Hey there! 👋

I used to get to tell people, "Hey, you got the deal!"

The excitement in that. The shared joy and everything. I'd look forward to saying that one sentence and watching somebody's entire afternoon change.

Oh, the old times!

Lol, sounds a tad bit dramatic to say that, especially from where I'm standing. Cause I mean, I'm not complaining. I almost can't complain. But what do feelings care about logic, right?

Creator Match has grown to the point where most of my time is spent hopping from calls with big brands to calls with big creators, while my team gets to have so many of those conversations that used to make my day.

And I love that they get to experience that too!

I just miss it sometimes.

I think you'll notice this as your business grows. You start handing things over, and some of those things are the very reasons you started the business in the first place.

And if you're not careful, you'll want to hold on to all of it.

But I don't think the answer is to stop things from changing. I think it's figuring out what exactly you miss about those good old days, and whether there's a way to make room for some of that in the business you have now.

Which brings me to September...

I was at the Creator Leaders Retreat, at a spa outside London, where we were taking turns bringing something we were working through to a small group.

One of the creators was trying to figure out how to get more out of the brand relationships she'd already built.

Brands kept coming back to her for another $1,000 LinkedIn post. Which was great, except she knew she had more to offer them.

So we started talking about what else she could put in a package.

For example, she knew her community well enough to tell a brand what people actually thought about its product. That's useful information for a brand, and something worth including in a bigger partnership.

And there I was, at a spa, happily talking about what ad buyers want from a LinkedIn video.

I loved it.

We'd started with a question about getting brands to buy more than another sponsored post, and now we were talking about something she was already in a good position to offer them.

That's the kind of conversation I miss having more often.

Then someone at the table turned to me and asked:

"How can we help you?"

Well. How much time have you got? 😂

Because apparently I had an hour or two a week to give back to creators, and about seventeen different ideas for what to do with it.

Coffee chats? Workshops? A podcast? YouTube?

I'd done coffee chats before. I'd run Batchers, where we'd make content together and spend the last fifteen minutes answering questions. I already had a newsletter.

Someone suggested doing a small workshop where everybody came with a question about the same thing. Which made sense!

Actually, most of the ideas made sense.

And that was kind of my problem.

I'd come to the retreat wanting to find a way to spend more time helping creators, and somehow I'd managed to turn an hour or two a week into a conversation about launching several different things.

Very on brand for someone who spends so much time telling creators to be careful what they commit to. 🙃

But the more we talked, the more I realized I needed to answer a different question first.

Because "creators" is a pretty broad answer.

At Creator Match, we work with established creators and brands on partnerships. And I love that work. We're helping creators get paid, build better relationships with brands, and make more out of the businesses they've already built.

But I also think about the creators who aren't quite there yet.

The ones who are still figuring out how to get their first few paid partnerships, what they should be charging, whether they need a manager, or how they're supposed to turn this thing they love doing into something they can actually make a living from.

I want to help those people too.

And I think that's something worth asking yourself as your own business grows.

Are the people you spend most of your time helping now the same people you originally wanted to help?

They might be! And that's great.

But sometimes your business grows into serving a different group, or a different stage of the same group.

You might have started out helping people get their first clients, and now you're working with businesses that can afford much bigger projects.

There's nothing wrong with that. Your experience grows. Your business changes. You have people to pay, and you can't keep offering everything exactly the way you did when it was just you.

But is there a group of people you still care about helping who don't have much access to you anymore?

And if there is, what would you actually want to help them with?

Because when I say I miss telling creators they got the deal, I don't necessarily mean I want to go back to managing every part of those partnerships myself.

My team is doing that work, and they're good at it. I want them to have those relationships, make those calls, and get to experience the wins.

I don't need to take that away from them to feel like I'm still part of something I love.

What I really miss is the conversation.

Getting to hear what somebody is trying to do, asking a bunch of questions, and helping them figure out what makes sense for their business.

And I think there's something about getting to help someone do something they weren't sure they could do.

Like someone who's been trying to make this whole creator thing work for ages. They want to get to a point where brands are paying them real money to do it, but they're not quite sure how to get there.

And I get to sit with them and figure that out.

Or they're already making great money, but the business side of things? A mess.

They can go out and land another huge brand deal, no problem. But ask them how they're going to hire the people to deliver all that work, or how they're going to manage the team they already have, and it's a whole different conversation.

Because getting to the point where you can make that kind of money is one thing. Building a business that can actually handle it is another.

And I love getting to help with both.

I think I just really like getting to be there when someone goes from "I don't know if I can do this" to "Oh, wait. I could actually do that."

But there's an important difference between missing a particular part of your work and wanting your old job back.

Maybe you've handed over your community to your team, and you miss being in there talking to people.

But what exactly do you miss?

Is it answering their questions yourself? Hearing what they're struggling with? Finding out whether the things you're teaching are actually helping them?

Because depending on your answer, you might not need to take any of that work back.

Maybe you join a community session once a month. Or your team starts bringing you some of the questions they're hearing, and you get to answer them in your content.

You still get to be part of those conversations without having to manage the whole community again.

And before you go telling your team you want to start doing some of that work again, I'd get really clear on what you're actually asking for.

Because there's a difference between wanting to be involved and wanting to be responsible for something.

If you miss talking to your community, do you want to answer questions once a month? Or do you want to be the person making sure every question gets answered?

Very different jobs!

And your team needs to know which one you're asking for.

I'd probably start by telling them what I miss, and asking how we could make room for it without changing who's responsible for everything else.

They've probably spent a lot of time figuring out how to run things without you. You don't want to come back in and accidentally make everyone wait for you again. 🫣

And even once you've figured out what you want to be involved in, there's still the question of how much time you can actually give it.

I mean, I went into that retreat with an hour or two a week in mind and came out talking about podcasts, YouTube, workshops, and coffee chats.

All things I would probably enjoy doing!

But I still have a business to help run.

And I want to do that well too.

So if I'm going to make room for something else, I need to be realistic about what that actually looks like.

And not just the hour I spend with a creator.

Someone has to organize it. There might be questions to collect beforehand, things to send afterwards, or people who need help following through on what we discussed.

Even if I'm doing it for free, somebody is spending time making it happen.

So before committing to anything, I'd want to try one version of it.

Maybe you join one community session next month. Your team still organizes it, handles the follow-ups, and keeps everything running.

You get to have the conversations.

And afterwards, you can ask each other: Was that useful? Did it create extra work for anyone? Do we want to do it again?

You might find you've got exactly what you were missing.

Or you might realize you want something slightly different. Which is also useful to know before you've committed to doing it every month.

Because the last thing you want is to miss doing something, bring it back, and somehow end up with another entire part of the business that needs you to run it.

Well, I'm still figuring that out.

But I know a lot more about what I'm trying to make room for than I did when I arrived at that retreat with my very ambitious list of ideas.

I want to spend more time helping creators who are trying to make a living doing this.

And I want to keep having those conversations where we sit down with a problem and figure out what might actually work.

I just need to find a way to do that alongside everything I'm already responsible for at Creator Match, without creating a whole new set of things for my team to manage.

At the retreat, I told the group that if I didn't have time to help creators, we'd scaled too quickly.

And I meant that.

Not because I think I should personally be involved in every creator conversation. I couldn't be, and I wouldn't want Creator Match to depend on that.

I'm proud that we've built a team that gets to do so much of the work I used to do myself. It means we can help more people, and those relationships aren't dependent on me being available for every call.

I want that to keep growing.

I also want to keep some room in my own week for the conversations that made me love this work in the first place.

So if you've been missing something you used to do in your business, I'd start by figuring out what exactly you miss.

Then get specific about the part you want to be involved in, talk to whoever owns that work now, and try a way of doing it that doesn't put the whole thing back on your plate.

You might find that you don't need to change nearly as much as you thought.

And who knows? The people you've hired to take things off your plate might be the very people who help you get some of your favorite work back.

Talk soon,

Tara