~ by Haley Lynn Gray ~
When I started my home care agency, I had a plan. I’d handle operations and internet advertising, which I was good at and enjoyed, and I’d hire someone to do the public-facing part.
I’m an introvert. The office suited me.
What I discovered is that people wanted to know the owner. They wanted to meet me, talk to me, and decide about me. They were not especially interested in meeting whoever I’d hired to represent me.
You can probably guess how well the plan worked.
Why the owner can’t delegate this early
This is the part worth generalising, because it catches a great many people.
In a small business, you are a substantial part of what’s being bought. Particularly in anything involving trust, care, money or judgement — a client choosing a home care agency is not comparing service specifications. They’re deciding whether they trust the person running it with their mother.
That decision can’t be made about a company. It gets made about a person, and for a long time the only person available is you.
Which means the face-to-face work isn’t a marketing function you can hire out in year one. It’s the product. You can delegate it eventually — once there’s a reputation, a track record and people who embody it — but not at the start, and not by preference.
The lobster
Rabbi Abraham Twerski used to tell a story about how a lobster grows.
A lobster is a soft animal in a rigid shell. As it grows, the shell becomes confining and uncomfortable. So it retreats somewhere safe, casts off the shell, and grows a new, larger one — and repeats this throughout its life.
His point was that the stimulus for growth is discomfort. If lobsters had doctors, they’d never grow: at the first sign of discomfort they’d take something for it, feel fine, and stay exactly the size they were.
It’s a good description of what running a business does to you, and of the specific trap. The discomfort is the signal that the current shell has stopped fitting. Treating it as a problem to be avoided means staying the size you are.
The honest version for introverts
Most advice about leaving your comfort zone implies that it eventually becomes comfortable. In my experience that isn’t what happens.
I went to networking meetings. I made cold calls to organisations. I got noticeably better at selling, and I learned that sales is the lifeblood of a business — you have to sell to succeed, and there’s no arrangement where someone else does all of it for you while you stay in the back.
But I’m not thrilled about cold calls now. I’m just confident enough in what I do to make them anyway.
That’s the actual transition, and it’s a better promise than the one usually offered. The discomfort doesn’t disappear. Its authority over you does. You stop waiting to feel ready, because you’ve learned that feeling ready isn’t a thing that arrives.
Which is genuinely freeing, and it’s available to people who will never enjoy a room full of strangers.
If this is you
Work out what’s actually being bought. If people are buying trust or judgement, they need access to you, and no amount of marketing substitutes. If they’re buying a commodity, they may not care who you are — and then this doesn’t apply.
Choose the format that costs you least. Introversion isn’t an inability to talk to people; it’s a limited budget for it. Spend the budget where it counts. One coffee with a well-chosen person may be worth more than an evening event, and it costs a fraction of the energy.
Do the uncomfortable thing at small scale first. One call, not a campaign. The goal is evidence that it doesn’t kill you, and evidence only comes from doing it.
And plan recovery around it. A day with three unfamiliar meetings needs a quiet evening after. That’s not weakness, it’s scheduling.
Where it went
I pushed myself out, repeatedly. I sold the home care business. I focus on Leadership Girl now, and the Women’s Entrepreneur Network has grown past 77,000 members — which would not have happened if I’d successfully hired someone to be the public face while I stayed in the office.
The painful lesson was the valuable one, and I’d have avoided it entirely if the plan had worked.
Now I have a considerably bigger shell.
More on choosing where to be visible and what the early silence feels like.
About the author
Haley Lynn Gray is the founder of Leadership Girl, of In2itive Biz Solutions, and of the Women’s Entrepreneur Network — a community of more than 77,000 women in business.
She writes here about what happens when running a business starts demanding that you lead one. More about Haley →
