The Owner Has an Experience Too

As a customer experience strategist, I work with a lot of solopreneurs and solopreneur-led agencies. So I’m talking about businesses where it’s primarily the owner doing the work, maybe they have a VA and a few contractors they pull in depending on the project, but for the most part that owner is involved in damn near everything.

And one thing I keep noticing is how much time they spend making sure the CLIENT experience is good while barely considering their own experience running the business.

We spend all this time designing what the client sees, what they feel, what they know and what they experience when they work with us. Which, yes, we absolutely should be doing that.

But the owner has an experience too.

What do YOU have to remember? What do you have to approve, explain, chase down, rescue or manually carry just to make that client experience look smooth?

Because the client might be happy as hell and have no idea what you had to do behind the scenes to make sure they stayed that way.

The owner sideFig. 01

The client might be happy as hell and have no idea what you had to do behind the scenes.

Just to make the client experience look smooth, what do YOU have to…

1. Remember?
2. Approve?
3. Explain?
4. Chase down?
5. Rescue?
6. Manually carry?

When you’re the whole business, you don’t always see how much of it is YOU

I think a lot of solopreneurs operate on autopilot, and I don’t even mean that in a bad way. When you’re the only one doing everything, you’re not sitting around separating all the different roles you’re playing every day. You’re just trying to get the work done.

Okay, I need to send this email. I need to follow up with this person. I need to send that reminder. I need to get paid. Let me go ahead and handle that.

And you do.

Then something else needs to be done, so you do that too. After a while, you’re so used to moving through the business this way that you don’t really see how involved you are in every single process. You’ve built systems, because if your business is operating you HAVE systems. But a lot of those systems were built around the fact that you’re the one using them.

So now the business might be able to deliver a really good client experience, but what does it feel like to actually operate it?

Does every little thing need your attention? Are you always the person who knows what’s next? And if you weren’t the person doing it today, would anybody else even know where to start?

That’s the part I want people to look at.

And then you get ready to hire somebody…

I remember talking to somebody who was getting overwhelmed just THINKING about hiring because they were like, “Bro, what would I even have this new hire help me with? I’m so all over the place.”

And I get why that happens.

Because if you’ve never really separated yourself from all the things happening inside the business, how are you supposed to know what to hand somebody else?

You know you’re tired of answering emails, making graphics, editing things and doing all the other little tasks that keep taking up your day, so you think, okay, let me hire a VA.

Cool. But then the VA comes in and has no idea what to do because the way the work gets done only makes sense to YOU.

You know when to follow up, when to make an exception, what a client actually meant in that last email, what needs approval and what can just get handled. You know because you’ve been the one doing it.

That doesn’t automatically mean you need a different VA, either. Sometimes you need to go back and really look at what you’re asking another person to step into.

And that’s hard to do if you’ve never stopped to see where all the work actually lives.

Start with the client journey, then look at what it takes to make it happen

This is why I keep coming back to the client journey.

When you actually break down what happens from the time somebody finds you, to when they inquire, pay, get started, move through the work and finish, you can start looking at each stage differently.

Okay, what actually needs to happen here?

What has to be sent? What information do we need? What decision has to be made? Who’s responsible for making sure the next thing happens? And what happens if something doesn’t go the usual way?

Then underneath each stage, write out the tasks and processes that make that part of the experience possible.

The client journeyFig. 02

Finds you → inquires → pays → gets started → moves through the work → finishes.

Underneath each stage

• What has to be sent?
• What information do we need?
• What decision has to be made?
• Who’s responsible for making sure the next thing happens?
• What happens if something doesn’t go the usual way?

Now you can start to see the JOBS inside your business instead of seeing one giant pile of things you personally have to do.

Some of those positions might be imaginary right now because it’s still just you. That’s fine. Some of the work might eventually go to a VA or a contractor. Some of it might make sense for an AI agent or an automation. And some decisions are still going to belong to you because you’re the owner and that’s where your judgment is needed.

But at least now you can see the difference.

Because I don’t think you can confidently hire, delegate or automate work you haven’t taken the time to understand.

And let’s talk about automation for a second because I know that’s everybody’s favorite answer right now.

An automation still has to be thought through. Somebody has to set it up, make sure it’s doing what it’s supposed to do and know what happens when it doesn’t. If you don’t understand the process underneath it, you can end up automating something that didn’t make sense in the first place.

So I’m not telling you to go hire a whole team tomorrow or buy another tool. I’m saying understand how your business actually works so you can make those decisions from a place of knowing what you need.

I had to look at my own owner experience too

I’m not saying any of this like I’ve been exempt from it.

I own a solo-led agency, and I had to go through my own business and audit the way I was operating. I had to get clear about my skills, where I wanted to spend my time and how I actually wanted to show up every day.

Because what does it even look like for ME to stay in my genius if I’m busy trying to keep up with every tiny task in the business?

My brain naturally runs at a thousand miles an hour, and I don’t be remembering shit. So creating an operation that depends on me personally keeping up with every reminder and every follow-up is not designing a good experience for ME. That’s giving myself another job I already know I don’t want.

And that’s the thing. We can spend so much time talking about how to make life easier for the client that we forget to ask what would actually make operating the business easier for the person who owns it.

I’ve heard too many stories from owners whose businesses look like they’re flourishing on the outside. They’re getting clients, leads, public praise, all of that. But then you talk to them privately and they’re telling you how overwhelmed they are, how stressed they feel and how much they’re going through trying to keep everything together.

And baby, some of them sound like their iron low and their vitamins A, B, C and D low too. That’s how run down they’re feeling.

Burnout is real. I don’t want us treating it like the price you’re supposed to pay because your business is doing well.

You deserve operational peace too

When I think about the owner experience, and especially when I think about the experience I want for myself, I want EASE.

I want to be able to show up and actually do the work I’m good at without having every little thing depend on me noticing it, remembering it or being available to make it happen.

That doesn’t mean you stop being involved in your business. It means you get to be more intentional about WHERE you’re involved and what the business can carry without you.

And y’all always wanna make the client happy, but what about yourself?

Because if you’re the person running this business and you’re constantly stressed, overwhelmed and trying to manually hold everything together, that’s going to affect how you show up. It doesn’t matter how good everything looks from the outside. Eventually the people paying you can feel that shift too.

So if you’ve never really looked at the owner side of your client journey, I’d start there.

Map what actually happens. Then look at what YOU have to do to make each part happen. Figure out what can move automatically, what can belong to another person and what actually needs your attention.

You might be surprised how much of the business has been depending on you just because you’ve never had a reason to separate it.

And I really want more solopreneurs to know that designing a great client experience doesn’t have to mean accepting a terrible experience for yourself.

The owner matters too.

That’s a big part of why I made the Client Experience Playbook. It helps you sit down and look at what your clients are experiencing, what’s happening behind the scenes to make that experience work and what you’re still personally carrying. That’s usually where you start to see it.

Free & fillableFig. 03

The Client Experience Playbook is free and fillable.

Go through it with the business you actually have right now, because that’s the business we can actually do something with.

Get the Playbook →

And if you go through it and want somebody to look at it with you, book a Systems Success Audit. It’s $397 for 90 minutes, and we’ll look at how your business is actually operating and what’s still coming back to you so the owner experience gets some attention too.