Word of mouth is a set of shackles for a great specialist. You can break the cycle through the right approach to content and building a team.
Why is word of mouth a set of shackles for a great specialist?
Take service industries as an example: beauty, foreign languages, music schools, any profession where you work directly with clients.
Say you’re a solid specialist who keeps developing. You take courses to level up, keep learning, keep improving the quality of your service.
Your current clients are mostly very happy with you, and sometimes recommend you to friends.
New clients who come through word of mouth are loyal people — they don’t haggle, don’t give you a hard time, and trust you.
Working with them is a pleasure.
But…
After a while, you start to feel like 90% of every day is the same thing, over and over. Like “Groundhog Day.”
Your brain gets bored, because the service is repetitive, already running on autopilot.
Sometimes you consider bringing on an assistant and training them.
But your clients react very negatively to that idea, because they already trust you and don’t want anyone else.
Plus, the trainee makes rookie mistakes, and you realize you constantly need to redo their work and keep watching over the process.
And word of mouth itself is unpredictable. Some days you’re swamped, then three days of silence.
So your assistant just sits idle on those quiet days, but you still have to pay them…
So you keep doing the work yourself.
You start taking the occasional vacation, giving yourself more days off, and wondering how to break this vicious cycle…
Maybe you post something on social media once in a while, but not consistently. Either there’s no time, or it doesn’t feel like it’s worth the effort…
Sometimes you just forget about making new content, and sometimes you just don’t have the energy left to post even the video or post you already made.
Maybe you tried running ads a few times, but they didn’t deliver the results you wanted.
You can break this closed loop through the right approach to content and by building a team.
And that content doesn’t have to be filmed and posted by you personally.
If you understand the DNA of good content and set up the conditions for it to get made, you’ll end up with more than just customers and partners — you’ll also attract people who want to join your team.
Setting up systems so your business grows steadily through social media isn’t complicated. It’s a matter of time and technique. You can also build processes so less depends on you personally, and more depends on your team.