You Don’t Scale By Doing More. You Scale By Deciding What To Stop Doing Yourself.
Most founders think the path to a bigger business is doing more. More clients, more hours, more output from the one person who can do it best, which is you.
Maddie Niebauer built VChief, a fractional chief of staff firm, by doing the opposite. She stopped being the service provider early, long before she was forced to. That single decision is the reason the business grew past her.
Her numbers are unusual. Most women-owned businesses never cross half a million in revenue. Her story is worth your attention for a different reason, though. The decisions that mattered most were the ones she made while she was still small, still scrappy, and still unsure it would work.
The Shift That Changes Everything
Maddie started as a part-time chief of staff for one executive. When demand grew, she had a choice every founder eventually faces. Take more clients herself, or build something that could serve them without her.
She chose to become a matchmaker.
When new clients came to her, she told them plainly: I’ll set up the project, I’ll figure out exactly what you need, and I’ll find you the right person. Her skill stopped being the delivery. It became the judgment behind the delivery.
“You will always talk about VChief as we, whether or not it’s just you,” her executive coach told her in the earliest days. That reframe, she says, was how she got into the headspace of building something bigger than herself.
This is where most founders get stuck. Clients want you. Saying no to that feels like turning down money and flattery at the same time. But giving in to it is exactly what keeps a business small.
Delegate the Work You Shouldn’t be Doing, Not Just the Work You Can’t
Maddie didn’t wait until she was drowning to bring in help. In the first month, she looked at QuickBooks and decided she was never going to learn it. She hired an accountant from her coworking space instead.
She did the same with SEO, with website work, with interviewing candidates. Not because she couldn’t do those things, but because they weren’t where she created value, and they were eating the time she needed to grow.
The filter she used was simple. What do I not want to do? What am I not good at? How do I give that away? She hired contractors for a handful of hours a week so those tasks stopped taking up her brain space.
Systems Solve Problems That More People Can’t
As VChief grew, Maddie kept hitting the same trap. A process would break, and the instinct was to throw people at it. At one point she thought her finance team needed to grow to five people.
It didn’t. It needed better systems.
She had been tracking every consultant’s skills in a spreadsheet. Fine at a few matches a month. Impossible at fifty. The honest lesson she shares is that you often need the people to cover for a weak system while you build the better one. Right-sizing is the real skill, not hiring.
Protect Your Time Like it’s the Asset it is
Here’s the part that should stop the skeptical reader cold. Maddie grew this business on an average of less than 20 hours a week, with a four-day work week for her central team.
Not by working harder in those hours. By setting firm boundaries and getting protective of her time. Meetings only on certain days. Full days blocked for deep work or for her kids. A standing belief that it is okay, and actually better, not to work 60 or 80 hours.
Every yes to something is a no to something else. That’s the math most founders avoid doing.
What This Means For You
You don’t need eight figures to use any of this. You need to make the same decisions earlier than feels comfortable.
Look at your week and name the work that isn’t yours to do. Hand off one thing this month, even for a few hours. Notice where you’re solving a recurring problem with effort instead of a system. And get honest about the client pushback you’re using as a reason to stay the only person who delivers.
The business that depends entirely on you isn’t a business yet. It’s a job you can’t quit.
If that’s the season you’re in, this is the work worth doing next.
Full Transcript
Christine: Welcome to FoundHer Rising, the podcast for women founders in wellness, coaching, and consulting who are ready to build businesses that create freedom, impact, and income. I’m your host, Christine Hakkola, business coach, former psychotherapist, and mentor to women scaling service-based businesses.
Today I’m joined by Maddie Niebauer, founder of VChief, based in Madison, Wisconsin. She provides part-time chiefs of staff to leaders to help them use their time more effectively. Maddie, welcome to the show.
Maddie: Thank you, Christine. Thanks so much for having me.
Christine: I’m so excited to have you. And I’ll say right out of the gate that our listeners are in for a treat, because you’ve built a really successful business. We’ll get into that in a minute, but I want to start at the beginning. You shared earlier that you started this as a side gig. Tell us where you were at the time and how you got started.
Maddie: Well, I was in a chief of staff role at Teach for America, a large nonprofit. The woman I supported left to start a new nonprofit, then moved into a different role at TFA. She came back after a handful of months and said, I can’t live without you, will you work for me on the side, five or ten hours a week? I was excited to do that. I did it for a number of months, then decided I wanted to transition out of Teach for America. I thought, maybe I’ll do what I’m doing for her for a handful of other clients. So the genesis was, I’ll just be an independent contractor, grab a few clients. And it grew from there.
Christine: What was the moment this stopped being a side thing and you realized it could be bigger?
Maddie: It’s interesting. I was transitioning out of my role and I was with my family in Costa Rica at the time. We used to do these trips over the winter to escape Wisconsin. I was reading The 4-Hour Workweek and really thinking about what the future could look like. I started the business focused on me, but pretty quickly I realized there was demand for significantly more than me having three or four clients. With the mindset that book gave me, to stop only trading my time for money, that was when I decided to grow a real business and stop just doing the client services myself.
I continued to support my former boss for the first year. But every other client who came in, I became a matchmaker and found other talent to work with those leaders. That was one of the most important decisions that led to where we are today.
Christine: There are so many reasons I’m excited to talk with you. You’ve built a business that many female founders aspire to, and yet you started as a service provider yourself. In those early days, what service were you actually providing?
Maddie: I was a part-time chief of staff. A lot of people don’t know what that is.
Christine: Yes, tell us. What is it?
Maddie: For her, I did a lot of helping her think strategically about how she spent her time. She had an assistant who managed logistics, but I helped her set strategic priorities each quarter. We’d say, these are the things you really need to win at, and what are the ways you’re moving them forward.
The support varied, but it was mainly taking things off her plate so she could focus. Supporting her with her direct reports, planning team retreats, preparing for the important people she needed to meet when she traveled. And I’d hold bigger strategic projects that didn’t have any other natural home in the organization. Each chief of staff job is a hodgepodge. It’s a lot of project management, a lot of directly supporting an executive, sometimes writing speeches or building presentations, bringing the team together, holding big projects.
Christine: I want to elaborate, because in my world these roles are very important to women growing small and mid-sized service businesses. I often think of them as fractional COOs or directors of operations. The right-hand person, the left brain for the visionary. That person you hand the thing to when you don’t have the bandwidth. What a gift it is to have someone take that off your plate so you can focus where you’re needed.
So you did something a lot of service providers don’t. You recognized early, before you got saturated with your own one-on-one clients, that demand could be much bigger than what you alone could service. And you brought on other people to deliver. Talk to us about how, especially since for a lot of listeners that’s a foreign concept.
Maddie: It’s hard, because in the early days people come to you because they know your reputation. They want to work with you. I personally said, no, I’m not going to take any more clients. When people came to me, I’d say, I know you want to work with me. I will set up the project, I will find out exactly what you need, and I will find you your perfect person. I got really good at matchmaking and understanding the talent in our pool.
Being a great matchmaker became my special skill. Initially clients said, I want you to be my chief of staff because I’ve heard great things. Then I had to do the convincing. Here are other people who could do the job as well as me, and here’s what’s great about them that might not even be true about me.
There are other ways to do it. You can subcontract pieces. Maybe there’s a project with a lot of admin and you hire someone just for the admin, but it all flows through you. That’s a starting point. But part of it is a mindset shift and putting a stake in the ground. A lot of times leaders will respect you if you say, I don’t actually do client-facing work anymore, here’s how we do it, you can trust our brand. It’s about building something bigger than yourself.
My executive coach, when VChief was only me, said, you will always talk about VChief as “we,” whether or not it’s just you. That was one way to mentally get into the space of, I’m building something bigger than me.
Christine: I love how clearly you laid that out. So many women founders get really stuck there. Even when they start to talk about not being the primary service provider, one of the first obstacles is pushback from clients. Of course people want to work with them. And when we give into that, when it becomes a barrier we don’t know how to overcome, that’s when we stay stuck. It sounds like you took the service provider hat off and put the matchmaker hat on, and decided, I’m not doing that anymore, but here’s what I will do, which proved arguably better for your clients and definitely better for you and your business.
What happened after that? What were the milestones as you started hiring people to deliver?
Maddie: It was very early that I hired other people to provide services. In the beginning it felt like a run-around every time, because we didn’t have a pool of talent yet. I’d get a client with a specific need, run around my network, and try to find people. It was overwhelming at times. But because I kept doing that, we built up a stable of people we knew could be good. They might not be perfect for this project, but good for another. So we unintentionally started building a pool of talent, and over time became more intentional about it.
Even though I wasn’t doing client-facing work other than with my original boss, I was doing all the behind-the-scenes work. Interviewing every candidate, talking to every potential client, figuring out social media, a website, accounting. The problem became, there are a million things to run this business. I’m good at some of them, not an expert at others. Which pieces of the central running of the business do I need to let go of? And how do we do that when we’re not making much money yet?
That’s one of the stickiest spots of growing a business. You’re working with limited resources but you don’t want to burn yourself out. So early on I figured out, what do I not want to do, what am I not good at, and how do I give that away?
I looked at QuickBooks the first month and thought, I don’t want to learn this. I’ve built complicated financial models for multimillion-dollar organizations. It’s not in my wheelhouse and it doesn’t make sense for me to own. So I got an accountant right away, someone from my coworking space. She was my accountant for five years, and now she works with our clients.
Digital media was another. I didn’t know anything about SEO. I made our first website. You can bootstrap and be scrappy. But if I want to show up in search, or figure out advertising, what should I be doing? Through networking I found our first social media guy. I said, I don’t want to be spammy, I don’t want to send a newsletter. He said, Maddie, that’s not an option, we’re sending a newsletter. This is my area of expertise and you’re going to listen to me. Our own fears and misconceptions get in the way so many times, especially when we’re not the expert.
There were a handful of things I either didn’t know or that were eating all my time. Interviewing candidates took over everything, so that was another person. I hired all of them as contractors, a handful of hours a week or a month, to run those pieces so they stopped taking up my brain space.
Christine: On one hand you were scrappy, but also really strategic about who you hired and what you outsourced.
Maddie: Yes. And within our limits. I’m not going to hire full-time people in the beginning. Part of me looks back and thinks, that was lucky. And then I think, no, that was a strategic decision. At some point you just have to decide, screw it, I’m going to take the risk.
Christine: Before we keep going, I want to say something. If you’re listening and thinking, I’m in that season right now, I’d love to talk to you. FoundHer Rising isn’t about polished success stories. It’s about real growth, the hiring decisions, the revenue plateaus, the identity shifts that happen when your business starts stretching you. If you’re building something meaningful in wellness, coaching, or consulting, and you’re willing to have an honest conversation about what scaling actually looks like, apply to be a guest. The link’s in the show notes. I’d love to meet you. Okay, back to the episode.
Many of our guests are earning $150,000 to $200,000, sometimes up to a million. You’ve grown your business to $10 million. You’re that rare unicorn who broke past that ceiling to eight figures. To a lot of listeners, that seems impossible.
Maddie: It would have seemed crazy to me when I started. I remember when we hit a million in a year and thought, this is ridiculous, it’s beyond my wildest dreams. Then we hit a million in a month and I was like, stop it, what is that?
Christine: I want to ask more about that, because I talk with women founders who believe that when they hit a million, the stars will align and life will be different. What was life like when you hit a million?
Maddie: The first million still felt manageable. After that, things really started hitting the fan. We grew organically and nicely until about the 900,000 to 1.3 million range. We went 200,000 to 600,000 to 900,000 to 1.3 in our first four years. Through 1.3, I could still manage most of it with help. It was the growth period after that, where we went to 6 million and then almost 12 million, that was unbelievably difficult and unsustainable, even for the role I was playing. We grew our team from basically zero full-time people to almost 20 full-time people in nine months.
Think about what that takes. Bringing all those people on, finding great ones, onboarding them, getting them rolling, while client work is skyrocketing and you’re pedaling to keep clients coming in and happy. And it was all in the backdrop of COVID. The beginning of COVID was terrible for us, but then we skyrocketed, partly because businesses were saying, I don’t know if I can hire full-time, but I have all this work. The fractional, part-time, contract-based concept was attractive.
Christine: And people moving online.
Maddie: Exactly. Being a virtual business from the beginning was an objection at first. Come COVID, it was not an objection, because everyone was virtual. I remember hitting a million and being so proud and in shock. But you couldn’t sit there and celebrate. You’re too busy.
Christine: I’ve spoken to many women who grossed a million and didn’t even notice the day they hit it. Sometimes they see it in hindsight, a month or six months later.
Maddie: It was my executive coach who said, you need to pause and celebrate. I don’t always look at the numbers every month, so it was sort of, oh, here we are.
Christine: That’s important to highlight. Especially for those of us who don’t come from money, a million sounds like a lot. The reality is your whole world doesn’t change when you hit a million. You’re still running a business.
Maddie: It’s just a bigger business. More people, in some ways more risk. It’s not just about you anymore. You have team members relying on you for work and for keeping the business alive.
Christine: Talk to us about growing from 1 million to 10 million. Were there stages? What were the turning points?
Maddie: Some of the biggest challenges were around growing the team and knowing what to grow and how much. We had pain points around our finance team. My friend from the coworking space was our accountant for five years, doing it as a side gig. She got busier, so I thought, we need a real outsourced firm. We engaged one, and the person they matched us with wasn’t doing a great job. We didn’t realize it for a while, and it was a nightmare to fix. So much reconciliation. We were also experiencing clients not paying us for the first time. As you get bigger, with clients not directly tied to your network, that becomes a bigger risk, and you need strong systems and follow-up to make sure you get paid.
At one point we thought we had to grow the finance team to five people because of this external mess. We moved it in-house and grew the team to three, thought it might need to be five. Over time we figured out that systems can solve a lot of those problems instead of people.
As you grow you have these scrappy, sometimes crappy systems. We sorted all our consultants in an Excel spreadsheet. The chief of staff role is so varied. Maybe they need finance to build a model, maybe HR to hire a bunch of people, maybe strategic planning. So we tracked who knows what skills in a spreadsheet. When you’re doing a couple of matches a month, it’s easy. When you’re doing 30 or 50 matches a month, it becomes impossible. Then you think you need more people, when really you need a better system. In that period from 1 million to 10 million, I didn’t know which systems weren’t working well enough to know what to fix first. Systems take a while to roll out, so you kind of need the people to make up for the crappy system. It’s a balancing act, right-sizing.
We invested in systems that still work for us now. CRM, applicant tracking, a custom matching function. Technology first, then people pull information from the system and do the things only people can do.
Another big challenge was the sales role. It was really hard to find great salespeople. We have some phenomenal ones, some who’ve been with us a long time. But we’ve also had people cycle in and out, because it’s hard to find the right fit. And as a woman founder, and I know a lot of other women are like this, we believe everyone is coachable, we want them to succeed, we’ll bend over backwards. And we take way too long to let people go.
Christine: A hundred percent. I’m guilty of that.
Maddie: Sometimes your hand gets forced until you learn the lesson. Even though we’ve figured it out, we still want to give people every chance. But letting go of people who aren’t in the right role is part of doing business. That’s really hard for empaths, for people who care, who love the human but know they’re not in the right role.
Christine: We talk often about finding the right fit for the company and the right fit for the role. As a business scales, what gets confusing is that someone who was a right fit at 300,000 or 500,000 isn’t necessarily the right fit at 2 or 5 or 10 million.
Maddie: I’m proud of the times we’ve shifted people into other roles. But it’s all about the business, and there aren’t always times to do that.
Christine: We talk on this show about the importance of hiring. Most folks start doing it on their own and get to 100,000, 150,000, even 200,000 without hiring. But by the mid six figures you’ve got to hire, or it’s not sustainable. What I’m hearing is that on the heels of that comes the importance of systems. You said it was manageable between 1 and 3 million, but beyond 3 million it was chaos. Talk about what you experienced.
Maddie: The reality is you always face different challenges at any level. People think, you hit 10 million, you’re golden. We made it up to almost 12 million, and last year we were at eight and a half. It’s not always upward forever. Entrepreneurs can fall into a trap when things are great, thinking they’ll stay great because the systems are set and you’ve figured out how to bring in clients. But the world is always changing. External currents like COVID or tariffs or wars or recessions make business leaders make different decisions, which makes your business shrink or grow. And technology is changing. The way people use AI, the fact that you can’t just do SEO anymore, you have to think about showing up in AI search. It’s innovate or die. If you’re not thinking about how you need to shift in a given moment, your chances of continuing that upward trajectory are lower.
We’ve grown in response to client demand. For the first five years we just did chiefs of staff. Then clients asked for different things, and we were like, this is really COO work, or CFO work, or HR business partner work. We still had chiefs of staff doing it, charging chief of staff prices. Then we realized these are actually different things with different bill rates and different willingness to pay. We needed to differentiate that, and it let us differentiate pay for our consultants too.
The way we’re thinking now is a lot about AI. How we use it, how our clients use it, how our consultants can be savvy to save time for the executives we support. Regardless of your feelings on AI, the train is going whether you like it or not. Figuring out how to use it responsibly and effectively is the type of thing that will separate people through the rest of your career.
Christine: I appreciate that. At this point it’s not about opting in or out, it’s about deciding how we want to be in relationship to it.
I want to pull on a couple of threads. In the six figures and low seven figures we talk a lot about team and systems. There’s this idea that hitting a million is the top of the cliff. There’s often not a lot of talk about what’s beyond, so in that vacuum we idealize it. It’s just a new level of challenge, with more opportunity but also more on your plate, whether that’s innovation, demand, or sales.
Now, I called you a unicorn at the beginning, and I see you as one. When you look at the statistics, the vast majority of women-owned businesses earn under $500,000. A few years back, doing market research, I looked up female founders over a million dollars in my state and couldn’t find any. And the heads of seven and eight figure businesses are overwhelmingly male. What has your experience been like as a woman owning an eight figure business?
Maddie: I do a fair amount of networking with other business owners, and I’m in some women’s business groups. You’re right, those businesses tend to be on the smaller side, more solopreneurs, or people building things who maybe don’t even have the aspiration to make it huge, or maybe haven’t thought they could. I’m also in spaces with much bigger businesses. I’m a member of EO, Entrepreneurs’ Organization. You can’t even be in it without a million in revenue, and there are people with 50 or 100 million, selling businesses all the time. The conversations are really different.
Those spaces are much more male-dominated. Our EO chapter, I go to the one in Chicago, is less than 20 percent women. But I adore the women who are there. I feel much more connected with them, partly because we face the same obstacles. We’re often trying to raise a family while growing a business. That’s not to say the men aren’t, but we all know how things often look at home given today’s gender norms.
I spend a lot of time talking with leaders, especially women, about how to stay focused where they can have the most impact, so time isn’t all taken up by work. One of the things I’m most proud of is that I grew this business on average in less than 20 hours a week. People think that’s mind-boggling, but it’s not that hard when you set firm boundaries. I’d do things like, I’m only doing meetings on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or I’m going to have this day completely off so I can do a work block or take kids to appointments. Our business has a four-day work week for the central team. I deeply believe we spend too much time working as a culture. If you’re more efficient and focused, you can get your work done in smaller chunks and have the rest of the time for meaningful things with the people you love.
So I help leaders stay in that zone of genius, the areas where they love the work, it energizes them, they’re good at it, and nobody else will do it as well. That’s where leaders should spend their time. Then they should look at all the other stuff taking up their time and figure out how to get it off their plate, whether by automating it, handing it to someone on their team, or bringing on part-time fractional talent. Set up guardrails and tell yourself it’s okay not to work 40, 60, 80 hours. Not only is it okay, it’s more sustainable, healthier, and you end up growing a better business.
One benefit of fewer hours is you get more protective of your time. I’m less apt to take on the things I really shouldn’t be doing, the things I should delegate, because my time is so precious.
Christine: You have to learn to say no. Every yes to something is a no to something else.
Maddie: And we’re often geared to be people pleasers. My co-CEO had to talk me out of being so accommodating. People would have a certain number of hours each month, not use them all, then come back and ask, can I have that? And I’d say, sure. She said, Maddie, that stops. We’re losing $80,000 a month from people not using their hours. They signed up for the ability to use them. If they choose not to, that’s not our fault. That was a hard mindset shift.
There’s a lot in business, even the money stuff, where women are talking about the money pieces. When I started, another woman in business said, we’re going to talk money, because people don’t talk money, and you need to charge your worth. A friend said, you’re a Porsche, not a beat-up old car. Charge what you’re worth. Not being afraid to ask for what you’re worth and spending your time in the most impactful ways are some of the most important lessons.
Christine: I so appreciate this conversation. I feel like we have five more episodes to dive into. One more question before we wrap. What’s next, Maddie? You talked about stepping back. What’s on the horizon?
Maddie: For now I’m going to keep leaning into things in my zone of genius. Going on podcasts, going to conferences, meeting people, brand building. I’m not involved in the day-to-day running of my business. I have a co-CEO who leads all of that, and that’s not going to change. I loved it while I did it, and now that I’ve separated from it, I’m not going back. Other people can do it as well, if not better. Frankly, I got a little bored of it. I did it for a long time and I’m ready for something new.
I have lots of fantasies about other businesses I want to start. Some will wait until my kids are out of the house. I have two sophomores and a senior, and I want to treasure the time I have with them. I also help care for an elderly mother. Right now my zone of genius is these pieces of VChief and being a caregiver to the people in my life. In a few years it might look really different, and I might be starting all over with a new business and seeing more of the world.
Christine: I can’t wait to see what you build next. I’ll definitely be following you. For anyone listening who wants to learn more about your story, get in touch, or take advantage of VChief’s services, which I highly recommend, how do folks find you?
Maddie: Our website is https://vchiefs.com/vchief-team/maddy-niebauer/. That’s the best place to learn about our services. We still do chiefs of staff, and also COO, CFO, and HR business partner support. It’s easy to find out what it would cost. We’re really transparent. To stay in touch with me, I welcome connections on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/madeleineniebauer. LinkedIn is the best place for me. We’re on other social platforms, but that’s where I post most.
Christine: Thank you so much for your time, for sharing your story, your success, and your challenges. I so appreciate it, Maddie.
Maddie: Thank you.
Christine: Thank you, listener, for tuning in to FoundHer Rising. If today’s episode resonated with you, follow the show, share it with another founder, and leave a quick review. It helps more women find these conversations. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or learn more at HakkolaHorizons.com. Until next time, keep rising and keep building the business that gives you the freedom to live, lead, and create on your terms.
