Learn to Edit Yourself: Why Your Business Doesn't Need More Complexity
Our founder, Sam, and her family moved abroad this spring. They planned for it — budgeted the time, mapped the logistics, told themselves they understood what they were getting into. The two to three months before the move were still harder than she expected.
"I know that that sounds naive, but, like, we really planned things out. We understood what we were getting into. It didn't feel like there were any big surprises. It was just incredibly challenging."
Content got deprioritized. Auxo brought on a new ops manager. They built an internal app. Q2 was, in her words, still a fun quarter — just not one with room for a podcast.
The Overestimation Nobody Warns You About
What she came back to wasn't a content strategy. It was a pattern she kept running into — in her own move, in client sessions, in her business — and it wasn't new. It was the same thing she already teaches, showing up again with higher stakes.
"Time and time again, in my clients' businesses and in my business, the philosophy that shines through, that leads to the most success is simplicity."
What Cooking Show Judges Know That Founders Forget
Have you ever watched a cooking competition show? Whether its Beat Bobby Flay, Top Chef, or MasterChef, every season of every show, there’s always the same feedback from the judges made several times to different chefs:
"Learn to edit yourself. Restraint. Keep it simple.”
These chefs get lost in the idea of trying to prove themselves and that causes them to lean into doing way too much on a dish for the sake of complexity and sophistication - and this often causes them to make a dish that doesn’t make sense and has no point of view.
Founders do the same thing with coaching programs, software, hires, and offers. That extra layer isn’t validated against a sound vision or strategic thought process and ends up not actually solving anything. But these decisions perpetuate because complexity feels more legitimate than simplicity.
On top of wasted money, time, and energy in countless useless decisions, founders also end up designing a business that doesn’t actually make them happy. Without a point of view for the business, you end up with:
"Wrong services, wrong clients, and looking for answers everywhere else, which usually results in hiring a coach and wasting a shit ton of money on coaches."
She's not anti-coaching. She's specific about the failure mode: paying for an answer before you've done the work only you can do.
"You're thinking that they're gonna provide this magical answer and then everything in business is going to make sense, and then it still sucks."
The Three Questions Before Any Hire
So, to avoid the cycle of aimless decisions, there’s three key questions every founder should be able to confidently answer:
What are you building toward? This is your horizon - it’s not a fancy, mic-drop moment to share your why or your vision mission and values. This is connecting professional and personal goals: “I want this business to be successful because….”. For our founder, the horizon is “I want this business to be successful so that we can comfortably live abroad and live out our values.”
For you it might be that you want to dominate your market, set yourself up for a successful exit to go explore other passion projects, live a luxurious life, or live a comfortable life with your family while allowing your spouse to stay at home. This is a specific, dry (yet inspiring to you) statement that will ground your revenue goals and other key decisions in the business.
What do you actually want to sell? This is not the time to figure out pretty packages and pricing. Of course, you will need to have a legitimate service offering that the market will pay for. But, the key here is to avoid the common coaching approach of “pick your highest paying client and build a high-ticket offer for them”.
For our founder, that led her to offer process improvement services to corporate and construction clients when her heart is really with the solopreneur. It’s important that your business is designed around what you want to be doing.
How do you actually want to deliver your services? Again, this is a step toward figuring out your service offerings but we don’t want to get distracted with packaging, pricing, and SOPs right now. What this question is getting at is how engaged and involved do you want to be in the delivery of those services. This will then dictate the clients, price point, and potential processes or team members you’ll need.
What Actually Changes
The answers to these three questions is not going to fix everything in your business.
"Oftentimes, you don't need a whole overhaul of your business, but this clarity allows you to tweak... and then actually make the best next choice for your business, not just what you think you should be doing for your business."
This creates a foundation to make the next best decision with ease whether it’s a budget for the right coach, hiring an assistant, locking in your next big goal, etc. This moves you away from second guessing big decisions in your business and instead moving from big idea to confident decisions with ease.
Did one of these questions spark something in your business? We’d love to hear from you! Let Sam know directly by DMing her on LinkedIn or emailing her at samantha.cordero@auxosvs.com.
And if you're mid-hire, mid-overwhelm, or just suspect your business has gotten more complicated than it needs to be — book a Delegation Strategy Session. We'll map what you're actually building toward before we talk about who to hire.
Sam Prestidge is the founder of Auxo Business Services, where she helps founder-led businesses delegate to U.S.-based virtual assistants and operations-minded pros. Listen to Can We Not? Business is hard enough wherever you get podcasts.