Baby, Business, and Brain Injury
Episode 050: Show Notes
In today’s episode, we’re probably going to get a little personal and a little emotional, but we think it’s important that we tell you a little bit about what happened earlier this year and how we have been able to manage all the changes. In the beginning of 2017, Emylee adopted a baby, which completely changed her whole world. Things were going so well as a new mom, but suddenly she totally hit a wall with work. It wasn’t like she did not want to work anymore or did not want to be a mom; she just struggled to figure out a balanced way to do both at the same time.
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Around the same time, Abby was in a car accident and suffered a traumatic brain injury. So it is safe to say we had a bit of a rocky start to 2017 and we spent a good chunk of the beginning of the year mourning and grieving our former selves. So in today’s episode, we are jumping into all the details on what happened, how we handled the changing situations, and exactly how we got out on the other side.
The Magic of Implementing Systems In Your Business
While preparing for Emylee’s new baby, Penelope, to arrive, we implemented systems to let the business run as smoothly as possible as a one-woman show. However, just around the same time, Abby was in a car accident, which ended up putting us both out of commission and leaving no one available to run the business. By the end of January, we were both blatantly aware of the holes in our business and where we needed to really spend time focusing on buttoning some things up and letting other people into how things work in case we just wanted to take off. So we started working on systems, making them even better, and really smoothing them out so that we could hand them off to someone who had never seen them before and they would understand exactly what to do.
Scheduling Your Days for Specific Tasks
As business owners, obviously we are our own “bosses”, so for there to be accountability and to actually get stuff done, we definitely needed a bit of structure. As you guys know, we absolutely love Trello and it has been a major factor in creating this structure within our business. For us, our main approach was to schedule each day and designate it for a specific task. This way we would also be able to know when we could schedule things and when certain activities could be expected to be accomplished. For example, Monday is very task oriented, focused on emails, planning, and catching up on the week. Tuesdays we have meetings, Wednesday is totally dedicated to the podcast, and Thursday has been dubbed selling day. Then finally, Friday is generally pretty light and we specifically chose not to work on the weekends.
Adopting Change and Shifting Our Business
The things that happened in our lives made us realize that we had to actually sell differently. We had to reach different people, talk differently, and even offer different things. This was a super scary realization and we completely had to shift not only our mindsets, but also the way that we approached our business. So we slowly shifted our business away from constant blitz launches and webinars towards longer launches. Now when we do a launch, instead of doing everything else at the same time, 100% of our energy goes directly into the launch. Because of that, we are actually getting more sales, which is allowing us to get higher revenues per launch, and launch fewer times throughout the year. In addition to this strategy, we have also decided to show up more for our people, hold them by the hand, walk them through things, and truly be there for them on a longer term basis.
Blending Our Lives and Finding New Communication Strategies
Our next big goal is to get to a point in our business where we can blend our lives in a much better way. When dealing with brain injuries and a new mom brain, forgetfulness is a common occurrence. We would forget commitments we had made, meetings we had scheduled, and even conversations we had had. Not fun! So we both spent a lot of time figuring out new ways to communicate. We have had to communicate in ways that just allow us to come back to it later, which is really why we have taken advantage of Trello to keep our brains in check. This has freed up more space in our heads and now we don’t necessarily have to absorb that information, as we can come back to it. It is there when we need to reference it and we are able to focus on other things like our family and our health and that is what is most important right now.
Quote This
You really have to figure out what your new normal is after going through trauma of any kind.
Highlights
Understand the importance of setting your business up with systems that can be delegated out. [0:07:27.6]
Learn how to schedule your days with different tasks, to focus in on specific topics. [0:17:44.8]
Find out how we had to shift our business and sell differently to adapt to all the changes in our personal lives. [0:26:42.9]
Discover how we were able to work towards blending our lives and finding better ways to communicate through the changes. [0:31:30.6]
#TalkStrategyToMe [0:39:26.4]
Go to yourbizonautopilot.com and enroll in the free course so you can start automating the systems.
Go to trelloforbusiness.com and enroll in the course to learn how we use Trello in our business.
Spend some time away from everything in a place that makes you feel calm and collected; think about what you want and where you want to be spending your time.
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
We help overwhelmed and creative entrepreneurs break down their Oprah-sized dreams to create a functioning command center to tame the chaos of their business. Basically, we think you’re totally bomb diggity, we’re about to uplevel the shiz out of your business.
KEY TOPICS
Implementing business systems for automation, Structuring your work days, Adapting to change and selling differently, Blending your business and personal life
