So I asked him a question of my own. Was he turning down clients because he was already exceptionally wealthy, or because the work was not organised to handle them?
It was the second. Finding reliable people was difficult.
And he was right.
In a field like that, growth often follows the individual professional. You become interested, study, try things, get results. People start to know you. More clients arrive. Then you look for somebody to help.
The very good people are effectively your peers. They can help, but their work leaves you little margin. Less experienced people need training. Once they become good, it is natural for some of them to want a business of their own.
They have not betrayed you by wanting that.
A way of working that can be taught
A professional practice is still a business. If every service needs to be touched by your own magic hand before it can be delivered, you have a capacity problem.
Part of my work consists of talking to clients. I know that part depends on me. The businesses where I am only a decision-maker and supervisor have a different structure. It helps to be honest about which of the two you are building.
A defined way of working makes at least part of a service teachable. Here is an example from a session with a personal trainer.
His starting plan was to try filming for two hours on Monday. We worked through what actually had to happen: which videos were needed for each exercise, what went into each video and what the editor needed in order to prepare the material for the different platforms.
That gave him a checklist for the shoot. It also gave the editor something to organise the work around.
Then we separated the preparation that a colleague could do. Take the exercise. Describe the important points about how it is performed. List the benefits. Research the common mistakes. With that material prepared, the trainer could spend one block reviewing it and another block just filming.
A block of time marked filming tells you very little about whether any of that preparation has happened.
You cannot organise everything you know
I am sympathetic to people who are good at many things. In consulting I may write a piece of promotional copy, help select a member of staff or work on the structure of a business.
It is good for my ego when somebody is impressed by that. It is less helpful if I then try to find an employee who can do all of it.
It took me years to learn those things. Documenting all of them at once is an enormous job. Finding somebody who can absorb all of them is another enormous job.
The alternative is to isolate a narrower piece of work and organise that. It becomes easier to break down, explain and teach. You can recruit for that piece of work rather than wait for a remarkably talented copy of yourself.
The boundary matters. If a service has been organised around doing one thing, adding every extra request to it makes the work harder to teach again. A new business opportunity may deserve a separate decision. It does not have to become an exception inside the existing process.
People will still leave
A good process does not cancel people's lives or ambitions. The freelance editor doing a particular task today may not want the same task when they have two children at university.
That is why recruitment and training have to continue. There needs to be a way to bring another person from knowing nothing about this job to being able to do it.
The narrower the role and the clearer the working method, the less you depend on finding the one exceptional person who can somehow work it all out.