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Show notes:

Business Questions:

How to hire an impactful team?

Think through what you truly need, hire based on your weaknesses, hire self-starters, automate your management, and tell people when they’e doing a great job.

How do you deal with people who talk over you? 

Ask every stupid question, don’t confront them in a group, and communicate the issue with them.

Any tips on getting funding, loans, etc.? 

We highly recommend saving instead of taking out a business loan.

What is the best way to grow a blog to 100K page views a month? 

Post regularly, have 50 quality posts, do long pinning on Pinterest, make sure your blog posts are answering questions, and make sure you are passionate about it.

What is the milestone for a blog to get ads to pay you?

100K page views per month.

How do you network online?

Be friendly!

How big are your small businesses? 

We have two small businesses: A Beautiful Mess (which has three full-time employees) and our app business, which has six full-time employees and four full-time contractors.

What is your biggest work regret? 

Elsie: Oui Fresh essential oils

Emma: Her blog series called Kitchen Basics

What are your tips for batch working?

Just try it and break down your tasks. Elsie wrote a post about how batch working changed her life.

What are the startup costs?

For a blog and Instagram, they’re free. Apps are $50,000 minimum and online classes are around $500.

How much do you invest? 

Look at what your business truly needs and get quotes, match 401Ks, and invest young in a retirement account.

How to make affiliate money? 

Consistently post affiliate links, post the same link multiple times, and use the LTK app (an app where you can store all your links). Here’s a link to the A Beautiful Mess LTK.

How to stay true to your goals when you are not seeing results? 

Give it time (six months to a year).

When to press through and when to throw in the towel? 

If you have been consistent for more than a year and are still not seeing results, then it might be time to throw in the towel.

How do you set social media boundaries? 

Plan strategic time, set your boundaries ahead of time, and stick to them.

How do you pay yourself? 

We get an annual salary, owner’s draws, and a retirement account.

-Emma’s birthday presents: puzzle table, personalized ring, this puffer jacket, and dip powder nail kit.

-Emma’s favorite TV show of all-time: Bob’s Burgers

-Elsie’s favorite comedy TV show of all-time: The Office

-Elsie’s favorite drama TV show of all-time: Mad Men

-Elsie’s favorite comedy TV show that is still airing: The Righteous Gemstones

-Elsie’s favorite drama TV shows that are still airing: The Handmaid’s Tale and Better Call Saul

Comment below if you want Elsie’s top 10 drama TV shows! xo.

Miss an episode? Get caught up!

• Episode #131: Reactions to 2022 Trend Predictions
• Episode #130: New Year, Same Me
• Episode #129: Favorite Things of 2021

Episode 132 Transcript

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Emma: You’re listening to the A Beautiful Mess podcast. Every once in a while we love to break free from our home and garden podcast category and go full-on business episode. Today we are here with business secrets. We compiled a list of secrets to share. It’s pretty candid and we hope you find a little nugget that helps you with your business. 

Elsie: They will. 

Emma: They will or just like, I don’t know, your life. I feel like a lot of business advice kind of can turn into life advice, but not that this is advice. Its secrets. 

Elsie: It’s secrets. It’s deep, dark. 

Emma: Dark, yeah. 

Elsie: It’s amazing. 

Emma: But first, personal segment.

Elsie: But first, Happy Birthday, Emma. So Emma had her birthday this past week and was it, Emma, was it the best birthday of your life? 

Emma: It was a typical late January birthday. So all my fellow January birthdays out there, you probably know, that it got ruined, as usual, by sickness or snow or something. That’s always how it goes with my birthday. Well, at least 50% of the time. But this year, my whole family got COVID. So we’ve just been home together. And it’s been actually cozy and fine but being sick and caring for a sick seven-month-old is obviously rough and scheduling to go get our test. Obviously, we’re not a daycare, obviously so just kind of taking turns, me and my husband, and you know. 

Elsie: Womp womp. 

Emma: That was kind of my birthday. I did get some really cool presents so I thought I would at least share a couple of those. 

Elsie: Yes, share your presents!

Emma: The most exciting thing was, Trey got me a puzzle table. I’ve been wanting to do puzzles, honestly had never heard of a puzzle table. Then when Trey got me one for my birthday, I was like, oh my gosh, I’ve never even heard of this and this is exactly what I needed. Now we like to do it at night and then put it underneath this little loveseat that’s in our bedroom closet room area. 

Elsie: That’s perfect. I think a puzzle table is an amazing gift. I want one. So yeah, you’ll have to link the one you got in your show notes if you can. 

Emma: That was the super, super exciting thing but a couple of other little things I got for my birthday, one I bought for myself, which is a small gold ring that says Oscar. I have this other ring that’s bigger but this one now goes with my engagement ring and wedding ring set. So it kind of all fits together. Then from our mom, I got a coat and also a nail polish powder dip kit. 

Elsie: Wonderful. 

Emma: You drip your finger in the powder. It’s really cool.

Elsie: Anyway, happy birthday. I know everyone wishes you would have a happy birthday and sorry, your whole family got COVID. We’re glad everyone’s healthy and recovering now. Okay, so I have written down here, business secrets, juicy or nothing. I just think that since we titled this episode, business secrets we owe them more than just a standard explanation to each question, what do you think? 

Emma: I’m not trying to take this personally, but I feel like you’re trying to tell me, Emma, I know your advice and your stories are going to be like, be consistent and good things will happen but like nobody wants to hear it. 

Elsie: No, that’s not true. I think that it’s more just that I want to say some things we haven’t said before. That’s what it is. Anytime you get business advice, it’s like you have to just filter that, like who you’re getting it from. You guys know, you’re listening to our podcast, our advice is like, it’s somewhat specific. It’s based on our life experiences. It applies or it may not. So yeah, take the nuggets that work for you, and don’t worry about the rest. That’s all I would say. So let’s start, so basically, we compiled like 15 or 20 questions. There were like subject lines so let’s just jump in. So the first one is how to hire an impactful team, which I liked how they phrased that. I think that hiring is an under like, whenever we do like Q and A’s and stuff, we don’t get a lot of questions about that but like hiring, communicating with your team, disciplining people or conflict resolution and firing, I think are the hardest parts of owning a business. So I think it’s a very good question. So what are some of your tips for hiring an impactful team?

Emma: The first one is probably definitely thinking through what you truly need. Definitely higher based on your weaknesses. You don’t really need a carbon copy of yourself. Sometimes we feel like, oh, that would be helpful if I just had one more of me. But think about what you’re really bad at, but still, like moves the needle in your business and find someone who can do that really well. That would be more impactful than just trying to photocopy yourself. Plus, you don’t want to like hire, basically, you’re having to do all the parts of your job that you hate still and you’ve hired other people to do the parts of your job that you enjoyed. Now all of a sudden, your job is just like, the sad parts and they get to do all the fun parts. You might feel a little resentful if you do that so don’t do that.

Emma: I think that that’s really solid advice. In the early years of our business, something that I know I struggled with was that I wanted to give people jobs that I thought they would like. It was hard for me to give people jobs that I knew they would hate and that is really difficult. Okay, my advice for hiring an impactful team. This is specifically for people who own small businesses, where you’re intending for your business to be small and stay small. The biggest thing that I think has helped our success is that we only hire self-starting individuals for our team. Everyone on our team can work for a whole week with no instruction from us. We do talk to them every day so I’m not saying that they don’t ask us questions, but they don’t need us. They’re able to make decisions. They know what they need to do and they continue working when we’re not around. If we go on vacation, if we’re sick, we have a lot of childcare issues, we both have young children, things like that, wheels keep turning when we’re not there. For me, that is like the number one most important thing because there are a lot of people who are talented and good at their jobs, who are not self-starters, who need a lot of instruction and a lot of check-ins, and a lot of one on one meetings, and that wouldn’t work for me as a business owner.

Emma: Yeah, that kind of plays into the next one that you had written down is supervising and managing others. I think that that exactly plays into that. At A Beautiful Mess, that’s the environment Elsie describes. We haven’t hired now in quite a while but when we do hire really, at both our companies, when I’m involved in the process, one of the things I asked about is kind of like, how much management do you need? Trying to figure out like, do you need a lot, and do we have the structure in place for that? At A Beautiful Mess, we don’t. There is no upper management. If you saw an org chart, organizational chart, it would be pretty lateral. There’s just not, you know, oh, this is the manager who talks to these people every single day, it just doesn’t really work that way, it’s too small. So we have to have people that are really happy to work independently, and very much can manage their own time without a lot of oversight. In other companies, that doesn’t work. Especially larger companies, there’s definitely space for more management and upper management but that’s not what we have at A Beautiful Mess so we don’t hire for that type of thing. So another thing I think people don’t think about is like, generally, when someone goes to hire, they’re like, okay, here’s the amount of money I have to pay someone, so I have to hire in that range. If it’s a low amount, you know, if you’re starting in your business, growing your business, you probably don’t have tons and tons of money to hire a massively experienced person or whatever. But one thing I would take into consideration and just think on how it can work for you is when you hire more entry-level people, so someone who doesn’t have a lot of experience in the workforce, maybe they just finished college, maybe it’s their first big job. They’ve never worked freelance before, like, this is really the first thing. Obviously, that’s a great place to start, they’re probably going to be very enthusiastic. A lot of great things about that but they are going to need a lot more training and management. So they could be cheaper on the salary scale but it’s going to take more of your time. If you don’t have that, you don’t have that resource because time is a resource. I think of it as a resource, just like money. If you don’t have that to offer them, then it’s not going to work. You’re doing them a disservice, you’re doing yourself a disservice. It’s not going to work out. You need to wait until you have enough salary budget that you could hire someone with more experience if you don’t have the time to do that amount of training and managing.

Elsie: I totally agree with that. So as far as communicating negative feedback, I found that the best way to do it is to kind of just like say it as plainly as you can and openly and then just sort of train yourself to get used to doing that and not making it a big deal, not making it a whole meeting. Just make it like a little note, like be able to send a little note that isn’t totally positive and let that be. That was hard for me at first. As far as managing other people, I think that just communicating the vision of what you want to see, for the season, or for whatever the next big project, that’s like really, really important.

Emma: I would also say like, along those lines with the communicating the vision, I think being really clear about problems you’re seeing, not necessarily with them, but like problems in the business, like things that you’re trying to solve. Being really honest about like, here’s some problems, I’m seeing that I’m trying to figure out a solution, can you help me solve these? Making it like, come along on my team, rather than I am up here, and I’m going to dictate to you what you need to do. It’s more like, well, here’s the challenges we’re facing as a team, how can we solve these? What ideas can you bring? What work can you bring? Here’s what I’m doing? Here’s what I’m seeing, you know, and just approaching it more collaboratively, I suppose. 

Elsie: I totally agree. Having a space like we do a once a month meeting, and for us once a month is the perfect amount. Everyone can like, you know, have a space to express their frustration or their challenge or the next big thing they’re working on. Say their main to-do list, get a little bit of like a pat on the back for something good you did. Then you just like, keep doing your work. I think that those little check-ins and ours is a group meeting, it’s not a one on one meeting, I honestly don’t think we could have a business if we had to do a check-in with every person every week, like a lot of businesses do. I think that would be too overwhelming for me.  I guess one of our tips is to sort of automating your management as much as possible, where it kind of goes on its own and you don’t have to be checking in, as little as possible. You have to find a way to make your business operate without all of those management hours. 

Emma: Then the only other tip I’d give, which I think to most people this is a no duh, but to a few people might not be, do tell people when they’re doing a great job. If someone’s done a great job for you make sure they know it. I also think, send gifts for their birthday. Everyone deserves a nice birthday so if anyone works for you send them something on their birthday. If they’ve been sick like just be a human. I do think it’s good to have some professional boundaries because I think when you’re working together you need to provide a professional environment. I think that’s on the owners to do and upper management, whatever. That being said, we’re still all humans who work together and spend a lot of time together, even if we work remote. So I think being kind and making sure that people know they’re appreciated is professional and also friendly but it’s a good thing to be thinking on and to spend some time on.

Elsie: Yeah, no, I totally agree. So the next question, I really like this question, is how do you deal with people who talk over you? So I think that this happens a lot to women, like from men in workplace environments and just in life. So actually, I learned, the advice I’m going to give, I learned it from Emma and I think it is the advice, so just do this and you’ll be good.

Emma: I can’t wait to hear it. 

Elsie: So early, early, early in our career, we were like setting up our retirement accounts and our investment accounts and trying to get our taxes all set up properly and like, figure out how much to pay. You remember we were just doing so many meetings in those days? Whenever someone says, talk over you, I’m assuming that that means like, you’re not like catching everything they’re saying, and like, I don’t necessarily think it means that the person’s being condescending on purpose. So the thing I learned from Emma that she always did, and now I always do is ask every stupid question. So it’s just like, raise your hand and ask the question and have no shame about it. There is never a question that is too stupid to ask. I feel like that is a key to success in life. If you go through a tax meeting and you don’t totally understand what you just heard, in a way, it’s kind of on you for not stopping them and asking. So that’s my best advice is just to like, you know, because sometimes people don’t even know and maybe sometimes people don’t want to treat you like you’re someone who wouldn’t know things. I think it’s okay to not be familiar with things. We all have areas in our life where we need to learn more facts, like no big deal.

Emma: Yeah, it’s not a big deal. It’s not a big deal not to know everything. Get over that for sure. So I guess when I read the question, too, I don’t know, this person situation but I was kind of imagining like a big team meeting at work. Where they have a lot of ideas that they’re excited to share but everyone kind of talks over them. I don’t know. I think, yeah, interrupting. That’s what I thought and I have no idea. Maybe it is more a situation you describe, I don’t have any idea. 

Elsie: Like the way, I’m not interrupting you right now. Like that.

Emma: Yeah, the person in my life, so here’s what I do for Elsie, who interrupts me all the time. No, I’m just kidding. That’s what I was picturing so like, that’s what I was thinking on. For those types of things, what I would say is, number one, don’t confront them in a group. Don’t confront them in front of other people. Wait till it’s just you two. 

Elsie: Don’t yell let me finish. 

Emma: Yeah, right. Don’t yell let me finish, especially in front of others. And the reason is the minute when a conversation like when someone becomes defensive, it’s over. It’s not going to be effective. If you’re like, Well, I don’t care if it’s effective, I just want to have my mic drop moment, well check your ego friend, because what you need is effective communication. The minute someone’s defensive, it’s not going to happen so wait, tell us just you two. If possible, I think talking is better than email or Slack or whatever. Sometimes that’s not possible so if you need to email or Slack or whatever, that’s fine, too. But if you can call on the phone, or see them in person, or video chat, that’s preferred. Do that, if possible, just the two of you. You approach the conversation, I would make it more again, try to get them on your team. Explain your point of view, I feel like you know, and I think it’s okay to talk about your feelings by the way unless you are a robot. But if you’re a human being, it’s okay to say how you’re feeling. If you’re like, I was really excited to share my ideas and I felt like you kept talking over me. 

Elsie: I think that works really well. 

Emma: It makes me feel like you’re not excited to hear my ideas or you might think that my ideas are not valuable. I just wanted to check in if that is how you feel. I think probably not, and definitely don’t come off accusing, but let them know how it’s affecting you, this situation. Then when you can bring it around to a place of I would love to be heard better by you so what can we do to make that happen? What can I do? What can you do? What needs to change about the situation for this to be better? Let them answer that, let them give you some ideas. What might happen is you might broaden your perspective on this person. You might be feeling like this person’s a d*ck, screw them. But it turns out in their family, they’re one of eight children and they were never heard. So they are used to if I have something to say, I gotta say it right away. Who knows, you might not know at all, where they’re from or what they’ve been through in their life. So it might broaden your perspective on their side of it. But also, it’s important that they hear your side and they understand where you’re coming from so that you guys can find a way together to solve this communication issue.

Elsie: Yeah, no group communicating is really difficult. I feel like I always either constantly interrupt, or I will never talk because I like don’t want to interrupt at all. So yeah, I think keeping an eye on people who are shut down and then also trying to have patience for people who keep talking. Those are both really challenging. I think just group projects are so challenging. So this one comes in a lot, and so I wanted to include it but our advice, might not be what you want to hear. I think we’re gonna give the genuine advice that we’ve given to our peers in private and things like that. So tips on getting funding, loans, etc. So our personal way that we do business, we usually bootstrap everything. We have very rarely gotten a loan before for a business venture. I would be very hesitant to get a business loan. I think it depends on your type of business. It depends on a lot of things so maybe this doesn’t apply to you. I think for someone wanting to do the sorts of things that we do in our career, I don’t think you need loans to do those things. I think that if you feel like the one thing holding you back from starting a small business is having a large amount of money in the beginning. I think that that might be a good barrier to conquer. That might be a good challenge for you. I don’t think you should get a loan unless you need one and have a good reason and a good plan. I think if you are having a hard time obtaining that then that also might be a sign that maybe, like a warning sign.

Emma: Yeah, we’ve also never raised funding. I feel like that’s a big topic in the media lots of times. So just a heads up, we’ve never done that, so I don’t have any advice because I’ve never done it. But I would definitely seek out friends who have done it and then maybe also, like, read some articles and books on it. But I can’t give you any advice, I’ve never done it. Yeah. So I did want to share one story. It’s not at all advice but since we’re doing business secrets. I don’t know if it’s a big secret, but I don’t think we’ve ever shared it on the podcast so I kind of wanted to do. 

Elsie: I’m so excited to hear what it is.

Emma: It’s about loans. So a long time ago, Elsie and I had a local store so we needed some extra money to buy all of this stuff, buy the business and we didn’t have it. So what happened was our dad, our parents, took out a second mortgage on their home and loaned us the money. We paid it back in full. We paid it on time but I’ll never forget that. Our parents just believed in us. Our dad is a very frugal man and he’s also extremely loving and took a massive risk on his kids doing something that they were passionate about and that was really, really sweet. I just kind of wanted to tell that story.

Elsie: No, I mean, from the perspective of our parents’ generosity, I think that it is one of the most endearing things and one of the things that makes me feel really bonded to my parents. That they believed in us during a time when we were honestly struggling pretty bad. 

Emma: He probably shouldn’t have given us that money. 

Elsie: So yeah, from the other perspective, he absolutely should not have. It is one of my personal regrets. I’m really grateful that we were able to pay it back and kind of just close that chapter but I regret asking my parents for money. I wish I wouldn’t have done that. I don’t think that it was the right move at all but I still am grateful that they believed in us, of course. 

Emma: Yeah, it meant a lot how much they believe in us and it still does. 

Elsie: That could have been bad.

Emma: It could have been really bad. Yeah, it was very risky. That’s what that’s why I was like, this is not advice. I’m just gonna tell a story. 

Elsie: It’s when we were having our store so it wasn’t a solid business. We paid it back with money we were making from other things from our blog. Probably the thing that saved us in that moment, was the ability to pivot through and be flexible on where our money was coming from. We weren’t so determined that it had to come from our store. Which was probably like the saving grace of the whole situation. Sorry, if I brought it down, but that is personally one of my big regrets of my life but I would do it for my kids for sure.

Emma: No, I understand. I understand. I mean, I’m not saying it’s advice. I also think that that’s that is one of the unfair advantages I have in life is, I have two parents who have always unconditionally loved me and told me so, and supported me. Sometimes people are like, Are your parents super, super-rich and gave you everything? And I’m like, no, but they gave me exactly what I really needed and I’m so grateful for it. So grateful. 

Elsie: 100%. We love you, Mom and Dad. Okay, so the next question is, what is the best way to grow a blog to 100k page views per month? Okay, so I’m assuming that this question was asked, because 100k page views per month if you don’t know, this is a qualifier to join certain ad programs where you can have ads running on your site, not a sponsored post, but like the ads that run in the sidebar all the time. Some of the better programs require that as the bare minimum. So I’m just sure that that’s why this person asked that question. 

Emma: Yeah, I think so. But I also just love that they have a specific goal.

Elsie: 100k a month, sounds like such a big number. I think it’s definitely obtainable. I think we can give good advice on this because it’s something we know. So let’s assume that you’ve already started your blog. I’m assuming you’ve already started your site. You have lots of content up. You’ve already been posting regularly. So that’s the first step is like, you have to have a site with content on it, lots of quality content. I would say if you’re looking for like a number of posts to goal for at first, like 50 quality posts. The goal for that if you’re just starting off. Then after that, what I would put my energy to and this depends on your category of course, but if I were me, and I’m writing like A Beautiful Mess, a home and food blog but it’s brand new, I would put my interest or my energy into doing a lot of Pinterest work to try to build up the 100k views. I think that there’s a really good opportunity there. So if you look at our Pinterest, A Beautiful Mess Pinterest, you’ll see this we do a ton of long pinning. A long pin is a sort of like a hidden image on your blog post. It’s embedded in our blog posts, but it’s not a part of our blog post. It pops up when people go to pin anything from the post as the first thing they see. What it is, is it’s sort of a collage of images that’s long, like a long skinny collage. It has words in the middle. It’s like a vertical collage. It’ll show several images from your posts so if you’re doing like a pizza or a room, you’ll show the ingredients and the finished pizza or several different angles of your room, and then it’ll have words on it to say, what it is that are kind of like appealing, sort of like a little clickbait. Like, best pizza recipe or cute living room idea, like things like that. Then when people go to pin, it’ll pop up for anyone who tries to pin from your site. Also, you can pin those yourself\. I would put a lot of energy into a schedule where you’re making these long pins and you’re pinning them consistently. Then you’re adding them to every single new post, what would you do, Em?

Emma: I agree with all of that. The other thing I would say along with what Elsie is saying, and I don’t know where this person starting from so I just want to make sure that this is super clear, with blogging, your goal is a little bit different than some of the other influencer areas like Instagram or Tic Tok or whatever else, Twitter, I don’t know. So what you’re aiming to do is cultivate your loyal following but also you’re really looking to answer questions. So when people are googling something on the internet, you want to be the result that pops up in the category that you know about that you work in. So if you’re a home blogger, you want to be the website that pops up when somebody types in how big of a rug should I buy? How long should my curtains be? Whatever these common questions are that people have that they’ll go to the internet for, you want to be the person that pops up. If your food, you want to be the person who pops up when someone types in how do I air fry salmon. I wrote something like that a couple of weeks ago. That’s kind of the goal with blogging is it’s not just about entertainment, it’s not just about sharing your personal life, it’s about adding value to the internet. So answering questions that people need answers to that might be super simple things. That might be more complicated things. It might be a very specific, very niche or niche, or it might be broader. It really depends on what you know, and what category you’re working in. You shouldn’t be blogging about something that you’re not passionate about and something that you don’t know anything about just because you think it’s going to get pageviews. That’s not a great way to go about it. You want to work in an area that you’re passionate about and knowledgeable in and growing your knowledge all of the time. 

Elsie: When people ask us, how do you never run out of ideas, the reason why is because we’re staying in categories that were genuinely interested in. It’s just like the years go by, and we keep learning new things and having new things to talk about and more projects and it’s natural. Good luck on the 100k page views. I think that’s a great goal. The next question kind of plays into this. It is what is the milestone for a blog where you can get ads to pay you? I do think the answer is kind of in the realm of 100k pageviews, which is per month. I think that having a sponsor choose you, I think can happen earlier for people who have excellent photography, and a really compelling personal style. Because the brands are just like wanting to use your pictures, especially if they’ll be able to use your pictures on their own ads or things like that. A lot of people who have next to no following can get sponsors for those reasons. By the time someone’s choosing your blog and sponsoring you just for the eyeballs on your site, I think it will be probably more than 100,000 page views per month. The next question is how to network online. It says I can’t attend conferences right now. I don’t think you really need to attend conferences ever as a networking requirement. We’ve been to lots of conferences before and I can’t think of anyone relationship we have that is specifically from a conference.

Emma: No, I’ve met a lot of people at conferences. If you can go to a conference, I like it, I would do it but that’s just not the world I’m living in right now.

Elsie: Well, but I will say, you don’t need them. If you can’t, you don’t need it. I think just being freaking friendly. That’s what I would say like networking, a big part of networking, is just being a friend to people. Leaving them comments, leaving the messages, being nice, being complementary, being there to help people being willing to post about other people’s things and support other people, even at moments when you don’t have anything to gain for it. A lot of our important relationships were built that way. 

Emma: I agree. Another little one, that’s not necessarily something they’ll even see visibly. So this is more like, not so much networking I suppose, as just like being supportive. When I know I’m about to buy something, I’ll see if any of our friends have affiliate links. I think that’s part of networking is talking and sending comments and promoting others but it’s also like literally being supportive, even if it’s unseen at times.

Elsie: I think supporting your friends, like your network, and then including people in your network who haven’t necessarily done anything for you, that is all totally worth it. How big are your small businesses? How many full-time and part-time employees do you have? So if you don’t know, we have two small businesses. The first one is A Beautiful Mess, which you know because it’s A Beautiful Mess podcast. We have a blog and we have three full-time employees. Our other businesses are kind of two businesses but our app business, how many full-time employees does it have?

Emma: It has six full-time employees, and then a number of full-time contractors. I think four more full-time contractors so 10 total.

Elsie: The next question, we always get this one, and I never know how to answer it. Your biggest work regret, any whole projects that you regret? Obviously, like our, we’ve talked about our small shop business. We had two shops in our hometown. I mean, we shouldn’t have done them and they were not successful, but I would never regret it. I felt like at that point in my 20s, it was something that I definitely needed to get out of my system. It was a life experience that I deeply value and I’m glad that I have. So I guess for me, maybe I kind of wish that we wouldn’t have done, I’m gonna say the essential oils. The reason why, so if you don’t know, we did a side brand called

Oui Fresh for like, five years, something like that, and it started off with like t-shirts and stuff. Then we added some beauty stuff and it kind of went lots of different directions. We made some sunglasses, and then they got copied by Urban Outfitters and Target so we stopped doing them, which is fine. It overall was not a big success and overall, it was kind of a big distraction. I think that’s why I was hesitant to do it again in the future is that unless we were willing to pivot our whole career, which we definitely weren’t to focus on, I don’t think we could make an essential oil business. I don’t think we could give it what it needed to have to grow and be something. I think it was just sort of like an interest that we had and I think lots of people are gonna relate with that. I have so many interests, how do I pick which one to focus on? It’s like, choosing what you focus on is such an important decision. 

Emma: Yeah, no, I totally get what you are saying about that.

Elsie: I love essential oils. I mean, like nothing against oils in general.

Emma: No, the products we made, I loved. For me, the thing would be long, long time ago, many moons ago, would have been like 2010 or 2011.I don’t even know, early days of blogging, I started this little series. So I’ve always loved food blogging, and it was called Kitchen Basics. Okay. My idea with it was I just wanted to do some of the simple, very basic recipes that like I had Googled before because I didn’t know how to make them. 

Elsie: I remember, it was like how to make mayonnaise, like things like that. 

Emma: Well, that’s kind of complicated but yes, yes, it’s things like that. It was like how to make whipped cream, how to make pesto, how to make fettuccine sauce, like things that are relatively basic. I felt that they were things that I had looked up until I knew how to do them and I’d kind of learned little tricks along the way. I thought it would be an interesting series. Anyway, I did three or four of them. Each time I got feedback from some of our readers at the time, who kind of said like, this is really boring, or this content already exists, you should do something original. I can’t believe you’re not doing anything original. I really took all the feedback to heart and what I wish I had done at the time, and I’m not blaming them, what I wish I had done at the time that was my shortcoming is I wish I had taken in all of the data. So instead of just those few comments, if I had looked at our Google Analytics and our page views had been like, well is this content being seen? Is this being sought out? Is it helpful to someone? Maybe not to these particular commenters, but generally, is someone enjoying this content? I think I probably would have seen that actually, relative to all of our content, it was helpful. It was something that people were looking up and asking for, like Googling and things like that. What I learned from that experience that I’m like, looking back on now is like, I really don’t like to read reviews too often. It’s a tricky thing, because it’s like, I want to hear from our audience and I want to take in the feedback because I want to create stuff that’s valuable, and that people like, obviously. Also, sometimes you’re listening to a very small minority that’s just fairly loud and you need to take it into the bigger picture and take in all of the data, all of the feedback, not just the loud minority part.

Elsie: Alright, the next question is batch working. This person says it feels impossible to me. Well, if it feels impossible, it probably means that you haven’t tried it yet. I think batch working is surprisingly simple. I think if you will just set aside one day to try it and try to do whatever you normally do. For me, it would be a blog post, do what you do. I know that normally if I don’t try one blog post in a day is good for me. But if I try to batch work, I can do three in a day. So I would try to do three. Just try it. Seriously, I’m not sure if this person’s listening but if you do, send me an email, and let me know what you think because I’m very curious to hear. I think that everyone should try match working, even if you have to tweak it, even if it’s not perfect for you, and you do it in your own way. I think there’s value there for everyone.

Emma: Yeah, I would say that too. If you tried it one time, and it went poorly, try another time, because most of the time when I try something new, it goes poorly. So definitely, give it a few more shots. Then the other thing I would say is to make sure and I don’t know this person situation, but make sure that you’ve really broken down your task so that you can batch work, because that’s really the key to it, is it’s actually a kind of a lot of planning and thinking through what it is you need to do before you can really get started. So like you may need to really break down whatever the tasks are so that you can do all of one portion of it at a time depending on what it is that you’re needing to do.

Elsie: That’s true. I mean, not everything in life can be batch worked or needs to be but I think that when you find things that can, it can be immensely helpful for a business. Okay, the next question is startup costs for different things for context, ie, a blog, Instagram, app, online class, etc. So I’m just gonna rattle this one off really quickly because it’s just relative, and it’s just money. This is just our experiences, someone else can have a totally different price. To start a blog, I think should be free. I think you should do it yourself. Maybe a couple $100, maybe you get the whatever the fancy WordPress is and so the basic one or something like that, you can use templates. I think if you want to hire a person to design it, then set a budget that feels comfortable to you and do that. I don’t think that you need to have any kind of big substantial amount of money set aside to start a blog at all. Instagram, same. I think that a lot of people stop themselves. They don’t realize that it’s actually just an excuse, saying I need to have this kind of camera, I need to have money to buy clothes every month, or I need to have money to buy supplies. You can start any of these things for free. Actually not an app. Apps are expensive. So starting an app – $50,000 minimum, $100,000 normally, would you say? They’re very expensive.  How much do you think that you should set aside if you want to start an online class?

Elsie: I would set aside at least $500, just so that you can get a couple of things like you might need a couple like plugins for your website, and just some different things like that. A little bit of marketing.  I would say something like that would be a good budget to think on.

Elsie: Yeah, most of these things you can start for minimal amounts of money. Apps are different. I think it’s good to just like say the real price, though, so that people don’t get down the line and think that they can do it for like $5,000 or something. The next question is how much do you invest? 

Emma: So I don’t think of it as a percentage like, oh, here’s the gross of what we’re going to make this year, the gross revenue, o 20% of that we’re going to reinvest. You could think of it that way. That’s one option. I think of it more like what are our goals for the year and how much will it cost to do them? You could also break that down by quarter if you needed it or every six months. So I think a bit more like, what is it I’m trying to do? I’ll go get quotes for it, and then figure out, can I do that this year? Can I do that this quarter? Things like that.

Elsie: So in our business, we do the 401k match, that’s done and we do like the maximum. Then in my personal life, I would say investing for retirement and for the future is definitely my biggest budget line item. 

Emma: Yep, us too. 

Elsie: Part of that is like being like for me, almost 40. So if you’re like 25, and you’re hearing that, and you’re still getting started, don’t feel anything about that. Except for like, wow, she’s old and I’m in the part of my life where that’s like a comfortable thing for me to do now.

Emma: But I would start as 25 or even younger, definitely do go ahead and start a retirement account of some kind or something with the compounding interest because you have so many more years than we do at the current moment for that compounding interest to like work in your favor. So do start that, but if that’s all you can afford to do at that stage in life, you’re doing great. Do that and start there.

Elsie: Yes, yes. So how to make affiliate money? My favorite question. So I remember at the beginning of 2020, one of my blogger friends gave me sort of like a pep talk, they were like, you could be easily making double the affiliate money you’re making now. You just need to do these things. We started doing them, and it did work. So I’m going to tell you what it is. Our affiliate money makes definitely more than six figures a year and it is a good part of our business. It’s not our main income by any stretch, but it’s a good solid income in the business. Yes. 

Emma: Elsie is going to tell you the steps that we followed to how to do that, before she does, I kinda just want to point out that what she said right there, that right there is kind of the power of networking, and why you should be networking. Also why if you have a friend who you see could use your advice, something that you’re good at, give it to them because this friend gave us this advice and it was super, super valuable to us. It’s a friend we’ve cultivated over the years but that’s networking. It’s like you should be giving and you should also receive like it’s a two-way street and this is the great part of it. Anyway, tell them the tips, show them how to make the affiliate money. I’ll stop now.

Elsie: I totally agree. They paid it forward to us and I’ll pay it forward to you. The first one is just to consistently post affiliate links and that is very friggin obvious, but we didn’t use to do it. Now we post affiliate links, basically every day, on our blog and on Instagram somewhere there will be some kind of affiliate link. We normally post a lot of the same things over and over. That’s another tip is that I didn’t know that it’s much better to post about the same types of things over and over than to post something different every time. So I think that in the past, I had the impression to post affiliate links every day, I would need to make a whole new shopping collage of all different items that I found from God knows where and it’ll take forever, and I’ll have to research them and find them. It’s so annoying and I don’t want to do it. It’s really not like that. It’s more like we have certain staples. We have are things we use in our office or things we wear or things we use for home stuff or things that are good for work or makeup, anything. Any kind of everyday thing. We post about it over and over and over all year long. The last tip is to actually use the LTK app, it is worth it. It’s an investment upfront of time. It feels like our first year, I’m not gonna lie like it felt like we were wasting some time on it but now that we’ve been doing it more than a year, it feels more than worth it. Over time it becomes its own source of income, its own plate because it’s like a shopping app. People will know that they can always go to that page for all your links. So it’s kind of just like a hub for all this work that you do throughout the year. It’s very worth it to use it. But I think that if you want to make affiliate money, you just need to consistently post about things that you really use and like throughout the year and just keep doing it and you will make money from it. The next question is how to stay true to your goals when you’re not seeing results yet. Anytime you start something like I have a lot of friends who have put their last couple years into Tic Tok and now it feels worth it to them, nothing feels worth it in the beginning, nothing. Like blogging, Instagram, any of these things are, you put in the year, and then maybe you start to see results. Even if you have an audience to start with, like our podcast, for example, we definitely put in like a year of making basically no money, and it was worth it. I actually love podcasting. But my advice is to give yourself a time limit of you don’t worry about results, like six months to a year, those are good amounts of time. A few weeks or a month, that to me is not enough for a major goal, like building a small business or building a new platform. You need six months to do that of consistent hard work.

Emma: I would also say like, especially in the beginning, you will need to kind of check-in on your progress, obviously. If you’re trying to build your blog, you’re trying to get those 100k page views. You’re going to be checking in on your blog back end or Google Analytics, whatever you’re using to track your pageviews and your metrics. So you’re going to be seeing that fairly often. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend not looking at it. But I understand that when you do and you’re not seeing the results you want, you’re going to feel discouraged. So what I would try to do is as much as you can try to change your mindset to one of just curiosity. Be like, oh, this performed better than I thought, I wonder why? Oh, this performed much worse than I thought, instead of feeling sad about that just say, oh, I wonder why. As much as you can, I know that surprise sounds like so like, oh well, that’s easy to do or well, that’s cheesy, I get it. But just try to change your mindset to total, just curiosity. Then I’d also say when you have those moments of discouragement, it’s okay to feel unsure of yourself. We all feel that. Elsie and I feel it all the time, you might look at us and think that we’ve arrived somewhere, I don’t know where you think we’ve arrived, but you might think that, but I promise you, we feel a lot of unsureness and not sure that the thing we’re doing is worth our time, not sure it’s going to work out. Do we look like idiots? Everybody goes through those feelings. It’s okay if you feel that, but don’t necessarily let those feelings derail you if you’re still in the period where you need to be letting something grow. You don’t need to feel bad for feeling that but don’t use it as anything actionable. It’s just for a while a feeling and then just let it come in your front door, and then leave. It’s not a houseguest that needs to live with you.

Elsie: That’s nice. I like that. The next question is kind of a similar thing, knowing when to press through and when to throw in the towel. So I think that this one, I think that we’re uniquely qualified to answer this question because we have quit a lot of businesses that we started. I think that knowing when to pivot and when to quit, when to let something go, instead of hanging on to it as like a part of your identity is a strength. I think that quitting too early, or somehow finding an excuse not to really put yourself out there and try in the first place that is like a tragedy. So it’s two very different things. It is hard to tell the difference. But I would say if you have been consistently working hard at something for more than a year, and you know that you have put in your best effort. You cannot find a path to make it into what you need it to be, like if you need it to be a job that makes money. You need it to grow this much more before you can do this milestone or whatever. If you know that, like that path sort of like isn’t there. You have already done all the steps, I’m not saying that you’re someone who’s done it for two months. You’re someone who’s done it more than a year, consistently, and put in your best, then I think it’s okay to be like, okay, that didn’t work, and to just move on and just let it go. Nothing is ever a waste even if you but sometimes when you can’t find a way to make money at something you do need to move on and pursue something else in a career sense. 

Emma: Yep, I would agree. 

Elsie: Social media boundaries. I want to grow my Instagram, I think this person was talking specifically about a business Instagram, but I don’t want it to be my whole life. So our Instagrams 100% are not our whole life. I don’t have boundary issues anymore at all with what I put on Instagram. I basically never put something on there that I regret and I don’t think you have to either. So it’s a myth that you have to share every bit of your day or you have to be on there all the time to grow. That’s not true. I think that you can definitely do it with a strategic 30 minutes or an hour a day, whatever you want to set aside and whatever you want to put into it. The most important thing is that you’re creating valuable content and you’re on there consistently. If you’re doing those things, it’ll probably grow. I think that feeling like you have to be some kind of a slave to it is a weakness, it’s not a strength.

Emma: I think too, like, this is just sort of a tip for boundaries, generally I suppose. but just set them ahead of time. Like, oh, I’m not going to post about my children, maybe that’s your boundary. It’s not for some people, maybe it is for you. Just set your boundary and then stick to it as best you can. There may be a time something has to kind of shift a little bit but just know what your things are, and then stick to them and then see how much you can grow within the parameters that you’ve set for yourself.

Elsie: Yeah, I completely agree with that. So how do you pay yourselves? Do you pay additional dividends, retirement, etc? How do you decide how much to pay yourself? Okay, I’ll let you explain this, Emma.

Emma: So Elsie and I work out A Beautiful Mess and the name of our business is Red Velvet Art, LLC. It’s not actually called A Beautiful Mess, that’s a DBA. We receive a salary, an annual salary that we pay all the normal taxes for as employees of our company. We have an S-Corp. We also receive owner draws so that’s dividends. I think those are essentially the same thing, although it’s possible, there’s a slight difference depending on how you file as a business so we have those. We also have retirement accounts as we’ve already mentioned in this episode. We have a group retirement account that all of our employees are welcome to join and they all have. Elsie and I are also in that retirement account and our company does a match for all of the employees including us so we also have that. At our other business, we do not work there full time. We don’t draw salaries. We only receive dividends based on profits. So if the profit goes down, we get less money. If the profit goes up, we potentially get more money unless we want to reinvest it, which we often do if we want our company to grow. So in a nutshell, that’s where it is. How do we decide those amounts? Really, how we decided it was we talked to our accountant who we have worked with, from really the very beginning and we’re very good friends with him, and we trust him. So it’s a trusted adviser who basically has more knowledge and experience in this area than we do.

Elsie: Okay, so we have a listener question. Oh, this has nothing to do with business. Alright, so we’re moving on now. It is, what are your favorite TV shows of all time? What a question! What a great question.

Emma: I really have one top of all time favorite TV show. I have other ones that I love and rewatch, but I really have one. That’s like my number one. rewatch it all the time, love it so much, really need to buy some merch. Okay, and it’s Bob’s Burgers.

Elsie: Yeah, I know you were gonna say that when you said the merch. 

Emma: They have a movie coming out this year and I’m so excited. I love Bob’s Burgers.

Emma: I’ve never even watched it before because you know, I like don’t like adult cartoons. 

Emma: It’s so sweet. It’s so wholesome and so funny. I love it so much.

Elsie: Okay, I love TV. I love TV. But I find this question very intimidating because like, of all time, that’s just a lot. But I will say, of course, my favorite comedy of all time has to be The Office, The American Office because it is great. We do watch it pretty consistently. If I had to pick one favorite drama of all time, I’m gonna go with Madmen, because I just have to. I could probably do like a top 10. Tell me if you guys are into that and I’ll come back with that but I’ll have to agonize a little bit. My favorite TV show that is still airing is a tie is The Handmaid’s Tale and Better Call Saul like dramas. Then my favorite comedy that is still airing is the Righteous Gemstones. So I think I narrowed that down to like five. 

Emma: That’s pretty good. 

Elsie: Which the new season is so good. Well, thanks so much for listening. Join us next week for our cliche advice episode. It’s going to be so much fun. We’re going through all of the most often repeated common advice mantras and you can give them a thumbs up or a big thumbs down. See you next week.

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I love Abbey’s story and her enthusiasm is inspiring! If you are looking for a flexible career change, you might want to check out this FREE training her team offers. And if becoming a VA isn’t for you, you might still want to check out her site or sign up for her newsletter because Abbey and her team are excellent at marketing—and we talk a little about that in our interview as well.

You can stream the episode here on the blog or on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, and Stitcher. You can find the podcast posts archive here.

You can learn more about The Virtual Savvy or follow them on Instagram here.

Miss an episode? Get caught up!

• Episode #86: The Best Business AND Life Advice We’ve Ever Received
• Episode #85: How To Add Personality To A Cookie Cutter Home
• Episode #84: Home Project Updates + Naomi Davis Interview

Episode 87 Transcript

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Emma: You’re listening to A Beautiful Mess podcast. Today I’m doing a mini episode with Abbey Ashley of and The Virtual Savvy. I love her story, it endlessly inspires me. She started out, she was having her second child and needed to find a way to make money from home. She became a virtual assistant and now she runs a virtual assistant teaching basically empire, where she teaches lots and lots of different people to do exactly what she did. And as you can imagine, in 2020, her business boomed and it had already been killing it. So we’re going to talk with her today, hear more about her journey. And she’s super inspiring. And I can’t wait for you to hear our interview. All right. So the first thing I wanted to ask you, in case any of our listeners don’t know, is what is a VA, what is a virtual assistant?

Abbey: The very good question. So a virtual assistant is any kind of remote freelancer that helps with administrative, creative or technical tasks. So kind of think of it like a small business. Instead of hiring an admin to come into a physical office to do tasks for them, you would hire somebody remotely to help with social media posts or blogging or invoicing or some of those tasks that need to be handed off in a business. A virtual assistant can do those tasks for a business owner remotely.

Emma: So typically, do VAs work for small businesses or do even like large companies tend to employ VAs? I know you work with lots of different students. So you’ve probably seen a lot of different situations. And I’m just curious who is employing all the VA’s?

Abbey: Right. I would say that the majority of people who are hiring virtual assistants are small business owners. So people either in that startup phase or maybe in that like six or even seven figure mark in their business. But more like solopreneurs, there are businesses, bigger businesses for sure. Companies even, I think as virtual assistance is becoming more of a known industry that are starting to hire virtual assistants or even a lot of VAs end up going on to specialize. And they’ll become a Facebook ads manager or a Pinterest manager. Right? And I think that especially for those specialties, that bigger companies are starting to realize, oh, there’s a real value in hiring these specialists to come in on a contractor basis. And so a lot of companies are starting to hire VAs or specialized freelancers as well.

Emma: That’s kind of what I was wondering is it seems like it would be a great path to kind of get your foot in the door to become maybe a social media manager or some other different areas that VAs tend to cover, which I think is really cool, because sometimes you you know, you don’t know how to get your foot in the door in certain arenas unless you start your own thing. And for some people, that’s just not what they want to do. They don’t want to be, you know, have their own social account that they have to manage first. They want to do it for someone else and learn the skills and all that, which I think is awesome. And typically, when you started out as a virtual assistant and then the students you now teach, is it usually you own your own business, you are a sole proprietor or start as an LLC or whatever you want.

Abbey: Yeah. So that’s mainly what I teach. Now, there are companies out there that will hire you as like an employee to work for their bigger VA company. That’s not necessarily what I teach people how to do. I think that most of us have the skills and to start our own business, we just kind of need that step by step path is like, oh, OK, I need to for my LLC or I need to get this certain license because it’s required in my state or whatever it may be. We need that path. But once you do it, it’s, you know, we are skilled people. I think that most of us discredit our experience and our background and we don’t realize that we really do have skills that small business owners could be using. And so, yeah, most people, you know, it’s pretty simple to set up a LLC or just to start out as a sole proprietor and you can start your business with the skills that you already have. And I love I love that so much because like you said, it can be such a stepping stone. And some people start their virtual assistant business because they want to homeschool their kids and make an extra couple hundred dollars a month or whatever. But then there’s people who go on to build these full blown out agencies. I know somebody who has 60 subcontractors underneath her, like she’s grown this massive agency or, you know, somebody is growing a blog, which, as you know, can take time to really gain some traction with, to start making some some really good income with. It’s an awesome opportunity, but a lot of times people will, you know, the skills that you’re already learning by starting your own blog or by writing a book or whatever it is your big dream is, a lot of those skills could be used to help other people in their businesses so you can make money with services in my opinion, pretty quickly, I think it’s one of the fastest ways to make money online while you are building relationships, while you are establishing your traffic for your blog or whatever it may be. I just think that it’s a really great stepping stone for a lot of people. But then again, some people it’s not a stepping stone and they just they live there and they they expand these huge businesses just as a VA. So a lot of opportunities there.

Emma: Well, tell me more about what your life was like, like your journey when you became a VA, because now you teach and you have this whole little empire. And I admire it so much, but you start out as a virtual assistant. So tell me more about that, because I love what you just said about how we probably already have skills that could be useful that we could be using to make money or side income for our business. So where were you at when you started with that journey?

Abbey: Definitely so, I had no idea what the VA was. I’ll just go ahead. So if this is the first time you’re hearing about virtual assistants, it’s OK. You’re in — you’re you’re in good company. So, you know, I was actually pregnant with my second child. And it’s…I know you’re pregnant right now. So there’s like this I don’t know, there’s like…

Emma: Panic (laughs)

Abbey: …waves, Yeah, number one there’s panic (laughs). But number two, this was my second also. But like, I would get these waves of, like, being super tired and then super, like, energized and productive and like, oh, I could conquer the world at building a human! (laughs) So anyways, I was I was pregnant with my second child at the time and I, you know, was just really needing to find a good, reliable way to make money from home. I had previously, I was an I was a academic advisor for an online university. So I kind of had some experience in the online space, but not really. I mean, I was helping kids with like their class schedules and not really anything transferable to small businesses. And I had nannied for a while. I try to start other businesses like I did this thing where I would like invite people over and we would do like these freezer meal parties, but like with two kids running around, that’s not going to be really that great of idea. I would like find jeans at thrift stores and sell them on eBay like I did all these little side hustle things. But none of them really grew to be substantial and none of them were super flexible. Right?

Emma: Right.

Abbey: If they still needed a certain amount of time and I had to go to the post office to send off the jeans or whatever. And so a friend actually suggested she said, “hey, my sister in law is a virtual assistant. Have you heard of that?” No, I haven’t. So that night I just did what most of us do. And I spent till three a.m. googling everything in the world about virtual citizens. And the more I read and the more I learn, this is back in twenty fifteen. So there was there was quite a bit of information, but definitely not as much as there is now. But I just devoured everything I could find and I thought I could do this. The more I started reading the descriptions and while I didn’t have virtual assistant experience, you know, I had, I had gotten a degree in marketing, which may maybe helped me. I was at least interested in small business and entrepreneurship. Right. And I thought this could be my thing. And so I literally started calling myself a virtual assistant. The next day, I got some business cards and I was living in the…yeah I was like let’s just do this. Right. Yeah, go set. Ready is like one of the things my family and I, we say all the time, we’re like, let’s just let’s do this, we’ll get set and ready along the way. And so just kind of jumped in. And I was living in the Washington, D.C. area and so there were some local networking events. So I’m showing up, you know, eight, nine months pregnant to these networking events, handing out my business cards and got clients really quickly. Honestly, I was literally typing on my hospital bed to my clients, like I’m going to be out for a few weeks, maybe not the best time to start a business, but that’s what I did. It was really great because I you know, I got that freedom. I got that flexibility. And within a few months, I ended up having so much work that I was able to employ other basically moms at the time to help me with some of the extra work. So I had subcontracting team and I was running my own little mini agency from my basement apartment with one window in Washington, D.C. right?

Emma: You had so many clients. You’re like, I need other virtual assistants to help with the workload. I really have never met someone who owns a small business, who didn’t have other weird things, they tried first like the freezer meals or reselling jeans. I’m like I used to resell like DVDs in college online and like, yeah, just like random things. You’re always trying. I love a curious mindset and I love your confidence of, like, started calling yourself a VA right away and it worked. So many people like it where they like I, I can’t do this or I don’t have any right to like start something. I don’t have any right to call myself this thing when I’m not ready. I’m not a professional yet and I just love that you dove in. I think that’s like the boss mentality, you know?

Abbey: I mean, I think we have to. We have to remember we all we all started somewhere, right? Yes, exactly. I’m starting to do like weightlifting and I’ve been doing it for like two and a half months. And there was this machine that my coach wanted me to get on and do. And I’m looking at it and I’m like, I don’t think I can physically do this. And I got on the machine, but I really couldn’t do it. I was just not it was just not working. And I honestly, I started to tear up and I was frustrated. I was like frustrated that I there was like this thing that I couldn’t conquer and I couldn’t do. And I had to remind myself, I’m like, Abbey, you started this the last week of January. And so for reference, that’s been like, you know, two months from now, like, do I really think I’m going to be an expert? Do I really think I’m at advanced expert status two months in? No, I’m not like, you know, it takes there’s there’s baby steps. And so the next time I went, I was like, OK, this time I’m good. I’m going to get on the machine without crying. That is my goal. And then the next time I’ll go a little further and do a little more and I’m going to work at it. I’m going to get better. And I think we just…you just have to start, right? You got to start where you are. And yes, even if it’s scary,

Emma: I love that so much. I have definitely had moments at the gym or like just trying something new that you see other people doing and you’re like crying because you’re like, I can’t figure this out. Why is this hard for me? But I can see that this person has it figured out. And I feel like so often we’re in that place of comparison or of, oh, I’m just not a gym person. I’m just not a business owner type. Oh, I’m just not the kind of person who’s going to make my dreams come true. But it’s like, no, you are. But yeah, the first time you get on the machine, you might cry. And that’s that’s the beginning. That’s not the end unless you choose to stop. So thanks for sharing that story because, yeah, I’ve been there I’ve been there at the gym or doesn’t work and I don’t know what to do! So for a long time you were a VA and it sounds like you were successful enough. You had to start getting other Vas to work with you to manage the workload. At some point you transition to what you’re doing now. Virtual Savvy, teaching people to become VAs and to own their own business. So tell me why again, you felt the confidence that you could do that and how did you begin to scale that business?

Abbey: Yeah, it’s just so funny how when you take like, I had no aspirations, like I literally started this, I was like, oh, I would like to I was a stay at home mom. I’d like to contribute some financially and I want to do some some entrepreneurial things. And now we’re like a team with like twenty employees and all that. And I’m just like, what where did how did this happen? Sometimes I look back at it just I don’t know. So for me, I started the business in early 2015 and one of the clients that I got a few months in was an online course creator and he had a course on how to get email subscribers, so how to get lists. And I was just like it was incredible. It was like the best paid internship ever. It wasn’t a paid internship, but it’s what it felt like because I was getting paid to be behind the scenes of this guy who would do these course launches and would make hundreds of thousands of dollars in a week or two weeks of opening up his course. And I’m like, this is amazing. And so I didn’t know what I was going to teach honestly, but I just thought, I want to do this like this. Now I know that again, this whole world I didn’t even know existed. And I thought, this is what I want to do. I want to launch courses and I love to teach. I love to….I just thought that that would be really fun. And I loved just kind of the marketing behind all of it. I’ve always been really intrigued with marketing. So I started taking his advice, taking his course on how to build an email list. And that’s where I started. I just I talked about anything that I knew how to do and I had a little freebie download I think it was like how to get clients on LinkedIn because I got clients on LinkedIn. I was like, oh, I teach people how to do that right. And so I wrote a little ebook and people would download it. And so I just slowly started building this list. And so it took. For me, it took me about a year and a half to get to a thousand email subscribers, but that was like my goal. Like I put it in front of me, I’m like, I’m going to get a thousand people on my list. And I talked about everything, marketing, branding, even though I’m not actually very good at branding and things like I, I just I talked about what I knew and would email my list every week and tried to get more email subscribers. And then once I got a list of a thousand email subscribers, I asked them, I said, what do you guys want to learn from me? Like, what if I were to create a course in something? What would you want it to be about? And I was actually really surprised because the the responses I got back were we would want to learn how you became a virtual assistant, how you started a virtual assistant business. And I didn’t even know that that was the audience I was building. I really didn’t. So I thought, well, I can teach that. Obviously, I it’s like I didn’t even know that that’s what people wanted to learn. And so I, I kind of followed this this guy’s methodology, which his name was Brian Harris, by the way. He has a business called Growth Tools. It’s phenomenal. Check it out. He would basically say to to kind of launch your first time, you know, you could spend six months building and recording and doing all the things or you could do a little bit of a pre launch. And so I sold the course at half the price of what it was going to cost eventually in my head at least. And I so I was selling it for four ninety seven because my eventual goal was to sell for nine ninety seven. And I said this isn’t built yet, but here’s what I’m going to cover and you guys will be on the journey with me as I’m teaching it will kind of teach it live. And so I remember because we were, we were coming home, it was like Christmas time and I was my family and I were coming to Missouri because we were living in DC at the time. And I’m like doing this course launched right before Christmas, which was probably a terrible time to launch a course, but I didn’t know any different. (laughs) And so I got 16 people to buy. And so in a week I made eight thousand dollars, which was like amazing to me. I was I was just blown away and I was hooked. I’m like, this is it. All right. So I took that money and I invested in actually a Pinterest manager myself. I’m like, I’m going to blog and I’m going to do Pinterest. And to this day, I still don’t even know how to do my own Pinterest account because I’ve always just hired somebody to do it for me. But that’s exactly what we did. We just started growing an audience and I was like, all right, so a thousand people was my first goal. Now I want to get to ten thousand email subscribers. And so the goal has kind of always been get more email subscribers, because then I can know how many of these people will percentage-wise maybe convert and buy my course. And we launch it a couple of times a year. And it just makes me so happy because the stories that come out of it are incredible, like the people who are taking the course and changing their lives and have confidence in themselves and finding remote work, flexible work, which is really needed for a lot of people.

Emma: Yeah. Well, I was going to say I knew you all were crushing it, I mean, for years. But I’m guessing and maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know. But twenty twenty might have been a big year for you all because so many people careers change life change needed more virtual options for work, remote work. Yeah. I could see a lot of people needing the service or like needing to needing something new, a way to make money at home with their kids in the background, home schooling.

Abbey: We all became homeschooling parents, what do I do now?!

Emma: Yeah!

Abbey: So it, it, it was, it was interesting because we just I think none of us knew, you know, it’s February 2020 and we’re all the world is starting to shift and we’re all the business owners are going, OK, I know this is going to affect us somehow, but what’s, what is it going to do? And we really had no idea. And, you know, at the time, I had six full-time employees who were all moms and all became homeschooling moms. And so, like, OK, I told them just because we were in the same boat and at this point I had retired my husband. So he was able to help with the kids. And I knew that my employees didn’t have that same like advantage. And so I said, here’s what we’re going to do. Like, you know, they’re all full time 40 hour week employees. I said we’re going to, like, write down the things that have to get done. Like, absolutely. Like these things have to get done and do those things in the week whenever you can get them done. And other than that, like if you can get those things done in five hours a week, you’re working five hours a week this month, like for the entire month of it was actually I think it was April that that was when like things like home schooling. And so that’s what they did. And we they they all were working like five to eight hours a week as opposed to forty hours a week. So they could kind of adjust, oh, this is the new normal. This is what life is now. And it was crazy because that was the month that we doubled. So, of course, all my employees were like, we should just all work 5 hours! And I was like no no no, we do have to go back to actually working full time. But, yeah, it was crazy. The business like of virtual assistants, just in general, like all of our students, saw an increase of people wanting to hire them. And it was one industry that fortunately really did thrive during the pandemic.

Emma: Yeah, which is great. And it’s amazing that you were able to offer that kind of flexibility to your team. I mean, it’s just a really, really cool to watch. I’ve loved learning about how different businesses have kind of made it work last year. I think it’s really inspiring. And the empathy that I have seen from people I talk to just inspires me endlessly in my own journey to try to be a good boss. Anyway, the last thing I wanted to talk with you about is kind of how like what you guys are up to right now with Virtual Savvy, because so often I think, I do this too, you kind of look at others and you’re like, wow, she has a team of 20. She’s got it made. And that’s it’s done. Happily ever after. But I feel like life is a series of small goals and always growing and always getting on that new workout machine and crying the first time. It’s always that it’s a continual thing. And so I love to hear like what you all are up to. What’s on the horizon for you?

Abbey: Yeah, for sure. So we have senior leaders now, which is…I love growing a team. That’s like my favorite part of…it was this unexpected thing that I fell in love with. I’m like, oh, I didn’t realize how much I love growing a team until I had a team and now I have a team. And it’s like my favorite part of the business is growing a team and having this team culture and things like that. So we have senior leaders. And so right now we’re really training our senior leaders to have ownership and make decisions. And it’s been really cool, but also very stretching because you don’t realize how much of a control freak you are until you start letting other people make decisions for you.

Emma: Yes, yes. All of a sudden your ego is like, oh, you’re better at this than me. Are you doing it different than I used to? Yes. That’s that’s hard to let go of and get off the reins a little bit, I think.

Abbey: Yes. That was the biggest thing. Exactly what you said was it happened about two months ago where I had this moment. I stepped back and I was like, you guys literally do this better than me. And like that might have not seemed like a big deal. But for me, I don’t know, like I had done every element of the business for so long and handed off little things. But when it came to like actual like big decisions being made, I don’t know. It’s been really, really rewarding. So we’re handing off more to them. And then my kind of my right hand person and I are starting to work on it seems like we’ve grown really fast, like we’ve grown one hundred percent year over year since we started. And…

Emma: That’s amazing.

Abbey: Thank you! But it’s it’s…it seems like we’ve grown fast. But when you really look, it’s like we’re still selling like that exact same course, like we’ve tweaked it, we’ve we’ve rerecorded it, but we’re still doing the same things that I started in twenty sixteen. And we’ve we’ve slowly added like one new product. So we’re selling two things and that’s it. We just wash, rinse, repeat and get better and better and better and better and better at it. And so now we’re starting to launch. We’re working on a marketplace where people can hire virtual assistants and it’s a whole new world for me. And so I’m jumping into that. So that’s been really stretching as well to be like, OK, time for a new product, let’s do this and do it well. And yeah, so that’s that’s what I’m working on right now, which I couldn’t do that if I didn’t hadn’t built a team of amazing people to support the current business. So.

Emma: Yep, yep. I’m the same. I work with a lot of smart people who do things better than me. Same. So OK, well tell us if anyone listening is interested in becoming a virtual assistant, tell us where to start. I also kind of want to put it out there for our listeners, even if you’re like, I don’t think I want to be a virtual assistant, but maybe you want to learn a little more about marketing. Just a heads up. Abbey and her team are really like the way that they do their email marketing. I spy on their strategies all the time. So you might want to sign up even if you’re not wanting to be a virtual assistant just for everyone. But tell us some things that people might want to check out first,

Abbey: It’s so funny because we had your strategy. (laughs) So that’s fun. When you spy on each other, spy on your friends. That’s the moral.

Emma: Definitely spy on your friends. Yes.

Abbey: Ok, so if you are interested in virtual assistants, you can go to thevirtualsavvy.com/checklist. It’s our step by step checklist for how to start a virtual assistant business. And so again, having that step by step blueprint is my biggest advice with any new business venture. Just kind of follow the steps of somebody that’s gone before you, so you’re not having to figure it out all on your own. So that is checklist is really helpful for that.

Emma: Wonderful. Thank you. And I’m going to have lots of links in the show notes so you can go to abeautifulmess.com/podcast to find that. And you can click on the links, find Abbey, find her team and learn about their amazing business, just like I have.

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You can stream the episode here on the blog or on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, and Stitcher. You can find the podcast posts archive here.

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Show Notes:
This week, we’re chatting about advice, so there are not as many links are usual. We provide a full transcript here in the show notes if you’d prefer to read along.

-We mention Ryan O’Neal’s enneagram 101 in Episode 62.

-Elsie mentions The Righteous Gemstones.

-Elsie mentions her dollhouse (part one and part two).

-Emma mentions Shailey’s recent home tour.

-Elsie mentions these wood croissants and wood donuts.

-Emma mentions Andy’s Frozen Custard.

-You can now leave us voicemail questions on our hotline, 417-893-0011.

Thank you so much for listening!

Miss an episode? Get caught up!

• Episode #85: How To Add Personality To A Cookie Cutter Home
• Episode #84: Home Project Updates + Naomi Davis Interview
• Episode #83: Advice For First-Time Homeowners

Episode 86 Transcript

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Elsie: You’re listening to the A Beautiful Mess podcast, we’ve been given some incredible advice in our lives, and this week we’re paying it forward by sharing the best advice we’ve ever received with you. We’re also chatting about our current guilty pleasure and how the pandemic has changed us forever. Emma, what have you been up to?

Emma: Well, so normally we do a little bit of batch working, but this week you’re hearing us like we’re recording it the week of, which is nice.

Elsie: Yes, like days before it comes out

Emma: Rarely happens! Yeah. So I feel bad for our team. Sorry everyone. But so one thing that I did recently is I am now getting to the point in my pregnancy. I’m like 33 weeks where I’m just like wind it all the time and very tired and just generally uncomfortable, which is fine.

Elsie: You just moved your office upstairs and the stairs at Emma’s house are like very vertical.

Emma: I was so tired that day. I was so tired. I was like in a bad mood. At the end of the day, I was like, I can’t go up the stairs anymore. I didn’t even carry anything that heavy, just, you know, like a laptop. And I was like, I’m so winded right now.

Elsie: Yeah!

Emma: But anyway, but it’s really not like a big deal. I’m not complaining. So I’m really grateful to be pregnant. But that being said, I recently had some maternity photos done. And on Sunday, so yesterday, by the time you’re hearing this.

Elsie: They’re beautiful by the way, I saw them in my email late last night. Beautiful. Stunning.

Emma: Thank you. I’m not sure I’m going to share very many online other than our newsletter. So I kind of wanted to put it out there to our podcast listeners because I feel like they’re our real friends. We always say that. (laughs)

Elsie: It’s true. If you’re listening to the podcast, you’re already in our inner circle. So you might as well get on the newsletter because we do personalized newsletters almost every week. And actually I’m like always late sending mine and Emma is always on time, so…(laughs)

Emma: I’m mostly on time. I can be a little late. I just — we I feel like one thing we didn’t say in our batch working episode that came out a little while ago…was also if you work with any size team — like we have a really pretty small team, but any size team, if you’re not working ahead, you’re kind of making their life terrible.

Elsie: Oh, my gosh. That’s actually a great point!

Emma: When I turn in something late, I know it means that Keely or whoever else on our team has to kind of scramble to finish their part because I turned it in so late, you know. So anyway, so. Yeah, so I put my maternity photos in the newsletter and I might put a couple online, but it’s just one of those like kind of you’d think I would…I talk about this in the newsletter, but you think I’d be really used to getting my photo taken as a blogger. I think people think of us as like, oh, you get your photo taken all the time like a celebrity on the red carpet. I’m like, actually, no. Most of my life is like at my house. And I mostly take photos of, like, food, like that’s actually more how I think of my life. (laughs) So I still feel very self-conscious. And I also think I usually do photos with you.

Elsie: That’s true.

Emma: Like there’s two of us, and so it doesn’t feel it’s like all about me, like look at me, you know. So but anyway, I wanted to get these photos done just for me, just for fun, just to like, you know, document like this time in my life being pregnant. And I love how they turned out and I’m so happy with them. I worked with my favorite photographer, Jenae Hardy. My friend Emily Edgar did my makeup like I made a whole day of it and it was really fun. And yeah, they were in the newsletter yesterday and I’m kind of thinking I’ll probably put the first photos of my son once he’s born in our newsletter. So if you like stuff like that, I’m just putting it out there…the newsletter is more personal than like blog content or Instagram or whatever.

Elsie: And if you’re not sure how to sign up, just go to abeautifulmess.com and it is right there on the sidebar, a place where you can sign up. We give away a lot of like freebies and like printables. I do those bucket lists every season. We usually put those in there and then we’ll put other fun things, like a grocery shopping, like printable, like, you know. Cute things like that that you can print out and use. So anyway, yeah. I think newsletters are the future, right?

Emma: I think so. I also just think if you want more, it’s not that it’s crazy personal, but just stuff that isn’t so searchable or I just kind of think of different parts of our brand is like for different people.

Elsie: Yeah, I agree. I think sharing like your really personal photos in the newsletter are smart, because then you haven’t just like put them out there for all eternity. It’s kind of like you share them, but then they’re not, you know, on the website forever. So I think that that it’s kind of like a good way to share if you’re a private person, like a Snapchat for old people.

Emma: Yeah. It’s not like I mind if someone were to, like, take them from the newsletter and I wouldn’t be necessarily like crazy upset. I would think it was a little weird and a little obsessive. It’s just not really my personality. I’m just a little more like private, but I do like to show friends and people, you know, if someone’s interested, it’s fun to share. So anyway, that was like one thing from my life this week is maternity photos.

Elsie: Well, I got threw up on for the first time in my journey, so I had an amazing weekend as well.

Emma: Nice.

Elsie: Yeah.

Emma: What was happening?

Emma: I’m assuming wasn’t Jeremy who threw up on you, so…

Elsie: It was one of my kids, I. Yeah. We were actually getting dressed up to. We were going to try to take family photos in the backyard. So I found a new photographer I never worked with. She did one of my friend’s Christmas card photos. And this year I decided to, like, go full force. So I booked her once a season so that I can try to just get more like family photos. So, yeah, she’s going to come four times this year and just take pictures of us in our yard with the kids. Just because I feel like last year we missed out on a few things. One of them was like getting lots of nice pictures. So trying to catch up.

Emma: Mm hmm. Yes.

Elsie: Yes. So anyway, yeah, but it was canceled, so we’re going to reschedule. (laughs)

Emma: So you’re putting Goldie’s cute outfit on and then…bad news.

Elsie: Yeah. Barf. Yeah it was…

Emma: Poor thing. You and her. (laughs)

Elsie: It was sad. And yeah it’s always sad you know, but it’s part of being a mom. Anyway. OK, so this episode we decided to do an episode about business advice and also life advice. So the best advice we’ve ever received and these are definitely some life changing gems, so we’re excited to share them today. Do you want to start it off Emma with your best business advice?

Emma: Yes. And I was trying so hard to remember who first — I’ve heard this a few times, so it’s not like, you know, it’s so unique that only one person ever told it to me. But I really wanted to remember who was the first person who told it to me. And I can’t remember now I’m going to blame pregnancy brain. But anyway, I wish I could because I like to give people credit. It’s nice, you know, but at any rate, the best business advice I was ever given is simply this: to finish things.

Elsie: Yes.

Emma: Yeah. And I feel like the best advice is usually something very simple and something that maybe even comes off as cliche. But if you actually do it, it changes your life. Like to me, that’s the gems of the world as far as like advice goes. So with finishing things, I have so many friends, so many peers where they have great ideas or they’re building something in their business or whatever, and they just get stuck. They maybe get into a place where they’re trying to make it perfect or they get discouraged because usually halfway through your project is the time when things kind of fall apart and you start to get really stressed or you start to do a lot of self-doubt. I struggle a lot with that. You think like, what am I doing? I, I shouldn’t I’ve never done this before. I shouldn’t be allowed to do this. And you just don’t end up finishing and feel like some people think…

Elsie: I have that problem of chronically wanting to restart because I’m like halfway through I realized that I could have done something better. And so I want to just, like, restart the whole project, delete everything I’ve done. And yeah, if I did that every time I wanted to, like, I would get very little done because, yeah, it’s, it’s definitely a bad habit, but it feels like you’re trying to do your best work in the moment.

Emma: Right, exactly. Yeah. And that is to me that’s the hardest one, is whenever you get halfway or two thirds or whatever and you realize there is a better way of doing it and you’re like, do I go ahead and finish, do I start over? And sometimes you should start over or quit. I’m not saying that that never comes up, but I just feel like for every great idea I’ve ever heard, like friends who had an amazing business idea, app idea, whatever, it’s the people who actually finish the ideas that made something happen. Like that’s the real difference. It’s because so often I think people think, oh, you have to have the best idea. And I’m like, no, you just have to be the person who finishes their idea. That’s really like the secret sauce, because when you finish something, you learn from it. So you can then make it better afterwards or you also just like have something to sell or put out there, whereas a half-finished project is kind of nothing. It’s just like something you filled your time with, maybe spent money on. But it’s not necessarily something that you can use in any meaningful way. Maybe you learned, but, you know, I don’t know. I have a lot of friends who I feel like their whole career is kind of half-finished things at this point.

Elsie: Ugh it’s heartbreaking!

Emma: It’s sort of a bummer. Yeah. Yeah, it really is. And I have a lot of finished things that are not great.

Elsie: Me too.

Emma: They could have been a lot better. They were not — like there’s things that I’ve finished that I’m like I’m not even really that proud of anymore, but I think they propelled me to the next thing. And so I think whoever gave me this advice to just finish things and keep going, they were right.

Elsie: I agree. And I’ll say one more thing. I think that it’s it feels better to finish and still fail than to not finish and wonder what would have happened. Last year I did a book proposal and it went nowhere. And I decided early this year I told my literary agent, I’m done with that book. I’m not doing it. I might repurpose the content on something else or whatever, but it just feels good to know that I like, gave it its best shot. I made like the full, like, really good pitch, like it was beautiful. I wrote sample chapters, I did a photoshoot like did all the things. Didn’t work out, you know, and I don’t have to wonder like what could have been with that.

Emma: Yeah. Because that’s another part of it. When you don’t finish is like it’s almost like it becomes this like fantasy.

Elsie: It’s like more powerful than it ever really was. It’s like the one that got away.

Emma: Yep, exactly. It’s the one that got away and it’s like maybe it wasn’t even that great, but now you’re kind of stuck on it in your mind. And if you just had finished it, you might have been like, oh, that was great. Or Oh actually that wasn’t so great. Never mind, you know, and then you get to move on…

Elsie: She’s giving you good advice so take this advice. The finishing is Emma’s life mission.

Emma: This could be dating advice, too.

Elsie: And it’s one of the main things that you’ve taught to me is how to be a finisher, because people always ask me that. They’re like, if you’re seven, how do you get so much done? And I’m like, Emma! It’s Emma. Emma trained me in, you know, the importance of following through. And eventually it worked.

Emma: Well. And I think of our friend Elise, because you’re seven, we’re talking about Enneagram. Elsie is a seven, I’m a nine and Elise is a three. And I feel like threes are the ultimate, you know, can finish things because they’re so goal-oriented and, you know, wanting to achieve. And yeah. So I’m kind of like I consider myself sort of in the middle because I do like to dream and I, I have a lot of unfinished craft projects around my house, trust me, (laughs) that are like, OK, I’m probably never actually going to finish that. But I also try to a certain percentage to get it done.

Elsie: To me there’s a difference between an unfinished craft project and unfinished business plan. You know what I mean?

Emma: True.

Elsie: Like, the consequences are not the same.

Emma: Yeah, I mean, I don’t want to at least I don’t want to give the impression that I finish everything that I start, because that is certainly not true. But to be fair, I start a lot of things. (laughs So, yeah, I think that’s all I got on on my business advice, which is: finish things. So let’s hear what was the best business advice you were ever given?

Elsie: Ok, so I know for certain that I’ve shared this on the podcast before, but I’m going to share it all over again because it’s worth it. It’s so good. So this is coming from my friend Carter Bryant. So really early in my career. I had sort of like lost my job, and I was trying to live off my Etsy shop. I opened a shop that was honestly like a really bad idea, like it was… (laughs)

Elsie: Like a local…

Emma: Yes, I opened a local shop where there was really no demand for the things I was selling and I was just trying to make it work, that it was fun. It was a dream. Like opening a shop is like so many people’s dream. And if it’s your dream, like, look at me, I’m doing the finger thing with my eyes, like we have the same dream. Because the other night I watched You’ve Got Mail with Jeremy and he was like, “Oh, you want to open a shop now, don’t you?” And I was like, “yes!” I always, no matter what happens in life, I will always want to open a shop. So anyway, I had my little shop and Carter Bryant was my friend. He’s like a little bit older than me, definitely a little bit wiser than me, more advanced in his career. And he would drop by frequently and just like have coffee and chat with me. And he kind of…

Emma: Well, maybe you should say what he has done in his career or at least a couple of highlights if people don’t know. I know who he is but…

Elsie: Right so Carter’s like, Claim to Fame is that he created the Bratz dolls, which we all know what the Bratz dolls are I don’t need to, you know, no introduction needed. I have one in my office that he autographed. It’s like a bowling Bratz doll and yeah, it’s very special. So anyway, we lived in the same hometown and I found out that this man lived in our town who had invented the Bratz. And I was like, holy shit, I need to make best friends with this person. And I did.

Emma: Obviously.

Elsie: Yeah, because it’s just so interesting. And I would love…I’ve always had a dream that I would love to be in the toy industry. I did a big pitch when I was in my mid-20s. That was a fail. But it was like a great life experience. Like Emma just said, you know, the finishing I feel like I really like gave it my all. And I still have the box of samples that we created, like somewhere in my storage in my garage, and I’ll never get rid of them, even though it’s like — I also don’t want to open the box. It’s one of those weird things. But anyway, so Carter kind of took me under his wing because I think he could, like, see that I had potential and that I had some talent, but that I really was lost as far as like a sense of business and being able to create a solid income for myself. I was very unstable. I was broke as hell, let’s put it that way, and struggling. So anyway, he came in, I was young. I was like figuring it out. And I asked him, like, what should I do to try, you know, to make my business stronger because it was just really hard. I was staying up all night just trying to make my next five hundred dollars all the time. And he said to think of your business as a table with four legs and you need to have four income streams all the time. So right now you have one: your shop. And let’s count your website as you know, the same income stream because one of them was making basically no money, it was just costing money. And he’s like, you need to find three more. So I took his advice. And over the next — the next year after that, we launched our first course. And that was a game-changer for us because it gave us some semblance of a solid, consistent income. And then after that, we started to sell ads on our blog like advertisements in the sidebar. So even though it wasn’t a big income, it was steady and it came in every month. And then, you know, we started to do sponsored posts a few years after that. So over time, we created those four revenues and then we did it for our next business and our next business. And I also did it for my personal life as well. Like, you can do it in your family as well. So maybe like you have an income. My husband has an income. Maybe there’s a way you could have a side income. Maybe there’s a way you could have some kind of investment that is sort of creating revenue as well. So I think it’s great advice. It changed my life and I always want to just tell it to everyone, because if you’ve never heard it, it’s it’s like so simple, but it really worked.

Emma: Yeah. We still do this in our business. And it’s interesting because, you know, every blogger, every, you know, online influencer kind of has different ways of making money, different revenue streams, and some people are very focused on one, and some people are more like us, where it’s a bunch of different ones, like we probably have even more than four at this point. But yeah, and I sometimes do get a little jealous of the people who just have one main thing, like one revenue stream because I just feel like it’s easier.

Elsie: Because they’re able to focus on it.

Emma: Yeah. You can focus on it and it just feels simple. And I, you know, but whenever something weird does happen, the industry changes in a drastic way. I’m always really grateful that we do have these other legs on our table.

Elsie: Right. Like it means that your table, if you lose a leg, it might become very unstable, but it’s not going to instantly crash the way that it would with one leg only. So, I love that advice. And I think you should use it in every like possible place you can in your life because it’s just stability, it’s just basic stability. OK, let’s take a quick sponsor break.

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Emma: Maybe we should talk about life advice because when we were kind of prepping for this episode, we were just talking through like, you know, different bits of advice we’d gotten over the years. And so often I do feel like life advice and business advice can bleed into each other. So, yeah, we were like, let’s just do both. (laughs).

Elsie: Oh, yeah, I mean, they’re both equally important. So, OK, tell me what is…I’m so curious to hear the best life advice you’ve ever received.

Emma: Ok, so here’s mine and I definitely think it’s a little bit colored by the year I’ve just had, which, you know, we all just have been through…

Elsie: Pure shit.

Emma: …whatever you’ve been through. Yeah. (laughs) Basically. So it is to enjoy what’s in front of you. Which again I think is so simple and probably a little bit cliche, but for me and my personality type, it’s something that I needed to hear and that I need to hear over and over again, because I’m a very goal oriented, future focused type person, like I’m always thinking about, or at least I used to be. I think I’ve I think I’ve been changing in the last few years, and I’m actually really proud of that personal growth. But I think in general, I’ve been a person who’s extremely like, what’s my next thing, what problem am I trying to solve right now? What goals do I have that I’m working on? Like that’s always on my mind. I love that stuff. And that’s never really going to change about me. I think that is a good and healthy way to live life for me anyway. But I think the drawback is a lot of times you can kind of not enjoy what’s in front of you or you miss out on the little moments that happen in between. And those are really what life is made up of, you know. And I think also for me, it’s a goals are awesome, but they are a fantasy. Like they are like, you know, your expectations are high, like what’s my next house going to look like? In my mind, it’s going to be perfect, you know, but in reality, there’s going to be something about it that’s not perfect because that’s what houses are. They’re real places.

Elsie: There’s no perfect house.

Emma: Right. So just as an example. Exactly. So and that’s what life is to. There’s no perfect life. Like it’s just not no matter how hard you try, no matter how focused you are on personal growth or goals or whatever it is, there is no perfect life. There is no perfect house. There’s no perfect relationship. There’s no being a perfect mom. There’s no perfect career. You know, there’s just what you have in front of you. And I think learning to really appreciate it and especially sit in those moments of pure joy is a certain amount of wisdom that I haven’t had in the past that I’ve been really cultivating.

Elsie: That’s beautiful. Yeah, I feel the same way. I think thinking about the future, you know, it has its time and place, but at a certain point you have to learn to just worry about today. Like I’ve been thinking a lot lately, like my Instagram. It is like not I am complaining so I’ll just…whatever, but it’s like so many people every single day. They’re just saying, your kids are so big, your kids are so big, your kids are growing, your kids are bigger. And I’m like, hello, I know that, I buy their clothes like I realize, like more than you do how much they’re growing. But I think the thing for me every day that I’m trying to focus on is that they’re still little now that they’re growing. Not that like it’s all over because it’s like it’s not over. They are three and five years old like the time is now. So really, I feel like I have to cancel out the message that I’m hearing every single day and remind myself they’re still little like this is our moment. Oh, my God, I’m going to cry.

Emma: That’s interesting, because that’s kind of the second trap is like I get stuck in the trap of future thinking, like, oh, my expectations are high and I’m thinking about my next goal. And that is the other one is like living in the past and wishing for the thing that was yesterday. And it’s — it’s good to remember the past. I think that’s kind of the whole point of photos for me and like saving all my memories. But also it’s like what’s in front of you, present tense. That’s like so it’s magic and it’s like only there in that moment because otherwise it’s the future that you’re thinking about or it’s the past that you’re wishing you had back. So it’s like enjoying playing with Nova and her Woody doll right now this week, instead of remembering her tiny pigtails from two years ago or whatever, which it’s good to remember it, it’s just what’s in front of you. And it’s so hard to do that. I don’t know why it’s so hard to live in the present, but it really is.

Elsie: I think it is for everyone. And I think that’s a really good thing to focus on. Um, probably no matter where you are in life, is to just try to appreciate right now. That’s definitely what I’m trying to do. OK, so my best life advice and I like you said earlier, I can’t remember where this came from or I would totally give it credit. I have no idea, though. But it’s the idea that my children’s childhood that they’re having right now is actually also my second childhood. So and I love this concept that when you’re a kid, you have a childhood. But how much of it do you remember? Like, you know, like how many times do your parents tell you these stories? And you’re like, I don’t even remember that, you know, like it’s you have these magical, nostalgic little feelings of, like, cookies on Christmas Eve and like certain pajamas and certain wallpaper and certain, you know, things you remember. But there’s so much of it that you can’t really you know, you don’t even know that it happened like a lot of years from your childhood are completely a mystery, like it’s only in your parent’s memory. So, yeah, I think it all comes back to this time a few years back when my dad said that the happiest years of his life were when we were little kids. And I was like, oh, my God. Like, I really lost it. I didn’t know I was in a crying mood today, but I am. Anyway. So I know right now that I’m living every day in the best years of my life. Oh, God! (sniffles)

Emma: I like that we started the episode with you telling a story of getting barfed on and here you are saying I’m living in the best years of my life! (laughs)

Elsie: Right? I mean, it…it feels…it’s the best. It really is the best. So, yeah, I think that when we do our little vacations, our memories, our weekend activities, I know that my kids aren’t going to remember a lot of it. And that’s fine because I do a lot of it for myself. And I try to remember that this is their childhood that I’m giving to them. But it’s also like a part of it is for me to like I get to experience this with them. So. Oh, my God! (crying) OK, I’m going to have to move on from that point. But I think it’s a really powerful thing if you have little kids or if you’re moving into that stage of life soon, remember that their childhood is also your childhood to enjoy with them and never forget that.

Emma: I love that. Yeah, because I think it can be so easy to, I don’t know, just kind of think, well, they won’t remember this anyway or, you know. Oh they, they didn’t enjoy that as much as I thought they would. But it’s like, you know, it’s for you too! Just have fun with them.

Elsie: It’s true. There’s so many things that are a lot of work that you do like..the first maybe 100 times you paint with your kids, they might not remember it. And the first 40 times you make cookies together, they might not remember it, you know, but I think that it’s important to remember that it’s not just like the value of it isn’t just if they remember it or not, because these are your memories that you’re going to, you know, have forever. (laughs/cries)Yeah!

Emma: Well, we’re going to give Elsie a minute. She’s crying. But we do have an honorable mention.

Elsie: Yeah, let’s say the honorable mentions. All right. So my first honorable mention is in the life advice category. This is like this is kind of not advice, but it kind of is…hear me out. So understanding my Enneagram and also the Enneagram of my loved ones. So my husband, Emma and our coworkers even and you know, our parents, it’s helped so much like we spent whatever was the recent time figuring out our brothers Enneagram. (laughs) And that was so fulfilling. Also, I think that when you …which I have to give a shout out to Ryan O’Neal. He’s the one who got me into the Enneagram, he and his wife Kate, and he is in Episode 62, going over Enneagram like Enneagram 101. So if you don’t know what we’re talking about, save episode sixty two for later and enjoy that. But yeah, it’s a very, it’s, I think Enneagram is such a funny thing that it became so popular and important. It’s way more important to me personally than astrology and other things like that.

Emma: me too.

Elsie: It’s just — it’s been really beneficial and I feel like I understand. I understood myself and for the first time I understood sort of like how I had power to improve and also just understanding why other people are different from me. So that was very life changing for me.

Emma: I agree. I think it’s such a powerful tool for growing empathy, your empathy muscle, which I think is something, you know, we should all be doing all the time. And it can be confusing because you obviously you experience the world and even the behavior of others through your own lens. And so I just sometimes find other people, especially in the past. But I’m sure I will, again, just kind of confusing. Like I like I don’t understand why you’re going about this in that way. Like, I’m so confused. And for whatever reason, Enneagram is like one thing that has kind of helped me to at least broaden my expectations or my mind or my views on people and be like, OK, you’re this number. I’m not that number, that’s a very different number for me. OK, so you…Like it just helps me to kind of open up my mind a little bit and not be so narrow, which I think helps me to understand or just try to empathize at the very least, because of course, we can never totally like know what’s going on in someone else’s head. But I think trying to get there is really, really helpful. And yeah, I also wish that is where we’re actually hiring at our app company right now. And one thing I kind of wish we could ask every applicant is like, what’s your Enneagram? But not everyone knows!

Elsie: Yeah I don’t know if that’s an appropriate question or if it like signals to them that like you’re in a cult that they’re not in yet or something.

Emma: Exactly (laughs)I don’t want to turn them off!

Elsie: But I would also benefit a lot from knowing that, but I feel like I don’t know, it feels like a weird question. I bet there’s someone that’s gonna write into us and say “I ask every applicant that it’s no big deal.”

Emma: Right. Which is fine. Yeah if you do great. But I think yeah. Just so sometimes I meet someone and I’m like I’m not sure if they know what this is and if it will come off the way that I would like it to come off. So I don’t know. But yeah, I find it really helpful to know, like, if I’m going to work with someone or spend a lot of time. Someone in some way, like working together, like what their number is, because it helps a lot.

Elsie: Right. Emma and I used to get in so many fights when we were younger because I always wanted to either rebrand or to change the name A Beautiful Mess, like I always ever since the early days, I always wanted to change the name. And she was always like, Why are you like this? Why are you like this? And now she knows.

Emma: I was like, “I don’t understand why you’re focused on something that doesn’t matter”. That’s what I said!

Elsie: Yeah, and I just kept…

Emma: You were like “It does matter!”

Elsie: Like it was like my like it magnetized me back to it every time. And now I know why. It’s just like my need to like always be resetting things like I make a mood board for my home and my like my closet and like my life at like all the time, like every month I make a mood board. But I just don’t do that for A Beautiful Mess anymore because I know it annoys everyone.

Emma: Well, and I think too, like I always thought that I needed to steer you like you were some kind of ship. And I have to be at the big wheel in the front like a pirate. And I have to, you know, keep you on course. And now I think of you as more like this really powerful river. And I should see which way it’s flowing. And just like dig a ditch that direction, because that’s going to be the powerful way to, like, channel this, you know.

Elsie: Yeah. (laughs).

Emma: You know, it’s an imperfect system, but I’m like, well, that’s where it’s flowing and let’s go that direction if possible. So and I just feel like it’s, you know, made me more flexible, but also made me understand, I don’t know, like maybe we can understand each other a little bit better and what our strengths and weaknesses are and like kind of get out of each other’s way a little bit. But also be honest when something isn’t working and know, like, OK, she’s probably not going to take this well and we’re just going to have to talk it through, you know. Yeah. Just like how it goes.

Elsie: We don’t fight that much anymore. So I think that it would be unsatisfying to people if they heard, like, our worst fight from last year, like, I can’t even think of what it would be. It’s probably stupid, though,

Emma: Probably because we’re…we’re grown ups now.

Elsie: (laughs)

Emma: Now, we’ll take a little break and hear a word from our sponsor.

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Elsie: So there’s one thing we haven’t done in a very long time.

Emma: Yep.

Elsie: It’s Guilty pleasure treasure! OK, so I have two guilty pleasures to share this time. I’m still kind of crying from earlier. I’m really trying to get past it. But it’s not working.

Emma: (laughs)

Elsie: Okay, I don’t…I hope that was the most emo thing. Oh, my God. Like, OK, so…

Emma: I don’t know.

Elsie: (laughs) Here’s my guilty pleasures. So first of all, we just watched the TV show, it’s season one only: the Righteous Gemstones, for the third time, three times. I think it’s been out for a year and a half. So we’ve watched it three times and I already want to watch it for a fourth. And I just saw the news that they’re filming season two. So I am so excited. It’s definitely one of my favorite TV shows that’s still currently airing. And yeah, I’m a super fan!

Emma: Oh, so you said you had two guilty pleasures.

Elsie: Ok, the second one is I got back in my dollhouse zone and I started redecorating our dollhouse. So you all know, maybe that we made a dollhouse two Christmases ago. It’s a DIY. I will link it in the show notes. And then I also showed it like finished. And then recently I started redecorating it because I was like, actually, I got excited because Kate Zaremba, who is an Etsy shop, she did the wallpaper for our guest room. And then she asked me if I wanted a tiny one for my dollhouse. And I was like and I lost my mind, of course. And I of course, said yes. So she sent us some tiny wallpapers. And then I just like started buying pink sofas and little like things on Amazon and I couldn’t stop. So I’ll put a few links and I’ll show you a picture of how it’s looking right now. I still have one more room I really need to work on, but this dollhouse is very much like a gray area, like is it for the kids or is it for you? It’s like it’s up on my desk in my office now where my kids can barely even reach it. And it really is bringing me a lot of joy. So it’s inspired by the Dollhouse from Mary Poppins with the two doors that open where it’s almost like a shelf, you know what I’m saying? Yes. So, yeah, I love it. It’s one of my favorite DIYs we’ve ever done, and I will link it as much as I can. And then hopefully sometime, maybe the summer, I’ll do like a dollhouse, updated like blog post and show all the stuff because it’s kind of a lot. I found it wicker, like a hanging chair that looks like our hanging chair on eBay.

Emma: I think I saw one of those somewhere. I can’t remember where. Maybe it was a podcast listener. Yeah. Anyway, I was like, oh, Elsie has got to get this for her dollhouse. I’m definitely going to have to do a dollhouse for my son someday.

Elsie: You have to it’s so fun!

Emma: Right now it’s just a big choking hazard. (laughs) So not right now, but yeah,

Elsie: I would do it at age 3.

Emma: Age three. Yeah. Yeah, not right now. He’s Yeah. But my friend Shailey, who we shared her home tour on the on the blog. So I’ll put that in the show notes, she lives in my neighborhood. Anyway she has a kind of vintage kids kitchen, you know, the little you know how it’s like you can buy one from IKEA and do special hacks. We have a bunch of those on our blog. This one is like a old timey vintagey look, and it’s not that old timey, but like kind of so I’m going to put that in my house pretty soon. I feel like I can put some little things on that that are not choking hazards, things that he can, you know, not right away, but like over the next year or two.

Elsie: Ok, well, I just found where they have like a wood croissant. I’ll send you the link. It’s so cute. I just got it for our kids and also some little wood donuts. It’s adorable. The play kitchen is like the toy…it’s like the gift that keeps on giving. It’s definitely one of the best toys in our home. Do you have a guilty pleasure Emma?

Emma: Yes. So mine’s pretty simple. It’s food-related, surprise. Feel like it’s always food or romance novel related with me. But mine is, I haven’t really had pregnancy cravings exactly. But one thing I have been eating a lot more of, and it may just be the time of year, is Andy’s frozen custard.

Elsie: That is such a BFD in Missouri where we’re from, and they have it here in one of the suburb towns not that far from us. But I actually don’t like frozen custard.

Emma: I know it’s not like not everyone likes it, but I love frozen custard. I kind of go through phases with it, it’s very rich but I am into it right now.

Elsie: So what’s your order?

Emma: My order is a chocolate sundae with strawberries. So it’s just a whole bunch of chocolate custard with strawberries basically. So yeah, I’ve been getting that for myself a lot.

Elsie: That’s awesome. Well, she’s at the very, very end of her pregnancy now. Her doctor told her the baby could like…it’s already like a small but fully formed baby in there and it could come out at any time. It’s crazy.

Emma: Yeah, she was very like, if you feel, you know, contractions just go on to labor and delivery. And I was like, whoa, we’re not quite to that point yet. (laughs) No! I should come here, right? We’ll just check in. And she’s like, no, no, no. I’ll just go right on to labor and delivery. Just, you know, just in case I’m like, Ok, yeah. All right. (laughs)

Elsie: Treat yourself Emma, anything you want is yours!

Emma: We have one more segment, which is…

Elsie: So for the final segment, I thought it would be maybe interesting, maybe sad, maybe fun to share about how the pandemic changed us, because now it’s been more than a year and I don’t know about you, but I spent last month really reflecting on just how so much had changed. And it’s something. So you want to share how you feel? (laughs)

Emma: Yeah, let me see. So my life advice is kind of, you know, part of it. I actually mean, I’m showing Elsie. Well, I don’t think you can see it our Skype here, but I have a notes app that just says 2020 lessons when it’s just like…

Elsie: Wait, can you read them?

Emma: Yeah I have one, two, three, four, five. So I’ll just kind of read them and not go too long on each one because that’s too many. So my notes app says. Human interaction is a gift, always lean into it, live in the now and be more available for people and conversations, cherish the people you love and any time you get to spend with them, like kind of the same as the first one. But maybe I thought it was a revelation at the time. (laughs) Stay curious about people, about everything. It’s a choice to be curious. And the last one is lean in. Don’t be lazy, have fun if there’s fun to be had there usually is.

Elsie: Aw Emma!

Emma: Yeah, that’s what my notes app says. That’s what I learned, I guess. I don’t know.I just write things down when I’m like in the grocery line. If something occurs to me, I don’t know, I’m like that. So anyway what have you learned?

Elsie: Oh OK. So the thing that’s like funny and ironic I guess in my specific situation is that right before the pandemic started, we were in the process of moving and we had adopted not that long before. So we were just kind of in this already transitional period of our life. And we, because of our younger daughter’s age, she was one at the time. We basically had stopped eating out and we felt that it was very temporary, but it was just a lot. Like we kept going to restaurants, especially on the weekends in Nashville, and they would seat us at, like, you know, one of the small little round tables and for four people. And when you have two toddlers, it was just like not worth it. And we couldn’t, we didn’t have the heart to be like, we only want a giant table or we can’t eat here. (laughs) So.

Emma: Right. Yeah.

Elsie: So there — it just didn’t I don’t know, I guess we were kind of already staying home a lot and kind of had it was just like the worst possible timing. Like we had one date night in 2020 before it started, before we started quarantining…only one. And I had one night out with my friends for one of my friend’s birthday parties and that was it. So it just felt like I was already like one of my goals in therapy shortly before was to go more places? (laughs) And to, like, when my friends invited me out to like, you know, to show up because it was just a time of my life. I think a lot of people understand, like when you have just had a baby or for us adopted a baby, that you can go through a time when you all you want to do is just stay home and hide and like it just it just didn’t feel like I didn’t feel motivated and so anyway, I guess that over the past year of having no option, it has made me a lot more grateful for my online friendships. I think a lot of times in life, people try to make it seem like online friendships aren’t as valid or as real as like, you know, a friend you go to brunch with. But it really is. Like I have several friends who we had regular, like lunch dates with face time all year. And it was really helpful. And my friends with the Marco Polo obsessions and, you know, just a few things like that really got me through. So I think it changed my idea of what a friendship is supposed to be and what a friendship can be. And it kind of made me leave more room for that for the future. Like, after all this is over, I don’t know if I’ll be is like hard on myself if I don’t feel like going out, I think I might just, like, be OK with having friends who don’t care for a while or who, like, want to hang out in our backyard with me. Yeah. Because I just don’t want to go to Broadway ever. Ever.

Emma: Oh burn Broadway!

Elsie: Like I just don’t want to go there. It’s cool if other people do but I just don’t. Why of course. Pandemic or no pandemic. So I don’t know, I guess I just became more of a homebody and I had other things that I think were like sad struggles. I don’t know if I want to fully go into it, but I know a lot of people feel this like almost like anger that if you made a lot of sacrifices and then you feel like other people almost like mocked you for it, that’s really hard.

Emma: Yeah. Yes, I understand. Yes.

Elsie: And I, I don’t know. But it’s like we’re all make our own choices and I’m proud of what we did. I think we did the best we could and I’m proud of the parenting we did throughout. And I and our kids are excited. We told them that in a couple of weeks we’ll be fully vaccinated and that we’re going to take them to Chuck E. Cheese. (laughs) So that’s the thing they wanted. So, you know, I don’t know. I guess I don’t know if that’s like the most beautiful ending or the stupidest ending but that’s what it is, that’s the true ending.

Emma: Yeah, yeah, I like it.

Elsie: Ok, so we have exciting news. We started our own hotline so you can call in and leave us a voicemail asking a question, and then we will possibly play your voicemail in a future episode and answer your question. So here’s the number and we will put it in the show notes too: is 417-893-0011. So thank you so much for listening. Don’t forget that every week you can go to our show notes to see all of our sponsor codes. We have awesome deals in there. It’s at abeautifulmess.com/podcast And oh, we now offer a transcript for every single episode.

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You can stream the episode here on the blog or on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, and Stitcher. You can find the podcast posts archive here.

Thank you to our sponsors for this week! We are so excited to bring you offers from Grove, Issuu, JuneShine, and Curtsy! You can see our full list of podcast sponsors on this page.

Show Notes:
-In this episode, we share secrets on how to start an influencer career. We focus specifically on blogging, Instagram and podcasting (since those are the areas we have the most experience in).

-We talk about whether you can still start a successful blog in 2021.

-Linking the book: The Twelve Week Year

-Linking Emma’s viral oatmeal post that we mention.

-Do you all love it when Emma says “life is long”?

– Have you read Emma’s Career Advice I’d Give My 20-Year-Old Self?

-Check out Claire’s 3 Tips for Working with Sponsors!

Hope you all have a wonderful week! If you have topic requests for upcoming podcast episodes, we’d love to hear them here! XX

Miss an episode? Get caught up!

• Episode #80: Our Secret Weapon—Batch Working!
• Episode #79: Emma’s Evangelical Upbringing Story
• Episode #78: Elsie + Emma React To 2021 Trend Predictions

Episode 81 Transcript

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Emma: You’re listening to A Beautiful Mess podcast, we’re always giving our friends advice about how to start a blog or make side income from influencer work, and they never do it! So in today’s episode, we’re compiling all our advice for you. If you’ve ever wanted to make full or part-time income from blogging or social media, this episode is for you.

Elsie: Yes, this episode is for all of our listeners who are like, I like it when you talk about money, because that’s a very certain part of our audience is like the money people. And this one’s for you because we like to talk about money, too. OK, so I thought you could start off by giving us the most important advice, Emma. Like if they’re going to, like, click off after five minutes, the number one key to success, the number one.

Emma: The number one.

Elsie: This is the number one. All right, Emma.

Emma: Yeah. And it’s not even the key to success for just blogging or social media. It’s the key to success…

Elsie: For business.

Emma: …period,

Elsie: …that’s true, for anything, I guess.

Emma: Finish. That’s it. I don’t even know who gave me this advice early on, but I feel like I say it so often that I have like, lost track of that. But finishing is the most important thing. So often people start and then they lose momentum or they lose interest. Or the one I see a lot is people derail themselves because they want it to be perfect. So they keep tweaking, tweaking, tweaking for like five years and they never actually finish anything. And an idea that’s like, OK, but it got finished and an idea that’s amazing, but never gets finished? Like the success of those two is starkly different and it has nothing to do with how good the idea was, which is crazy sad in a way. But it’s like finishing is, is it. It’s where it’s at.

Elsie: Yes.

Emma: So if you have an idea, the most important thing you can do is finish the idea, which might include like years of work. It might not be like one time finish line thing, like running a race. But as you finish things, you grow, you learn, you get better. For us, it has to do with, like, growing a following over many, many years, because a lot of times people will ask us, like, basically, how do you make money or what was the one thing that changed? Made it where you’re rich now, or whatever they think of us. I don’t even know. And I always want to say, like, well, we’ve just been working for a decade, so I’ve done a lot of finishing for many, many years. And I, I plan to keep doing that over and over and over again. And that’s really the secret, which is a very boring secret. So…(laughs)

Elsie: Most entrepreneurs and especially influencers don’t have like one overnight success moment, you have a series of lots of little things that happened, kind of as a result of already getting yourself out there and creating a brand like if you want to get your first sponsor, you have to already have like a running brand with an appealing, you know, point of view. And, you know, like you kind of already have to do all the groundwork before you can make a penny, which I think is the hard part about influencer work. Yeah, but there are a lot of advantages if you can get past that. So this episode is kind of a pep talk. We love to give a pep talk. I’m like one for asking for pep talks. Pretty often. (laughs)

Emma: I give myself a pep talk like every day. (laughs)

Elsie: Mhmm! So here’s my pep talk. OK, a lot of people blog for like two weeks or two months. And this is — this is heartbreaking to me because you cannot judge your success or your work, your creative work, your potential. You can’t judge anything in two weeks or two months of doing influencer work. I think that a lot of people just start and they have an expectation that they want to gain some kind of traction, whether it’s making money or whether it’s getting more followers really quickly. And then when that doesn’t happen immediately, they give up or they say, I’m going to take a break and make my brand way better, like Emma said, getting in a perfectionist mindset. And then, you know, they talk about doing it for a while and then they eventually realize they’re not going to do it and they don’t. And I want you to just not be that story because that that’s really like the most common thing that we see in people quitting blogging. There are people who blog for five years and they have success and then they quit, but really not very many compared to people who quit after two weeks or two months. So you have to commit you have to tell yourself, I’m going to do this all year. I’m going to lay the groundwork and we still have to do it all the time. So I think I’ll get to it later on. But like recently, you know, we started this podcast and we didn’t make any money or feel like we were really gaining traction for a while.

Emma: Elsie kept trying to quit and I was like, no!

Elsie: I did not try to quit, but I was a little bit like, if this doesn’t make some money soon…yeah…(laughs)

Emma: It’s not worth my time. I was just like, hold on. We got to do it for at least a year.

Elsie: Yes.

Emma: We’re going to get there.

Elsie: This is a thing that we really want you to hear from the beginning. You have to commit to doing influencer work for a long time if you want to make it. You can’t do it for two months or six months, you have to do it for years.

Emma: It’s not a weekend boot camp and then, boom, you’re there.

Elsie: Right.

Emma: That’s just not how it works.

Elsie: And also, I understand how it looks like when you see someone with 500,000 followers or a million followers or, you know, they have a sponsorship with a company that you want a sponsorship with, you look at them and you think like it came so easily to them, but you don’t know. You don’t know the back story that they went through. I promise you, it wasn’t as easy as it looks.

Emma: That’s why I like reading memoirs or seeing documentaries about famous people, because so often it does give you that look where basically you’ll see them working for years and years and years.

Elsie: Yes. And failing!

Emma: And doing well, and failing and having moments where they’re, you know, doing something that kind of looks silly. And then they finally start getting traction and then you’ll see them start doing interviews where they’re like, “oh, how did you get your overnight success?” And you want to scream at the TV or the book, like it wasn’t. Haven’t you seen that they were just working for years? Because now, you know, because you got to see the behind the scenes part, which usually like we don’t get to see that because we only know of people once they’ve already become famous or they’ve already made it or whatever it, whatever our, you know, perception of them is or whatever. But it’s like pretty much always there is a lot of years of work behind that where they didn’t feel like they were — they just felt like they’re kind of treading water. So you have to be willing to do that part if you want to make something, build something or whatever. So that. And then the other little thing I wanted to say before we get started into, like, the tips and like how-to is, so often I have people ask me this and I know people ask you too, they’re like, but can you start blogging now in 2021 and make money?

Elsie: A lot of people think that, like have the perception that blogging is dead. And here’s the thing. Like there was a boom like ten years ago and it’s not like booming in that way anymore, but now it’s like very, very steady water. It’s actually better to start now. I think there’s more opportunity. There’s more sponsors. Like when we first started, you couldn’t get a brand to want to sponsor a blog. Now, it’s very easy to find brands who have a budget for blogging. Sorry I interrupted you. Go on.

Emma: No, I was pretty much going to say the same thing.

Elsie: It’s easy, guys! It’s a great time to start!

Emma: It’s a great time to start. I think if you want to be an early adopter. Yeah, you missed it. Like that’s over. Yeah. And we all know that being an early adopter is kind of a way to have success. But it’s not the only way.

Elsie: But, and it’s also like just doesn’t happen sometimes. Like I started a vine, I started a lot of things that didn’t take off, you know what I mean? Like…

Emma: Yeah, it’s a little more risky.

Elsie: I used to be like hopelessly devoted to my MySpace, you know what I mean? So there’s a lot of things you do, like blogging was just another thing like that that we did. It wasn’t important to us at the time when we started. I wasn’t starting it as a way to start a career at all. I just started my blog because I saw my friends had one and I was like, I guess I should start one. That looks fun.

Emma: Yeah. And there is more competition now than like at the very, very beginning. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing either, because it also means there’s more opportunities to network, there’s more opportunities to learn and to see what works and what doesn’t work and to build off, you know, lessons that you can learn from others. You don’t have to learn every single lesson yourself, which is nice because as OG bloggers, we kind of did have to learn every lesson ourselves, which can be kind of frustrating and take up a lot of time. So…

Elsie: It’s true. There’s so many things that we navigated in the early years where we were working to make like a fraction of the money that we can make now on a much more established, streamlined system.

Emma: Yeah.

Elsie: So I definitely think it’s a great time to start a blog. Don’t get hung up about that, honestly, like some people who started in the very beginning had a disadvantage because they started in the beginning.

Emma: Yeah. It changed.

Elsie: Because they didn’t know what — right.

Emma: Yeah. And we’re really…we’ve been saying blogging, but there’s really three areas that we feel like we can teach in, which is blogging, Instagram and podcasting.

Elsie: Yes.

Emma: There’s lots of other areas, by the way, like YouTube and TikTok. We can’t teach you that because we don’t feel like we necessarily have anything helpful to really share.

Elsie: Yeah, it’s just not a thing we’ve done as a business. So we have courses on blogging, Instagram and podcasting. You can go to courses.abeautifulmess.com and check out all our courses. We have more than that. But definitely like, from this episode, you’re going to hear us talk about blogging, Instagram and podcasting a bunch. And you can use the code PODCAST for twenty five percent off any of our courses, which is kind of a banger deal.

Emma: Yeah, it’s pretty good. So, and this will work. We’re not putting expiration date on it. So, you know, if you’re listening to this five years from now, maybe it will expire, but probably not. So you can use this any time. PODCAST, 25% off.

Elsie: The Year was 2026…

Emma: And the code still worked and I was like, “wow!”. Okay…

Elsie: Cool!

Emma: And now we’ll take a quick break and hear a word from this week’s sponsor:

Elsie: You probably know we’re big fans of our sponsor, Grove Collaborative. Grove makes it easy to shop clean label and sustainable products and have them delivered right to your door. They have all kinds of home, beauty, and personal care products that are good for your family. And as a company, they’re taking big strides towards fighting the single-use plastic problem, including their new line of plastic-free home cleaning products. Grove is excited to offer 100 percent plastic-free cleaning concentrates, hand soap and dish soap powered by plants and packaged up in glass and aluminum, they’ll keep your home and our planet clean. Clear glass and aluminum are infinitely recyclable. Beyond Plastic packaging will save almost 30 tons of plastic from landfills in just one year. Beyond Plastic is their five year plan to solve a single use plastic problem for home and personal care products. Make your home healthier this year. For a limited time, when my listeners go to grove.co/abm, you’ll get a free five piece Beyond Plastic gift set that includes: glass hand soap dispenser and hand gel soap refill, glass spray bottle and cleaning concentrate, walnut scrubber sponges, plus free shipping with your sixty-day VIP trial, a $40 value. But you have to use our special code. Go to grove.co/abm to get this exclusive offer. That’s grove.co/abm.

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So we divided this into three sections. The first one is make your plan. The second one is execute your plan. The third one is keep going! And we’re going to teach you how to start an influencer business in this 40ish-minute podcast episode. Ready, set, go.

Emma: Yeah. So first, make your plan. So this has to do with the first three to six months or so. And just like as you’re launching, which is going to be your most exciting time, like you’re going to feel really jazzed. So take advantage of that energy to make a plan. But as you are. Make sure it’s something that you can truly execute with however much time you have. So let’s explain how we used to blog versus how we blog now. And this also applies to Instagram or podcasting.

Elsie: Right. So when I first started blogging, I felt that the most genuine way to blog was to write a post that day and publish it that day. And that was what I often did. And I would blog several times a week in my very first year or so. And it would just be like what I was doing that day, what I was doing that week, what I just bought, what show I just watched, you know, things like that. And it was very much just like a diary of my life. And then over time I had to adjust my thinking because I realized that it really wasn’t sustainable. I wasn’t going to wake up every day with a new idea. I needed to plan ahead. And when we started doing shareable content, that was when…which shareable content to us is like something kind of like teaching content, like a recipe, a DIY, something that you would send to a friend or you would save for six months and then do it or something you would pin to Pinterest.

Emma: Right, or so something someone would Google, you know, like a question they would have and they would type in how to make royal icing sugar cookies or whatever, you know, something like that.

Elsie: So when we started doing those types of posts, I started making long lists of ideas. And like I have this picture from our early days where I was like putting this like huge calendar of post its on my wall. And I think that type of method is really, really helpful in the beginning, like writing down your ideas to where — like and if you take Emma’s course, she’ll help you do this. But where you have months of ideas already just sitting there waiting for you and then you go ahead and schedule them and then you execute them and then you can do it in batches where you can get like a whole week of work done in one day. And I will tell you this, it’s not less genuine. I know that people…like it bothers people like after the last time…

Emma: People think it is. But they’re wrong. (laughs).

Elsie: Right after the last time I mentioned that we batched our podcast episodes, I got a couple of, like, strongly worded messages that were like that kind of ruins it for me and which like…

Emma: You’re like, OK, see you later.

Elsie: Yeah. To that I would respond like OK, like if we were doing like a Daily News podcast then…

Emma: Right.

Elsie: I get it that you have to wake up every morning and respond to that day’s events. But for what we’re trying to do, if we didn’t batch, we wouldn’t have an episode every week. And so I think that in the big picture, when you zoom out and look at it, it’s better to work ahead because then we’re doing something that’s sustainable that we can maintain instead of just like busting our ass so that it can, so that we can, like, talk about, you know, something that was in the news this week. That’s not what our podcast is.

Emma: Well and another way to say, busting your ass is to say burning yourself out.

Elsie: Right. Yeah.

Emma: Which is not what you want to do because you’re not, like Elsie said, be able to sustain that.

Elsie: Yeah, because for what we’re doing right now, you know, we…a lot of people know we have two separate businesses and we’re very involved in both of them. And we run our podcast. And Emma’s preparing for maternity leave. There is no…

Emma: And Elsie has two young kids.

Elsie: Yeah. And I have two little kids. There’s no possible way that we would have an episode for you every week if we didn’t batch at least a good amount of them. And I really, I won’t apologize for that. And I don’t think you should either.

Emma: The moral of the story is if you have a friend who tells you that planning is bad, that’s not your friend. (laughs)

Elsie: (laughs) Right. Like so. And the thing that’s really cool that I wish someone would have explained to me in my first year of blogging. And what I’m explaining to you now is that you really can write a whole month of blog posts in one or two days, maybe three. You know, I don’t know how what kind of blog you have and how complicated your posts are, but you definitely can do all your content, set it on a timer and, you know, check in every day and like respond to the comments and stuff where it’s like very easy to maintain. And for some people, not us, blogging can even become like almost like a passive income where it’s like a very, very small, like side project thing that they do right now or podcasting. But I feel like our podcasting is like, it’s a small amount of our time compared to the other stuff we have to do in our business.

Emma: Compared to the other stuff, I would agree.

Elsie: Yesterday I spent the whole day writing outlines, though, so…

Emma: And today we’re going to spend at least half the day recording. But we don’t do that all the time. We do that once or twice a month.

Elsie: Anyway, planning is absolutely the way to get your work done and then still have capacity where you can, like, add on something fun or try something different, you know, or experiment in your business. If you don’t want to be stressed and behind every day, you have to plan ahead.

Emma: Yeah. And if you’re even needing a step right before this, before the planning, which is just like I need help defining my blog, defining what my Instagram is, defining what my podcast is, we do have lessons about that, too, because, yes, you’re not going to be able to plan content months and months in advance if you don’t know what you’re writing about or what you’re talking about. So if you’re needing to define that and take that step back, then I definitely recommend doing that on your own. But also, if you want to go to courses.abeautifulmess.com, we have some resources available there, too.

Elsie: Yes. All right. Let’s move on to executing your plan. This is the most important part. This is the part where a lot of people stop or don’t complete it or they’re like, I need to wait till I can be more perfect. And then that day never comes.

Emma: This is called finishing.

Elsie: Yes.

Emma: Over and over and over again.

Elsie: So I want to first recommend the book The 12 Week Year, Emma and I both read it right before the New Year, and it’s life changing. It’s very good. It has a lot of things in it that are going to help you keep going. One of the things I learned from it that I thought was the most helpful is that if you execute at 80 percent of your plan, most people will still achieve their goals. So that really helped me just to feel like not every day has to be perfect. Like I can have days where, like, my kid was sick and they were home from school and it didn’t go as planned or like, you know, other, you know, medical things or whatever, like life happens. And your plan doesn’t have to be perfect every day for you to achieve your goals.

Emma: Yeah. And I especially give this to all the Enneagram ones out there because. Eighty percent…so here in the U.S. with grades. I grew up in the U.S. that’s a B it’s a lobby. Like you’re hanging on by a thread. You’re almost to get a C plus. Right. So and to me, as I was in school a B was like that’s the lowest grade that I would really accept for myself. And an A was like, oh, wow, I did a really good job, you know, because. I’m not much of a perfectionist personally, but that’s kind of the idea is you don’t have to get an A. You just have to hang on by a thread and get that B, get the solid B, and you’re going to be able to achieve things. So, yeah, if your nanny doesn’t show up one day or your kid’s sick or you just have an off day and your content wasn’t what you wanted it to be, as long as you’re executing at 80 percent, you’re still going to get where you need to go, which I think is really inspiring because none of us are operating at 100 percent all the time. That’s just like a really special good day when you feel like you’re achieving that. So — it’s true. OK, so another thing I really like about the 12 week year that I think might help is you’re starting to execute your plan is you do need to blog or podcast or Instagram for a solid year at least to kind of get traction. But if you think about doing hard, hard work for a year, sometimes that’s really hard to wrap our minds around. So thinking about it in a 12 week cycle, I think helps a lot where you kind of have a mini finish line every 12 weeks. Yeah, it’s like what content?

Elsie: 12 weeks is like a quarter. Yeah. So there’s four of them in a year. Yep. So it’s really it’s yeah. That’s kind of the point of the book is that when people make a year long goal they might like take a month before they start or always feel like they have enough time. And when you have the shorter number of weeks, every week matters. And I really like that.

Emma: I really like it too. And yeah, you can’t procrastinate. And you also don’t feel like the finish line is so far away that like because if you’ve ever ran — I’ve never ran a marathon, I ran a half marathon and that was enough for me.

Elsie: Counts for me. (laughs)

Emma: And it felt too long. I wanted to quit. (laughs) I much prefer something where I can kind of see the finish line from where I start and then…so I can get there. And then if there’s another finish line after that, OK, like I’d rather you trick me and just do a series of 5Ks as a half marathon like that would work better for my mind than doing like a long, long, long race. That’s another thing I like. About 12 week cycles of planning is like, OK, this isn’t like such a long finish line that it’s so far away. So what I’m in the thick of it and things aren’t going as planned. I don’t feel like quitting. So I’m like, you know what, I can see the finish line. I’m going to just finish this up and then start my next one.

Elsie: Absolutely. Yeah. And for people who love to set goals like me, you get to set them more often. Yup. Which feel like you have that fresh start feeling more often.

Emma: Yeah which is good.

Elsie: I think that’s really good too. Yeah. I was just going to share that when we first started the podcast, we — and we started with like, you know, a big audience, like we have a blog, we have an Instagram, like we have an established audience for more than ten years. But it still took us a while to gain traction on our podcast and be able to both feel like we were growing and feel like we were reaching outside of our initial core audience and then also to feel like we were, well, to literally make money to make any money. It took a while and then, you know, all of a sudden it clicked into place and it was like cooking all of a sudden. And it really felt like, you know, it felt like it happened quickly by the time we got there. But there were like long stretches of months where it felt like, are we really, like, doing the best use of our time? So in the 12 week year, I feel like we’re talking about that a lot, but it’s so good. He calls it the Valley of Despair. And I think it’s good to, like, anticipate it next time that you start a new goal. Recently, I started a new like trying to become a runner again. And when I knew it was coming, the valley of despair, of like I don’t like working out, it helped me get through it.

Emma: Yeah. Because you know you’re in it and it just makes it less…not that it’s less real because your feelings of despair when you’re in it are still valid and they’re still real.

Elsie: You know, that it’s an obstacle that everyone has to go through and that a lot of people quit at that point. And so I think that if you start your influencer goal, knowing that you’re going to go through this spell of feeling like you’re working for nothing, it’ll be easier for you to get through it because you’re not surprised by that feeling.

Emma: Yeah, you won’t be surprised. You’ll know that it’s part of it. It’s part of the journey. You know, it’s the part of the movie where, you know, things are going bad, but they’re about to go good.

Elsie: Yes.

Emma: If it’s a happy movie. (laughs).

Elsie: So, yeah, when you have a boring day, you feel like you’re wasting your time. You feel like, oh, maybe I should just start a new plan and start over. Don’t start over. Just keep going. It’s such an essential part. All right. Let’s just take a quick sponsor break.

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Elsie: And then for the third point. So this point is just keep going, learn from your mistakes and build off your successes.

Emma: Yes.

Elsie: So you know that it’s working. You’re starting to gain traction. You’re like, I can see a real business forming here.

Emma: Yeah. And this is the time. So as you finish, as you execute. So whether it’s you’re doing our thing with the 12 week, you know, cycles or however you’re doing it, this is the time where you’re like, OK, I completed some things and now I’m going to collect some data. I’m going to evaluate. And, you know, I feel like the number one…

Elsie: I love looking at stats!

Emma: Yeah.

Elsie: It’s such a fun part.

Emma: Because the number one thing I think you’ll already know is how you felt like how did I feel going through that goal? You’ll already know that. And that’s good. That’s something you should take into consideration. But you also should take some time to go through the stats, whatever that might be. You know, if it’s a blog, you probably have installed Google Analytics and you can check out your traffic, check out how people discovered you. What were your top posts? You know, whatever it is, whatever kind of metrics you have, Instagram has its own insights. So you can look through those like this is the time to kind of see what worked, what didn’t work and evaluate it not just from an emotional how I felt doing it perspective, but how did people respond? What gave me the biggest boost? What things could I try to replicate, but in a different way? And what things like, oh, that was a ton of work and it actually didn’t move the needle. Good to know, I won’t spend my time on that again, you know, like those things. So this is like evaluation lesson learning time.

Elsie: If you didn’t like doing it and it didn’t work, then you kind of get this permission to be like, all right, less of that and more of what’s working. Building off what’s working is like a huge point that — it cannot be emphasized enough.

Elsie: So tell us a little bit about it. Tell us a little bit about learning from our mistakes. Yes, we have a good story.

Elsie: Yeah. Favorite lesson to share. And I believe I share this in my blog essentials course, a little bit in a little bit longer form. But the gist of it is we used to blog so… We’ve been blogging a decade. If you don’t know, we used to blog three times a day, and that’s a lot of work. You could probably just guess that just by me saying it, but that takes a lot of work. We had a bigger staff and it took up a huge portion of our time. Is just creating the blog posts that you see on our blog. So we would blog three times a day and over time it just started to feel not as sustainable, we felt very burnt out with it. And so we went down to two times a day and then eventually we went down to one time a day. And the reason we didn’t even try this for years is mostly fear. We were afraid that if we didn’t create all the free content that people were used to seeing from us that they would leave, they wouldn’t return to our site, which would be terrible.

Elsie: Yeah, and sometimes we would have a day like back when we did three a day, we would have a day when we did two. And people would like call it out and complain. And I think that’s another important point, is that if you react to criticism too quickly, you can kind of like make a lot of mistakes because a lot of people will give you kind of bad advice in their criticism. And it’s not that they’re trying to it’s just that they feel like they’re speaking for everyone and they’re really only speaking from their own opinion and they’re not speaking based on your stats and what is, you know, furthering your business.

Emma: Yeah. So for us, we should have tried more experiments with how many times we were posting a day, but we didn’t for years. And finally, we did.

Elsie: It was very scary, to be honest, because…yeah.

Emma: We mainly changed it up out of necessity, like our lives were just changing. And we also, you know, the landscape changed. So where we needed to keep up with Instagram and we had other goals and things that we were working on. So we just, we just had to change it up. So we did. And guess what? Our stats barely changed and we didn’t even make less money. So we were working three times as hard as we needed to for years just because we didn’t really try experiments. We didn’t really look at our stats. We listened to a very small sampling of voices that were mostly negative and fear-based and that held us back for a long time. We could have been doing lots of other things. We could have been putting more time into the content we were making…

Elsie: The hard thing about having super fans is that they will always tell you not to change.

Emma: Yeah.

Elsie: And that isn’t good advice. (laughs)

Emma: No.

Elsie: It’s coming from a good place, you know, and a place of like, genuine fandom. But it’s…but it’s not advice that is going to help you move to the next phase, whatever that is for you. And that’s something that took us a really long time to learn. OK, let’s talk about that unsexy money.

Emma: Oh, OK.

Elsie: OK, we’re going to talk about Emma’s oatmeal money. So Emma just showed me this chart yesterday.

Emma: Yes. Let’s call it oatmeal money. Oh, my God. Yes.

Elsie: Yeah. So, you know, we have blog posts every day and we do a lot of like really expensive, really fancy blog posts. Like we do room tours. We do, you know, big DIYs…

Emma: Some of our blog posts cost thousands and thousands of dollars.

Elsie: Right. But Emma just showed me a chart of last month of our ad thrive money, which is like the…

Emma: CPM based ads.

Elsie: Yeah. The CPM based ads that you see like popping up kind of in-between our content on our sidebar. And there was like this one huge spike one day in the month. And it was because she did this oatmeal post and it got re-shared so much. So we got a lot of traffic that, you know, was outside of our normal traffic. And so, yeah, there was this huge, huge, huge spike that we — I would have never known was there if we didn’t look at our stats from the inside because like, it’s great oatmeal, but I never would have thought it was like five times better than any other post from a month. (laughs)

Emma: Right? Yeah. It’s it’s truly a delicious recipe. I made it. I eat it. It’s delicious. But I don’t think from the outside looking in, you would — like if someone was just looking at our blog and I was like, hey, what do you think our biggest posts of last month was? There’s no way anyone would say…like maybe someone would guess this, but I don’t think so. They wouldn’t guess that, like, this baked oatmeal recipe was the banger for the month. But it was, you know, and I, I don’t like…I didn’t know for sure that it would be. But that being said, in our monthly meeting, which is where we kind of talk through our a lot of things, but including our editorial calendar, it’s basically so the three writers for our site don’t overlap each other too much.

Elsie: Yeah.

Emma: And other reasons too, so we can support one another, so on and so forth.

Elsie: Some of us like doing the same ideas all the time. Right. And so we want to make sure we’re not doing like I’m not doing the same idea as Laura or very, very similar in the same month because that would be not helpful. So anyway, so the month before I did this oatmeal recipe I mentioned, I don’t even know if you remember from the meeting, but I was like, I’m going to do one of my baked oatmeal recipes. It’s always a big one every year. And then sure enough, it was. And it’s like I think you could kind of look at that and be like a baked oatmeal. That’s not like the cool blogger thing to do. Cool blogger, things like room tours and like, you know, there’s just a lot more sexy content.

Elsie: Right. Emma announced she was pregnant last month on the blog and the oatmeal got more, more money. (laughs)

Emma: People cared a lot more about the oatmeal. (laughs) And I kind of knew they would like. That’s just, you know, the stats of it. And it’s not in any way offensive. I hope that doesn’t come off. Like people didn’t care about me being pregnant.

Elsie: It’s just what can get shared. I think that this is a great lesson because first of all, it shows you that you never know what’s behind someone else’s stats or someone else’s brand or how they’re really making money, because, you know, people look at what we do. And I think that they make assumptions. Right. And we make assumptions about other people.

Emma: Definitely.

Elsie: And what does like, what makes the most what you know is their big thing. And sometimes you can tell and sometimes you really can’t.

Emma: Yeah.

Elsie: So I think, first of all, knowing to examine your stats, because, like I said, if I wouldn’t have looked and she wouldn’t have looked and we didn’t know? How sad because now I’m like going to be bringing up baked oatmeal every month. Like, let’s do more of that. Let’s do like baked mac and cheese, let’s do like…

Emma: Just so you know, it’s not only a baked oatmeal blog now that’s all A Beautiful Mess is. We’re only doing baked oatmeal from now on. (laughs) I’m just kidding.

Elsie: People like delicious comfort food, though, like I get it.

Emma: Well, there are some lessons to draw from it. Like it’s an easy recipe to make. It’s something that I saw a lot of people saying they’re making for themselves, but also for their families. For kids, it’s ingredients that are very easy to find. So there are some things that I can kind of take from that and incorporate into other recipe posts, like people don’t necessarily want super complicated recipes from me. They might want it from a different blog, but they don’t particularly want it for me. They want something simple that they can make for themselves and their kids. So it’s like, great, OK, good news. That’s the only thing I know how to cook anyway. So great. You know, I can move forward with that information, but sometimes, you know, you can get really excited, like when I see the people on other blogs or Instagram and they do like a beautiful giant wedding cake or this like super complicated, you know, I don’t know even know like, I get really excited about that stuff. I like food. I like cooking. But I think I kind of always come back to that’s really not my lane. That’s something for me to be a fan of and to love and to comment on their site. But on my site, I’m going to stick a little more in my lane, which is like baked oatmeal and other things like that. (laughs)

Elsie: Yes, finding the thing that you’re good at and that people respond to is super important. It doesn’t mean you still can’t try any idea that’s exciting to you, but you’re like creating your base around things that, you know, work.

Emma: Yeah.

Elsie: So before we do our listener question, I just want to repeat again that we have 25 percent off any of our e-courses. We have one for podcasting, one for blogging, one for Instagram and more at courses.abeautifulmess.com and you just have to use the code PODCAST for twenty five percent off.

Emma: Yeah. Courses are a little more packed with information and a little more linear in their teaching than this episode. We are trying to give good tips here, but also…

Elsie: Yeah, it’s much more of more of this. So if you felt like you learned a lot from this, you’ll enjoy the courses. All right. So we have a listener question.

Emma: Jillian asks: “you are very generous with your time on Instagram. Do you ever want to hide?” It’s nice that she thinks we’re generous. It’s really sweet of her to say.

Elsie: Yeah, OK. So I, I love this question because it’s like she’s feeling like we’re being generous. I, like, don’t always feel that way. I, I feel like I’m hiding like a good amount. Last year I had weeks at a time where I didn’t go on there at all and or I wouldn’t post anything at all. You know, I would go on there and just like look at my friends posts and get off, you know, and that was what felt good to me at the time. And I guess the lesson there is that no one really notices when you need to take time away. You don’t need to, like, announce it or anything. Just take time away. And then when you’re in the mood to come back, come back and then people will think you’re generous. (laughs) I don’t know, like I feel like we take a good amount of time away. I don’t think that unplugging is something that’s difficult for us. We’re not workaholics anymore at this phase. I think when you’re in those early building years, it’s really easy to be a workaholic because you need to be/want to be. And then over time you develop boundaries and you realize that like, OK, I need to be a healthy person now that I’m a mom. You know, I have all new boundaries for that. Emma will be, you know, coming into that season this year. So, yeah, I think that I guess what my point is, is that we have boundaries that you don’t even notice are there. And so it’s OK for you to have boundaries that other people don’t even notice are there? You know, you don’t have to announce that. You don’t talk about it. You can just, like, have them.

Emma: Yeah, it doesn’t have to be a big mic drop moment. I also think, like, it’s really sweet that she said this, and I I’m sure she is noticing something and I really do appreciate that. But I also feel like for me, there are a lot of ways that I make myself accessible to others that I don’t think people really see, or at least a very small portion of our audience will see it. Like I just spoke at an event last month. It was through Zoom because, you know, we’re all not meeting in person, but and they just asked me to do it and I did it. And also there’s a lot of times people email me because I’ve given out my email a number of times and people email me and just ask me for any kind of advice. Or a younger gal, she interviewed me for her college paper that she was writing about food bloggers. And I did like a 45-minute interview with her and it was really fun. And then she sent me her paper at the end and it was really good. And she got a good grade for it. Yeah. And it wasn’t just about me. It was about a lot of things. She did a great job. But it’s like there’s a lot of ways to give of your time and to be a generous person with advice and just with encouragement. And it’s also OK to have boundaries and be like, I don’t write back to every single DM. I don’t write back to every single comment, and I especially don’t if I feel like it’s a personal attack, but if there’s someone who, like I, I just perceive they genuinely want a little bit of time for me for advice or for encouragement or whatever, then I’m personally really happy to give of it. And there might also be a season of my life where I can’t. I’ve got to conserve that energy for my son.

Elsie: It’s a good balance.

Emma: Yeah.

Elsie: It’s like you have like a pay-it-forward side and then you have like a guilt-free side.

Emma: Yeah. Or like I can’t pay it forward at the moment, but I’ll come back to that. Right now. I need to take, (laughs) because I need to, you know, get my work done or raise my kid or, you know, whatever. And there’s just different seasons. Yeah. So life is long. Have I said that yet? (laughs)

Elsie: Right. I mean, I think the lesson…(laughs) Yeah. That’s your favorite phrase. I like it. I think the lesson is just that there’s always so much more behind everyone’s life that you’re not seeing. So always just remember that. I think most people do. I think for some reason some people don’t.

Emma: A few very vocal people don’t. (laughs)

Elsie: It’s good to remember that most of our life is offline and it always will be. And it always has been, honestly.

Emma: Yep.

Elsie: Thanks so much for supporting the podcast. If you haven’t yet, we would love it if you would take a minute to leave us a review like this review from PTschoolgirl on Apple podcasts, the title says “you need this podcast in your life” and the review says “literally, I’ve never written a podcast review before. I feel like we’re having a wine and pizza night with a close group of friends when I’m listening. Thank you so much for your vulnerability.” Oh, we love that. Thank you so much for everyone who leaves this review. We noticed how many there are and there’s like way more than the last time I checked. Sometimes I, like, don’t look at them because I’m scared. But then when I do, they’re all like, really nice. So thank you!

Emma: Thank you!

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You can stream the episode here on the blog or on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, and Stitcher. You can find the podcast posts archive here.

As always, a big thanks to this week’s sponsors! Be sure to check out the offers from Bev, Function of Beauty, Pharmaca and BetterHelp exclusively for our podcast. If you’re looking for any past codes, check out this page, and thank you for supporting our sponsors!

Show notes:

-Linking Jenna Kutcher’s batch working podcast episode. I listened to it years ago and it inspired me to write 20 blog posts for my maternity leave. After that, I never went back!

-I’m so upset I used the word “mind-blowned” hahahaha WOW.

-Linking the book The 12 Week Year.

-A personal note:
I recently saw a couple comments saying that knowing our podcast is batched “ruins the magic.” To be honest, it made me feel really insecure. I hope that after listening to this you can see that batch working makes this podcast possible!

Guilty pleasure treasure:

Elsie- Headband organizer 

Emma- Heated massage pillow

Thanks so much for listening! We’re so grateful for your support!

Miss an episode? Get caught up!

• Episode #79: Emma’s Evangelical Upbringing Story
• Episode #78: Elsie + Emma React To 2021 Trend Predictions
• Episode #77: Elsie Teaches Emma To Be An Internet Mom

Episode 80 Transcript

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Emma: You’re listening to the A Beautiful Mess podcast. This week, we’re chatting about our secret weapon — batch working. This is going to be a great episode because batch working is the number one productivity habit that changed my life. I get more done in less working hours now, and it’s truly amazing. So we’re going to share all the details of how we batch work as well as our current guilty pleasures.

Elsie: Woo! So we’ve been blogging for 14 years and for the first maybe 10 years we were blogging, I didn’t batch work. So I have a very good before and after story of like how much it changed my life. Can I tell that?

Emma: Yeah, yes!

Elsie: Story time. So when I very, very first started blogging, I would only…this is just this is so green, and you guys are going to laugh. But I thought that it wasn’t very authentic unless I shared…like I had to write it that day and publish it that day. So at first I didn’t even do drafts. I would just, you know, write something out that day. And if I had more time, it would be a better post. And if I had less time, it would be a really bad post. Some of our very early blog posts are surprisingly very short, very random, just pictures, just talking. It was all over the place, kind of like live journal-y type of vibes, sometimes ranting, unprofessional. Should I go on? (laughs) And then through the years, we learned the beauty of working on drafts and having, like, more, you know, always having our work done ahead. And we didn’t always have our blog posts done ahead before that day. But for the most part, we would have you know, we would be working ahead on things. And I think we started a little bit to lightly batch work and it did help significantly. But… where it really got good is when I was preparing actually to have my second maternity leave. So my first maternity leave, I don’t necessarily think I did that great. I think I did the bare minimum and then everyone covered for me. And on my second maternity leave, I think I felt a little guilty because I had adopted two kids in two years and I was having two maternity leaves in a row. And I think I was like a little self-conscious. And also I think I just had listened to…I’m going to link to it. Jenna Kutcher’s podcast on batch working where she talked about her maternity leave and she talked about batching her like writing…or doing like 40 podcasts or something like that so that she could take a long time off. And that inspiration did a lot for me. And I think I ended up writing…it was something like 20 blog posts for my maternity leave. It was like way more than we needed! (laughs) And we ended up using them for, like, the whole year.

Emma: Yeah.

Elsie: But the thing that was cool is that I learned from it…

Emma: Yeah you came back from your maternity leave and we still had like half and…

Elsie: Yes!

Emma: And I think you were like, wait a second…(laughs)

Elsie: Yeah, I think I thought I was like saving the world. But actually it wasn’t even — we didn’t even need that many blog posts. But the thing that was cool is I learned how to do it. So…and I did all these extra 20 blog posts in my regular shoots, and I think it was over about two months. So that would be about three or four shoots where I just added extra things into each shoot. So like five extra posts in each one. And then I suddenly had like basically like half a year of extra blog posts completed. And it was kind of mind-blowing to me because I didn’t know I could get that much done that fast. And I also learned from it that the posts were standalone interesting, good posts, like high-quality posts. And the reason why was because I was batching the planning and I was putting — I put a lot into the planning of the topics and put like a ton of really different, really interesting topics, because normally if I was just batching what I was working on, I would do like three post about one room or something, which isn’t like a good variety. But this was like a very big variety of different things. And so I learned that batching my planning was essential too, and I think for anyone who’s a blogger or any kind of content creator batching you’re planning and batching your execution is the number one thing that can change your life. And since I had that experience over the last few years, I started having Fridays be a catch up day or sort of like an empty day with nothing scheduled. I usually do therapy on Fridays every other week and I’ll do things like run errands for the things I need to do the next week or things like that, like getting ahead. Like I feel like my schedule is much more airy and much more freed up, even though our kids were home from covid almost the whole year, and we had significant challenges so batch working is literally the glue holding our business together. And any time that someone wants to talk to us about how do you get so much done, this is like the main advice that I want to give them. So I’m really excited about this episode today.

Emma: Yes, I agree. Yeah. So I feel like you kind of defined batch working. It’s just basically like doing a whole bunch of the same thing at one time. So instead of writing, you know, because like, let’s just take a blog post since we’re bloggers and I think people can see blog posts pretty easily so they know what it is. So there’s the idea…buying of supplies or prepping of whatever it is you’re going to be doing, whether it’s a recipe or a room tour or whatever. So, you know, planning it, buying the supplies, actually making it, photographing it and then writing, you know, editing the photos and then writing the blog post. All of these things have to take place before the blog post can go live. So there’s actually a lot of, you know, steps. And you can do each of those steps that I just listed, you could do that for a whole bunch of blog posts at one time. So when I’m planning a blog post, it would be better if I plan five to ten. And when I’m buying my supplies, I should buy all the supplies for five to ten. All of that I have planned. And when I prep…so for me, like if I’m working on food, if I’m doing recipe testing, it’s like a recipe testing day where I’m usually testing at least two to three things and sometimes more depending, but basically like how much room I have in my oven and like what types of recipes I’m doing (laughs) because I can’t put an endless amount of things with different temperatures, but, you know, things like that. And photography, same thing. I like to photograph at least two or three things in one day, at least, and more is better if I can. I like to edit everything at once. And that’s the time when I listen to all my podcasts because I’m editing photos and it’s kind of visual only. And then I’ll often write two or three blog posts in a day, like the actual text of it. So that’s sort of, you know, and you can do batch working. You can think about it in all sorts of different ways. You could do it with housework, you could do it with different types of careers. You could do it, you know, with personal things, with job things, with parenting things. There’s lots of different ways to batch work. And currently this year we are trying more batch working in our podcast schedule. So we’re trying to plan better. So we plan a whole bunch at once. We work on all the outlines at once and then we’ll do a number of them in one day. We’re trying to find our balance with that, though, because everybody, you know, as you get into batch working, you’ll see that you…you know, especially if you’re working on something creative, there are times you kind of get exhausted or you kind of you know, you’re out of creativity for the day. So you don’t want to overwhelm yourself so that your work suffers. But you kind of have to find that balance for yourself.

Elsie: It’s interesting because, yeah, there’s certain things where, like taking a bubble bath, you wouldn’t want to batch work that it would ruin it for you. You just yeah, one is enough and you know, going to get a massage. There’s certain things where one is enough and then there’s certain things, and for us, a lot of it is work-related things, where you can do five of them in the time that it would take you to maybe do two and you realize that you can just get so much more done. And then with that comes more time later on in your schedule, like more freedom, more flexibility. And that is especially for us, you know, I have two young kids, Emma’s about to have a baby. This is a time in our lives when we need that freedom and flexibility because little kids go to the doctor and things like that all the time. They have sick days from school, things like that all the time. So flexibility is very important to us right now. And yeah, this is how we achieve it. And we’ve continued growing. Like, I think it’s really cool. We were able to grow our podcast during the time of covid. We were able to grow A Beautiful Mess last year during the time of covid — not like the biggest growth year we’ve ever had, but we were up against serious obstacles. So anyway, I think batch working is…it’s so essential and I hope everyone tries that we’re going to try to teach you as many of our little strategies as we can in this episode. And then please try and please report back on how it changed your life, because I really think it will. All right. Let’s take a quick sponsor break.

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Emma: Well, first tip for me. So there’s to me kind of two main mindsets that I had to get myself out of before I could really take advantage of all the benefits of batch working. And this could be different for everyone. These were just the two things that I had to get over. And one of them you kind of already touched on, Elsie, is I think sometimes we have this idea that it’s less authentic or it’s not as real to batch work something. And this happens with content creation. So blogging, posting to your Instagram, whatever, if that happens to be a part of your career like it is for us. But it can also happen with other things, like I know some people who are very…they don’t want to do meal planning. They don’t want to like do like prepping all meal stuff on Sundays because they feel like what if I feel like eating something different on Thursday? And I’m like, well, I understand what you’re saying. But I also think if this is a problem that you keep running into over and over again, this still might be an area you might try the back working and you can always adjust a little bit as you go, you know, so kind of changing your mindset on it instead of viewing it as a trap, viewing it as an opportunity for more freedom because that’s really what it is. So there’s that.

Elsie: Yeah.

Emma: And then the other mindset thing that I had to get out of is, Elsie and I are small business owners, as we’ve mentioned. And it’s not just our blog. We also used to own a store and we’ve done lots of other things in our career and we’re small business owners and so anyone else who owns their own business knows you end up doing a lot of different things, and especially when you’re starting out, because usually you can’t afford a lot of help at first. So you’re just doing a lot of different things as best you can. And so what it feels like is just putting out fires all the time. So for me, I had a big mental block about spending a lot of time planning and also spending a lot of time reflecting on what was working so that I could do better planning. I just didn’t want to take the time to do that. I felt like that was a waste of my time or that that would be me, like not doing work. That’s me just sitting around and not even doing work or like I just had so many fires to put out all the time. I just was like, that’s all I can do. I can’t I can’t get ahead. I can only maintain. And that was a mental block that I needed to get past. Because if you really want to do batch working and you want the freedom and the benefits that it brings, you have to make space for a lot of planning and also for reflecting on the past work that you did and seeing how it could improve, seeing what worked best, seeing what isn’t working, and so taking the time to do all that forecasting and planning and analyzing can sometimes feel like not real work, but it’s actually really important and the foundation of all of it.

Elsie: Yeah, I think that the thing that’s different is that if you’re used to having in a given workday, the feeling of starting and then finishing something in that day, you might not be able to have that feeling anymore. It’s kind of the opposite of a balanced schedule. It’s a very unbalanced schedule to spend your whole…like recently, you know, to prep for this day. We spent a whole day just writing podcast outlines, which I will tell you is not my favorite kind of day. It’s just not. But we wouldn’t be able to work ahead and then have, you know, eventually weeks where we don’t need to record if we didn’t do that. And planning for blog posts is like that as well. It can feel like you’re spending so much time just thinking about working before you actually start working, but I’ve learned that if you don’t put the time into like a really quality plan, the rest of it will all fall apart. So I think having a great plan in the beginning is actually the most important part of doing quality work, no matter what type of work we’re talking about, photography, writing, anything.

Emma: I agree.

Elsie: Yes. So you’ll have…when you start batch working, it’s a very focused schedule. You need to learn to focus. Like so many times I try to Face Time Emma and we’re big Face-Timers. We Face Time pretty much every day and she’ll be like, I’m doing recipes today. I have really good lighting. So basically I just can’t talk to you today. And that’s fine.

Emma: Yeah. (laughs)

Elsie: Like everyone in your life will understand, I think it’s important to learn for your employees to learn how, like, you know, that they don’t need you right then every single time. You know? I think it’s really, really important. So I’ve shared some examples about how I batch work in A Beautiful Mess like planning. I usually plan about two or three months of content at a time. Recently I planned my whole year of remodeling and it’s down to like when we’re going to do the post, when I’m going to complete the rooms, when I’m in a photograph `the rooms, what the budget is for the rooms, everything is planned, which feels really good. But it took a lot of time to do that and it felt like I was working on things that I didn’t need to work on yet. But it’ll free me up later. And it’ll also allow me to work ahead, because sometimes when you get ahead, you can get bottlenecked when you don’t know what’s the next priority. But when you’ve done all that planning in advance, you always know the next priority. So it can like…

Emma: Yep.

Elsie: …keep you moving faster. And in my personal life, I batch work basically everything I can. I’m definitely a grocery shop once a week person and like a big haul once a month, like if I go to Trader Joe’s it’s like a carful because I want it to last for a while. You know, with the freezer stuff, I buy all my Christmas presents usually in about one day every year, which I know is like very quick. But I feel like if I don’t — if I spread it out, like I spread it out with my kids and then I buy the whole rest of the family in one day and with my kids, guess what? I forget things that I bought them because it’s like it’s easier like when you buy something in August and something in September and two things in October, then it’s easy to have like a bunch of gifts everywhere and you don’t remember what they all are. So I think batch working can create a lot of efficiency for you too, and reduce waste. Like I remember when I was in high school and I was like staying over at one of my friend’s house and I learned that their mom went grocery shopping every day on their way home from work. And I was just like mind blown by that, you know, and it was just like how she did it and how she liked it. And maybe in some way it was like a comfort to her or a way to, like, reset herself at the end of her workday. But for me, it would be a nightmare to do it that way. I wanted to share a couple of reasons why having a batch working schedule can actually be way more productive than a balanced schedule where you do a lot of different things in one day. So especially when creating content, I think that seeing…being zoomed out and having that big view of what you’re covering is really helpful. Like if I write five weeks of blog posts and I do each of them in that week, I might kind of cover the same topic several times and not even notice it, if that makes sense. But if I’m doing all five weeks at once, I will be more careful to do a variety of different topics. And I’ll probably be covering off on more than one of our goals, which is really important and really helpful. Another thing is just that focused energy. So I learned recently in that The Twelve Week Year book that we loved that multitasking decreases productivity, which I had never heard that before. I was always very proud of being a multitasker and I can multitask a lot. Some people just naturally can, but it definitely decreases my productivity. And once someone put a label on that for me, like a stat, (laughs) I felt like I really got it. You know, that it’s not the kind of thing I want to do unless I’m doing something that’s just for fun, like just a hobby. It’s not something I want to do to be efficient in my work. Let’s take a quick break for our sponsors.

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Another thing that’s this one’s kind of a funny side effect. But OK, so when I started batch working, which was about two years ago now for our blog posts, at very first people were sort of like noticing the batching and calling it out. Like one time someone was like, it looks here like you photographed a recipe and a post about a shelf and a post about your garden boxes all in one day, (laughs) which is true. So I like basically, I learned to hide it. And I think that learning to hide it actually like created more variety too, because when I do my shoots, I’ll change clothes like four to ten times in a day and where I wouldn’t have done that before. And if I were shooting in real time, I often wear the same clothes over and over, you know, like I definitely probably would have accidentally worn, you know, the same thing on two different weeks. But I don’t know…when you do batch working and you’re trying to, like, compensate for it, then you end up with this like natural like big variety of different things because everything’s planned and everything’s intentional. So anyway, that was just a few of the things that I learned that have been really helpful. I would never go back. And my advice, if you want to try it for the first time, is just take one of your tasks, whatever is your main work task, and divide it into three different focus days and just try it like see how much more you can get done dividing up the planning and the execution and then the finishing work.

Emma: Let’s do our guilty pleasure treasure segment. OK, I’m always ready for this one because, you know, I just want to talk about shopping. So my guilty pleasure. This is actually not I’m not guilty about this at all. I’m feeling very high on it. So, you know, I’m like obsessed about my dream closet and probably going to be the best part of my 2021 every day I’m thankful in my heart for this closet. So one of the things I did was a shelf of headbands and so I got these headband organizers actually started using them in my last house and I will link to them in the show notes. They’re kind of like a plastic cylinder. And then you can open up the tops. You can store things inside of it, too, if you want to. But I don’t like to do that because I don’t like any kind of hidden stuff. Like I want everything to be, like, easy to see unless I’m trying to hide it. But that’s what cabinets are for, right. So anyway, I think I have four or five of them, which is a lot of headbands. I know, but it was one of my shopping therapies of 2020 like, how I made it through was buying stuff on Etsy and you know, just like collecting little cute things. So anyway — loving the headband trend and I got these organizers and now they’re all like in a row I can see them all at the same time and it’s right by my clothes. So that’s my guilty pleasure. But I’m not guilty because I love it. Woo! What’s yours?

Emma: Yeah, (laughs) mine is kind of dorky, I feel like all my guilty pleasure treasures are just like bordering into the dorky, but that’s OK. I got this heated massage pillow for Christmas it was actually a present from Trey and it’s you can put it in your car, which I have not done because I don’t know about that, but I use it in my office chair and when I’m watching TV at night and it’s very similar to if you go get your nails done and they have a massage chair, it feels like that where it’s kind of like metal balls that are inside fabric and they press on your back and then it heats up. And so, yeah, it’s it looks like a little alien face and I use it all the time. I love it. It makes kind of a like buzzing sound though. So I try to remember to turn it off if I have a Zoom meeting or something because I don’t want anyone to know that I’m just giving myself a little back massage at the same time!

Elsie: Oh my gosh, please wear that in our Monday meeting.

Emma: It’s been great because my back has been real sore. So yeah.

Elsie: Yeah that is an awesome gift. OK, we’ll link to it. So do you just use it on the couch mainly? Like where do you usually use it when you’re sitting and how do you position yourself?

Emma: Yeah, I mainly use it on the couch or my office chair and it kind of can do like your lower back or your middle back or your like shoulder blades. It can’t do all those areas at once. It’s, you know, so I’ll kind of put a pillow in the area where it’s not so that I don’t feel like I’m like leaning back or leaning forwards. So, yeah, it takes a little finagling. But…it’s really nice!

Elsie: I miss the pedicure massage chair. I miss it so much. It’s one of my things from the before times that I can’t wait — mark my words. As soon as I have my second vaccine dose I am going back to the nail salon and I’m going to get some claws. It’s going to be amazing.

Emma: I like it. Do it.

Elsie: Thank you so much for listening to our podcast and supporting us. If you haven’t left us a review, we would really appreciate it, especially if it’s a nice one. We also love getting your questions and topic requests. Our email is podcast@abeautifulmess.com. We love receiving those every week. And if you try out batch working after listening to this, we would love to hear if it helps your life. It’s a subject we’re so passionate about and we hope that it’ll help you out too. So have a good week, Bye

Emma: Bye!

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You can stream the episode here on the blog or on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, and Stitcher. You can find the podcast posts archive here.

Show Notes:

-If you haven’t heard Elsie’s first interview with Ramit, it’s on Episode 35.

-We LOVE Ramit’s book, I Will Teach You to Be Rich. I’ve given this book to multiple friends and recommend it often.

-He has a new course out, Find Your Dream Job, which we talk a lot about in the episode.

-You should definitely follow Ramit on Instagram and sign up for his newsletter. Both rule. Seriously.

Miss an episode? Get caught up!

• Episode #73: Home Project To-Do List
• Episode #72: What To Expect When EMMA’S EXPECTING!
• Episode #71: Hygge And How It Helps Us Live Happier In The Winter!

Episode 74 Transcript

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Emma: You’re listening to the A Beautiful Mess podcast, and today I’m very excited to share with you my interview with Ramit Sethi. You might remember him from episode 35, Elsie interviewed him. We are huge fans of his book, “I Will Teach You to Be Rich”, and he has a new course out, Find your Dream Job. So we chat a little bit about that. We chat about a big move he made this past year. We chat about negotiating raises and perks in your job and just finding the job that’s for you and just finding hope this time in history. So I love this interview. I was super jazzed after it. And I think you will be, too. So have a listen.

Alright. So last time we chatted, you got to chat with my sister, Elsie, and you already know that we are huge fans of your book and your brand, I Will Teach You to Be Rich, and you have a new course out this month, Find your Dream Job, which I am really excited about. And I feel like it’s a topic that our listeners are going to love. I also just think this year everyone’s looking for a way to take this current time in history and find something positive for ourselves, find some more hope. So I love the topic. And one thing I love about the way you teach is that it’s full of practical advice. So you’ll literally tell us what bank accounts to look for and what credit cards. But also it’s a lot about mindset and psychology. So with that in mind, I wanted to know what mindsets you see people have right now that are self-defeating when it comes to changing career or big life changes. And what can we do to get past those?

Ramit: Well, there’s two of them. And the first one is “I should just be lucky to have a job”. And this is super common. What’s interesting is that people have told themselves this when the economy was great and people have also told themselves this when the economy was poor. So maybe if you just feel lucky enough to have any job at all during good and bad economies, maybe it’s actually not about the economy and maybe it’s about the beliefs that you grew up with. And a lot of us grew up with parents telling us, oh, don’t try to do that. You should just be happy that you have a job at all. And I don’t believe that. I don’t think I want to go somewhere for eight or nine hours a day and just be happy that it is a job. Who wants ‘a job’ or ‘a relationship’? I want to have a great job. I want to have one that pays me well, challenges me. If I don’t want to commute, I don’t want to have to have a commute. So that’s number one. That’s the first mindset change that I want to encourage all of us. It’s not enough to settle for a job. I deserve a dream job. OK, that’s number one. And the second one, once people acknowledge this and they say, OK, all right, fine, fine, I need to get a job, you ask people, OK, what is your next step? And they go like this, “uh, I need to figure it out”. When they say figure it out, what they really mean is I think I need to update my resume. I’m probably going to go to some random job search website, type in the exact job title I have today, the one that makes me unhappy. And then I’m just going to wait passively for companies to find my resume and send it to me. The key thing I would teach everyone here is that. Top performers find dream jobs in a completely different way than average applicants, average applicants are passive. They put their resume online and wait. Top performers take a totally different approach and finding a dream job is a skill. You learn the skill, you’ll land the job.

Emma: I love it, yeah, because I definitely struggle with the first one that you mentioned, just like because you want to be a grateful person, you want to — you want to be thankful for what you have. But I also think there can be a barrier there with kind of settling and with saying, well, I’m not going to try for the dream because I’m just going to I’m just grateful I have something and I’m just going to play small and stay with that. So I love that. I love that you’re addressing that.

Ramit: You know, I am happy, but I’m not satisfied. And you can be both you can be happy and grateful, but not satisfied. And we have people that work at my company. They are employees. They’ve been here for years and they’re happy. They’re paid well, but they’re not satisfied in certain areas of their life, nor am I. So there might be an area where I’m like, you know what, I really want to get better at photography. Or, you know what? I’m actually good with this right now. I’m really happy and satisfied with how this area of life is working out for me. I’m good. So it’s not that we always need to be climbing some invisible ladder. There are areas of life. But if you’re listening to this, my guess is that you might not be satisfied with your job. You might be happy, maybe not, but you might want to get paid more. So, for example, we teach people how to get substantial raises, ten thousand to eighty thousand dollars raises. We teach people who used to have to commute an hour, hour and a half every day how to get a zero commute job working remotely. These are the kind of things where you start to imagine in your life. And if you’re playing small, you will instantly talk yourself out of it. “Well, I don’t deserve that. That might work. Well, if I went to that college, I don’t know, because if I got that pay, then I’d have a lot more responsibility”…trust yourself. If you got paid ten thousand dollars more like we can show you in the dream job program or twenty-five thousand dollars more trust in yourself that you would be smart enough to know how to handle those responsibilities. I trust myself, and I think you could trust yourself as well.

Emma: I love it, so as I mentioned, we’re huge fans, so I happen to know which if everyone listening doesn’t already follow @ramit on Instagram, you need to my favorite, other than just learning all the practical tips and all the mindset things is when you troll your trolls. That’s my favorite. I feel like I always learn something too, and it’s just empowering. But anyway, we’re not talking about trolls today. Since I’m a fan, I happen to know that you and your partner moved from New York to L.A. this last year, which isn’t necessarily a career change, although oftentimes moving can have to do with that. But it’s more of a life change. I just wondered if you would share with us a little bit about how you guys came to that decision and maybe if there were any barriers along the way or any self-doubting moments or difficulties with that, because it’s just such a big change and a lot of people are facing stuff like that this year.

Ramit: Yeah, we’re all facing change in one way or another, and my wife and I had lived in New York for over 10 years, that’s actually where we met. And when COVID happened, I have a general life rule in times like traumatic times, which is that panic is bad, but overreaction is good. And this all happened because I took classes on trauma and how certain people survive when others do not in things like fires, etc.. And I remember back in college reading all these stories about people who, they saw something bad happening and they were like, we got to get out of here. And they moved fast. And that was a big determinate. So when COVID happened, I turn to my wife and I said, we got to go. And maybe it’s because I watched too many Batman movies. I saw the bridges getting lifted up. And I was like, we got to get out of here. Yeah. And I remember texting my friends on WhatsApp and they were like, what are you talking about? It was that early that people were not really leaving or thinking about leaving. So we did. And we were fortunate to be able to move fast and we had saved money. So we were not — money was not the primary limiter for us. It was how fast can we move? And we moved outside the city for a few months. And I have to tell you, you know, I don’t really love change. I like my routines, you know? And so being there was, you know, we’re not going to complain. We were fortunate to be safe, but we were not in our routine. And then finally, my wife suggested, you know, hey, we’re both from California. We’ve thought about moving to California. Why don’t we give it a shot? Let’s just see how it is. And if we like it, we can stay. And if not, we can come back to New York and our families are also in California. So it made it very appealing to us. And if it wasn’t for her, I probably would not have done it, because, like I said, I don’t love change, but she’s pushed me to be a little bit more adventurous. And I said, all right, let’s try it. And so we made the move. And we love, we love L.A. There’s so many things we love. I’m still getting used to needing a car, but we do. I wake up every day and open the door and expect it to be frigid or humid. And it’s not it’s always the same. I love it. And I think one lesson I learned, which I think maybe all of us can apply at some point in our life, is that whether it’s a life decision or a negotiation, 80 percent of the work is really done before you ever walk in the room, you know, you walk into a room and if you’re negotiating your salary, that work has already been done with the way you approach the job, the way you filled out your cover letter, how you talk to them in your interview. Same thing with us moving. We did not have to worry about savings because we’d been saving ahead of time. That stuff, having those foundational fundamentals done ahead of time allows us all to make nimble moves when it calls for it. And just want to add one last thing. We don’t have kids, so that definitely makes things simpler. There are lots of parents who can’t just pick up and pack up and move across the country instantly. So we’re all dealing with different things. But, you know, I guess the lesson I learned back all the way back in college, you know, don’t panic, but overreaction is good in times like this. That’s what eventually brought us across the country.

Emma: I love too, I think there’s a lot of wisdom, and I guess it was your wife’s way. She brought it about that. This doesn’t have to be forever. We don’t have to say completely goodbye to this life that we had. We’re just going to try something new. And I think that that’s a really good when you are making a change in your life, because sometimes it’s just the the loss of the thing you’re used to that makes change so scary. You kind of give yourself that. I can come back to this. I could come back to this job that I maybe I’m OK with. But it’s not a dream job. But I’m going to try this new thing. I think there’s great wisdom there.

Ramit: So it’s scary. I mean, that’s what — she knew me and she knew that I needed to internalize that because it’s easy to start spinning and saying, well, OK, so now this is going to be forever. We’re never going to be able to live here again. And of course, like you said, that’s just not true. We can try things. And if we don’t like it, most things in life are reversible or recoverable, not everything. We need to be careful about those things. But for a lot of things, if you make a move to a different industry and you don’t love it or even a different company, a lot of times you can go back and that knowing that and feeling that allowed me to really say, OK, let’s take the next step and see where it leads us.

Emma: Ok, we’re going to take a short break and then we’ll be right back.

I am so excited to share a new course Blog Essentials with you. It is my belief that anyone willing to put in the work can have success with blogging. I have taken my decade long experience at A Beautiful Mess and condensed it into what I believe are the essentials for anyone getting started or looking to go from a hobby to making some income from blogging. To read the full description of the course and see all the lessons and materials that it includes, simply visit abmblogessentials.com and our podcast listeners can get 20 percent off with the code BLOG20. If at the time you check out we’re running a better promotion, you can use that instead. But this is an evergreen code you can use any time on the regular price and that code is BLOG20.

All right. So I know you are covering a lot of topics in your new course Find your Dream Job. It looks like it’s about potentially finding a new job, maybe crafting your own career that you love instead of seeking a job. Also, things on negotiating raises or negotiating perks, more flexibility, things of that nature. So one thing I wanted to ask you about is I think a lot of companies have had to go remote and many of them are probably going to stay remote, which I think is awesome. I think it opens things up for employers and opens things up for job seekers. But the drawback for job seekers is there’s going to be more competition. So do you have any — a few tips for our listeners about how to stand out among this new competition?

Ramit: Yeah, so I want to introduce this concept of what we call career seasons, just like there are different seasons in life and we all know it, we kind of look forward to it. It is predictable. We have the same seasons in our career. And I’ll just give you an example of my career. When I was in my twenties, I was in the growth season. I was working sixty hours a week and happy to do it. I wanted to learn more. I wanted to make more. And I wanted to just I was not worried about how much time it took. Growth. That’s what I wanted. So for some people listening, you’re like, yes, that’s me. Like, I want it, growth at all costs. I don’t care about cutting back. I want more. Perfect. That’s where I was in my 20s. Then I think for some people, whether they have children or maybe an elderly parent, maybe they just want to focus more time on their hobby as well. They might switch into a season we call lifestyle. And this is a different season for me, which is, hey, I have I’m married. I want to be able to travel more. I still am very, very interested in my work and I want to do an awesome job. But there are other things outside of that. Balance, lifestyle. And then for some people, they’re like, you know what? I’ve done this for 15, 20 years. I’m a lawyer. I think I want to be a beekeeper. And they just completely switch and we call it reinvention. And for a lot of people listening, that’s you. You’re like, I’ve done this. I want to switch to a totally different industry. Well, each of these seasons is totally natural. You might encounter it at some point in your life. And so if you think about remote work and you realize I actually love being able to wake up, make my coffee and start working and not have to struggle through an hour long commute each way, that to me seems very much like a lifestyle season. And so the first step that we teach in the dream job program is to show you a method to really understand your one lifestyle season. Everybody wants to say, well, I’m growth, but also lifestyle. No, we show you how to pick one. You’ve got to pick one in order to find a dream job. And then we show you how to find that dream job within that season. For example, if you do not want to commute, we show you how to find companies that are remote, but we also show you how to go to companies that are not necessarily remote and convince them to allow you to work remotely. So we have scripts. We show you how to do it in the interview, in the negotiation, even on your cover letter. So for everyone listening, if you have this feeling, this pit in the bottom of your stomach thinking, oh, I don’t want have to get back in a car, fill up my gas two times a week and have to struggle and go through traffic every day, there is a way in the dream job program. And if you decide, you know what, I’m ready for growth. I want to get a ten, twenty thousand dollar raise and I’m willing to put the work in. We can show you how to do that as well.

Emma: Love it, I love it. And on that note, so with negotiating for a raise or a perk, like less commute time or just more flexibility, can you give us one tip or maybe one pitfall that you see a lot of people do when they are negotiating? Because every time I’ve given one of our team members your book, I Will Teach You to be Rich. I’m waiting for the day that they used the negotiate tips on me. And I just am like, if they really read it one day, the next evaluation I’ll be hearing…

Ramit: I know, but they got to get to work. They have to get to the end because it’s in Chapter nine. So you’re going to know that they made it OK. So I’ll tell you, the biggest pitfall is people simply not doing it OK. And just again, like most mistakes in life, they are mistakes of omission. Most of us are passive in our lives and we just don’t do it. And if you learn the skills of negotiating, you can completely transform your life. A single five thousand dollar raise can be completely life changing because people who get raises once tend to get them again and again and again. So here’s how you do it. I’ll give you a quick one tip, which is split your negotiation ask into three parts. Most people believe you just walk in and say, can I have more money? That’s going to get you kicked out of the office really fast. A better way is to split into three parts. Part one, go to your manager, get clarity on what it takes to exceed expectations. In other words, to be the best at your role, get clarity on that. Number two, deliver on exactly what you and your boss agreed upon. And that can usually take three to six months. Three, walk in the room and negotiate. And remember how I told you that 80 percent of the work is done before you ever walk in the room. This is how it’s done. You spend most of your time getting clarity and delivering. By the time you walk in the room, it’s a foregone conclusion that you deserve the raise that you’re negotiating for.

Emma: Yep, yep. And that’s always the thing I’m like just waiting for, I can see they’re doing all the steps. So the next time they come in it’ll be a — it is! Because you’ve done all the things.

Ramit: Can I just say for everyone listening I hope you caught — I hope you caught what just happened here. We have a manager saying I wish my employees negotiated properly. I hope everyone’s listening to this. Managers want to pay their best performers more. In other words, you have money that’s sitting there waiting to be taken. You have to learn the skills of how to ask for it and how to earn it. That is exactly what we teach in dream job. But you just heard it here and a hiring manager and a manager saying, I wish my employees would negotiate with me. Well, a lot of you have managers right now who would love to pay you more. We teach you how to get that and earn that in the Dream Job Program.

Emma: I love it, I love it, and we’re going to put lots of links to all of this in our show notes so you can check out the course, check out his site, check out his book. We also love his newsletter. We recommend you sign up for that. Even if you don’t want a new job, just sign up for his stuff because you will learn so much about marketing at the very least. So Ramit, Thank you so much for coming on again. I always love chatting with you. Always love hearing your advice. I feel jazzed now to change my career! No, just kidding.

Ramit: (laughs)

Emma: But I really do love the idea of not settling, not playing small and changing our mindset. So thank you.

Ramit: Thank you so much.

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You can stream the episode here on the blog or on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, and Stitcher. You can find the podcast posts archive here.

Show notes: 

-Books we recommend:
–I Will Teach You To Be Rich
–The Simple Path To Wealth
–Work Optional

-Link to more blog advice posts: Business advice for our younger selves, 5 ways to treat your blog more like a business, How I still love blogging after 12 years, Our top 12 posts about blogging, Our app story.

Thanks so much to this episode’s sponsors Calm and Issuu! We’re so excited to partner and share more about these awesome companies with you. Our sponsors help support our podcast, so be sure to check them and their great offers for our listeners out!

Miss an episode? Get caught up!

• Episode# 62: Enneagram 101 with Ryan O’Neal
• Episode #61: Unpopular Opinions
• Episode #60: Our Favorite Movie Houses

Episode 63 Transcript

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Elsie: You’re listening to the A Beautiful Mess podcast. This week, we’re doing a listener AMA on the topics of business and money. We’re going to rapid fire about 20 questions. We love sharing business secrets and we truly believe it’s one of the ways we can contribute is to be generous and open with our business advice. If you didn’t already know, we own two successful companies, blah, blah, blah. Not to brag (laughs) that we built from scratch. And guess what? It’s not all roses, but we truly believe that anyone can have the same success as us on your own paths. All right. So we have around 20 questions and we’re just going to, like, blow through these questions and give you all kinds of advice. We zig we zag, right, Emma? (laughs)

Emma: Yeah. And we’re going to try not to do too many disclaimers. And also, it is kind of weird to talk about business and money. I always start to get a little, uh, just feeling like I have a big head or like I’m bragging or like I’m making someone else feel weird by talking about my own opinion or my own, I don’t know, success?

Elsie: And to be fair, you might be right. That’s like always in the back of our minds. But let’s just consider this a safe space where we’re just talking with friends really openly….

Emma: Right. Well, where I was going with it was a little bit that I do think maybe I have fallen into — maybe no one else does this — but maybe I have fallen into the trap of, you know, it’s not good to talk about business or money, especially if you’re a woman. And I just hope that us trying our best to be open about what we know, which isn’t like, you know, we know some things, but by no means do we know everything. So you’ll see. But I hope that it encourages more women and also anybody to be bold in the things you want in life and to be proud of what you’ve built and what you’ve done. You know, because sometimes I want to minimize my own achievements. And I think that that’s a bad way to go about life. But it’s something I struggle with. So maybe people do, too. I don’t know.

Elsie: I think so. I definitely think it’s an awkward place to be in as a woman. And so let’s just do it.

Emma: Yeah.

Elsie: Yeah, we can do it. OK, so we collected questions from Instagram and we’ll just kind of like go back and forth, read the questions?

Emma: Yeah, let’s try it. All right, cool. So the first one is “I want a financial adviser, but I can’t afford it. Any books on investing or stocks?” So we have you on this one. So one of the books I just read said, like, the greatest little line that I really, like, hung on to. It was “by the time you know enough to pick a good financial adviser, you know, enough that you don’t need one.” And pretty much the three books have all kind of said the same thing, that you need to learn these basic things. You can learn them from these three books. You’ll be like a little mini expert by the time you finish these three books and you can totally do it. You don’t need, like, someone with a tie to explain it to you.

Emma: No. Tie optional.

Elsie: Tie optional. OK, so the books are I Will Teach You To Be Rich, The Simple PPath to Wealth and Work Optional, and we will link them all in the show notes. I’ve read them all within the last year and they’re all worth it. And they all give similar advice with different emphasis.

Emma: These three books are awesome, but also there’s lots of books you can check out. And I think that is the number one way to kind of get past feeling intimidated about certain things in your life, which it could be your financial life. It could be owning a business, it could be maybe marriage, it could be maybe parenting. If there’s any area of your life where you’re wanting to grow or you’re wanting to learn more, go to the library if yours is open and get a book or get on whatever bookstore you like to shop on online, Amazon, whatever else, and buy a book. I think that’s a really good way to start to learn the lingo and just educate yourself. I’ve been reading financial books since like late high school, early college. Started with Dave Ramsey and Suze Orman. And I think it’s a lifelong learning thing that you have to kind of get into because nobody’s born knowing about 401K plans so…(laughs)

Elsie: Absolutely! It’s a fun hobby, learning all this stuff.

Emma: Yeah.

Elsie: I’ve really enjoyed it.

Emma: Mmhmm. Be curious.

Elsie: Yes, love it. Next question?

Emma: How has covid-19 affected your business.

Elsie: Oh man. So, for A Beautiful Mess we actually already all worked from home except for one person who now works from home.

Emma: Yeah. (laughs)

Elsie: And for our app company everyone formerly worked in an office, so I think it was a lot hard…

Emma: …on the business side.

Elsie: Yes, I think it was a lot harder of a transition for the people who were working in an office. For us, it’s been pretty seamless because we already kind of had a flow. A lot of us already had our workspaces, you know, set up and ready to go, and we’ve been fortunate, like we haven’t had to do any layoffs, and we have I mean, we’ve worked really hard also to protect our employees, fortunately we weren’t, you know, restaurant owners or some of the people who really had to go through pure hell this year.

Emma: Yeah.

Elsie: So, yeah, it’s definitely been like a struggle time, but we’ve kind of just adapted and shifted and tried to keep doing what’s still working and not worry about what’s not working right now. Just kind of like sidestep it.

Emma: Yeah, just get through it. But then I think we’ve mentioned this on other episodes, but our short term rental businesses…

Elsie: Oh yeah…

Emma: Which we kind of just started that in 2018, 2019. So really kind of the worst time that you could have started it. If, you know, if we had had a crystal ball, boy that would have been useful.

Elsie: Yeah.

Emma: But yeah. So Elsie already sold her Florida house her BnB that she had in Florida.

Elsie: I did. So sad. But it really was the right choice for me.

Emma: Mm hmm. And we’re kind of looking into that with some of our other properties, too. I never like to announce that until something’s like finalized just because I, I’m I’m a little superstitious. I’m a little ‘stitious. (laughs)

Elsie: Yeah.

Emma: But yeah, I think that area of our business has been, you know, not as good and kind of a drag. And, you know, we were so excited about it and we started it at a really tough time. Hindsight. Yeah, that’s how things go.

Elsie: Anything that’s like a travel industry affected business is really hurting this year. And yeah, AirBnB is definitely not great.

Emma: Maybe some areas, but ours haven’t done as well because our Florida ones are…really the big draw is all the parks, and that’s really — they were closed a huge part of the year. I’m not even sure they’re open now. I think they might be but there’s restrictions.

Elsie: They’re open.

Emma: So, you know, but a lot of people still don’t even want to go, which I understand for sure. So it’s just a strange, you know, situation on that front.

Elsie: Yeah, it’s stuff it has affected us. Yeah. But luckily our online businesses are online already, so that’s been good.

Emma: But we are fairly…we really believe in diversifying. That’s like a big thing in all areas of our businesses. We don’t like to rely on just one income stream. And this is exactly the reason why, because you never know when something strange is going to happen, like covid-19 or other things.

Elsie: No one could have known.

Emma: No, no one. No one knew, no one could have known. So, you know, trying to have different ways to make income for us is like a safety net. And I think this year, some of that has kind of saved us, which has been really lucky, and also something that we did work on. But I also want to recognize that it’s hard work and luck and we’re really grateful, you know, for what we have because this year sucks, so.

Elsie: Oh, does it ever. OK, “Would love tips when first starting out low income personal finance stuff.” So I love this question because we started out super low income.

Emma: Slash NO income. (laughs)

Elsie: Like I know for sure we were in the poverty line at certain points.

Emma: Yep.

Elsie: In our twenties and then you know, we’ve grown now to be successful. So, OK, we can each give a tip. How’s that sound?

Emma: OK, yeah.

Elsie: OK. My tip is when you, when you’re low income and you like you are struggling just to pay your next bill, like it’s obvious to you what’s essential and what’s not. But as you grow through the years, especially if something happens where your financial situation changes really quickly, it can be like kind of confusing what to spend money on and what not to. So my tip is, if you’ve grown up without much money, you haven’t learned the skills of how to spend. So spend some time thinking about what’s really important to you. And like, that’s what I wish I would have done more in my late 20s is like spend more time thinking about like what are my priorities and what are my goals? Because I think that I…it took me some time to realize what that was.

Emma: Yeah. Yeah. And I think I guess the tip I would give when you’re first kind of starting out or feeling like you’re at that starting place, wherever that is in your life. First I would get rid of any debt as much as you can, especially anything that has a high-interest rate or that feels like it’s suffocating you and anyone who’s been in that type of debt, I think you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Elsie: Definitely.

Emma: Where it’s just climbing and climbing and you can’t, you know, get past it. So, and make that a big goal in your life. And I feel like sometimes that doesn’t feel very exciting. Like people are like I want to build a business, but it’s like make that in your own heart, in your own mind. An exciting goal to get that debt out of your life because you’re going to feel so much better and your mindset is going to change. After that. I would then work on what I would consider basics and a safety net, so this is having an emergency fund, so if you get laid off or if you don’t have income for six months, you’re going to be able to pay all your basic bills, rent, mortgage, if you have one, being able to buy groceries, so on and so forth, having health insurance. If you’re outside of the U.S., this isn’t going to apply to you. But, you know, in the US, we’re kind of in charge of our own health insurance. And if you become really ill, that can cause major debt in your life. And you also don’t want to be going through that when you’re also very ill. So, you know, getting that in place and then, you know, building up kind of the basics is really…I just feel like some of that stuff is not very sexy. It’s not very exciting.

Elsie: None of that is sexy.

Emma: But you got to make it sexy for yourself, because when you’re starting out, those are the things that are really you’re going to fall back on whenever you start to do the sexy stuff that’s a little more higher risk. Like if you want to start a business or if you want to take on some debt because you’re going to flip a house or, you know, whatever is going to happen in your life, that stuff’s cool. I love stuff with some risk, but you’ve got to have the basics and the safety net all in place first.

Elsie: Beautiful advice, Emma.

Emma: Get a safety net if you want to be a trapeze artist. Step one. (laughs)

Elsie: (laughs)

Emma: Yeah, OK, this person asks, how are you saving for retirement?

Elsie: OK, so we have our own case through our business. If you are an employee and you have a 401k plan at your business and you haven’t signed up yet, do it right away.

Emma: Especially if there’s a match.

Elsie: Yes, if there’s a match, it’s like free money. So cool.

Emma: It’s an immediate raise. You just don’t get to use the money today. So, yeah.

Elsie: And it really adds up over time so you can make your own 401K or a lot of people’s employers provide one. So that’s a great…

Emma: And there’s actually a couple options. It can be a 401k. You can also do an IRA or a Roth IRA. If you don’t know the difference, Google it or speak to a financial advisor. I feel like I have to reteach myself this over and over again because it’s one of those things that basically has to do with when you’re going to pay the taxes on this money, you know, so it’s it lets your money grow tax-free or you pay it now or you pay it later. And it’s really, in my opinion, as long as you’re saving for retirement, and especially if your employer offers some kind of match, any of these options are good. So doing something is better than nothing. But yeah, Google it and pick one. OK, sorry I interrupted you.

Elsie: Totally.

Emma: So 401K the company has it.

Elsie: Each month you know, a little bit of our paychecks go into this and it started off pretty small. And we get statements, you know, like I don’t know, every six months or so and it’s like amazing. Like every year, a couple of years it grows like quite a bit like it’ll double and stuff like that. I highly recommend that as a start for your retirement.

Emma: Yep. And after that you can do more investments, like if you have goals where you want to retire early. That’s part of The Simple Path to Wealth and really other books. But as Elsie mentioned that book earlier, it’s very much about like building up basically your stocks account so that you could live off of it and kind of retire early if you want. Some people are interested in that. Some people like if you own your own business like we do, I don’t know if we’re going to retire early, slash retire ever unless we were forced to do it for health reasons. But I do think we might kind of ebb and flow on our income and it will give us the freedom to be like, hey, we’re kind of doing this more for fun now because our income’s kind of taken care of.

Elsie: Having the option…

Emma: Like in our sixties.

Elsie: …to take off for a couple of years or even just. Yeah, like take a long vacation. Like, that’s something I dream of doing with my daughters when they’re little older. Having options is always good. Yes. OK, let’s take a quick sponsor break before we keep answering questions.

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Best tips for making blogging my full-time income. All right. So first of all, we will put a link in the show notes. But Emma has a brand new E-course about blogging it’s very thorough. It’s a great thing to dive into if you’re interested in learning a lot really quickly.

Emma: Yes, I have been putting my heart and soul into this course, and I really wanted it to be packed with a ton of information, but no fluff because I feel like this year nobody has time for that. So it’s like, this is just going to help you go from zero to 60. It’s all the best advice that I have from our decades of blogging. And I still really believe blogging is a great way to make side-income or full-time income. So, yeah, I feel like this is turning into a commercial, but I can’t really give all the advice in like one minute, you know, podcast Q&A. So I didn’t really want to put it out there like we have this course.

Elsie: So I’ll just say one little thing, first of all. OK, so the one tip that I give my friends when they ask me if it’s worth it to start a blog now or not is it’s not worth it unless you’re willing to do it every day, every couple of days for the next year. Are you willing to do that or not? Yes or no? And be honest, if you’re like I, I’m hoping to blog for a month and then start making an income, don’t even start like it’s not for you if that’s your attitude. Like, so that’s like my like, cutthroat really honest advice.

Emma: I mean, it’s a business, it’s a small business.

Elsie: It’s a business. And you do have to put in the work upfront. You don’t have to put in a lot of money up front. You can build your own website. You can do a lot of things for free, but it’s a lot of work. And the the people that we know who have had a lot of success in blogging, they work on a plan, they work on a schedule and they stay focused on that. It’s not like what you feel like. You wake up that day and you blog about you feel like blogging that day, like, you know, it’s not 2007 anymore. (laughs) It’s, people work on an editorial schedule and it really doesn’t have to take up a lot of your time. But the planning is essential.

Emma: Yes. Yeah. And I talk about that a little bit. There is a free, completely free five day challenge where I give tips every single day.

Elsie: Let’s put the link to that in the show.

Emma: It’s an email. You sign up, it’s a newsletter or email or whatever. And one of them is about bach working. So it’s a great way to and this applies to a lot of areas, not just blogging, but it gives you ideas for how to better batch work so that you can get a lot done quickly, because a lot of people are either trying to build this as a side thing or maybe their kids are home this year. So they have limited work hours, you know, so on and so forth. So knowing how to batch work like a pro is really beneficial, I think, for anyone. So five days of free tips — you can sign up for that, too, if you’re like not in the course, but just give me the free tips. We got it! Going into real estate. What advice do you have? Oh, that’s really general. OK.

Elsie: I know like I don’t know what people mean when they say, like, I’m going into real estate, but if it means I’m going to buy my first second home or second property, that’s what I’m going to assume it means.

Emma: OK, so you think they either already own their home or they’re not interested in owning a personal home?

Elsie: I would think so.

Emma: And this is just investment. OK, yeah, I think that makes sense.

Elsie: I would think so. So I actually think Emma will have better advice. So I’m just going to give my little quickie based on like I’ve bought a couple AirBnB properties and that’s my whole experience. But I would just say do the math, make sure you factor in all the cost, especially if you’re going to do an AirBnB it’s going to cost like for us, it’s usually about twenty thousand dollars or so to furnish each project. That’s a lot of money, you know, that you have to pay up front. It’s…and even like if you anyway, maybe there’s a way to do it cheaper. But a lot of times there’s not, especially if you want to go quickly, I think that just factor in all the cost and make sure that it’s really, truly an investment. I think that real estate, like at least how I got into it, I was like, this is fun for me. I’m interested in it. But in the end, I’ve ended up selling a couple of my properties and just investing in boring, unsexy things because I realize, like I’m a mom and it’s actually like taking up a lot of time and not making that much money. So I, I won’t say I’m not going to lie to you. It’s not that glamorous. It’s not that profitable unless you, you know, have good money. And then sometimes it’s like the things I’ve heard about that make people like this crazy money, it’s like buying like strip malls and stuff. It’s like really unsexy.

Emma: Hmmm…strip malls.

Elsie: It’s not like fun, cute little BnBs.

Emma: It’s like offices or like little shops. Like a strip mall or…

Elsie: I guess what I’m trying to say is that I feel like we made it look so cool to, like, buy houses and make AirBnBs and now I’m afraid that, like, we gave people the wrong advice because of covid and because actually, well, out of all the things we’ve done in life for money, it’s not at the top of what’s done well for us.

Emma: Yeah, and other than short term rentals, which you guys all know about, my first home that I ever bought when I was twenty five or twenty six, it’s a three bedroom, two bathroom I’ve talked about in previous episodes. We kept owning it and we’ve had it as a long term rental for I guess like five years now, something like that ever since we moved to our other home. So I have that experience too. And I think long term rentals can be a good investment for some people. It really depends on your market. It really depends like how much you’re willing to invest and how the money shakes out basically in the market you’re in, or if you’re choosing to buy in a different market, like if you’re using like roof stock or something like that or just you have access to buying properties and markets you don’t live in. So, yeah, I mean, I don’t it’s not one of those things I really feel confident recommending just generally because I feel like I just don’t know, like where you live and where you’re at in life. But for me, that made sense at the time and it’s been a good investment and our house is being paid off over time. We definitely do have to check in on it. We have a management company and we definitely do you know, you have like costs, like if things break or we have a renter and their dog breaks the fence and you have to repair it, of course, because you don’t want their dog to get out all the time, you know, so you have like things you have to keep up with.

Elsie: Just owning houses generally has hidden costs.

Emma: Yeah.

Elsie: Like on our Florida houses like, how many times do we have to replace the pool pumps and things like that, you know? And we only owned it for a year. (laughs)

Emma: And I’m like, I don’t even really know anything about pools because I’m from Missour and I don’t have one (laughs) so I don’t know.

Elsie: Yeah. So our advice is, be very careful with that one.

Emma: Do it if you want, but it probably takes more time than you think.

Elsie: Yeah.

Emma: And yeah. And that’s fine if you’re into it. But if you’re like, oh I really just want something completely simple and like well maybe do stocks then because it’s a little more hands off. But yeah. OK, do you and Elsie pay yourselves a salary. And how did you decide how much?

Elsie: Actually our accountant decided for us.

Emma: Yes he did.

Elsie: So, we have an accountant we love and trust. He’s been with us since we were broke ass, you know, little children basically. And he was he started off as a small business accountant when he was also much younger. And…(laughs)

Emma: We’ve known him a long time. Jason!

Elsie: Yeah. Now that we’ve grown together through the years. Yeah, he’s someone we trust. And so the way we do it in our business is very like tax advice based. So we pay ourselves the biggest salary that you can to be in, is it like, to be in like a certain tax bracket? You explain it — I don’t know.

Emma: It’s because you pay certain taxes on full time income as an employer. So we do pay ourselves a salary at A Beautiful Mess, Elsie, and I do not pay ourselves a salary at our other business, A Color Story, we also receive owner draws from time to time if the businesses do well and if they don’t, we don’t receive them. (laughs) So, um, yeah. And here’s how I would think of it: So one, if you don’t have an accountant who you trust, I would get one. Just I know it costs money…

Elsie: One million percent.

Emma: I know it can take time. I really, really, really do recommend it though. Unless you yourself are an accountant, OK. Or if your dad is or your mom is or something like that. But I would think of it like runway. So whether you’re thinking about paying yourself a salary or your team or both, depending on where you’re at in your business, think about how much money do I have in my business checking account or business savings account. However you hold your cash, however you hold your liquid assets. How like I would like to have…to me, I think it makes a lot of sense to have about six month’s. Runway so I could pay salaries for six months if I stopped making money today. If we just everything dried up, I could still pay salaries for six months. And the reason I like to do that is because it gives you, you know, runway like a plane landing where you can figure something else out. So if the money dries up in certain areas, you can hopefully figure something out and still keep paying people or paying yourself. And if not, you still have some time to be like, all right, we’re going to have to kind of end this and it’s going to take money to end it. And it’s you know, I’m going to need to fulfill some promises I’ve made or bills that I might have outstanding or whatever. So I would do it based on that. So if you’re starting to pay yourself a salary, think about runway. Think about like, how much do I have in my business checking, business savings and start there. I also think, you know, you kind of have to think about what’s a living wage in the area that you live in, and once you start hiring people, you absolutely have to think about what’s a living wage in the area that your employees live in. Also, obviously, there’s laws about minimum wage. You want to know those, but hopefully you’ll be able to offer something that’s maybe even better than that so that you can get the best people and you should be one of those best people who gets paid well at your business. But, yeah, I would start there thinking about thinking of it like a runway.

Elsie: Nice. Good advice. Ok, the next question is, what’s your advice on starting an Etsy shop? So my advice on starting any type of business is the same. You need to like sit down with your calculator, with your pen and paper and really think about how much money you can make before anything else. I think that that’s the most important thing, because I think that…

Emma: So you want to think about the cost of your materials.

Elsie: Yes.

Emma: How much time it’s going to take you to make it.

Elsie: How much output can you realistically do.

Emma: Shipping materials and how much time it will take for you to ship it or someone else? Because that’s when I feel like it’s easy to forget.

Elsie: Yeah.

Emma: Like packaging boxes.

Elsie: I think that in the maker universe there is a lot of like it’s like a lot of people don’t go in with a plan and then they have like they have the most success they can, and they realize like that they’re capped right on either how much they can output with their own two hands or how much they can realistically ship or realistically keep in their garage or whatever other thing. So I think choosing something that you have a chance to grow, if it does well, is an important step in the very beginning of any business.

Emma: Yeah, I agree. Being able to scale it beyond just yourself, potentially.

Elsie: We started off with an Etsy shop, so it was like a very happy but scary time in my life. Like I lost a job and I was kind of just making ends meet with, like staying up late at night making paintings. And I definitely learned all these lessons the hard way. So that’s where this is coming from.

Emma: I did her customer service and shipping! (laughs) So I know about packaging boxes. So I was like, let’s Henry Ford this assembly line here.

Elsie: Yeah, Emma like kind of worked for me when she was in college. It was. It’s so funny.

Emma: Yeah. You were like, hey, would you quit the pizza place and just do my Etsy shop? And I was like, if you pay me the same as the pizza place. Yeah.

Elsie: Oh God, that’s so cute. (laughs) OK, I love it. Next question. Are you ready?

Emma: Yes. In your experience, what qualities and approaches make for good team leadership? Oh, so how to be a good leader is what? The question is a great question.

Elsie: So in a A Beautiful Mess, we’re really proud of how we manage our team, how we hire. We have employees we’ve had for almost ten years now. Like it’s…

Emma: Some…

Elsie: Some of them. Yeah, it’s a — we’re proud of what we’ve done because, you know, it’s…

Emma: I learn something every year.

Elsie: Yes. And like, my advice is…the thing that the thing that’s been really valuable to us is finding people who are self sufficient self starters, who can work on their own, who can be reliable and consistent and can like have their list of goals and complete them, because managing — a lot of people don’t know when they start a business that managing people can take up your whole week. And if you still want to do creative roles in your company, which most of us do, that’s going to really mess with your output. So finding people who are self starters is absolutely essential if you want to have employees, but you also want to have a creative role in your company.

Emma: Yeah, being able to thrive in a minimal management atmosphere. That’s like one of my interview questions always.

Elsie: Right.

Emma: So that and I’d also say on the flip side of that, as a leader, you do have to take time for your team. So if you’re unwilling to do that at all, you may need to just work alone, because it’s not just…you do have to provide feedback. You need to sometimes be critical, but also professional and respectful. You need to say when something’s not working, and you need to do it as immediately as you can so that it doesn’t go on and on and on. And then people feel weird, like they feel like you’ve been thinking this for a while and you didn’t say it or something to that effect so that. You also need to take time. I think this is part of being a good leader. You need to take time out of your day to tell people when they’re doing a great job and to tell people that you appreciate them and to find your own way to let people know that…Elsie I always do this, like there’s this like Don Draper thing from Mad Men where…what’s the character’s name? She works for him.

Elsie: Peggy Olson.

Emma: Peggy. Peggy’s like, you never say thank you, and he’s like, that’s what the money is for! And that’s like not how to be a boss, because…

Elsie: Emma says that all the time. (laughs)

Emma: Yeah…that’s what the money is for! (laughs) It’s like that’s exactly not a good way to be a leader. You don’t because yes, of course, you should pay your employees and you should pay them well. And if you can, offer benefits. Absolutely. But I think actually having professional boundaries but still caring about them and helping them to succeed is a part of being a boss. And if you don’t want to take the time to do that, you just aren’t cut out to be a boss.

Elsie: It’s true. Humans need to be seen. They need to be appreciated. And that’s definitely something we’ve learned along the way managing.

Emma: Yeah, and it takes time and communication is hard for everyone. So there’s always more to learn in those areas. But yeah, and I think it’s really exciting. I get a lot more done because I have an amazing team, so it’s 100 percent worth it. But there are times it’s kind of confusing and you don’t know if you’re doing it right or you thought you communicated well and then you realized you didn’t and you have to go back and try again, you know, so that’s part of it, too. And if you don’t have the time to do that, then you’re going to have to either make it or not be a leader, one or the other. So, yeah,

Elsie: OK, let’s take a quick break for an ad.

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Who are your business life role models and what have you learned from them? OK, so…

Emma: I have one, but I think I’m going to say a second.

Elsie: OK, so I…

Emma: I mean, I have a lot but…

Elsie: So yeah, I had my friend Ting on before, on a couple of episodes and he’s definitely my mentor in business and a little of in life too, because I do aspire to have a more Lucy Goosey schedule in my future. Like that’s something that…

Emma: Do you?!

Elsie: He has in his life that is a value to him and I think it’s a value to me that I would like to have someday. You know, it’s just the ability to be like, OK, this week I’m going to go visit my grandma, OK? This week I’m going to spend a lot of time with my friend who’s going through a hard time.

Emma: Yep.

Elsie: Things like that. Yeah. And when you’re an entrepreneur with a lot of responsibility, that’s not always possible.

Emma: Yeah.

Elsie: So I think one of the things I’ve learned from him, well I’ve learned a lot of like good money tips, big wins, big picture, you know, not like, I think that as…maybe it’s my personality type, maybe it’s my conditioning, maybe it’s being a woman. But I think that I like focused on small things too much in the past. And now I’m learning to focus on the big ones. Yes.

Emma: Yes. Yeah, yeah. I think focusing on the big wins is a difficult mindset shift sometimes, and it’s really fun. Yeah, Ting is an amazing person, so I’m glad you mentioned him. Oh, I’m going to mention someone who’s more famous. Sorry, Ting.

Elsie: More famous.

Emma: Yes, I know, but really I probably have a lot. But one person I want to mention is Martha Stewart. As you can probably imagine, we idolize her. Obviously, sometimes when I very quickly am trying to explain my job to someone who doesn’t know what blogs are, I’m like, we’re Internet Martha Stewart’s kind of.

Elsie: Oh, my God. You say that?!

Emma: Yeah, I do.

Elsie: Oh my god I’m so embarassed! (laughs)

Emma: I know. I know. I say a lot of pretty braggy, pretty braggy shit now and again. It’s just shorthand! People know who she is! It’s shorthand. (laughs) And I don’t know Martha Stewart personally. Maybe someone who works for her would have a story that they would like to share. I don’t know. But here’s one thing that I admire about her. Does anyone remember the time that she got in trouble and had to go to federal prison (laughs). I do.

Elsie: Raises hand.

Emma: Raises hand! And she wrote a book about it afterwards.

Elsie: In prison.

Emma: Oh that’s right she wrote the book in prison. And here’s what I think is really inspiring about that, anyone going through any kind of life, including owning businesses, is going to have times where bad things happen, where maybe you messed up or maybe something crazy happened like covid-19 and you ruined all your great plans. Who knows? But I think it’s really inspiring to watch someone get completely knocked down and keep going, because I think that’s really what it takes to have success more than any other time.

Elsie: Like, I don’t know if you all remember when Martha went to prison, but people were talking like it was the end of her career and her reputation forever. And now we all know that it wasn’t.

Emma: She was like, nah, I think I’ll do a show with Snoop Dogg in 20 years. (laughs)

Elsie: I think I’ll write my 95th book soon, like, that’s like literally what happened afterwards. So I think. Yeah, sorry I took over your story. (laughs)

Emma: No, no, I think that’s it. (laughs) It’s just like, you know, you get knocked down and you keep going. And I think that that is any time I see her…

Elsie: I admire that about her also.

Emma: …endlessly inspiring whenever people do that, because it’s hard, it’s embarrassing. Whenever you fail, it’s embarrassing if you messed up. And it sometimes has big consequences, like for Martha having to go to federal prison. Right. But I think not giving up and not saying, well, that was it for me. I’ll never have anything else, I think is a really interesting attitude and takes the pretty steely mindset. And I hope that I can aspire myself to that at times whenever I get knocked down, because it’s going to happen to all of us in some way.

Elsie: Right. It’s not over!

Emma: It’s not over. Unless you give up, then it’s over. Is it necessary to have a professionally built website or can I do it myself? That’s the question.

Elsie: All right. So one of the other questions in our Q&A that I didn’t put on here was like, how much is it cost to have, like, a nice, like, professionally made blog you don’t even want to know! Is the answer. Like seriously…

Emma: How much money do you have is probably the question you’ll get asked if you… (laughs)

Elsie: Yeah, it’s not uncommon that it could be like 20 grand.

Emma: Yeah.

Elsie: So ugh, yes, you can make it yourself. There are all kinds of templates all over Etsy, like Google it and just Google blog templates and you’ll find a hundred websites with cute reasonably priced blog templates. Like maybe you have to pay one hundred dollars or something.

Emma: Right.

Elsie: But it’s affordable and it’s worth it and it will take you seventy-five percent of the way.

Emma: And then Emma and I, we both learned our little basic coding from having our MySpace pages. (laughs) Learning things like that is fun. I would just say it’s fun and it’s worth it. Spend a weekend and try to make your own website and you will be surprised what you can do. You don’t have to pay twenty thousand dollars unless you just want to, but please don’t.

Elsie: No, not for your first one. Just do it yourself and then like get into the group of blogging and then as you have more money, you reinvest it into making it better. You can do it yourself. Our first blogs were all built ourselves, actually. Like sometimes I would like text my friends and be like, can you do this whole big thing for me? And they unfortunately say yes. So I mean, yeah, be scrappy, don’t be ashamed of it. Start your business the scrappy way.

Emma: Never be ashamed to be scrappy.

Elsie: Is going into debt to start your business a bad idea. So I’ll just give the short answer. Ninety five percent of the time, yes, it’s a bad idea. There are certain businesses where it it would just have to, you know, like there’s certain businesses where it would make sense, but for the most part, don’t go into debt to start a business, find one that you can start with whatever amount of money you have, even if it’s five hundred dollars.

Emma: Yeah. Our general mindset on risk. So risk it to me is kind of similar to saying going into debt, is you should risk things that you can lose and it’s not going to ruin your whole life. Like when we started our app company. I think we’ve shared this on this podcast before. So just quickly, when we started our app company we had gotten a two book deal with our blogging company and we got an advance for that. And we spent the entire advance building our first app. And because we had an app idea and we wanted to try that into us, we knew that that was money that we could afford to completely lose. If no one downloaded our app or just totally bombed, we could afford to lose that money because we hadn’t I don’t think we’d even like put it in our account yet. Like, we know we had gotten a deal. We’d signed the contract and we knew how much money it was…

Elsie: It was worth our little gamble at that time.

Emma: Yeah, we knew we had other money to pay ourselves to keep blogging and to do the books that we were going to do. And we just use the advance on that. So it was money that we could lose. And I think that luckily the apps worked out and we have a whole nother company about it. But if it hadn’t, we wouldn’t have been bankrupt. We wouldn’t have been in a bad place with our business and with our livelihood. And I think that’s kind of a better way, a safer way to go about it, unless you’re just. Independently wealthy, in which case I don’t even know why you would listen to us, because we don’t know what your life is like.

Elsie: So definitely not. Ok, so the next question was how much money would you risk on a new business adventure and business venture? (laughs) Business adventure! And I feel like Emma just kind of answered that, like only risk what you can afford to lose and it won’t ruin your life or hurt your life, damage you in a way that you know is too painful, like plan on losing it, obviously, like you’re hoping not to. You’re hoping to make a lot more, but definitely like be risks, only something that you’re OK with losing. Yeah, it happens. You know, like we’ve lost money on things and lots and lots and lots of our friends have most people who start an app don’t make their money back, you know, and other retail ventures, lots of things like that. You know, it’s it’s OK. Like it happens.

Emma: Oh, yeah, it happens.

Elsie: All right. The next question.

Emma: OK, what boundaries have you set up to keep work and life separate when you’re working from home?

Elsie: All right. I love this question. This is one that we get a lot. And I feel like we’re kind of pros at working from home. Like we…

Emma: If I’m a pro at anything…(laughs)

Elsie: We’ll give you a great pep talk. If you’re just starting working from home, set up your own space, leave…when you finish for the night, here’s what I do like. I have my little office. I leave my computer in there unless I’m going to bring it out to do something fun, leave my computer in there. You know, I turn off the light, I leave all my notes there and it’s just all there the next morning. So I think that you really do have to just train yourself. And it’s hard at first and it takes time that unless it’s an emergency, you’re just not going to work after a certain hour of the night. You’re just not going to work on the weekends. Like, I will occasionally work on a kid’s nap on the weekends.

Emma: Right.

Elsie: But like but that’s about it. Honestly, unless it’s an emergency, I’m not going to spend my whole weekend working. And that’s like part of, you know, my life as a mom and having a boundary so you can set those up. It’s a habit that you have to form over time. So be a little bit of a hard ass at first and then it becomes routine.

Emma: Yeah. And if you’re finding that you’re having a emergency every single weekend, then take some time to evaluate that, because that sounds like there might be something kind of broken or it might be time to hire someone or outsource something to a freelancer or change the way that you do something. You know, it just sounds like maybe there needs to be some evaluation there. And if you have really limited space, like you’re like, I don’t have my own room to have an office, that sounds great, but I just don’t have that option, then get creative. It could be you buy a little folding card table and you set that up in the morning and you work, work, work, and then you’ll fold it up and you put it in a closet at the end of the day. And I know that probably sounds so. It makes me think of, this is going to sound crazy, I think. But when Mr. Rogers walks into his house and changes his shoes, you know, as a child, now it’s time to play. Now it’s time to hang out. Now it’s time to be home. And in the same way, I think when you work from home, you need these little mental things that make you say, now I’m working. Now I’m not working.

Elsie: I honestly think that’s great advice. For years, Jeremy and I would do this like Friday night. We went to this same dive bar right at five p.m. every Friday for like three or four years…

Emma: Cheese fries!

Elsie: Yeah, and we…and it was with other people who also worked from home. And it was all of our way of like signaling weakened in our brains.

Emma: Yep.

Elsie: So if you need to do a little one of those each day and to start your workday like, you know, I like going to my office every morning with my coffee and, you know…

Emma: Yeah, it’s like time to start.

Elsie: …do the same couple of things to start my morning, you know, check the email, the slack, whatever it is, you know. So you can do it. Just don’t be hard on yourself and remember that you need to pick your boundaries and then you need to create them over time. It’s a habit. It’s formed. It’s not like a one time thing that you decide. It’s something that you what…

Emma: It’s like a ritual.

Elsie: It’s a yeah. It’s a ritual that you have to do over and over before it’ll feel…

Emma: Real and meaningful.

Elsie: Intuitive. Yeah. Yeah.

Emma: Some things grow meaning over time. Yeah. All right. Moving on.

Elsie: Do you invest in stock. How, in which company. OK, so I just did this so I can answer it.

Emma: Elsie is pretty hyped.

Elsie: I am so hyped.

Emma: Did you write this question?

Elsie: I’m so proud about it because…

Emma: Yeah you should be!

Elsie: I’ve been spending the whole year learning, you know, from these three books. We already put the books in the show notes. You’ve already heard it, so I won’t repeat them again. But they all give basically the same advice. So the stock thing that I’m doing is the Vanguard Total Market Index fund. And all it is, is a way to invest in the total stock market, you know, a little bit of each company all at once, so when the market goes up, it’ll go up and when it goes down, it will go down. And over time it’s supposed to be, you know, in a rocky way, always going up. So there’s some sense of security, you know, unless the world goes to hell, in which case we’re all F-U-C-K-E-D anyway!

Emma: Yeah, it’s walking dead time if that happens.

Elsie: So anyway yeah, that’s the thing and they basically all recommend Vanguard. So I’ll just say Vanguard is the one. Next question.

Emma: Love it.

Elsie: What is the one thing that really catapulted your business to the next level? Ok, I love this question because I feel like we have such a passionate answer. It really is a lot of little things.

Emma: Yes.

Elsie: Everyone always wants to know, like people ask, like, where did most of your money come from? And I’m like, it didn’t mostly come from just one thing. And I think that people want to hear that because they want to be they want to know, like the shortcut. Right. There truly isn’t one. It’s all like this building block compounding effect, you know. So a couple of…Say a couple of the big turning points we’ve had.

Emma: So a big one in the beginning was learning to focus. So we used to own a retail shop, the Red Velvet Store. It was on Commercial Street in like our city, Springfield, Missouri. And we also we’re blogging at the time and we kind of used our blog as supplemental income in a supplemental way to promote our shop so that we could promote it outside of just our community. And over the first couple of years, we realized that if we focused more on the blog, we would make a lot more money and our efforts that we were putting into our business would be less divided and a lot more rewarded, probably. And we were right. And so we did that. It was a really hard decision because we like to do lots of different things, as you could probably guess, based on the content of our blog. But focusing down made a huge, huge difference that those first couple of years. So that was a big one. I’m trying to think of what else.

Elsie: A big one was when we started our first app because it was our first big risk and it was one of the ways that we diversified our income. And that was like the first year that we ever reached a million dollar year was the year we had our first app. So that was pretty life changing.

Emma: That was kind of a lesson in reinvesting money that you make into your business and then also diversifying revenue streams for sure. Yes, that was a big one. I think growing our team has been huge, which we weren’t really able to do that in the very beginning because we don’t have the money to do it. But as we did have more income over time, every time we’ve gotten to add a full time team member one, I feel like, oh, we created a job in our economy. That’s exciting. I know it’s just one job, you know, every now and again, but I still feel like I’m participating and I like that. It makes me feel proud. But I also think each time it’s made a huge difference to our business. Yeah, because our team’s awesome and we get so much more done with them than without them.

Elsie: Yeah.

Emma: And it’s better. (laughs)

Elsie: The last couple years our big wins have been like very invisible, boring things. We’ve been focusing really hard on our archives and our Google ratings and things that are so boring, like growing Pinterest…

Emma: SEO…

Elsie: And growing our affiliate programs and things like that that are yeah. Like kind of boring when you just have a conversation. But when you set a goal and you work on an all year and you achieve it, it’s a great feeling. So, yeah, a lot of the things…I think that the app launch is like the only one that’s truly like a sexy one.

Emma: Yeah, yeah. I think everything is kind of it probably sounds like small wins, but they add up to really big wins over the long haul. If you’re if you’re in it for the long haul, which is why we don’t really believe you can blog for a month and see the amazing success that you probably deserve if you do it for a year or two or three or fr us it’s been like fourteen now.

Elsie: Yeah.

Emma: So here we are.

Elsie: Yeah. Like seven thousand blog posts. That’s crazy. All right, how much of your home do you write off since it’s quote unquote content. Does that factor? OK, so we get a lot of questions like this, that are tax questions that are about like write offs and things like that. And our honest advice. We talked about this last night and like to summarize, just focus on making more money where you’re not too worried about the tax write offs. Like to us, taxes is like something we work on with our accountant. But no, we honestly don’t write off like our houses or…

Emma: Like a personal clothing.

Elsie: Our clothing. Yeah, like our yoga pants. It’s like maybe we’ll make some affiliate money from these adorable yoga pants, but they’re not a tax write off and they’re not going to be. And also, we don’t want to have that complication if we’re audited in the future. So don’t worry too much about tax write offs is our advice.

Emma: Yeah. Get a good accountant. Take their advice, and then focus on the big wins in your company, not necessarily…This is what I would consider small win tax write offs, but, you know, every business is different. But, yeah, for a blogger, I wouldn’t worry too much about trying to write off your entire life. I would focus more on monetizing your content.

Elsie: OK, this is my favorite one.

Emma: Elsie, do you think you could have started a A Beautiful Mess with kids?

Elsie: Ok, pep talk for moms. Here we go. Buckle up. One hundred percent. Yes. It’s like…we had more time to work before I had kids obviously. But…

Emma: Right.

Elsie: …this year my kids have been out of daycare almost the whole entire year. And for almost…for most of that time, my husband and I were watching them by ourselves and my hours were slashed. And it’s still been a great year of growth and achievement. And honestly, I’ll teach you a couple of things that you just need to know. Lower your expectations, go easy on yourself, make a good plan and stick to the plan and batch working. If you’re a mom and you want to get a lot done, you have to batch work. That is my key to everything. You can do it.

Emma: You can do it. Your life is not over. Your life is long and there’s lots of different seasons. Maybe you’re going to have a little less time in this season, but you can still do things.

Elsie: Most of the bloggers that are like in my group of friends who I know are like making the big bucks are moms. So you can do it. All right. The next question is, is there anything you wish you never tried? That was all loss and no gain?

Emma: Yeah, we were talking about this one yesterday and I’m trying to remember where we landed.

Elsie: We basically were like, no, yeah, we’re glad for everything we tried because even the things that…there’s things that you try that don’t make a lot of money or are disappointments. But even that is good to know because it’s getting something out of your system, you know.

Emma: Yeah. Or it’s teaching you something. You learn a lot. I really do feel like I feel like I’ve said this before. So I’m sorry if I’m a broken record, but I just really do feel like a lot of times people view failure as kind of like the end of the story. You either succeed or you fail. And I think success is failing over and over and over again. And but every time you do, you change your mindset. You learn something, modify it. Yeah. You pivot a little. Whatever it is, you know, like that’s what real success is, is just failing over and over and over again. So, you know, it’s hard to really we failed so much. Yeah. On stuff and be like, I wish we had never done that. So I’m like, well I mean, I guess I wish we hadn’t bought short term rentals the year before covid? But also, I don’t know. I mean, I think…

Elsie: You have to try things. There are so many things that we’ve tried and we were like, this is going to be the big one. And then it wasn’t.

Emma: Yeah.

Elsie: And we don’t even remember them anymore.

Emma: I forget a lot of our small failures and probably our large failures. Because I move on to the next thing, because it’s like, OK, well, that didn’t work. What did I learn? All right, let’s do this now. Let’s try this now. And so it’s just always like a path forward.

Elsie: Just don’t get stuck. And you’re good.

Emma: Mm hmm. Yeah. Write a book from federal prison. Do it like Martha. (laughs)

Elsie: (laughs) Ok, thank you so much for listening and telling your friends and family. Always makes our day when you share it on Instagram. So tag us. It really helps us out. And we we’ll talk to you next week I.

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You can stream the episode here on the blog or on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, and Stitcher. You can find the podcast posts archive here.

Show Notes:

-Shout out to our mom, Elizabeth Chapman, who pivoted from teaching to painting full time not too long ago. You can see her art here, and follow her on IG here.

-R.L. Stine. Emma is OBSESSED with R.L. Stine. We watched a bunch of his videos after we recorded this the other day. The interview Emma references is this one. We also love the trailer for his Masterclass.

-As usual, we mention Office Ladies Podcast, which is SO good. If you hang out with me, I am now an endless well of The Office trivia thanks to that podcast.

-Julia Child. Emma mentions her book Mastering The Art Of French Cooking as well as the book and movie Julie + Julia.

-Grandma Moses. Here’s a link to her autobiography, My Life’s History. She produced over 1,500 paintings over three decades, so something like one painting every week.

The reader question this episode is about buying a first home. We LOVE this topic, so as usual we talk about it for a long time! :))

Thank you so much for your support. We just passed our first one million unique listens!!! We appreciate you!

Miss an episode? Get caught up!

• Episode #47: A Cooking Episode!
• Episode #46: Book Report Episode!
• Episode #45: Covid Pivots

Episode 48 Transcript

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Emma: You’re listening to the A Beautiful Mess podcast. Today, we wanted to talk about folks who started careers later in life. There are a lot of stories like this and we are just going to share a few. Also, we’re going to answer a reader question about shopping for your first home. But this is a topic that gets both me and Elsie really excited for the future. So we hope it gets you feeling that way, too.

Elsie: Yes, same. I guarantee, no matter what, that I will have a late in life, second career for sure. And I can’t wait to do it.

Emma: Oh, yeah. I mean, I really hope I do. I want to. And yeah, I think that was kind of part of, I forget exactly why we came up with the idea to talk about this particular subject, I think we just were talking about it one day.

Elsie: I think it’s something that we really aspire to, something that we want to make sure that we always keep on our horizon is that your career isn’t over when you turn 40, 50, 60 and beyond. And I think it’s just a thing that a lot of young people aren’t taught. So we’re teaching it to you now.

Emma: Yeah. And I don’t even know if young people listen to our podcast. I have no idea. But yeah, I remember feeling so much pressure in my like early to mid 20s. I felt like if I hadn’t figured it out by then, I was behind. And I don’t exactly know where that pressure came from. It might be something that other people feel too, or might be a little bit of something in our society. There are a lot of stories of like young people doing amazing things, which is awesome. And if that’s your story, that’s fantastic. But sometimes I think people turn 30, turn 40, turn 50, and they’re kind of like, needing a change, but they feel like maybe that’s silly or scary or it’s too late for them and it’s not. So.

Elsie: No, I totally agree. It’s something that I want to contribute to glamorizing, promoting just, you know, spreading the news that you can have a whole new career at any age. And, yeah, that’s what this episode is about. So I’m so inspired by this subject.

Emma: Yes.

Elsie: So we’re going to talk about several different careers that started later in life, like and later in life, they’re — really some of these people might have only been in their thirties, but some of them were much older…

Emma: Right.

Elsie: …like even into their 70s. So.

Emma: Yeah, we tried to…I mean, we’re really only talking about a handful of people and there are so many stories like this. So I highly encourage you to go check out more. Also, if you want to leave comments on this shownotes of this podcast, you can do that at Abeautifulmess.com/podcast and tell us about other, you know, stories of people starting later in life. But we’re going to talk about a writer, a few actors, a chef and a painter. And a lot of them are women, a few men. But there’s definitely lots more stories than this. So this is just a very small sampling.

Elsie: Yes. We’ll talk about our mom, too. Ok, so before we jump into the famous people, we wanted to give a shout out to our own mom, who really is…

Emma: She’s famous to us.

Elsie: She’s famous to us. She is an incredible painter. And she decided to go from being a teacher to a full-time painter. I think when she was in maybe her 40s or maybe early 50s, somewhere in that realm…

Emma: Somewhere in there.

Elsie: …and it’s so inspiring. And I always think of my life, you know, in 20 or 30 years. And I think I want to do something like what she’s doing. I think it’s really cool. She wakes up, she has a long several hours of painting. You know, she does a few things and then she goes back to painting. And her life is, it’s really a beautiful life. So we wanted to. Yeah. Mention her just because it’s so inspiring to watch someone who, you know and love completely change what they do for a living just because one day they wake up and decide that’s what they want to do.

Emma: Yeah. And she was always a painter. She studied art in college and got her art education degree in the end. And she raised three kids. And then she became an art teacher for many years. And then once all those kids were out of her hair, then she had more space and commit— she committed, finally had the time and the space to commit to being a painter full time. And so now that’s what she does. I’m going to try to say, like just little things that I find inspiring about each of the stories. So with our mom, like at each stage of her life, I think she found joy in the things she was doing. And I think she never decided. “Well, I just can’t be joyful this season. Oh, I’m home with little kids and I wish I was painting.” I don’t think she felt that way. But, you know, you could kind of be like, oh, I can’t do that thing I went to school for, you know? But I don’t think she did. I think she just found the joy in the season of her life and she never stopped. My mom is a real example of someone who finds joy in everyday life. And I think about that like almost every day, especially if I’m having a day where I’m feeling kind of down or I’m having a little bit of a bad attitude because something didn’t go my way or whatever. You know, I think about our mom. Because she’s a real source of inspiration for me on finding the joy, because I do think it’s kind of up to us to do that

Elsie: For sure.

Emma: Anyway…

Elsie: R.L. Stine!

Emma: Let’s do the first one. So I wanted to talk about R.L. Stine because I definitely wanted to have a writer in here. And there’s lots of examples of writers doing things later in life…

Elsie: He’s the best one, though.

Emma: But I just think he’s a fun one. And I grew up reading Goosebumps. I have a feeling a lot of you listening maybe too, you might be at the age…

Elsie: Of course they did.

Emma: …where you grew up reading Goosebumps and. Yeah, so I’m going to link in the show notes this YouTube video. I’ll tell you some about it now, but I do highly recommend you watch this. It’s an interview. And it’s just kind of a random interview. I think he was a speaker at some kind of event and then afterwards they interviewed him. But I love this interview with R.L. Stine. I watch it sometimes when I’m feeling down. I just really enjoy it. So I’m definitely about to butcher it. So please go watch the real thing. It’ll be in the show notes. In the interview they’re basically like, tell us how you became the writer that you are and if you’re not familiar, R.L. Stine writes the series Goosebumps. He writes kind of horror and scary books for young readers. So middle grade, that type of age range, sometimes even younger. Goosebumps is a little bit younger. So…

Elsie: The baddest ass third grade book you could ever read.

Emma: Yeah. If your kids like Halloween, get this shit for them Goosebumps for life. So one thing that’s interesting about him. So his name is Robert. That’s what the R in R.L. Stine stands for some people call him Bob. One of his nicknames is Jovial Bob, because for many years he wrote this kind of joke magazine for Scholastic, and that’s what he did for his career, like into, I think, his mid 40s or early 40s. And then him and his wife both worked at Scholastic. She’s also a writer. And then he kind of was at a stage where he was sort of retiring and he kind of was like, well, that was it. I did the thing I wanted to do. I wanted to write this kind of joke comic type literature for kids. And he did that and he was known for it and he enjoyed it. And then one day he was kind of retired and he was having lunch with an editor from Scholastic who he knew they were just friends. And this editor was like, I really need an author to write a horror book for young teens. And this author who was going to do it kind of flaked. “You know what, Bob? You can write, how about you do it?” And he was like, I don’t really write horror. I don’t know, and I’m kind of retired. And finally he was like, all right, I’ll do it. And she was like, OK. And I believe the editor was a woman I can’t quite remember, but I think it was a woman. She said, OK, the title is Blind Date, so just give that a write. And he just did. And that was his first children’s horror book was called Blind Date. And it’s part of the Fear Street series. And it wasn’t published until he was 43 years old. And it wasn’t until a few more years after that, I think he was forty-six, forty-seven somewhere in there when he started the Goosebumps series, which in the interview he kind of says he almost didn’t do because he thought that would mess up his Fear Street series. But again…

Elsie: No Bob, No.

Emma: (laughs)No, Bob. And he really, it’s so funny because in the interview he very much like kind of makes fun of himself, kind of talks about how his wife was the successful one and he was just kind of doing his thing. And he was like, “I almost didn’t do Goosebumps so I’m so great at business, huh?” Like, he’s just very, like, poking fun at himself because he’s a very funny man. And I just find the whole thing endlessly inspiring because some of the lessons from it that I took was like, I loved his willingness to just try something new, like he didn’t really even have an interest in writing horror for young readers. But an opportunity came his way and he was like, I like writing and I’m not really doing much right now. Why not? So the willingness to try something new. And also kind of the humility to try something new, because it can be very humbling to try new things…

Elsie: So true.

Emma: And you can feel like that’s not my thing and I don’t want to be known for this or that, or you kind of can have a bit of ego about yourself. And I think he just chose to make the most of an opportunity that came his way. And I just love that. I would be thrilled if sometime in my 40s I get an opportunity to do something random, and I take it. It just thrills me to think that that could be in my future. So anyway, it’s a really cool interview and I am endlessly inspired by Mr. R.L. Stine. So I hope he hears this and sends me a note. That would be the most amazing thing…no I’m just joking.(laughs) But yeah, I love it. I loved his books growing up and I just love that lesson from him. So anyway, that’s one, a writer. I think we have some actors next.

Elsie: I love it. Yeah. Ok, so my one…kind of goes along with the willingness to try something different or something random. I think that it’s really extremely important to maintain some openness in yourself to try new things. And because I don’t know, in our career, we’ve had — we’ve been advised many, many, many times to do less, and I think that sometimes that’s valuable advice that you need to hear, but sometimes you can, you can kind of like miss out on maybe the best thing that ever happened to you in your life if you stay too focused on your own bubble and you aren’t willing to ever go outside of it. So both are valuable, but I’m kind of going to lean on the try new things harder. So I want to talk about some of the actors from The Office and shout out to The Office Ladies podcast, because that is where I heard all of these little fun facts and tidbits. And I love that podcast. It’s so much fun if you enjoy the show and you enjoy learning about acting and TV production, because that’s mostly what they’re talking about. It’s super interesting. There’s three actors from the show that I specifically want to shout out to you because everyone knows that B.J. Novak and Mindy Kaling were writers, but then also actors on the show and also kind of in love. And, you know, they’re like, my Valentine’s Day card is like, B.J. and Mindy.

Emma: Definitely.

Elsie: They’re the cutest ever. But there are a lot of other people who were working on the show who were working behind the scenes on the show, who became actors. So one of them is Paul Lieberstein, who plays Toby, and he was also a writer.

Emma: Toby!

Elsie: Yes. And in the end of the series, he was also the showrunner. But he…so he like I don’t know if he ever acted before, but, yeah, acting for him wasn’t his, like, main thing. But he opened himself up to it and he became…Toby’s definitely in my top three characters I love.

Emma: Oh, he’s hilarious.

Elsie: His character…

Emma: That character is hilarious. His delivery of it is hilarious. Yeah. It’s such a funny counterpart to Michael and how much they hate each other.

Elsie: And I love how they had some people act who were kind of just a part of the show in other ways, and they said, “yes”, it’s just so cool. So also Phyllis Smith, who plays Phyllis, was running, like she was like a casting director. And she was, she did some of the auditions for the other actors when they were auditioning to be on the show. And then more towards when they were filming the pilot, they kind of just randomly asked her if she wanted to be an actor and she did it.

Emma: That would be so intimidating to be like, oh, this isn’t quite what I do, but now I’m going to act alongside other actors.

Elsie: It’s so cool.

Emma: I don’t know. It would be very intimidating, so pretty gutsy to get out there and be like, yeah, I’ll do it, I think.

Elsie: Yes.

Emma: Pretty cool.

Elsie: I love it so much because these people couldn’t have possibly known that this was going to be like their famous actor breakthrough, you know, but they just kind of went for it. And now, you know, there’s some of our most beloved television icons of all time. And then another fun little story that I just love. When I heard it, I just like couldn’t wait to go tell Jeremy is that Kate Flannery, who plays Meredith, didn’t quit her waitressing job until season two because they all believed the show is definitely going to get canceled and definitely only going to have one season. And, you know, people were like really mean about it when it first came out because of the British one and there was like a lot of like comparisons.

Emma: Sure, they were comparing it, because it was so…

Elsie: Yeah, I love that she was still waitressing tables until season two. It’s just so amazing. So, yeah, I feel like RL Stein, a combination of our RL Stine and Phyllis Smith is going to be like always in the back of my head when someone asked me to do something that I would never do. I just, you know, I’m just going to give it a hard maybe.

Emma: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. I love that. Yeah. I also just like the idea of, like, kind of keeping your “day job” while you’re working on your other thing. I mean, that’s the story of, like, pretty much any creative or small business owner that I know. They’re like, yeah, I was starting my thing, but I also, did whatever…

Elsie: It definitely brings it back to reality quite a bit, because I don’t think most people realize that when these people were filming, you know, even the whole first season, that they didn’t even think there was going to be a second season.

Emma: Yeah. They were like, I’m just going to keep my server job on weekends because I’m not sure. Yeah, yeah. That’s so interesting. Okay the next one I want to talk about is a chef, and she’s very famous, Miss Julia Child. So what do you think of when you think of Julia Child? This is not a quiz. I just…

Elsie: I think of like the Muppets. (laughs).

Emma: Yes, I do, too! Yeah. The Muppets. Or there’s this, like, skit on SNL where they’re kind of doing like a spoof or whatever of her show. So I kind of think of her show, which I believe was on PBS. I want to say. Yeah. So I think that’s a lot of what people know her for is her show or maybe, you know about her first cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She had lots of other cookbooks after that. But yes, she’s a very famous chef. She brought French cooking to Americans, to American kitchens. And that’s kind of what she’s known for.

Elsie: Was it like not a thing before that?

Emma: No, it wasn’t really…

Elsie: Oh, I love that!

Emma: There also just weren’t as many cookbooks that weren’t catering to just convenience, or that’s what it seemed like. OK, so I’m basing — I should say this. I’m basing this information off of the book and movie Julie and Julia, which I think is fairly accurate. I’m not at all dissing the book or that movie, but also I didn’t read a biography or an autobiography, so I kind of want to put that out there because I don’t really know for certain. So. I’m not a journalist, this is based off that movie.

Elsie: It’s okay, Julia Child isn’t coming at us. She doesn’t need a disclaimer.

Emma: I know, she can stand on her own. By the way, though, if you haven’t seen the movie, Julie and Julia, it’s really cute. It’s a really cute book, too. I read the book many years ago, probably like, probably like 9 or 10 years ago was before Trey and I were ever even dating and we’ve been together…

Elsie: Nice!

Emma: So anyway…

Elsie: What’s the book about?

Emma: So it’s interesting because it’s a blogger, Julie, who does a year-long challenge where she cooks her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child.

Elsie: Ooh, that sounds fun!

Emma: And yeah. And so that’s what the premise of her first blog was or in the beginning. And then she wrote a book about it and then it became a movie. And so it’s a pretty interesting story like that in and of itself. But she obviously becomes very she loves Julia Child. So that sort of part of it, too, is she is kind of trying to change her life. And I think you kind of see some parallels between her and Julia because they’re both women trying to find their way. So anyway, it’s a charming book, charming movie. I highly recommend. So Julia’s first cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, didn’t come out until she was 49 years old. So before that, she had lived abroad and her husband worked in the government. He worked at embassies and things like that. And she, in the movie, it shows that they never had children and that perhaps she wanted to. And it’s just something that never quite happened for them. And so she was finding things to do with her time trying to find something meaningful to do with her time, something that she loved and was passionate about.

Elsie: That’s so beautiful.

Emma: And in the movie, she tried like a couple like various things like hat making and like different classes like that when she was in France. And then she finally really fell in love with cooking because she was like, I really love eating.(laughs) So and then she gets really into cooking. And one of the schools that she attends, it’s mostly men. And so, you know, there’s a bit of an intimidation feeling for her there trying to fit in and trying to prove herself. And then as she’s working on…

Elsie: She’s better than all of you! Step aside.

Emma: Yeah, (laughs) she’s she’s a pretty good cook. I mean, I’m sure in the beginning you had to learn, but and then her book, I own Mastering the Art of the French Cooking and it’s a pretty big, it’s a very large book. So it doesn’t surprise me that she had trouble getting…she had two other authors, too, I should say. She had trouble getting it published originally. It is just a pretty intimidating cookbook. And so it took her quite a while to get that published as well. So I think she’s a really interesting case study for someone who to me, what I find super inspirational about her is, I mean, many things, really, but one is how she didn’t wait around for life to bring her something meaningful. She went and sought it out. She sought out meaning in her life. She sought out something that she was passionate about that she could grow with. And she didn’t get intimidated by the fact that some of the schools were mostly men or, you know, had instructors that perhaps didn’t really like her. She just pushed forward to find something that she was passionate about, something that was meaningful to her. So I love that. I think that’s so cool, like so brave and courageous and I love that. And then the other thing is, I think it took her quite a while to finally get a cookbook published. And then it wasn’t until some years after that that her TV show started. And I just think she stayed passionate about cooking for a very long time without seeing any monetary or fame, success around it. She was just like, this is my thing, French cooking. And I’m going to bring it to America because I’m an American.

Elsie: She was like, It’s not over.

Emma: Yeah, she was like, this is what I do. I don’t know where it’s going to go. I’m I don’t you know, back then, I don’t even know if chefs really were famous. Now it’s quite you know, there’s like Food Network and being a chef is definitely like a path. And, you know, you could work in a restaurant or you can be kind of a TV celebrity. Like this is a thing. Everyone knows that. But back then, there were not as many examples of that. So I don’t think she really could have known that that was where her life was going to go. But I think she was just like, I love cooking, I love eating, I love French food. I’m going to do this. And wherever it goes, that’s where I’m going. And I just think that’s an interesting way to go about it, because so often, at least when I was younger, I feel like you see the end. And then you kind of try to work your way there, but she didn’t really do that, she was like, I love this thing, I love doing this thing, and I’m just going to go with that wherever it goes. And those are just two kind of different ways to approach passion.

Elsie: It’s a much better approach.

Emma: I think so! There’s a lot of wisdom there. So she’s rad.

Elsie: It’s just so cool to realize that you have so many lives ahead of you when you’re in your 20s especially. I think that it is easy to think that your life is somehow going to end when you’re 30. And then for sure for sure end when you’re 40. But that’s just not true at all.

Emma: Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah. And I also just love, like the idea of leaving a lot of space, like literally a lot of time in your life to cultivate knowledge, experience and even just like passion around a specific topic or variety of topics.

Elsie: I love it.

Emma: Yeah, that’s just fun because there’s just so much pressure sometimes to be an expert out of the gate at something. And it’s like, I mean, just love what you do and do it for years and years and that’s cool. I don’t know. It doesn’t have to be all this pressure to be perfect or to attain something so quickly.

Elsie: I do agree with that. We get a lot of emails and stuff from people who want to do something like we do for a living, either an app or be a blogger, an influencer. And it is really hard to respond to people who want to know how long it’s going to take to make money, because the answer is never what you want to hear. It’s always much longer. And you have, ah, you have to at least be willing to do it much longer than you would really want to, because it’s just not the kind of thing that happens overnight. So these stories, I don’t know. It’s just cool because a lot of people would have quit by then and none of these people quit or they were at least still open and willing to try it when the opportunity finally rolled around one random day.

Emma: Right. Right.

Elsie: Dreams come true. It can happen to you!

Emma: I want to sing that song. We have one last person. And I must admit, this one is the person that I was least familiar with. But when we were thinking about recording this podcast, we already had some stories that we wanted to talk about. And I decided to kind of put it out there just on Instagram and see what like who people would suggest, because I was hoping to get at least one or two more people in different fields. And so this was someone that people said over and over again. And whenever I had I was familiar with her work. It’s a painter and a woman, but I didn’t really know very much about her. And I must admit, I still haven’t had time to read her autobiography, but I read that it’s really great. So it’s now on my list of things.

Elsie: Mom sends me…well, sorry. Go ahead.

Emma: No, no, no, go ahead.

Elsie: OK, well, it’s Grandma Moses. Yeah. So I was just going to say our mom sends me Grandma Moses links and artwork and references all the time because I think that she thinks I should be a folk painter out of all the categories of painter because I always am like trying to find my painting thing. It’s just been like a thing I’ve been wandering around with for like ten years. But yeah, she always sends me Grandma Moses over and over. So maybe this is the sign. And so I’m pretty familiar with her and I love folk art.

Emma: How would you describe her work? I think listeners should look it up if they don’t know but…

Elsie: So folk art. I think that the way to describe it, the easiest way to describe it is it kind of looks like a kid could do it. But then you realize that it’s a lot more sophisticated and interesting and beautiful than you originally thought. Do you think that’s fair to say?

Emma: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think a kid could — I mean, I couldn’t pay for paintings if I was trying to copy it…(laughs)

Elsie: I mean it’s kind of a simplistic style.` Like a rustic, simplistic style.

Emma: It is more rustic and simplistic. It’s not trying to be a photo realistic.

Elsie: Yeah, it’s not trying to be realistic at all. And it’s it’s very beautiful. Very, very beautiful. Yeah. We’ll put some pictures in the show notes.

Emma: Yeah. For sure. And I think more often than not and I’m not familiar with all folk artists or anything by that, but they’re usually depicting their work or their music or whatever it is, is kind of about the place in the world that they grew up or the culture that they’re a part of. So a lot of times it’s an opportunity to see into a part of the world or a culture that you may not be familiar with if you’re not a part of the, you know, place where they’re from. So I really like that about the artist too because I think it’s a very like, seeing the world around you instead of wishing you were somewhere else, you know what I mean?

Elsie: That’s beautiful.

Emma: Anyway, so Grandma Moses, her full name is Anna Mary Robertson Moses, which I actually didn’t know. I was like, oh yeah, Grandma Moses. I’ve heard of her. And I was like, I didn’t know. So anyway, famous folk artist, she’s a painter, so her autobiography, which I have not read, but I hear is great, so I really want to I hope it has an audio version is called My Life’s History. And she was born in the eighteen hundreds. So this one is a much older one. Here’s an interesting thing about her life that I liked. So she was a housekeeper for many years and then she was a farmer. She also was a mother. She actually had 10 children. Only five of them survived. Again, she she was from the eighteen hundreds. So, you know, children didn’t survive as much as they do now in the modern age. And that was kind of devastating in a way. She was always interested in art. She always kind of had little hobbies like embroidery or not little hobbies. But I mean, when she wasn’t working or raising all of her children, here’s some things she did. She mostly was into embroidery, quilting, and then a little bit of painting. There’s like an early painting that she did like on a fireplace mantle. I feel like she could have been a blogger.

Emma: Yeah, I know.

Elsie: Because those all things we love doing.

Emma: Yeah. Yeah. And so as she got older, she got arthritis because as you probably guessed from this very short thing from her life, she was a really hard worker. So she did get arthritis. So she kind of switched from embroidery and quilting to painting and she focused on that. She started focusing on painting like in earnest, I guess you could say, when she was 78 years old. I read online that she produced over fifteen hundred paintings in something like three decades. So that’s something like a painting a week, like it’s like an average of 50 paintings a year, something around that. I’m really not a math expert, but she definitely was painting a lot. And, you know, I think anyone who produces any kind of creative work, you know, that it’s not like you keep every single painting.

Elsie: A painting every single week, like a completed one is a lot.

Emma: Yeah. I mean, I imagine there was some that she was like, oh, I’m going to start over, you know what I mean?

Elsie: If I made 52 paintings in a year that I loved, that I was proud of, that I put out to the world. That would be crazy. Yeah that would be. Yeah. Pretty awesome.

Emma: I am so inspired by how hard of a worker she was her entire life. Like she obviously had to work very hard being a housekeeper and a farmer as trade what she did growing up and then all the children she had, everyone who’s had children or been around children knows that’s a lot of work, very rewarding, but an awful lot of work. And then, 78, she’s like, I’m just going to paint a ton. And it’s like, well, that’s a lot of hard work, too. And of course, it’s joyful work. But still, sometimes I feel like it’s easy to be like, oh, when I get older, I’m going to kick back and just do nothing.

Elsie: This is an aspirational life story, it’s so incredible.

Emma: For sure. And her paintings are just beautiful. So. Oh, and a lot of them are of like rural countrysides, you know, things she probably would have been around, would have seen a lot of you know, while she was I’d like to think that while she was farming all those years or chasing kids around outside, she was kind of collecting all the scenes that she would later paint. You know, like it’s kind of one of those things you never really know, like what you’re doing right now, the season of life you’re in, how it’s going to inform the work that you might do later. So just like paying attention and being a curious person.

Elsie: That’s so true.

Emma: Having observations. Yeah. I just think you never know.

Elsie: Everything that I’ve ever done in my career has been something that I practiced before just for fun, even like my very first job when I was like 21 or 22, like it wasn’t even a job, it was like a side money because I was just trying to survive. But I used to make fonts and I would make like five or ten a month, like kind of way too many. But I feel like that skill came from like in high school, that I was just like drawing in my notebook all day and classes, you know. So yeah, if you’re doing something that you love and enjoy, it might just be preparing you for what’s next in your career. I feel like that’s just kind of how it works.

Emma: Yeah! And there’s just so many times I, I like, get really excited about something and I’m like, well, but is this a waste of time? Because this doesn’t make money. This is kind of a weird little hobby I want to do. Should I even spend my time doing this or spend any money doing this or, you know, and I then…I start to get in my head about it, like, this is kind of a stupid thing. Why am I even doing that? And it’s like, well, you don’t know what the next season of your life is going to have. You don’t know what you might be preparing for in the future because you’re probably not supposed to know yet. You’re supposed to enjoy the time that you’re in. So the universe doesn’t let us know the next thing anyway. But I just love the idea that she was probably collecting all these beautiful scenes all her life and then she ended up painting so many of them later.

Elsie: I love that.

Emma: She’s very cool.

Elsie: Ok, I want to say something so Emma always OK. So people always say. Life is short, which is true, but Emma always says “life is long”. She says that all the time, at least once a week to me, she’s like Elsie life is long. And it really is true. I mean, they’re both true. But when you look at these career stories, you realize that, like, there is often more time later to do the thing that you aren’t able to do right now or you can’t quite do right now. So don’t get discouraged if you feel like this hasn’t been your season. I mean, in 2020, it hasn’t been a lot of people seasons. Yeah. But I feel like it’s, I don’t know. It’s good to keep that hope for the future.

Emma: Yeah. And that’s what I, I’m glad you get that because it is a weird thing to say. I get it, but I mean it to be like a very hopeful thing like or also kind of like don’t give up on yourself or don’t write that person off. If they did something shitty because life is long and maybe they’re going to change, maybe you’re going to change, maybe, you know, things are going to work out later. And yeah, of course, also sometimes I mean, I think people say life is short as meaning for whenever you’re in that mode, like, I don’t want to do anything, I’m going to put that off till later. And you’re kind of being lazy or you’re making an excuse to not do this thing that you’re scared to do, but you maybe want to do that. I think the advice of life is short is really important to remember because you’re not promised tomorrow.

Elsie: Life is short.

Emma: But I think when it comes to like, oh, I’m frustrated that I can’t spend every day painting for five hours because I have a two year old that I’m supposed to watch right now, then I think you need to remember that life is long, you know.

Elsie: Right. Because I’m definitely in the trenches of being a parent right now. And there are so many things that I want to do. But I know that in even just five years, I’ll be able to do them. And right now I need to let go of them.

Emma: Yes. And your girls will not be small in five years, so you should soak it up now unless they’re throwing a tantrum. But no, I’m just kidding. But yeah, life is full of a lot of different seasons and we should try to embrace them. But that is really hard to do and advice that I can not always take myself because I think it takes true wisdom to be able to just roll with the punches like that.

Elsie: I agree. So if you’re feeling down, start planning your second life and then if you still have time, you can plan your third and your fourth and your fifth.

Emma: That’s right!

Elsie: Because you can do as many different pivots as you want to do.

Emma: Yep. And if you’re in your mid-twenties, mid-thirties, mid-forties and you’re like, oh no, it’s too late for me, you’re wrong. You still might have the greatest thing that’s going to happen in your life, the thing that you become known for. You have plenty of time to still do it. So start today. There’s no reason not to or next week. Life is long.

Elsie: Yeah.

Emma: You know?

Elsie: Don’t compare yourself to Harry Styles, OK?

Emma: No, don’t do not compare yourself to Harry Styles, whatever you do.

Elsie: All right. We’re going to do a reader question from Ashley_elsewhere via Instagram. Do you have any tips for first time homebuyers? I’m seeing so many homes, but they all need new flooring, paint and other small renovations. I’ve heard renovations can be hard to finance, and I’m overwhelmed by the work I would need to do right away. Also, any general tips to keep in mind when buying your first home? I love this question!

Emma: Cool!

Elsie: OK. So first of all, Ashley, if you’re considering all new flooring, a small renovation, then you’re my kind of people and we can talk (laughs) because that is it’s a major renovation. Actually, I would say so…

Emma: Can be. Depending on square footage. But yeah.

Elsie: …for flooring. This is my advice. This is my general advice. Feel free to disagree. You can yes, you can get a home equity loan, a small side personal loan. You can get sometimes a construction loan if you’re doing a lot. But I think that the best thing to do is save up and pay for your renovations in cash if you can. I just think it’s better because then I just think it’s the best thing. And if you don’t have that option, then move on to the other options. So with flooring, flooring, things like flooring and windows can be more affordable than you think. So I would get a couple of quotes, get a couple quotes with your first, second and third choice of flooring and just see before you decide that it’s something you definitely can’t afford because you might be able to. And that is a very worthwhile thing to spend money on that people will appreciate when you sell the house.

Emma: Yeah, flooring is a good investment for a house.

Elsie: Yeah. I do think generally as a first time home buyer, the best thing to do is to find a home that you can afford to do renovations with cash. So if that means that you only want to spend five or ten thousand dollars and that probably means you can only do floors or maybe you can do just floors and paint, or maybe you can just replace the countertops in your kitchen and a bathroom or something like that. I wouldn’t choose a house that you think needs all new everything if you don’t already have a renovation budget set back in your bank account, because that can just be emotionally draining to live somewhere that has, you know, gross flooring or something gross that, you know, where you have to get in that moldy shower every day. I wouldn’t do that unless you have to. So find something, where you can afford to do the renovations within a year or two with cash, is my advice. What do you want to say Em?

Emma: Yeah, I mean, I would pretty much say the same thing. It’s always tough because I don’t know what market, Ashley? Her name is Ashley, Right?

Elsie: Yes.

Emma: I don’t know what market Ashley is in and in. That can really make a big difference. But I’ll just quickly say what I did when I bought my first home. So when I bought my first home, I had — I knew what my budget was. I could spend ninety thousand dollars or less. That was my budget in Springfield, Missouri, which, you know, five or six years ago when I bought it, or no, it would have been eight or nine years ago, I’m old (laughs). Then, it was a good budget. Not every market would that work, but just telling you my thing. So I had ninety thousand dollars. I knew I needed three bedrooms, I needed two full bathrooms. One of the bathrooms had to have a bathtub shower combo because my niece was going to live with me and she was two at the time and she was not going to take a shower and I needed a fenced backyard. I couldn’t afford to put a fence in and I had a dog. And other than that, I just wanted to buy the best house I could. I had to have those were my have to have. And then other than that, I had some things I would like to have, would like to have vaulted ceilings. I would like to have all hardwood floors and tile, but, you know, and would like a neighborhood that feels safe to walk in, you know. But, you know, those are all more those were more on my list of like to haves. And then I knew my budget and I found a house based on that. Did it have all my like to haves know? Did it have on my must-haves? Yes. Did it fit my budget? Yes. And so I just think really narrowing that down because, you know, I think when you have that pinboard that’s like this is my dream home, you can get really stuck on. “Well, I’m pretty sure quartz countertops are a must have.” And it’s like, well, maybe, maybe for you, I don’t know. But for me, it wasn’t. In my first home, I had the linoleum countertops for like the first three or four years until I could afford to replace them. That just came with the house. And I just think it really depends on your budget. I don’t know, you know, the market you’re in. So it’s sort of tough to say. But I just really think through the things you must have, the things you would really like and be really mindful of what your budget is.

Elsie: Yeah, another thing I would say is find a house where you can do a lot of things yourself, if that’s something you enjoy doing.

Emma: Painting, everyone can paint.

Elsie: Yeah, on my first houses, yeah, I almost, I did almost just painting and maybe I think on our second house we replaced a kitchen counter. We didn’t really do that much. We like, painted the cabinets that were there and put a new counter on it and called it a new kitchen. You can do that. Like that’s I think that just finding something and being realistic about the level you’re at, like you do not want to rip out a kitchen if you have a five thousand dollar budget for renovating your kitchen just don’t rip it out.

Emma: And you have a very specific plan. Already you know how you’re going to be able to do that.

Elsie: Right.

Emma: Yeah, because that’s pretty, pretty tight. It’s going to be tight budget for a kitchen.

Elsie: Yeah.

Emma: In any market, but in some markets it would be possible. So yeah.

Elsie: So yeah, priorities are great to have and you can always have, you know that next thing that you would do with your house if you got an unexpected bonus or a bigger than expected tax return or you know, something like that.

Emma: Right.

Elsie: Dreams are good too.

Emma: Dreams are great. Yeah.

Elsie: Yeah. Hopefully that helps. Shopping for your first home is a lot of pressure, but I think it makes it easier, like Emma said, to just focus on getting the best house you can for your budget and not thinking too much about a dream house at this point because it might not be your ultimate dream house. And that’s OK.

Emma: Yeah, exactly.

Elsie: Yeah.

Emma: Good luck, Ashley.

Elsie: Yeah good luck! (claps). Thanks so much for listening this week. We love it when you guys share a podcast on Instagram. It’s our number one favorite way that you can support us. So thank you so much. If you do that and even if you don’t, thank you for listening and we love you.

Emma: We appreciate you a ton. Thank you.

Elsie: Very Hillary. (laughs)

Emma: You said I love you. I said we appreciate you a ton.

Elsie: Thank you.

Emma: Nailed it, Emma. (laughs)

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You can stream the episode here on the blog or on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, and Stitcher. You can find the podcast posts archive here.

Show Notes:

Here’s a photo of Ting in case you’re like me and you have to Google every single podcast voice to see what they look like. Haha! Also, is it just me, or are pre-COVID photos so CLOSE and awkward looking now … it’s funny to me how quickly I got used to never hugging anyone. Bizarre!

What we cover in this episode:

-We define the difference between a general contractor and a subcontractor or sub.
-The pros and cons of being your own GC.
-Tips for hiring a contractor and what to look for.
-How to create a payment schedule, especially your first time working with someone new.
-How to be a good manager + always keep a paper trail.
-Uh oh … what if you need to fire a subcontractor.
-How to be prepared to get quotes (aka how to be a good client)
-We each share our favorite type of renovations.
-The big wins: focus on finding a good price, creating a good payment schedule and keep all your communications in writing.
-And we end with a little pep talk!

-Also, check out this episode on Is a General Contractor Worth It?

We also answer a reader question about how to keep a house clean and have cute rugs, etc., with PETS. We each have very strong feelings on this subject. Basically, it’s worth it! Just let your pets mess stuff up—you only live once! Oops. I think I just found my “hill to die on” haha.

Thanks so much for listening. We love you! Elsie

Miss an episode? Get caught up!

• Episode #42: Oops, I’m Moving Again
• Episode #41: Emma’s Quarantine Novel
• Episode #40: Side Hustles

Episode 43 Transcript

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Elsie: You’re listening to A Beautiful Mess podcast. This week, we’re diving into how, why and when to be your own general contractor, how much you can save, and what the tradeoffs are. My BFF and renovation mentor Ting is joining me for this episode. I met Ting when we start remodeling our previous home. He was my very first friend in Nashville when I moved here and he basically held my hand and wiped my tears through a grueling two year remodel. He taught me how to be my own general contractor, which ended up saving us not just thousands, but easily more than a hundred thousand dollars on our entire home remodel. So today I invited him onto the podcast to share some of his wisdom with you. And by the way, Emma is taking a break this week because her house is actually getting a new roof. And apparently that is really loud. So Emma will be back next week. OK. So let’s just jump into it. So basically, you taught me how to renovate when we did our last home and it was like two or three years long of crying and calling you constantly, facetiming.

Ting: I don’t think I taught you how to renovate because you were already doing it. I just saved you from some unpleasant experiences that you were having with a contractor. Right?

Elsie: He taught me. He was my mentor. I will say it forever, even if you don’t approve that my mentor.

Ting: That’s fine with me.

Elsie: And my best friend. OK. So first of all, let’s just start out by explaining even what a general contractor is, because this episode is about how to be your own general contractor. It can save you thousands it can save you hundreds of thousands if you are doing a whole house. Yeah. But let’s explain the difference between if you go to hire a general contractor or if you go to hire individual tradespeople, also called subcontractors.

Ting: That’s right. OK. So a general contractor is one person that’s in charge of your entire job. So if you’re doing it yourself, then you’re the general contractor. Subcontractors are people that work for the general contractor, which could be that person you hired, or the people that work for you, if you’re a general contracting the job yourself. So think of general contractor not as a person, but more as a position. You know, that could be somebody you hire or it could be yourself.

Elsie: So, for example, if you’re doing a kitchen, you can hire a general contractor and you could have one person come to your house, show them your Pinterest board. Show them what you want to do to the different parts of the room, what kind of tile what kind of counter, and they could handle the whole project. Or if you were being your own general contractor, then you would have to hire your own cabinet person, your own countertop person, your own plumber, your own tile person, your own electrician. Probably a lot more.

Ting: That’s right. Yeah. If you’re wanting to do the job yourself, you have to manage all those subcontractors and schedule them and pay them, make sure they’re on time. You may even want to pull your own building permit if you’re putting on an addition, which, you know, we could discuss later, because general contractors can pull permits and subcontractors can’t.

Elsie: Yeah. OK. Can you define for our listeners what is a type of project where you don’t need a permit, you can handle it on your own, and the type of project where you really should have a general contractor and you really should have a permit?

Ting: Okay, so that’s different from state to state and city to city. But in general, if you’re adding square footage, you’re going to need a permit. So let’s say you’re going to close in your deck and make it an air-conditioned room. I’m not talking about screening it in or putting windows in it or whatever, but if you want to take your deck and make it a screened-in room and count it as square footage towards your house, that’s air-conditioned, more than likely you’re going to need some kind of a permit. And it’s important to get that permit not because, you know, if you hire the right contractors they’re going to do a good job anyway. But it’s important to get that permit because when you go sell, and your square footage went up, they’re going to want to know that you added the square footage with a permit. And it wasn’t some under the table job your grandpa did for you with leftover parts or something.

Elsie: Which nothing wrong with that if you don’t need a permit. But if you do…so if you want to add square footage to your house, you have to have a permit or it won’t count as added square footage when you go to sell your house. Is that correct?

Ting: I mean, you might get away with it, but they might catch it. You know, it’s like it’s not guaranteed to count. But if you have a permit and it was done officially, then it has to count. So, you know, sometimes you could fly under the radar and they may not notice. But generally, if you’re gonna be spending a lot of money on adding square footage or investing into your house, it’s probably worth it to just get a permit. In Nashville,and I don’t know about anywhere else, in Nashville, if your total job is under twenty-five thousand dollars, you’re allowed to get that permit yourself. It’s called a self permit.

Elsie: Nice.

Ting: If your job is going to be more than twenty-five thousand dollars, then you’re required to have a licensed general contractor to pull the permit because they have the insurance and they have licenses to, basically, city wants to know they know what they’re doing to be on a job bigger than 25 grand.

Elsie: That makes sense. That sounds like a good cutoff to me for something I would feel comfortable handling on my own versus something where I would want to have a little bit of professional help. So what are some examples of a room or a renovation where you definitely don’t need a permit? You’re totally, you’re probably totally okay to just do it on your own.

Ting: Wallpaper painting, replacing kitchen cabinets, countertops, basically anything that’s surface…

Elsie: A finish.

Ting: Yeah. Anything that’s a finish. Anything that’s not attached to your house that you can just take out. I mean, a few nails is OK, but it’s not like, if you’re going to take out a wall that might be supporting your roof, obviously, you know, you need a structural permit to do that.

Elsie: OK.

Ting: Yeah. So anything that’s just I call them fluffy do’s, you know.

Elsie: Yes!

Ting: If it’s a fluffy do then. You know, you can do it yourself and you don’t need a permit. You want to make sure your plumber’s licensed. You know, if you’re gonna get into your kitchen and if you’re replacing cabinets, you don’t really need a plumber the cabinet people can usually handle the plumbing because it’s already there. But if you’re going to add a sink in an island or you going to add a line for your refrigerator, you’re going to want a licensed plumber to do that, because if it doesn’t work and it floods your house, they have insurance to cover that.

Elsie: Ok. That is a great tip. Yeah. I hate thinking about a house getting flooded.

Ting: Yeah.

Elsie: It makes me almost want to cry. Yeah. So let’s talk about the pros of being your own general contractor and then we’ll talk about the cons next. So I know one of the pros is you save a ton of money. Would you say it could be like double?

Ting: Yeah. So right now I’m just speaking right now, not five years ago. Right now, there’s so much building going on everywhere that general contractors, most of them have like a minimum amount that they need to make per job because they’re going to spend X amount of time doing your kitchen. Or they could spend X amount of time building a whole house because you’re just you know, they’re a project manager. So whether it’s doing your kitchen or building a whole house, it’s about the same amount of time for him. So.

Elsie: Woah.

Ting: Let’s say if his minimum is he needs make $30,000 a job and you have a $10,000 job, you’re gonna pay $40,000 because he’s got to make that money. Right. So if it’s a smaller job, you’re much better off doing it yourself. You save more than double. But if it’s a big job, if you’re doing a whole addition. It’s not cost you 150. It’s worth paying him his thirty thousand dollar fee for him to have the insurance and deal with all the subs and all the risk.

Elsie: Yes, 100 percent. Most people listening, their dream is probably, I want to get new kitchen cabinets, a new counter, a cute sink, you know, a gold faucet.

Ting: Yeah.

Elsie: You know, all of that stuff. And that is the kind of job where you can save a lot of money, right?

Ting: Yes. And that kind of job, you don’t even need a permit. Right.

Elsie: Woo!

Ting: You say you want to do a kitchen and you want to replace your countertop, your cabinets, repaint, rip the floor out and put tile down in place of carpet or whatever. Those are all non-permit required jobs. And I would definitely…

Elsie: My favorite kind of job!

Ting: I would definitely. Yeah, you do those a lot (laughs).

Elsie: Safe to DIY! Yeah. That’s definitely my sweet spot of what I love. And kind of why I am moving, because I want a whole house full of projects or where I don’t need a permit, and I don’t need a general contractor. I can just like, take it away, Elsie and Collin.

Ting: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. Basically if it’s just surface stuff and just decoration, sink, cabinets, faucets, get a licensed plumber, and hire a company that do cabinets hire company that does granite, sometimes they’re the same company. It’s usually best if you could do cabinets and granite from the same place because then there’s no finger-pointing.

Elsie: That makes sense.

Ting: And you know, you’ll pay maybe five percent more to do that, but it’s worth it.

Elsie: So another thing that is really helpful about being your own general contractor is you can diversify your risk.

Ting: That’s right.

Elsie: So can you explain that?

Ting: Yes. If you hire a general contractor, let’s just say he starts your job and then he is going through divorce all of a sudden and he can’t focus on your job anymore, then your whole job is gonna be messed up or delayed. Right?

Elsie: Because nobody’s in charge.

Ting: He’s the one that’s in charge. So if he…

Elsie: And if you don’t know all of his individual contacts, you know, then you wouldn’t be able to continue without him.

Ting: Yeah. You’ll have to go hire another general contractor. And most general contractors require a payment upfront. So, you know, you have a lot of skin in the game. Not to say that your general contractors will go bad, but when you do a job, you have to assume everything is going to go bad and plan for it.

Elsie: Right.

Ting: If you use subcontractors and your plumber goes missing in action or whatever, you just hire a different plumber. And that’s the thing about subcontracting is, I always tried to have three bids and I take the best two. I used the best one and then the second best as my backup. That way I’m not, you know, in trouble if I have to get rid of the first one or he’s not doing his job. I already have a backup ready to go.

Elsie: Yes. Everyone, please, please, please listen to that point. Always have a backup plan on each contractor. And if you’re being your own general contractor, I’ll just say from my own experiences, even with just doing a bathroom, but definitely with a kitchen, you will probably have to switch or replace at least one of the trades people throughout the project. Because it just happens like, more than you would think. So that’s part of the thing about diversifying your risk is like if you have, you know, a backup plumber who you can call, that’s a really good position compared to if you’ve already fully paid someone and they just stop showing up, that’s a really bad position. And you don’t have a backup plan. That would be the worst possible nightmare.

Ting: Yeah or they’ll do a bad job and they refuse to, you know, come back and fix it. Even if they finish the job, it’s still good to have a backup that can polish everything up for you.

Elsie: Just in case. And the last pro of being your own general contractor is that you can control the payment schedule. So this is, it’s kind of boring to talk about. But I will say it’s the number one most important thing that Ting is trained me on and drilled into my brain a thousand times. Having a payment schedule that you might think it’s pretty good, but make it even, you know, twice or maybe five times more specific than you think it should be at the beginning.

Ting: Yes.

Elsie: And you have so much more security.

Ting: Right. Well, I mean, I’ve drilled it into you, but you’re still too nice to say no a lot of the time.

Elsie: I hate saying no, especially if someone seems desperate. I just. I can’t do it. Yeah, but I mean, always. I can’t. Yeah. I’ll admit it. I am too nice. But I’m trying, I’m trying to be a bad-ass but I’m not.

Ting: (laughs) Well it’s not about being a bad-ass really. It’s just about, you know, when you’re working with a subcontractor, let’s say when I say subcontractor, I don’t mean Home Depot where you’re going to get your cabinets installed from or the granite yard that has a you know, that installs granite. I’m talking about people like a plumber or an electrician or some drywall person that you’re going to hire from Thumbtack or Angie’s List.

Elsie: Angie’s List.

Ting: Yeah. So if you find those folks, if they have good reviews, you’re more than likely okay. But I always tried to delay payment and not pay people up front, because once you pay them, you have the stress of worrying if they’re gonna show up. And it’s not that they’re gonna try to take advantage of you, but something could happen. They can have a car accident or, you know, all kinds of things could happen to them where they don’t show up or and you’re already out a bunch of money.

Elsie: Really, all kinds of things can happen. It’s, yeah. Very I mean, yeah. Anything.

Ting: Anything that can happen will. Elsie knows.

Elsie: Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Some sad stories. Some horrible stories. Yeah. It’s important to keep the majority of the payment for the end of a job so that there’s an incentive to finish…

Ting: That’s right.

Elsie: …and there’s little check-points, like just pretend that you’re a bank. Like my friends who get renovation loans, their bank has these checkpoints and you don’t get paid until you hit each marker of progress.

Ting: Yeah.

Elsie: And if you’re able to pretend to be that bank and make that type of payment schedule, I think that that is a really good place to be.

Ting: Yeah. Be friends with them after the job is done.

Elsie: Right.

Ting: Not before.

Elsie: Yeah. That’s good advice. Yeah. Because I always become best friends with everyone who I work with. OK. So let’s talk about the cons.

Ting: OK.

Elsie: So the biggest one hiring obviously just finding individual tradespeople, especially the first time that Ting helped me renovate our main bathroom in our previous home. I sort of lost my shit because I had to figure out how many different people you have to hire to do a job like that. Like there’s a person just for the shower door. There’s a person just for the tile. Obviously, there’s a plumber and there was a little bit of wood in that room. And, you know, there’s just other things. So it’s not going to be a short process. Getting all these quotes, collecting them, getting people to show up. Following up and getting everyone on a schedule where it works together it is a big commitment. And then managing them along the way, we’ve talked about the payment schedule, but also the quality, checking their work. Sometimes that’s hard to do when it’s something that you don’t know very much about. Like it’s obvious to me to check over tile because I can just look at it and be like, does it look good or does it look crappy?

Ting: Well, you go with your gut and you really have to trust in it. You know, if it doesn’t look right. It’s probably not right.

Elsie: But there’s things that are hard to check. Like what if you hire someone to run a gas line for you? Like, how would I know?

Ting: Go sniff all the joints and makes sure doesn’t smell like farts. Right? (laughs)

Elsie: (laughs) So, yeah. Managing and then firing, which I think is probably the hardest part of just any business transaction, is that inevitably there are going to be times when you have to fire someone. And it is sad usually. And also it can you know an angry situation.

Ting: It’s just stressful, right? It’s very stressful, especially when I’ve seen you try to do it and you’re always stressed out for days before, you cry for two days after. So it’s better to not have to fire anybody. But if you have to fire somebody and you’ve paid them too much and they owe you money, then obviously it’s bad for you and you’re going to feel resentful toward it.

Elsie: Yeah.

Ting: If you haven’t paid him enough to go, I want you to pay more. But you can’t because he didn’t finish the job and they’re doing a bad job. So then it’s negative that way, too. So, you know, you want to try to avoid having to fire people. But if you do, you want to make sure they still owe you enough money for you to replace them with a different person with the amount of money that’s left.

Elsie: Exactly. And I know that were being kind of like, this might be kind of scary to listen to, but this is the worst part of the whole thing. And remember, you might save 30 or 50 thousand dollars doing like a kitchen and a bathroom. You can save a lot of money doing these things. So even though it is a lot of responsibility you’re taking on, it’s also something that is going to cause a big, big, big savings in your project.

Ting: Yeah.

Elsie: Continuing on my list of cons, so there’s no one to complain to when things go badly. I think this is one of the bad ones, too, is that if you go in, and the tile’s done wrong or there’s like bad spacing, like I am pretty, I have asked people to redo things a lot and it’s hard to do because you don’t get to just call a nice, friendly general contractor. You have to call maybe…

Elsie: The worker themselves.

Ting: Yeah.

Elsie: A person who’s angry that they’re going have to redo something that’s really, really time consuming. My next point says, “do you like crying?”

Ting: Oh, you do! (laughs)

Elsie: (laughs) Just that, you know — I do! — are your own general contractor and wealth and you’re in my zone of personality, you’ll probably have a few extra tears.

Ting: Right.

Elsie: Just going to happen. The next one is the quality control is on you. So you do have to be comfortable asking someone to redo something specific no matter how many times it takes, which can be awkward. You know, if you’re like, hey, could you adjust that? And they do. And then it still looks the same and you have to say it again and then maybe again, like,

Ting: Well, that comes back to the part where you don’t want to be friends with them until they’re finished with the job. Right.

Elsie: Right.

Ting: And it’s better to catch problems before it gets big, like, you know, if you have issues with a grout line or the spacing, make sure you check it. Don’t let him finish the entire wall before you say something. You know, catch it at the beginning. If a gut feeling tells you the grout lines don’t look good to you and you don’t like it, don’t just sit on it. Go ahead and tell them and say, hey, this doesn’t look really straight, and if you still owe them money, they will straighten it up because they want to be paid the rest of their money.

Elsie: That’s very good advice.

Ting: Again, I don’t pay them too much upfront, or else they’re going to say, you’re too much trouble. I’m just going to walk with your money and then you can find somebody else to finish the job. But if you haven’t paid them yet and they want you to pay them, then they’ll fix whatever you want him to fix and know that if they don’t, you may not pay them at all when they’re finished.

Elsie: Yeah, I agree. I think that as far as conflict resolution, the best thing to do is just to say it, just to say whatever it is the first time you see the problem.

Ting: Yeah.

Elsie: And don’t wait, even though it’s awkward. I agree.

Ting: Yeah. Don’t assume they’re going to do the right thing and fix it, because they may think it’s good enough when it’s not good enough for you.

Elsie: Right. And then the last thing is, just really be honest with yourself. Can you tell people no if they have not finished their checkpoint of work and then they come and ask for a payment and they say, “I really need this.” Can you say no, you do have to finish that checkpoint. Because I think that’s the hardest part. It’s so painful.

Ting: But it’s also about setting expectations. If you set that expectation before you hire them and make sure you write everything down so you can refer back to it and show them, “look, we talked about this in the contract in the beginning where you agreed to do this job for this much money. And these are the payment schedules. I have to stick to that.”

Elsie: I love how you’re so emotionless about it. I want to be more like that.

Ting: You mean I don’t cry? (laughs)

Elsie: Yeah, I think that’s good. It’s definitely better. OK, so let’s talk about hiring a contractor.

Ting: OK.

Elsie: What are some things that you look for when you’re…if you’re getting three or four quotes? Obviously the price is a big factor, but what are the other important things that make you hire someone first?

Ting: First, is the price for me, because, that’s why I’m shopping for subcontractors. If price wasn’t an option, I would just use a general contractor. So if I’m subcontracting, price is a big part, but I’m also not hiring the cheapest person. Let’s say if you get a quote for the kitchen cabinets, no kitchen cabinets is bad because you buy that from Home Depot or a store. Right. Let’s say a plumber and a plumber estimates your job at a thousand dollars. Another one at three thousand dollars. Another one at five. The 5000 is too high and the 1000 is probably too low. You likely would go with the one in the middle. Right?

Elsie: I think that’s very solid advice.

Ting: Because if somebody can’t make enough money to live, they’re not going to do your job correctly.

Elsie: Yeah.

Ting: So if something is too cheap, it’s probably not any good.

Elsie: I agree. I have a story. I still don’t feel ready in life to tell it. But at my last home, I had a contractor whose, his price was too good to be true. And then it was too good to be true. And it was just a sad ending where we had to fire him. And it was ahhh I can’t even talk about it, OK.

Ting: You haven’t talked about that yet? No. Oh, wow. I figured you I figured you talked about it many times since.

Elsie: I’m so…I’m still ashamed of it because it was so bad that we should have never hired him. I should have known. I feel like now that I look at it, it was obvious that the price was too good to be true.

Ting: That was like when we first met, too.

Elsie: Right. Yeah. So I’ve I’ve learned a lot mostly from Ting, and actually Ting helped me fire that man. And that was an awkward moment of my life.

Ting: You mean I fired that man for you? But you were outside, though.

Elsie: Yeah. (laughs)

Ting: You were there. (laughs)

Elsie: I was standing by you when you said all the words.

Ting: Oh, yeah. (laughs)

Elsie: Yeah, I agree with that. Like someone who has a reasonable price. Not maybe not like the lowest possible price you can imagine.

Ting: Right.

Elsie: I think that that that’s probably a good thing, because the other thing is you want someone who’s sort of worked their way up a little bit where they’re confident enough to give a realistic, reasonable price.

Ting: Yeah.

Elsie: You don’t want someone who’s so new to it or so desperate for a first payment that they’re going to give you a price that’s not realistic.

Ting: And if you’re going to Thumbtack or Angie’s List, always look at reviews, too, because that really matters.

Elsie: That’s a good point. And also do a small project first if you have a chance.

Ting: That’s right.

Elsie: Like I found the greatest plumber who I love. We love him. And he came from Thumbtack. Yeah. But we use it for a tiny job and we just kept calling him back. And now he’s been over here like four times. Okay, so you’re gonna pick not the highest price. Not the lowest price. What next?

Ting: I think their availability and not necessarily they can get to your job tomorrow. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking like when you text them or call them that, they will actually answer the phone or call you back within a couple hours.

Elsie: Ok. This is a solid point. This is solid advice.

Ting: Because if they’re in the bidding process of trying to get you as a customer, if you can’t get a hold of them then, after you become their customer and you paid them a little bit of money, you’re not going to be able to get a hold of them then even more. So you’re going to be, you know, chasing your contractor. The bad thing about that is when you’re managing your own project, if one person is late, it messes up everybody’s schedule that’s after them and then it creates a lot of issues. So availability is really I wouldn’t say availability. Accessibility is really important.

Elsie: Communication.

Ting: Yes. That’s right.

Elsie: Yeah. I completely, completely agree with that point. Is there anything else? I think if I didn’t know when I first started hiring contractors that it’s kind of normal if you make an appointment like a week before it’s kind of normal that they won’t show up unless you send a follow up. So I will say you do kind of have to send a follow up that day, even though I think that professionally you shouldn’t have to do that. But you do.

Ting: Yeah. And the reason for that is because they want to filter out people that aren’t serious because their time is what makes them money and they spend all their time answering people that aren’t serious than they you know…

Elsie: If you take a minute to imagine how much it would suck to go to ten different homes and give elaborate quotes and not get any of those jobs. It is kind of understandable why they will choose the clients who seem like they have their shit together the best.

Ting: Yeah, you have to be a client they can satisfy.

Elsie: Yeah. Yeah. Something really helpful that I learned in our last home renovation is that it’s good to have everything picked out, a sketch and sort of like a timeline, a budget, like have everything in your mind or written down before you have these meetings, because they…if they ask you all those questions and you don’t know any of the answers, they probably won’t call you back. Is there anything else that you want to say about advice for hiring? Because I feel like that’s a big part of it. People get really intimidated.

Ting: Yeah. And a payment schedule is really important. If somebody wants to be paid 50 percent upfront before they even start. That’s a really bad sign. Right? Some of them will do that just to give it a flakes that will never do a job, just want a bunch of quotes and never really pull the trigger. So just because they say they want 50 percent upfront, doesn’t mean you can’t use them. But you’ll have to say I’m not comfortable paying 50 percent upfront before work started because we’ve never worked together before.

Elsie: Right.

Ting: But they have to be willing to negotiate, like you can say, how about if I buy the materials upfront and then I’ll pay you for labor when — 50 percent of your labor — when you’re 50 percent finished.

Elsie: Yes. I think that’s great advice.

Ting: You have to give something because they also don’t want to buy a bunch of materials and have you change your mind either. So you got to give and take. Right. But you shouldn’t give them a bunch of labor money when they haven’t spent any labor on the project. So their willingness to accept delayed payment until they have some work to show for is very important. I would pay more for a contractor that’s willing to be paid later than right now upfront before any work is finished. Again, that doesn’t apply to Home Depot or any place you’re buying materials from like, you know, a granite yard, or you know…

Elsie: Yeah, we’re talking about individual tradespeople.

Ting: Yeah. Like plumbers. Electricians.

Elsie: Yeah. So to summarize. OK. So I’m going to work with a new person doing tile. That’s our example.

Ting: OK.

Elsie: And I will say to this tile person, I’m fine to take the call from the store or to order the tile for you. I’ll pay for all the supplies and then I will pay you 50 percent when 50 percent of the job is done. And you do have to define what that would look like for this project. And then the final payment when the finishing last final detail is done and approved.

Ting: Yes. And it doesn’t have to be 50 percent. I personally only pay 30 percent when it’s halfway done because I want to owe them money. I don’t want them to owe me money. And I always have to have enough money left that I owe them for somebody else to come and finish their work. So 50 percent is the maximum. But you can say I could give you a one third draw when you’re halfway finished and just define those terms. And another really important thing I want to squeeze in there before I forget is you want to do all your communication through text. Don’t do it over the phone.

Elsie: The paper trail. Yeah. This is so important.

Ting: Don’t do it over the phone. Email’s OK. But make sure your contractor is capable of texting with you. That’s another thing. If they can’t text, you probably don’t need to use them. I mean, it’s 2020, right? So they have to be able to tax an e-mail and you want to establish most of your communications through text. If it’s too complicated to text, you have to talk to them on the phone, then follow up with a text summarizing the call. That way you have everything in writing so you can refer back to it.

Elsie: Ok. Definitely, definitely agree with this point. So in our last, in our most recent renovation, I shared our wood floor horror story where we had to do the wood floors twice.

Ting: Yes.

Elsie: And with that particular situation, our text messages were how we resolved the conflict in the end, because we had two different, two very different perspectives on how the project went and how we got to this point where we were unhappy. And he thought that the job was done well. So the text messages were definitely like the proof we needed to sort of resolve our conflict. Right. You got to have those texts. All right. So let’s talk a little bit about prep. So what should you have done? Let’s pretend we’re remodeling a kitchen. My favorite. What should you have done before you make your first appointment for your first quote?

Ting: Figure out how much money you have. All right. Budget. If you’re going to be your own general contractor, find all the fixed costs, like how much are the cabinets going to cost? How much is a countertop going to cost? I would figure out all those costs first before you involve individual trades.

Elsie: Smart. So you need to know how much all of your supplies are going to cost.

Ting: That’s right.

Elsie: Before you start hiring someone to do tile or plumbing.

Ting: Yeah. Because whatever money you have left is how much you have to hire these people. And if you don’t you either save up more, you cut back on your supply costs. So figuring out your budget and how much you could allocate to each segment is the most important thing.

Elsie: Beautiful. OK. I want to say my favorite kind of renovation. And then you can say yours because we’re very different.

Ting: Okay.

Elsie: My favorite kind of renovation is a hybrid of DIY and a little bit of subcontracting. So I do think it’s worth it absolutely, to work with trades, especially when it’s something like plumbing, like I would never try to learn that or try to coerce Collin into learning how to do plumbing.

Ting: Yeah.

Elsie: But he has learned to do tiling and, you know, we build shelves all the time, like all Collin ever does is build shelves.

Ting: Yeah.

Elsie: And so I feel like we save a ton of money and we get this really fulfilling DIY experience because we have sort of a low number of contractors needed for our projects, which feels really good because it can be very exhausting to have people in your house especially if it’s for months at a time.

Ting: And if it’s a dirty job like drywall or sanding floors…

Elsie: Drywall is so messy it’s messier than I thought it would be.

Ting: Oh yeah, it’s the worst…Yeah. My favorite type of project is I get a design, either I design it or an architect designs it, and then I hire the general contractor and then I don’t look at it again till it’s finished.

Elsie: So a building project?

Ting: Yeah, I used to like renovations, but, you know, I’m kind of, I don’t know, I guess I’ve outgrown it. It’s not that much fun to me anymore. I’ve just don too many of them now.

Elsie: How many times you think you’ve renovated a kitchen?

Ting: Total kitchens, probably a hundred. I didn’t I wasn’t personally involved in all of them.

Elsie: That’s so many.

Ting: Yeah, I mean some of them maybe I’ll design one kitchen and they put it in 20 different properties. That’s different.

Elsie: That’s true.

Ting: Your your renovation projects are much, much, much more involved than mine because you put your heart and soul into it. I’m just like…

Elsie: I do.

Ting: Cabinet company, what’s the cheapest cabinet, and how can you fill this room with as many cabinets as possible. Right? And then do it 20 times. So my projects are different. It’s more of the more of a job for me. That’s why I’m not emotional about it. I think for you it’s personal because it’s your artwork.

Elsie: Yeah. And I think for most of our listeners, it’s going to be their own home that they’re renovating.

Ting: Yeah.

Elsie: And it matters, like if you get a bad tile job in your bathroom or your kitchen, you might think about it every day for five years. If you’re like me and that’s not good.

Ting: I’ve definitely felt like that when I’ve been renovated my own house. You know, so it’s different when you’re renovating your own house because you have to live without not straight grout line. So if you see a not straight grout line, that’s gonna bother you for the next 10 years. Say something about it. Don’t be scared to say something.

Elsie: Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, if you’re not a grout line person, just start…next time, I know we’re not really going to restaurants right now or I guess next time you’re out and about after COVID is over, just start looking at tile and you’ll see there’s such a big difference between perfect tile and then really bad tile and everything in between. But it’s a thing that once you see it in life, you can’t unsee it everywhere you go for the rest of your life.

Ting: But something else to be said is you have to have realistic expectations because you’re…

Elsie: That’s a good point.

Ting: …because you’re doing the job, you’re subcontracting the job out yourself. You don’t have a general contractor. This is your personal art project. So you’re going to want it to be perfect so that not so straight grout line may just be what it all grout lines…none of them are going to be perfectly straight. So you kind of have to accept that nothing’s gonna be 100 percent perfect or you’ll just drive yourself crazy and your contractor.

Elsie: I do agree with that. Yeah. In summary, if you do a budget renovation, leave a little bit of room that it doesn’t have to be perfect. There were things, there are things in all my renovations that aren’t perfect. No house is perfect. I mean, I don’t think?

Ting: They’re not. But the thing is, you don’t notice it if you didn’t build it yourself. You’re walking in, you’re seeing everything. But if you’re renovating just your kitchen, then your focus is on that one grout line.

Elsie: When you become involved with where every single light switch plate is placed and every single vent, they do become a lot bigger than they really should be.

Ting: Right.

Elsie: Other people won’t even see those things. So, yeah, kind of go easy on yourself and focus on the big picture, remember, and remind yourself why you’re doing it. Because if you’re doing it, if you’re being a general contractor, it should be to save money and you should save money. And you should be so proud of that money you save because it is a lot of work and then focus on I think the big wins are the payment schedule.

Ting: Yeah.

Elsie: And wait what was the other one (laughs).

Ting: You’ve got to focus on the big items. Right? The pricing: you don’t want the cheapest. You don’t want the most expensive, you want something in-between. And if they’re too far apart, just get more, more quotes.

Elsie: Yes. You can’t have too many quotes.

Ting: Yes. And you want to make sure they’re they’re not necessarily highly available because if they’re good, they’re going to be busy. So you want to make sure they’re accessible. Meaning if you text them or call them, they’re going to respond to you within a short amount of time, because if they’re not accessible now, they won’t be later after you pay them either.

Elsie: Agree.

Ting: Right? And then you want to make sure that you control the payment schedule. You don’t want to pay them too much in advance. They have to have skin in the game just like you do.

Elsie: I think that yeah, that’s those are the things you can do to keep your project…

Ting: We’re missing on though, there’s something else.

Elsie: I mean, I think they kind of get it…

Ting: Oh, yeah, keep everything in writing. Oh, yeah. The last one is keep everything in writing. Yeah. So have a contract at the beginning. Have a payment schedule at the beginning and have check points that you’re agreeing on to other as you go through the project. I think that if you do that, you can it can save you from a lot of other problems.

Ting: It’ll save you from having to fire them because everybody’s expectation is the same.

Elsie: Yeah. The last thing I just want to say is even though this episode maybe is like a little bit overwhelming, a little bit scary feeling to do it for the first time, just do a smaller project for your first time if you’re interested in it. But I am a person, I cry a lot. I take things hard. I get stressed out. I’m not good at being harsh, but I still think that this is totally worth it to do and I can totally handle it and I will 100 percent do it again. So it’s worth it. And you can do it.

Ting: Yes.

Elsie: We have a reader question.

Ting: Ok.

Elsie: That is pet related. It is from Maggie. It says, I would love to hear about keeping your house clean even though pets cause a big mess. I never buy rugs because of my pets, but I really want some rugs. OK. So I have very strong feelings about this. Do you?

Ting: Yeah, definitely.

Elsie: OK.

Ting: My strong feelings about pets making a mess in the house is that it’s worth it. And you know…

Elsie: I agree.

Ting: Like I have a white dog that sheds. I don’t know where all the hair comes from. It’s like he has an unlimited source of shedding. You think he’d be bald, but he’s not right? So I just don’t wear dark clothes because, I mean, I’d have dog hair all over me.

Elsie: So in other words, you revolve your life around your pet, not the other way around.

Ting: Yeah. I mean, once you have it, then you kind of get used to the mess. And the most important thing is you have to have a Roomba.

Elsie: Oh, that’s a good tip. I’ve never had a Roomba because I’m really into shaggy rugs. Like see this? And that’s like incompatible.

Ting: Yeah. A Roomba is a reason I haven’t gone crazy from the hair, because it, I just scheduled to run every day and it picks up most of the dog hair. You know, eventually I’ll get to…

Elsie: Have you seen a Roomba looking lawn mower.

Ting: Yes. I want one.

Elsie: We saw one. Oh my gosh. Yeah I really want one of those. I think I do want a Roomba too. But I think I’ll just have to train it or something. But I do think it would be nice.

Ting: You can’t use a Roomba on this rug. But if it’s flat…You can still have rugs. Just don’t get rugs that are, you know, super, super tall.

Elsie: This is my kind of rug, though. This is my category of love and joy.

Ting: Well pick it up when you run your Roomba.

Elsie: Oh, no, no, no.

Ting: (laughs)

Elsie: OK. So here’s my feelings, Maggie, about pet ownership. This is. This also goes for children, because I get a lot of comments. They’re like, why would you buy that? Why do you have so much white stuff? How is your house so perfect? Do you not let your kids, like people actually ask if we don’t let our dogs and our kids on furniture and the bed and stuff and like, no no no no no. OK, everything in our house is not sacred, even if I. OK. So I believe this very strongly. Like when we got the Jonathan Adler sofa, I let go of it in my heart. Yes. I love the sofa. Yes. You know, it’s like the most important sofa in the world to me. But, you know, I let go of it. And the day that my dog pees on it, which will happen or barfs or my kid spills food on it or whatever, it will be, OK. And I’ll clean it up the best I can, and then I’ll continue living my life and loving my pink sofa. And I think that if you have that attitude, you can have whatever you want in your house. It doesn’t have to be, you know, dark colors only.

Ting: Yeah.

Elsie: You just have to be able to accept that, you know, if you have like, I love an all white house and yeah, there’s like little marks on everything everywhere and like who cares./?

Ting: Yeah. I mean, really the only person that notices it is you. Right?

Elsie: It’s true because that’s the other thing that’s funny is like on our bedding, in our bedroom, I posted a picture of like our you know, our bedroom it iss like mostly white. Then I get a lot of comments about that. And I was like, why do you assume that it’s perfect? It’s not perfect. It has lots of little imperfections all over it from all kinds of life things. And that’s fine.

Ting: Yeah.

Elsie: It doesn’t matter. And it’s washable so. Yeah. Learn how to clean things and turn your brain off to caring. I don’t believe in “this is why we can’t have nice things.”

Ting: I agree.

Elsie: Ok. So thank you so much for listening. If you are loving the podcast, it would be so awesome if you could share it on Instagram. That would mean a lot to us. Emma will be back next week. Thank you so much to Ting for joining us.

Ting: Oh, anytime.

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We hear these questions all the time. But what’s CRAZY to me is that we’ve been hearing these exact same questions for more than five years! In this post, I’ll share the pros and cons of starting a blog (or new social media account—they are quite similar) in 2020.

Let’s start with the downsides. First, I want to tackle some commonly said “Cons”:

CONS:
-It’s too late to start a blog.
Sure, it would have been BETTER to start sooner. Unfortunately, this is true with any business venture and really any large goal in life. There are no time machines. If you want something, your only option is to start today.

But even more than that, I think people assume that blogging was a trend that’s now over, or there are no ways to monetize a blog anymore and these are both so untrue.

-It’s more competitive.
Eh … I disagree. I would argue that there are actually less people trying to make a career (or side gig) from blogging than there were five years ago.

Lots of people have dropped out. And many more have opted to solely work on their social media channels (which I’m not saying there is anything wrong with, but my point is that they aren’t blogging).

-If you’re not a top blogger, you can’t make money.
I disagree with this 100%. In fact, I have seen firsthand that there are many jobs we can’t get because our blog is “too big.”

Plus many opportunities are not just about size, they are about what you bring the project, or what your audience values from hearing from you specifically.

-It’s too much work.
Ding-ding-ding! This one is mostly true. Let me say it louder for our friends in the back … blogging is probably WAY more work than you think it will be.

It’s also more involved and generally more expensive to produce than social media. So if you want to take the easiest possible path, blogging probably is not it. I’ll go more into this below!

-Blogging has been replaced by social media.
Not true. Although, sure, there are some brands who allocate more budget for social campaigns, there are also lot of brands who know that the lifespan of a blog post is much longer than social media, thanks to Google searches and Pinterest.

A high quality blog post can continue earning views for years to come. Also blogging often offers more real estate, meaning there is more room for multiple photos, videos, text, and links all in one place that isn’t going to disappear quickly.

A blog post is simply less disposable than social media. (Again, not a dis to social media. It’s just different!)

Next, here are some “Pros” that a lot of people don’t think about.

PROS:
-It’s easier to get sponsors than ever before. This is true! When we first started blogging and our stats were skyrocketing, it was still so difficult for us to make a basic income on our work.

Ten years later, things have REALLY changed. Major brands have good sized budgets set aside specifically for bloggers.

-Blogging income is more steady than social media.
I touched on this above, but it’s true that the time and effort you put into blogging can pay off more and for much longer. This is in part because, again, a blog post is less disposable than social media, so you can often monetize your content in different ways.

For bloggers who do rank high in Google searches, they have essentially created passive income for themselves in that those posts they may have written years ago will still earn them money today.

-Your blog is truly yours. Unlike social media platforms, which could be sold, deleted or changed without your consent, your website it truly your online real estate where you have much more control and choice.

This a huge pro and why I recommend every online presence have a website (and email list!!!!!!) even if you don’t choose to update it as frequently as a blogger would.

When friends ask me for advice on whether they should start a blog, here’s what I tell them.

If you are someone who loves to take photos, write, and share like you may already be doing on a social media platform, a blog can be a great way for you to expand on that and make more money, or more steady money.

The downside is that it can take several years to establish a blog.

I’m sure there are case studies of a few people who have done it faster, but my professional opinion is that it’s not worth it to start a blog unless you are committed to posting on it 2-3 times per week for at least two years before you start making consistent money (from CPM ads or sponsor offers).

I realize how deflating that time commitment can sound, but it’s realistic.

In two to three years, you can gain a lot of skill both in photography and writing, you can carve yourself a unique place in your industry and you can learn through using affiliate links what your audience will buy from you. I’m not saying you can’t get sponsors sooner—great for you if you can!

But if that time commitment doesn’t sound worth it to you, you probably will end up quitting anyway. So ask yourself: Am I willing to write 200+ blog posts before seeing a return on my investment? I would hate to overpromise, as I’ve sometimes seen others do.

Blogging as a career path is not an overnight make-money-quick option, but it is an AMAZING opportunity if you’re willing to put some foundational work in.

If you’re willing to make the commitment, there are so many ways to earn money as a blogger. And most of these revenue streams will grow with you.

You can have CPM-based ads (like we have in our sidebars and throughout our posts), you can use affiliate links, and you can work with sponsors. You can also create a signature product (physical or digital in nature) or collaborate on a licensed product line. Through the years we’ve done all these things!

Starting a blog and doing it for fun for several years was one of the best choices of my life. I didn’t set out to become “a blogger” because I didn’t even know that was possible.

But I found my dream job through writing daily on the internet about the things I loved, and I am forever grateful for that.

In this post, I’m definitely simplifying what it means to be a blogger, but if I write a 4000+ word post, no one will read it. If you’ve been considering starting a blog, this will help you decide whether or not it’s worth it for YOU—only you can decide that.

But if your question is, “Is blogging dead in 2020?” the answer is most definitely a NO.  

I’m happy to answer your questions in the comments! xx- Elsie