Building a Business While Growing a Family with Rustic Wedding Chic founder Maggie Lord

Interviews, Show Notes

Building a Business While Growing a Family with Rustic Wedding Chic founder Maggie Lord

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The Nitty Gritty:

  • Why seeking solace in work and home life when your office is your home is really important
  • How she built a business that was truly a family affair
  • How her company grew due to her diligence to preserve her uninterrupted time for the highest priority tasks
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This week on the Profit. Power. Pursuit. podcast, I talk to Maggie Lord, founder of Rustic Wedding Chic, author and sought-after wedding expert, about the juggling involved with being a business owner and a parent. Maggie shared how she’s managed to build her business to what she dreamed it could be while at the same time following her passion to be the best mom she can.

Seek solace

It’s really important for moms to seek solace when they are on their mom duty and also within the business world as well.

– Maggie Lord

Maggie talked about how seeking solace is one of her secrets for balancing motherhood and entrepreneurship, one she also shared in an article featured in Forbes magazine. Since she works out of her home, her work and home life are constantly intermingling. When she sits down to work, it’s not just about carving out physical space, but also carving out space mentally to be focused on her business. Even something as simple as taking a shower and getting dressed for the day as if she was leaving the house to go to the office helped her create distinction when it was time for work. She also found that her breaks throughout the day when her mom responsibilities took precedence, allowed her to be a better entrepreneur.

Family affair

When Maggie and her husband started their family, business was booming. Instead of picking one over the other, she just created a plan that would work for her. Her young son became a part of the business, joining in on meetings and traveling to book signings. She’d pick locations for business travel where she had family or friends who could help her out.

People understand that you don’t have to give up one thing in order to be driven about something else. For moms and dads who think they have to choose one or another Maggie has this advice:

“It’s really your own game plan. You are the quarterback. You drop a play that works for you and your company. You will find the opportunities that work for you.”

– Maggie Lord

When she takes conference calls, she’s very upfront to explain that it’s possible a kiddo might wake up from a nap or need something from her during the call.

Maggie’s mom was an entrepreneur as well, so she had a good role model to know that you could make things work the way you want them to and it is possible to be a business owner and a good parent.

There is no way to have true separation when you have a family and own your own business, so you might as well find a way to mix the two together.

– Maggie Lord

Growing business and growing family

Maggie coined the term naptime entrepreneur to describe the way she used her precious uninterrupted time to propel her business growth. She upped her productivity level when her kids napped or were at preschool and focused on the most important—business building activities—to get done.

She decided to expand her website to include the Rustic Wedding Guide, a resource for couples planning their rustic wedding, because of the hundreds of emails she’d receive each month from couples who were desperately searching for rustic wedding venues and vendors. In the podcast, she explains her process of breaking a larger project into smaller, achievable pieces so you’re able to keep up with all your responsibilities and still grow your business.

Anybody who is trying to launch another project or a big project, break it up into pieces. It’s going to make you feel so much better and you can celebrate those little wins along the way.

– Maggie Lord

I hope you listen to the full episode to learn more about how Maggie juggles her demanding business with her growing family, how she’s built her team and what’s on the horizon for Rustic Wedding Chic.

Tune in to the Profit. Power. Pursuit. podcast each week to join me as I speak and learn something new from enterprising entrepreneurs who are building the businesses and lives of their dream. Just subscribe on iTunes.

Putting The P In Profit: Money Lessons From The New Economy

Interviews, Show Notes

Putting the P in Profit

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Welcome to Profit. Power. Pursuit., I’m your host, Tara Gentile.

Most weeks, I take you behind the scenes with a New Economy business owner and expose the nitty-gritty of what it really takes to successfully run and grow a digital small business today.

This week, I’m going to take some extra time with one of our 3 P’s: Profit.

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When my friends at CreativeLive and I started this podcast over a year and a half ago, we were determined to get real about the money stuff that comes from growing a company you love.

When you set out to build a company you love, it’s easy to put all the emphasis on doing the work, loving your customers or clients, and spreading your mission to the masses. But without getting clear about how the money works in your business, any progress you make in those 3 areas is sure to be short-lived.

I’ve dealt with my fair share of money issues over the years.

And it all started with my very first post-college job at the now defunct Borders Books & Music…

I worked my way up from a summer time, minimum wage job, to cafe supervisor and then on to sales manager for our $5m per year location. I was in charge of visual merchandising, events, bookseller training, even scheduling & HR.

For these responsibilities and the 50-60 hours per week I was expected to be at work, I was compensated $28,000. Now I had a lot of mixed feelings about this amount of money:

First, it was the most money I had ever earned week after week.

But second, it evaporated very quickly and made it hard to start my journey to financial independence.

Still, it seemed like what I deserved: I had a BA in Religion. I’d quit grad school before it started. I’d never worked on employable skills… I should be lucky to even have a full-time job!

It was that story that would plague me for years: I was earning what I deserved.

You see, about 5 years after starting at Borders, I gave birth to my daughter Lola and decided to figure out how to make working from home work. I figured that if there were other women out there working from home, I could do it too.

That’s when I discovered the New Economy and digital small business.

I saw coaches, consultants, social media experts, makers, designers, and writers earning a good living, doing work they loved, and staying home—either with the kids or on their own.

I was ready to claim my piece of that pie.

So I started my business with a local arts & crafts blog and hung up my shingle.

I earned some initial traction and that gave me the encouragement I needed to plow ahead. I bought a second website 6 months later and, thanks to getting creative with selling advertising, I started making more than I earned at Borders.

It was a huge victory.

But it wasn’t the revelation I ultimately needed to experience.

You see, between earning “what I deserved” at Borders and telling myself a story about how much I could ever hope to earn in my life as someone who had chosen work I loved over work that paid well, I had created a personal earning ceiling for myself.

When I started to “think ambitiously” about my goals, they topped out at about $40-50,000 per year.

All of the decisions I made about my business were based on those numbers: how much I could afford to spend on web hosting, how much I should charge for my time, how much I should invest in my own training…

Luckily, I got exposed to some amazing money mentors like Amanda Steinberg and Danielle LaPorte—more on them in a bit.

Through both their personal and internet guidance, I could start to envision earning more.

When I set a much, much bigger target on my business—$100,000—I learned my first big New Economy Money Lesson:

Setting Bigger Money Targets Exposes Bigger Problems

Maybe that doesn’t sound helpful to you—but I can assure you it is!

You see, when you set a much bigger money target, not only do you start to make new decisions about how much you charge, who you hire, or how you invest in new tools, but you start to see the structural and systemic challenges lying dormant in your business.

You realize you’ve run out of advertising inventory (my problem), or that your sales pipeline is nearly empty, or that, if you hit your target, you couldn’t handle the customer service demands.

You realize that your lack of earning ambition has limited your capacity as a business—and that means that you’ve limited your ability to make an impact, do the work you love, and love up on your customers!

If this story sounds familiar and you recognize that your limited goals have limited your business, I’d recommend going back to my interview with Corey Whitaker & Parker Stevenson from Evolved Finance.

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In that interview, they talked about the importance of having a budget that you’re working toward. In other words, it’s not enough to have a sales goal—you also need to know how you’ll spend that money.

By considering how you’ll spend that money, you’ll uncover the structural and systemic issues in your own business. You’ll see where you have opportunities to invest and sure up existing systems.

Most of all, you’ll start to see how the revenue you earn in your business can be used to grow your business… which leads us to our second lesson:

Separating Your Finances Isn’t About Saving Yourself From The IRS

I learned this lesson later than I should have which is probably why it feels so profound.

We all know—I hope—that we’re supposed to be managing our business money separate from our personal money. You have a separate bank account, separate credit card, and separate check book for each.

This makes your accounting easier and it offers some personal protection should anything go wrong.

But here’s what else it does: it reminds you that your business is separate from you.

When your finances are separate, you start to see how the money your business earns can be put to good use. Every expense, team member, or training opportunity isn’t less money in your pocket, it’s a chance to earn more down the line.

Now, that doesn’t mean I recommend investing everything back into your business! But it does help you become more objective about what’s yours and what’s the business’s and that will help you grow a more sustainable, stable, and wealth-building business in the long-run.

Now let’s shift gears a bit for our third lesson:

Negotiate

I am no master negotiator. I would much rather rely on simple price tags or tables to tell me how much something costs. I would also rather reply on a simple sales page and buy now button to tell you how much something I’m selling costs.

But I’ve learned to embrace negotiation—and if not the art of the deal, at least asking for what I want.

The first person who got me excited about negotiation was Kari Chapin. In fact, I interviewed her on exactly that subject early on for Profit. Power. Pursuit.

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The secret to negotiation, from in this novice’s perspective, is simply realizing that every day you are presented with an opportunity to ask for what you want: whether that’s brussel sprouts instead of fries, blue instead of orange, or 15% instead of 10%.

Stop feeling disappointed about the way things are. Recognize the opportunity. And ask for what you want instead.

Be polite, respectful, and detached from the ultimate outcome of your ask.

Also, know when it’s a deal breaker and when it’s not.

There are sometimes when it’s nice to get a few extra percentage points and there are times when it’s the difference between saying yes and saying no.

The more you practice, the better you’ll get—and the faster you’ll be able to spot opportunities and make decisions.

Also, check out friend of the pod Vanessa Van Edwards CreativeLive course: The Power of Negotiation!

That brings us to the fourth money lesson:

Cultivate An Investment Mindset

If, like me, you grew up in a household where money was tight, it’s likely that you didn’t see “investment” modeled as a way of getting ahead, building wealth, or tackling your mission.

My mom—now my COO—taught me that you could always find what you needed for the things that mattered most. But we just didn’t have the opportunity to plant seeds for future financial growth.

So I operated my business in the same way for a long time. Instead of looking at high-ticket expenses as planting seeds, they just looked scary and hard to overcome.

When I met Megan Auman, back in 2009, things really started to change. Megan grew up in an entrepreneurial family and she had seen what an investment could turn into.

So when the opportunity to spend thousands of dollars on a tradeshow booth presented itself, Megan didn’t bat an eye. She’s used savings, credit, and sales windfalls to finance big leaps forward in her business and it’s paid off handsomely.

Instead of evaluating every expense through the lens of “can I afford it?” what if you first asked yourself what the results of investing in it would be? Could you earn more? Save more time? Propel your business forward?

Not every investment pays off. And not every opportunity to spend money on your business is a good investment. But it pays to cultivate an investment mindset.

The fifth money lesson is:

Money Can Be Creative

Invite money into every aspect of your business. Don’t silo it away from the part of your business that’s authentic, connected, spiritual, or mission-driven.

Money is a reflection of or a stand-in for value. If you can’t connect to money or make it an authentic part of how you show up, you’ll have a hard time connecting to the value your company creates.

Embrace money and all your ambition around it so your whole business becomes more integrated.

I mentioned that learning from Danielle LaPorte has been a huge part of this lesson from me. As you can hear in my Profit. Power. Pursuit. interview with her, Danielle never shies away from speaking about currency and connection in the same breath.

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Her ambition is self-expressive and so is the way she plays with money.

And that leads me to our sixth and final money lesson for today:

Don’t Let Anyone (Including Yourself) Put Limits On Your Potential

And with this lesson, we come full circle. Whether it’s an old boss, a well-meaning but unhelpful parent, a partner, or your own anxious psyche, don’t let anyone put limits on the amount you can earn and the ways you can show up.

I talked about the dangerous ways limitations can affect our actions with Amanda Steinberg in my second PPP interview with her. And I talked about the more personal limitations that affect the ways we reach for our goals with Nilofer Merchant. Both interviews are must-listens as far as I’m concerned. They’ll help expose the limitations that are all around you so that you can consciously and intentionally bust through them.

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Bottom line: constantly evaluate what you think is impossible, not for you, or “too much.”

These have been just 6 of the money lessons I’ve learned over the years, through trial & error, through mentorship, and through the insider conversations I have right here on Profit. Power. Pursuit.

Learning about money, how we each engage with it, and what stories we tell ourselves about it is a continual and continually important step on our path to creating a real impact in the communities we operate in.

If you fail to get a handle on money or you fail to revisit your assumptions about money, your business will never have the impact it otherwise could.

That’s why I’ve set aside June 1, 2017 to examine how we talk and think about money as business owners.

We’re hosting a virtual conference, The New Economy & Your Money, over at CoCommercial, the business association for digital small businesses.

If you’re using the internet, social media, or any other facet of the New Economy to grow your small business, this conference is for you! The best part? You can participate absolutely free.

All you need to do is start your FREE 30-day all-access trial of CoCommercial today by clicking here.

Then, on June 1 you can join in the conversation with Amanda Steinberg, founder of DailyWorth & WorthFM, Mark Butler, founder of Budget Nerd, Jaime Masters, host of Eventual Millionaire, Jacquette Timmons, author of Financial Intimacy, and, of course, me!

We’ll be talking about:

  • How to create a business budget that helps you grow
  • How to make your money choices truly personal
  • How to have tricky money conversations with people you love
  • How to avoid overspending as you grow your business
  • And much more!

Again, you can participate free of charge in this all-day virtual conference just by starting your trial of CoCommercial.

Go to CoCommercial.co/money — that’s CoCommercial.co/money

Growing a Hands-On, High-Touch Business with Perfect Planning Events founder Tara Melvin

Interviews, Show Notes

Growing a Hands-On, High-Touch Business with Perfect Planning Events founder Tara Melvin

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The Nitty Gritty:

  • How duplicable systems keep things running smoothly
  • Why strong vendor relationships help Perfect Planning Events deliver
  • How to control the client mix so that you’re getting the business you want
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I learned a lot about what it takes to run a hands-on, high-touch business this week when I talked to Tara Melvin, founder of Perfect Planning Events, on the Profit. Power. Pursuit. podcast. As a wedding and events planner for more than a decade, Tara has developed deep relationships with vendors and created systems that help her deliver the high level of service her clients expect.

Systems and strong relationships

Build your vendor partners and treat them how you want to be treated.

– Tara Melvin

On average, Perfect Planning Events handles 15 to 18 events per year depending on the mix of full-service clients and the less time-consuming coordination-service clients. Tara is highly involved with the customer for 9 to 12 months. All vendor communication from the venue to the DJ funnels through Tara, so the bride, groom and their families only need to worry about the phone calls and emails coming from one source—Tara.

I’ve been in business for 13 years now and I have good, solid vendor relationships that when I call on them to get the support I need, I know they’re going to bring their A game whenever it’s time to produce events for my clients.

– Tara Melvin

To be a successful planner, you need to be highly organized, and so Tara has developed a systems-based approach that’s mostly electronic to keep herself, her team and her clients updated and on the right track. Tara uses Evernote to keep the flow of notes and ideas going even when she’s on the go, Outlook to schedule all her appointments and follow-ups, and gives each of her couples a client workbook with checklists, budget sheets and information that she developed over the years to make wedding planning simple and less stressful for them.

With her full-service clients, Tara has nine face-to-face meetings (this doesn’t include site visits) that last two hours each. They discuss any changes to the “hopes and dreams” for the event, payments that are due and progress with the planning.

Pricing strategy and client mix

Tara recently verified her pricing strategy: She wanted to be sure she was providing a fair price for her clients, but also wanted to ensure that she was being fair to herself. So, she tracked every email, phone call and hour she used from start to finish for a full-service client. It was a real eye-opener for how much time she spent with each client. From there, she calculated what she wanted to make annually and came up with a per-hour price for her services.

Tara always aims to get that full-service client. She won’t sign a client for just coordination services until its 6 months out from their wedding date. This allows her to preserve her time for her most desired service offering, but then she can fill in any of her open time and make additional income by offering just coordination services.  

Listen to the full episode to learn the secret to dealing with client drama with poise and professionalism, how Tara introduces her team to each project so that they can step in for her if necessary, how networking helped her make connections that built her business and what’s next for Perfect Planning Events.

Never miss an episode by subscribing to the Profit. Power. Pursuit podcast on iTunes where every week I talk to today’s entrepreneurs about how they are building their business and teams to create the lives of their dreams.

Why Physical Goods are the New Services with inkWELL Press founder Tonya Dalton

Interviews, Show Notes

Why Physical Goods are the New Services with inkWELL Press founder Tonya Dalton

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The Nitty Gritty:

  • How a physical product helps service providers create a more sustainable model
  • How Tonya tackles product development from idea to launch
  • How using your mission to guide decision-making keeps your focus
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This week, on the Profit. Power. Pursuit. podcast I chat with Tonya Dalton, founder of inkWELL Press who has made it her mission to “help women find peace through productivity.” As a former teacher, Tonya knew right from the beginning that education was going to be a big part of what she was going to offer in her business. She said the biggest compliment inkWELL Press can receive is when people tell them that they’re actually a service-based company that just happens to sell a fabulous product—journals and planners of all kinds.

Products Extend your Reach

Products are physical manifestations of services.

—Tonya Dalton

As Tonya shared organization and productivity strategies with those she coached, she wanted those people to have the right tools available so they could implement the strategies she taught. A physical planner had helped her stay organized and productive, so she set out to design her very own for her clients. The products themselves have become brand ambassadors of sorts, since a lot of their business is from referrals. Not only are people talking about inkWELL Press’s planners, they also talk to their colleagues and families about the systems and how they are being more productive.

“Having a product helps you reach people without you being in front of them. I’m still able to generate revenue, put forth my mission without me having to do every single bit of it,” said Tonya.

Products help service-oriented and digital businesses reach corners of the marketing world that they may have not been able to reach otherwise.

Product Development Process: Idea to Launch

When you’re creating your timeline, you need to account for things that you don’t really know.

—Tonya Dalton

The first product Tonya brought to market was the weekly planner; what she considers to be their cornerstone product. She starts off with a brainstorm and thinks about all the elements that should be included. Then, she goes into a thorough questioning process, asking friends, family and even strangers to see if the new concept resonates with them. This is an important part of the process, and one that’s sometimes skipped by those who are too excited by their own amazing idea, they fail to check to make sure others also believe it is amazing. From there, it goes into design, finding the right materials and vendors to help make her vision a reality. And lots of back and forth with samples and tweaking before going into full production mode. Equally important is to simultaneously build the buzz around your product. It’s not enough to just have a beautiful product. If you don’t have a marketing strategy in place, your beautiful product won’t get in the hands of your ideal customers.

We put a lot of time and energy not into just creating the product itself but actually creating the buzz and excitement around it.

—Tonya Dalton

Use Your Mission to Guide Your Decision Making

Although the way she achieves her mission may have altered slightly—she focuses first on productivity and then organization naturally follows—at its heart, her business has really stayed true to the mission she set forth initially. Her mission is the ultimate litmus test to determine her focus, what products she develops next and how her business strategies shift.  

Get all the detail of our conversation including how Tonya and her husband skimped and saved to launch their business, asked lots of questions and invested in training for the things they didn’t know how to do, how her podcast, The Productivity Podcast is a natural extension of her teaching and what’s on the horizon for the business by checking out the full episode.

We’d love for you to subscribe to Profit. Power. Pursuit. podcast on iTunes so you can get the nitty-gritty details on how to be a small business owner from today’s most innovative entrepreneurs.

From Wholesale to Brick & Mortar with Girls Can Tell creator Sara Villari

Interviews, Show Notes

From Wholesale to Brick & Mortar with Girls Can Tell creator Sara Villari

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The Nitty Gritty:

  • Why wholesaler Sara Villari decided to buck the trend and open a brick and mortar shop
  • How to determine what will really sell (Hint: It’s not about a pretty shop)
  • Why trust in the right people is crucial for a business to grow
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As we learned in this week’s Profit. Power. Pursuit. podcast, sometimes your business can be the exception to the rule. In 2006, Sara Villari began selling screen-printed products that featured her doodles through her online shop Girls Can Tell gift co. Her wholesale business grew thanks to the support of small businesses and boutiques that purchased her products. In 2013, Sara decided to buck the online retail trend and opened up her own brick and mortar shop in South Philly, Occasionette, to feature her entire line of products as well as products from hundreds of vendors. At first, it didn’t seem like a big leap, but it has since surpassed her first business in revenue and scope.

Patterns for Success

What became my retail shop Occasionette has eclipsed my first business by leaps and bounds.

– Sara Villari

Inspired by the patterns she recognized from shops who reordered from Girls Can Tell gift co. often and were really good clients, plus finding a fantastic location on East Passyunk Avenue with lots of foot traffic, Sara decided it was time to open a brick and mortar location. She saw that successful shop owners would pick really strong SKUs and they would order very deeply into those SKUs because they had confidence in what would sell. She recognized that the secret to success for Occasionette was understanding what would sell—a combination of knowing what’s a really good product at its core, what fills a need in the marketplace, what people are looking for and what’s on trend right now. If your goal is to make a lot of money, don’t create products that are a vanity project.

Evolution of a Team

Sara has surrounded herself with fantastic people who really have the best interest of her companies at heart—a partner and employees who complement Sara’s strengths and are passionate about things that she isn’t necessarily good at or cares about. Her team also has the autonomy to handle their parts of the business. Building this trustworthy team is the linchpin that allows Sara to juggle two businesses and to expand Occasionette to a second location.

In the full episode, learn more about Sara’s current team and the plans for her businesses, how she manages to nurture her creative side while balancing the demands of being an owner of two businesses, and how she divides her time between the two.

Every week, I get the nitty-gritty details about how small business owners develop products, build their teams and manage their time. Don’t miss a single episode of the podcast named by Entrepreneur magazine as one of the top 24 Exceptional Women-Hosted Podcasts for Entrepreneurs in 2017 and subscribe to Profit. Power. Pursuit. on iTunes.

Growing a Million Dollar Online Course Institution with School of Motion founder Joey Korenman

Interviews, Show Notes

Growing a Million Dollar Online Course Institution with School of Motion founder Joey Korenman

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The Nitty Gritty:

  • How it’s possible even when you’re successful to change direction and create something that works better for your life
  • What signals of success let Joey know he was on to something
  • How building a team allows you to focus on what matters most to allow for company’s growth
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A few years ago, School of Motion founder Joey Korenman, my guest on this week’s Profit. Power. Pursuit. podcast, had achieved what he thought would mean true business success and happiness. Instead he realized he was so busy climbing the mountain of success he thought he should be on, he forgot to summit the mountain of success he wanted to be on. We talk about the path Joey took to build a $1 million online course institution for motion designers in less than 3 years and some of the lessons he learned along the way.

If at first you don’t find happiness; try, try again

It was a little bit of strategy and a little bit of naivety.

– Joey Korenman

Joey seemed to be living the dream. He had opened his own studio with two business partners. His office was in the heart of downtown Boston with a client list that included ad agencies for some of America’s biggest brands. About two years in, a daily 3-hour commute, all-nighters and client pressure to perform regardless of what it did to his work/life balance, Joey looked up and realized he was depressed and needed to “figure out an escape hatch.”

When he started to consider the possibilities, he didn’t know his new business would be selling training. Joey started a blog (even though he knew nothing about digital marketing) to teach people motion design after seeing Greyscalegorilla, a business in his space, was blogging. At the time he built his website, he had no idea how he was going to make money. After a trial period developing and selling plug-ins for animation tools, Joey realized what he really wanted to do was teach.

The moment he knew he was on to something

If you can bring someone from their head space into yours they will follow you anywhere.

– Joey Korenman

While blogging, Joey was honing his entrepreneurial skills and learning through resources from Pat Flynn, Tim Ferriss and Jaime Masters. He knew there was a need in his niche for an intent 6-week long course for intermediate motion designers where humans would review the work. The only problem? It would take 3 months to create the course he imagined; in the meantime, he had to keep paying the bills.

So, he took a bit of advice from Jaime and he decided to pre-sell a course (yes, a course he hadn’t even created). He sent an email (the email content is included as a case study in Pat Flynn’s book, Will It Fly?) out to a list of approximately 4,000 he built and very authentically told them he was going to build the animation course he wished he would have had coming up and he was going to explain more in a webinar. The webinar sold out in 5 minutes. At the end of the webinar the beta version of the course sold out in 5 minutes, and he made $5 grand in 5 minutes. These were clear signs Joey was onto something.

Building a team

Joey took it slow when building his team by first hiring a part-time contractor in part due to his fear of “having another mouth to feed.” However, every time he’s unable to focus on the work that he should do to build the company—content production and products—he realizes it’s time to hire another resource. Once the right person has joined the team in the right role, their collective productivity soars. And as Joey becomes better at learning to let go, he is finding ways to manage quality control in a different way rather than being involved in every aspect of the business. 

There’s a lot more in the full episode including a conversation about confidence and authenticity, customer acquisition and how Joey’s team is focused on creating systems that will catapult them to a $3 or $4 million-revenue company.

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