There’s something really satisfying about being able to do something yourself. Whether that’s renovating your home, fixing your car, cooking a nice meal, repairing your favorite shirt… These are acts of care and it’s natural to find pleasure in them.
When it comes to running a business, that same pleasure comes with a financial incentive. You're rewarded for transferring the DIY impulse into the various components of your operation.
As a lifelong autodidact (I love teaching myself how to do new things), this behavior is fun for me. I’ve taught myself various forms of marketing, copywriting, tracking, accounting, coding basics, every single facet of graphic design (typography design, print design, brand design, logo design, web design, presentation design, infographics, etc.), illustration, strategic thinking, workshop facilitation. All of these things involve sharing my many thoughts and opinions almost indiscriminately with the outside world (which, as an Aries rising, I also find very entertaining).
This proclivity toward learning has allowed me to keep my operations lean at various stages of my business, maintain ownership, and enjoy a level of freedom regarding my income, location, and career choices I would not have in any other arrangement.
How AI changed the game
It’s 2026 and now everyone can do what I’m doing. AI has collapsed the cost of execution, and with it, the gatekeeping that allowed service providers to inflate the value of execution. Clients are enjoying the tsunami of information and options flooding the open marketplace.
For a long time, clients paid agencies mostly for execution: making the deck, building the site, launching the app... That work was expensive and hard to do yourself, so it looked like the value. As the AI boom has revealed, the value the market is willing to pay for and what specialists prefer doing are two separate things. Execution on its own will always have a cap. The quality of the thought, and the judgment about what to make and why, is what's truly exponential.
This raises a question: what is a service provider actually for?
“Empower your clients.”
This is perhaps the best piece of business advice I've ever received, and it came from one of my clients! If you are a service provider, empowering the people you serve should be your first and foremost priority. I'm a believer that anyone who truly cares about their craft builds toward their clients no longer needing them.
Physical therapists encapsulate this brilliantly.
People have trouble observing their own body mechanics. Creating movement habits that build toward health and longevity requires a level of self-awareness most of us lack.
A physical therapist helps their client recover from an injury and teaches them exercises they can perform on their own. The therapist can be there to support them, but it's up to the client to implement the daily ritual of caring for their body.
A physical therapist knows they've succeeded when the client has recovered and is maintaining the exercises on their own.
How this applies to your situation
All the knowledge in the world won't help you if you don't know how to apply it. An outsider who has spent their career solving for your current problem can see blind spots in your system that would take you months or years to catch on your own. They can evaluate your situation and hand you parameters that have proven successful for others in your position. Once you receive that guidance, going at it alone is encouraged.
I mean this. As a consultant myself, sometimes I need another consultant to go through my business, find what’s not working, and rip me a new one. They always seem to find something I’ve walked past a hundred times.
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