Why Hire Experts: Growth

Marketing is the art and science of attracting people to buy our stuff. Seems pretty straightforward on the surface, but anyone who’s tried will tell you it is not that simple in practice. Hence why hire experts is a question. We all need help from time to time.

When you are part of a growing company (and “growing” always means marketing needs to get turned WAY up), it’s just not possible to do everything yourself. More often than not, the teams tasked with spearheading growth don’t even have enough capacity to handle all the must-do tasks, never mind putting together a strategic plan to guide the work or explore new channels and tactics. What to do? Well… this is why you hire an expert.

LISTEN TO SEASON 2: EPISODE 1

The Dunning Kruger Effect

One of the key problems with growth is that we humans have a tendency to overestimate our knowledge and capabilities in new areas. Basically, you don’t know what you don’t know.

This concept has a name; it’s called the Dunning Kruger effect. To get really fancy, we can say it is a cognitive bias. That is, it’s an error in our thinking—usually a result of our brain trying to simplify information processing.

Even if you’ve not heard of this, I think we’ve all felt it at one time or another: that moment of realizing there are striped stocking legs sticking out from under our house and knowing for sure we’re not in Kansas anymore.

This is usually followed by some equivalent of slowly discovering where we are and starting to navigate through. Usually not in the form of a lollipop guild though.

Why Hire Experts

It’s that lack of knowing that lies behind why hire experts.

But let’s take a moment to get REALLY clear on the motivations behind why you’d hire an expert.

Experts can:

• fill in knowledge gaps
• build bridges between where you are and where you want to be
• make things easier (they know the road)
• add capacity: through additional cycles or knowledge
• make things more predictable
• complete projects or tasks outside our skillset

Growth is messy. We can feel our way through it, falling into the pitfalls, taking unintended routes, wandering off the path, and then finding our way back. We can learn things the hard way. And sometimes we need to. But not always.

This is why hire experts. Hiring and working with experts helps smooth the path and lets you take shortcuts instead of scenic routes, making it all feel less hard, exhausting, and lonely.

Hiring experts can help dispel the Dunning Kruger effect and show you what you don’t know you don’t know before it becomes a serious flying-monkey-situation type issue. The right expert is your expedition guide in the new world in which you find yourself.

Using experts in this way keeps you and your team doing the things you are brilliant at and builds the knowledge base required to extend your capabilities. Most companies trying to grow have to expand capabilities and capacity in order to acquire more customers or revenue.

Leveraging an expert for growth means less wondering and guessing and more strategy and execution.

What You Need to Know before Hiring an Expert

When hiring an expert to help with growth and expanding capabilities, here are the key questions to ask BEFORE you start searching for whom to hire:

What specific areas do you need help with?

If you’re not sure, that’s okay. There are experts who can help you figure that out.

What is the outcome you want?

This can actually be one of the most challenging questions to answer when trying to grow because this is uncharted territory. And there are also experts who can assist here, but they are usually different experts than those who just know how to get things done.

Do you need a leader or an implementer or both?

Especially with new territory, you may need leadership and strategy ahead of implementation.

Essentially, get clear on where you are with your plan for growth to know why hire experts. No shame; sometimes we get handed a destination we had no input on, but then it is up to us to figure out how we get there from here.

From the moment her house hit the bricks, Dorothy was clear she wanted to get home. We don’t all start off with a clear destination. Sometimes we just don’t want to be where we are and we need someone else to help us sort out where we want to go before we can put together a plan to get there.

Learning by Hiring Experts

Recognizing the possibility of encountering the Dunning Kruger effect can prevent failed launches, missed deadlines, and hiring the wrong person for the job. In times of growth, there’s a lot to do and decide, so scoping out the “Oz” territories means you can seek out the right kind of expertise to shortcut the yellow brick road.

Hiring the right expert to overcome growth obstacles not only helps your team achieve objectives, but also “levels up” your internal systems and knowledge for the area. Using external experts also helps avoid the trap of self-reliance. If you only use your existing team, the danger with growth projects is that they don’t get prioritized, your team can’t stay in their lane of expertise, or you end up expending resources to build internal skills or expertise that aren’t going to pay future dividends.

Need Help?

How are you feeling now about growth and not knowing what you don’t know? More confident, I hope! Okay, that does sound like a weird thing to say, but the point here is there are experts you can hire to help you with just about every aspect of growth, including figuring out what you need help with. After all, that’s why hire experts!

Sometimes you’ve had the right sparkly shoes all along, you just need to know how to use them. Other times it’s more like you just had a house dropped on you, your magic shoes taken, and you don’t know what to do next. Either way, you don’t have to go it alone.

There’s nothing wrong with wandering your way through a new land, being serenaded by a chorus of high-voiced villagers, taking advice from pink-crowned strangers, and making new friends on a journey of self-discovery to find your way home. But if you’d like to get home faster with fewer poppy fields and green-faced nemeses, you can ask an expert for help. At FieryFX, we’re experts in websites, analytics, smart business, and technology. Plus, we know a thing or two about getting the most from working with experts. Get where you want to go faster by booking a consult with us.