental effort, and money to just have somebody else do that for them. You could be building funnels repeatedly. Sure, you you need to understand how to edit a funnel and edit your content, but do you really need to be developing all your funnels? Could you be better off servicing your clients or getting new clients in and having somebody else create those funnels for you? And then we sometimes see clients come to us and they really hack together their systems, they're duct taped with this piece and that piece, and it's really kind of a technology mess. And it kind of refers back to our technology debt um episode that we just did recently. This can really hinder your business in the long run. And then there's some hidden uh nuances to what can happen too behind the scenes for DIYing things too much. Um, I've seen clients be stuck and spent months being stuck because they were DIYing it. Uh, there's so many clients I've seen that, you know, if they just handed off, for example, a redo of their website or a port of their data from one platform to another to someone like us, you know, we could have had it done in like maybe a month if it were even a big project, versus I'm seeing some clients where they're still working on it six months later and they really haven't gotten hardly anywhere at all. Um, so you can really, really stay stuck. So sometimes the most expensive choice is trying to do everything yourself for too long. Again, I said in the beginning, it is important to do it yourself at first, but we need to be looking at these warning signs I just talked about as to when you may be doing this too long. And I'm um and I'm not saying that you need to like just completely hand everything over at once. You know, we always want to, when we're delegating and passing on things, we want to do it, you know, at a comfortable pace for us. But don't be too slow, don't be too fast. It's so easy to like be too slow at the delegating part. I know it it's easy it's easy for me. It's I see it all the time with our clients

A Simple DIY Decision Filter

Carrie Saunders 10:45

too. So let's do a DIY decision filter. I want to give you a tool to help you decide whether you are ready to, you know, pass on your DIY and what you're doing. So, first off, when you're thinking about a task you need to do, I want you to ask yourself, is this core to my genius or my business model? If it the answer is yes, then you maybe you need to learn it deeply. But if the answer is no, don't spend months mastering it. For example, if you're learning a new system, do you really need to know the ins and outs of the technology behind it and how everything connects together? Probably not. Do you need to be familiar with it so you can edit it? Sure, but you may not need to be the one actually building it. You can have somebody else build it and they teach you how to edit it. That is so much more business cost effective in the long run, um, right there, just so that you can you know maintain it, but you don't need to you know sink your teeth deep into it. It's not your core genius, it's not what you do to help your clients. What about question two? Is this high risk? For example, does it deal with security? Does it deal with moving your data, migrating from one platform to another? Does it involve payment systems or advanced integrations? These are usually not ideal learn as you go projects, and they're usually things that you only need to know once, you know. For example, setting up your payment system, you may only need to know how to do that once. So you it's not a repeatable thing that you need to know in your business. So that can be a flag for it, should be potentially, you know, given to somebody else to do, and then they give you enough knowledge whenever they're done with it. And this kind of alludes to my next question: is this repeatable or is this one time? Those two kind of go together. You know, if you'll use it constantly, learning may be valuable. But again, you're probably just need to learn how to edit it, not how to build it. You know, in all the types of clients we work with, e-commerce through course creators and coaches, most of the times it makes more sense for someone like us to build it, and then we teach them how to edit it and use it. And that's really all they need to know. And they don't need to know all the back end, you know, connections and all the things behind it. It's just more muddled stuff in their brain, trust me. And then I want you to ask yourself, what's the opportunity cost? I alluded to this a little bit earlier, but what's the opportunity cost? What could you be doing instead that could either create more business, service your clients better? What could you be doing instead? And then that leads us into what's the opportunity cost? What could you be doing instead? Could you be serving your clients? Could you be creating content? Could you be fulfilling orders? Could you be selling? Could you be resting? Let's talk about that. We all need to rest. What could you be doing instead? That, you know, if you didn't DIY it, you could be doing that, would be beneficial to your business. Okay, and then this last question might hit a little hard, it might sting a little bit. Am I learning or am I stuck? I'm gonna say that again. Am I learning or am I stuck? You know, sometimes we're just stuck and and we need to get help so that we can get unstuck. And as entrepreneurs, I feel like our instinct is, I've got to figure this out myself. I'm the boss, I'm the entrepreneur, I'm doing the thing, you know. But sometimes we need help, and that's okay. We're all not meant to know everything. That's why my brain is great at technology, but it's not great at creative writing. I really have to work hard to get in a brain mode where I can do really well creative writing. So, where's your zone of genius? And is this outside of it? Are you just stuck? Do you need to learn this thing?

Get Support Without Losing Control

Carrie Saunders 14:39

So now that we talked about how we can determine, you know, whether we're stuck in DIY or not, um, what does actually smart DIY look like? It looks like we're learning something strategic. We are building understanding of our business, we're staying involved, we're making intentional decisions. So you don't necessarily need to know how to build everything. I've been talking about this in this episode, but understanding enough to make smart decisions is incredibly valuable. So I don't recommend you completely take your hands off the wheels, but you know, know enough about what's going on to keep a pulse on it, but don't feel like you have to do everything. And how we like to treat our clients is, you know, the goal isn't dependence on us, it's support. We are here to support our clients. We are here to help them when they're stuck, we're here to help them when they feel overwhelmed or when it's not really worth them learning. We don't ever want a client to feel dependent upon us. So when you're working to find that perfect uh partner to help you out, make sure that's their philosophy as well. We've seen clients get so stuck behind some sort of developer or helper because they held the reins, that developer held the reins too tight, and there was no um, you know, passing of knowledge information. That's something we've always done in over 20 years of our business, is we will let our clients know as little or as much as they want to about their systems. It's just smart business. And I would want somebody to do that for us, which is why I do that for clients. You know, whatever they need or want to learn, we will teach them. So we want to have this partnership be support, not dependence on them. And so our goal is to never, not ever DIY. Our goal is to knowing when DIY is helping our business and when it's quietly hurting it. So

Gut Check Questions And Next Steps

Carrie Saunders 16:33

if you love tips like this on our podcast today, be sure to go over to Smarteronline Business.com and sign up for our newsletter. You'll see a form right on the home page. Just scroll down just a little bit there. And then I want to do a quick gut check before we wrap up. I want you to ask yourself, is this task moving my business forward or just consuming my time? Am I learning something valuable or am I just spinning my wheels? If I solve this tomorrow, what momentum would it unlock? Okay, so those are some pretty, pretty key three questions. I want to repeat those again for you one more time. Is this task moving my business forward or is just consuming my time? Am I learning something valuable or am I spinning my wheels? If I solve this tomorrow, what momentum would it unlock? That last one many times is key, and that's why I chuckled on that one. Those answers will probably tell you a lot about whether you should be DIYing the item that you're talking thinking about in your head. So to recap, DIY can absolutely help you in business, but at some point staying stuck in everything yourself mode can actually slow down the very growth you're working so hard for. So I want to give yourself some permission to stop carrying every piece alone and get help when it's time. That's all we have for this week's episode of the Smarter Online Business Podcast. I hope that you thoroughly enjoyed this and I hope it helps you get unstuck with your technology and with your business and with moving forward.

Closing Thoughts And Reviews

Carrie Saunders 18:05

And as always, please be sure to rate and review us on your favorite podcast app. That really helps spread the word about our podcast and help other business owners just like you. And we will see you next week.