There’s a moment most weeks where you catch yourself saying it, maybe out loud, maybe just in your head: “I just need another me.” Or ten of me, on a big week.
It usually arrives when you sit down to actually get something done. You’ve got the new program mapped out in your head: how the sales page should flow into the checkout, what people should see the first time they log in, which emails go out when. You could hand it to someone. But first you’d record the Loom, explain one part to one person and another part to someone else, answer their questions as they go, check what comes back and fix the bits that didn’t quite connect. By the time you’ve explained it all, you could probably have done half of it yourself. So you do it yourself. Again.
And it’s not that you’re short on help. You’ve got a team, and a good one: someone on operations, someone on marketing, maybe someone in sales. But you’ve still got a hand in every part of it. The content starts with your ideas, every campaign comes back to you for sign-off, and every page gets read (and double-checked, and triple-checked) by you before it goes live.
So I suspect that when you say you need another you, you don’t really mean more people. You mean someone who thinks about all of this the way you do, so not every last decision has to come back to you, or through you.
Before we jump into the post, if you prefer to listen, I’ve covered this topic in more detail on the latest episode of the Connect + Create podcast! Listen below, or add the show to your favorite podcast app to get notified when I release a new episode!
It probably isn’t that your team is doing a bad job
I don’t think the answer is to work harder, get everyone thirty-five times more efficient, or hire a much bigger team you don’t actually want. And I don’t think it’s because the people you already have aren’t good at what they do. They probably are.
I’ve spent ten years working alongside founders and their teams, across a lot of different online businesses, in the busy day-to-day work itself. From in there, I think it mostly comes down to two things. Sometimes it’s one of them, and sometimes it’s both.
Your business has a big company’s shape, with a small team
The first is the size and structure of your team. Your business probably has the loose shape of a much bigger company: operations, marketing, maybe sales. But where a bigger company would have a whole department, you’ve got one or two people.
A lot of the time, those people are excellent. As the business has grown and changed and developed new needs, they’ve stretched themselves into areas outside their core skills to cover them. Plenty of the founders I’ve worked with have a right-hand person who’s about as close to a clone as any of us could hope to get, and yet somehow there are still gaps.
That’s just the reality of a small team. There’s always going to be work that needs knowledge or skills nobody on the team quite has, or doesn’t have to the depth the job needs. The sort of thing I see a lot:
Everyone’s handy enough with Canva to put bits and pieces together, but nobody can really pull off a whole set of branding for the new program.
Everyone can update a section of the website, move things around and make little tweaks, but when the whole sales page needs designing and building from scratch, it takes two or three people forever and still doesn’t turn out quite how you’d hoped.
An integration stops working, and nobody knows why, or where to start looking, or has the time to look when they don’t know where to start.
Those gaps get plugged by whoever sits closest to them. If your social media manager is designing your lead magnets, or your OBM is updating your course dashboard, you probably know how this goes. Everyone is doing their absolute best, and in their own area they’re brilliant. In the areas they’re picking up around the edges, things take much longer than they should, and the result is workable. Good enough. Not the kind of thing that blows you away.
And maybe you end up sitting there yourself, trying to drag it over the line.
You’re the face of it
The second reason is that you’re the face of it all. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re doing founder-led marketing, whether or not you call it that. (I used to talk about this as personal branding, but that’s gotten so tangled up with influencers and content creators that it stopped fitting businesses where the founder is the public face but far from the only person working in it.)
It’s your name on the emails, your face on the website and on social, you presenting the webinar. People are buying from you, so everything they see has to feel like it came from you. And of course it can’t always actually be you drafting every piece of content or writing all the marketing copy. It shouldn’t be.
So your team is working to the standard of recreating you without being you. Inside their own area, they can usually do that pretty confidently. When they step outside it, the confidence drops, and they often can’t be sure they’ve met your standard, or the standard for the business as a whole.
That’s usually when every single thing starts coming back to you for review, because nobody is comfortable letting it go out under your name until you’ve seen it. To make it work, you end up over-explaining what you want up front, because the person doing it can just about manage with enough direction. Then the review takes longer and goes deeper, because they weren’t sure it was right, so you have to look really hard. And once it’s in front of you and you’re looking that closely, it’s very hard to resist fiddling with it yourself.
That’s what goes on between you and your team. Being the face of it reaches you from outside, too. When something goes out to your customers or your audience that isn’t quite right, you’re the one who hears about it. The questions and complaints land in your inbox and your DMs, because your customers don’t know who set up the automation or uploaded the PDF. They know you. You might have people checking those inboxes for you, but unless you can be entirely removed from them, it’s really hard to see it and not feel like you should at least tell someone.
None of this means you shouldn’t have a small team, or shouldn’t be founder-led. I’m all for both, and so are nearly all of my clients. It’s just worth knowing where the gaps come from, and how they tend to play out in an online business specifically.
The usual fixes, and where they tend to leave you
I see founders try to close these gaps in a few different ways, sometimes several at once. They all work for someone. Here’s where I see each one tend to fall short in a lean, founder-led business.
Building out the team
This is the traditional fix: if every department had more people, someone would surely have both the skills and the time. And it does work. Plenty of businesses run exactly this way. But to get to the point where things genuinely stop landing back on you, the team usually has to be a lot bigger than you’re prepared to be responsible for: full departments, with managers to run them. For some founders that’s the goal. Over the years, though, I’ve also seen and worked with a lot of people who hit this wall, decided more staff was the answer, scaled all the way up, then hated everything that came with it and scaled all the way back down.
Hiring only as needed
The other route is specialist contractors, brought in for a set project or kept on call and billed by the hour, with no retainer. It sounds sensible, and often it is. In practice, you’re working to their schedule. When the next project comes up, they may not have any availability, so you either move your plans around theirs or find someone new, brief them on what the last person did and hope they give you something similar. The frustrating part is that if one person could take all of those random jobs and projects, there’d be enough there for an ongoing role, internal or contracted. It just doesn’t look that way, because the work seems scattered across different areas, with no obvious single person to give it to.
Another VA, or another manager
Some founders hire another VA to take more of the task-based work, or a business or project manager to win back the time that goes into briefing and reviewing. That can free up time on work you can hand over clearly, without much explanation. But neither role usually brings the depth of expertise the gaps actually need, and both are still taking their direction from you.
Handing it to an agency
When none of that has worked, an agency can feel like the answer: someone else’s in-house team, a whole group of specialists, one contract and one point of contact, and they figure out who does what. That can and does work sometimes. But it takes a lot of time and explaining to teach them what your brand is meant to feel like, and how you sound. I’ve been the go-between for a founder and an agency a few times, on parts of the business I didn’t handle myself but was best placed to communicate about, and I’ve heard a lot of “It’s fine. It’s not quite right. It’s just not how we would do it.” When you try to pin down how you would do it, a lot of it turns out to be instinct that’s never been written down. And because online businesses move so quickly, whatever you tell them now may have shifted a month from now, so you’re back briefing them every time something changes. You hired them to take a job off your team’s plate, and created a new one for yourself in all the briefing and updating.
Doing it yourself with AI
The newest one, which I see more of every week, is founders (or someone on the team) trying to DIY it with AI. It can look like the closest thing to an actual clone: you tell it exactly what you want, and maybe it does it. But especially outside your own area of expertise, the time goes into working out how to ask for what you want, going back and forth a hundred times, and still not really knowing whether what came back is right or broken. A lot of founders end up doing more of the work they didn’t want to do, and had often already handed off. I went into this in a lot more detail in What Happens to Your AI First Draft After You Hand It Over to Your Team?.
What I’ve seen actually work
If you want to keep your team small (or small-ish) in a business where you’re the face of everything, the thing I’ve seen work well is being really intentional about hiring multi-skilled people.
If you’re thinking your team already is multi-skilled, because your VA is working on your landing page right now, I mean something a bit different. I don’t mean people stretching past their core skills, doing a little of everything because someone had to. I mean people who can hold an entire area of work, when that area needs more than one high-level kind of expertise. More and more, that’s how good people are choosing to work, in roles that don’t fit neatly under a traditional job title.
I started noticing all of this when I first began working inside teams like these. Early on, I was doing one client’s branding and graphics while someone else built their web pages, so I was designing graphics for pages I hadn’t seen yet. When they folded the web work into my role, everything flowed better: I knew what the page would look like, so I knew what the graphics needed to be. Over the years I kept picking up the pieces around my work (the pages, the platforms, the automations), and these days my clients can hand me the copy or a few details and get back the finished page, the graphics and the tech connected behind it, checked and ready, with the rest of the team set up to manage whatever doesn’t need me ongoing. I can’t take over every gap in your business, but the brand, the design, the pages and the tech behind them are so intertwined now that it rarely makes sense to split them across several people.
So do you really need a clone?
Sometimes, maybe. If what’s bogging you down is the ideas and the direction and where you’re taking the business, maybe you do need a clone, or a whole army of them.
But a lot of the time, the thing driving that wish is one area of the business that you might not even think of as one area, with too many different people trying to plug its gaps. The right kind of person, working in the right kind of way, could take that on for you. Finding them isn’t always easy, but I’d bet it’s a lot easier than producing a clone of yourself.
This is exactly the kind of thing I take over for founders through Creative Partnership. If the brand, the pages and the tech behind them keep finding their way back to you, here’s how to apply.
And if you’ve caught yourself saying “I need another me” lately, I’d love to know what your clone would take off your plate first. Send me a DM on Instagram or tell me at emilybankscreative.com/podcast.
See you in the next one!
Emily Banks
