Is Work-life Balance Real? A Q&A on Motherhood, Business, Hiring and More
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Links mentioned in today’s show:
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Listen to Episode 26: Torn Between Two Callings: Work & Motherhood
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Season 7 has brought stories from incredible women and solo-casts filled with insights on building a brand and growing a successful online business. As the season comes to an end, Victoria is thrilled to answer YOUR questions that were asked on her Instagram Q&A! Today’s episode covers a range of topics including, motherhood, work life balance, business growth, preparation for maternity leave or an extended leave of absence, hiring a team, and more! Your engagement has been the highlight of the season, and Victoria is already looking forward to returning with a Season 8 after some weeks off to enjoy her summer with her family!
Balancing the roles of motherhood and entrepreneurship is no small feat, and Victoria’s been right there with you. When answering the questions pertaining to motherhood and entrepreneurship,Victoria opens up about her experience with building BrandWell while also being a mom of two toddlers. She continues on to share strategies that have worked for her, how hiring has helped her scale, marketing strategies that BrandWell currently uses, and more!
In today’s episode, Victoria shares many tangible takeaways but also shares how The Branding Business School can help you even more! There are whole modules that surround questions that were asked, including, “How do you overcome imposter syndrome, self-sabotage, and standing in your own way?”. This episode is packed with personal anecdotes, strategies for growth, and heartfelt advice—all designed to empower you as you navigate the entrepreneurial journey. We look forward to more weekly episodes coming soon with Season 8, but until then, throw in your earbuds, or turn up your car speakers, and enjoy today’s Q&A with Victoria!
Let the Q&A Begin! [02:13]
For the season finale episode, Victoria is answering the questions that YOU asked. Since she is seeing and reading these questions for the first time, you are sure to get real, genuine, and authentic answers! Topics range from motherhood, daily routine, business, and lots of questions regarding business growth. So let’s get into it!
Building a Business from the ground up after taking a maternity leave [03:12]
Victoria has been a mom for almost as long as she’s been a business owner, so she has felt this exact concern and fear when she was pregnant with her firstborn, Maya. Victoria didn’t take much of a maternity leave, but that was because with brand and web design, it’s 100% virtual which gave her the opportunity to work from her laptop while the baby was sleeping. At this point in time, she also had a couple of contract designers that were helping her. While this was Victoria’s experience, she knows that it’s not everyone’s experience and that not everyone’s industry gives them that same opportunity. Maternity leave takes a lot of planning and Victoria has a whole podcast episode where she shares how she planned for maternity leave and how you can take extended time off in your business, even if you’re a solopreneur. You can listen to that episode here!
If you’re in a similar situation right now, here are a few pieces of advice.
Invite people into why you’re going dark. Let people know you’re having a baby. Let them know that you’re going to be unavailable from X day to X day in advance.
Do a little bit of work before you plan on coming back from maternity leave, or ideally, before you even go on maternity leave. Create content that’s scheduled to go out during that maternity leave and kind of get people excited about when you’ll be back.
Build a waitlist. Having a waitlist for people who land on your social media or land on your website and want to work with you, but they realize that you’re out of office, still gives them some sort of call to action. If you have a waitlist, you won’t really be building your business from the ground up.
Navigating motherhood and entrepreneurship [08:42]
Victoria had recently talked about this topic with her email list, Branding Beyond the Visuals, which has really great content written by Victoria, every Thursday. Click this link to sign up for the email list, if you’re not already on it!
As previously mentioned, Victoria has been an entrepreneur for her entirety of being a mom, and she’s almost been a mom for her entirety of being an entrepreneur. Thus, her entrepreneurial and motherhood journeys run very parallel to each other and she’s learning all the lessons that both owning a business and having children can teach you in life. Since the email that talks about the parallels between motherhood and entrepreneurship has already gone out, here’s a couple of points that were made.
There’s a period of time where things are new and scary. You’re feeling like you’re drowning, you’re not getting a lot of sleep, and you don’t know if you’re doing it right. You’re comparing yourself to other people on social media and they’re doing it differently than you are, which adds to your imposter syndrome. Something that helped Victoria with this imposter syndrome was learning to put her blinders on and do what was right for her. What she felt in her gut was the right thing for her baby and then what the right thing was for her business and how she wanted to build her team. It’s great to learn from others, educate yourself with books and podcasts, but at some time, you do have to put your blinders on and stop worrying about what everyone else is doing.
Embrace the chaos, and even more than that, find the joy in the chaos. Find the joy in the unpredictable days and just be along for the ride. With young children you can have as much of a schedule as possible, but they're always going to be interruptions to your routine. At the same time, embracing the unpredictability in your business. There are going to be weeks or months where you are slow, even if you’re doing everything right. But that persistence through those hard seasons is going to determine whether or not your business is successful or not.
Mom Guilt [16:09]
This is a topic that Victoria feels deeply. She herself is torn between having a business and making an impact, but also feeling called to be a present mom to her children. Victoria has a whole podcast episode that dives deep into this topic of feeling torn between two callings, you can listen to it here! The biggest thing to know is that you’re not alone in feeling this way!
As a Christian, Victoria encourages you to not just sweep the feelings totally under the rug, and say “it’s normal, everyone has mom guilt”. While she does believe that everyone has mom guilt, she also believes that we need to be in tune with our gut as well as in tune with the conviction of the Holy Spirit. Going back to Victoria’s motivator, when she was starting it was so that she could stay home with her kids. So now, if she’s constantly calling babysitters because her calendar keeps filling up, or when she’s with her kids she’s always checking her emails or jumping on calls, then she feels that “mom guilt”. Sometimes, Victoria believes that this is actually the conviction of the Holy Spirit asking her, what’s the most important work for you right now? When priorities are out of line then that’s something you need to listen to. As a Christian, who wants to obey the Lord in how she raises her children, Victoria is sensitive to that “mom guilt”, and for her it usually serves as a bit of a check and balance on if her priorities are in line or not.
Daily Routine & Working after kids go to bed [19:23]
For the most part, Victoria tries to NOT work after the kids go to bed. However, there are seasons of business where she is required to put in some time after the kids go to bed. Even with having a team that keeps things running during the day when she’s with her kids, there are tasks that Victoria needs to stay on top of. Having a team is wonderful, but there are new layers of responsibilities for you as a business owner. Her children are her first priority, but that doesn’t mean that her team isn’t a priority or her clients aren’t a priority. So, that means that she has to make time for them, and if she doesn’t want to take more time away from her kids, then she has to find windows of time that do work. If Victoria had to put a number to it, she would say around two nights per week she will work for a few hours after putting the kids to bed.
Creating systems, marketing, and hiring [22:27]
If you have this question, you need to check out The Branding Business School. Systems often feel hard when you don’t have a clear brand strategy. A clear brand strategy is going to answer some of the core questions about why your business exists, what you do for others and who your audience is, and then how you approach getting that message out to the masses. When you don’t have that core brand strategy developed, it makes creating systems and hiring really difficult, because we can’t take ourselves out of the equation. If you’re struggling with this, we highly recommend you to take The Branding Business School, because this is exactly what is taught inside.
Identify the areas of your business where you’re feeling the most overwhelmed. Or what are the tasks that continue to slip through the cracks? Start there. Don’t try and create a whole company-wide system that you’re going to start implementing in all areas of your business. Pick one and start there, when that’s under control, now you’ve freed up your time to focus on something else. When you free up your time, you free up your mind.
Work-life Balance…. How?? [26:24]
Victoria has been doing this for four years with kids, five years without, and she’s never found it. She has periods of business where she feels like she has great work-life balance, and other periods where she feels like she’s failing at it. That said, she does believe that work-life balance is possible, but it’s not going to be something that we’re always going to be able to attain. Work-life balance is a great thing to work towards, but we should also manage our expectations as business owners because there’s always going to be something we need to attend to.
Turning “off” work when with kids [29:10]
It is difficult for Victoria to leave her work at home/shut it off when with her kids, but working those couple hours at night after the girls go to bed, or taking a few hours on the weekend when her husband is home, helps Victoria be more present. The longer Victoria’s been in business, and the longer she’s had her team, the better she’s getting at delegating and giving responsibility to her managers. Being able to share the responsibility and weight with someone has been really helpful and allowed Victoria to check out more when with her kids, but she’d be lying if she didn’t say that she wasn’t scanning her phone and looking at her email every once and a while when with her kids.
How to know when to bring on contractors [32:12]
For Victoria, this was pretty natural timing. She had plans to start a family when starting BrandWell, so she knew that she would have to reduce the amount of hours spent on the business and that would directly impact her income. To help with that, she decided to bring on a contractor that was going to be in a direct role of generating revenue for the business. Victoria started hiring with playing it very, very safe and only brought on people that she knew she could essentially charge the client first and then contract them out and make sure to never lose money in that case. Now, she’s obviously grown a lot and gotten way more comfortable with hiring. She no longer only hires for revenue generating roles either. The best piece of advice to give with this is to take it slow. Hire one person at a time. Give yourself ample time to train that person and to know when they’re not a good fit. Trust your gut.
How to hire the right person for your company [35:49]
This comes back to having a clear brand strategy. Knowing your brand’s mission and values and making sure that you’re hiring people that you believe can execute on those items. Share your mission and values with your prospective employees or contractors and see what their response is. Or better yet, they may already know your brand’s mission, vision, and values and they’ll talk to you about them during the interview. The key thing for Victoria is to know that they’re aligned with the greater impact that BrandWell has and not just focused on if their skill set matches up with what they need to do at BrandWell.
Explaining to clients that you’re not the one to do their project [37:45]
This requires some foresight when you’re starting your business. Victoria started BrandWell knowing that she would eventually have designers. She had a bigger vision of BrandWell so she was able to position her brand as more of an agency, even when it was just her. Here’s how she did it:
She didn’t name her business after herself. If she would have continued her business under Marcouillier Marketing, it would have been a lot harder to disassociate herself from the actual deliverable. With the name BrandWell Designs, it already sounds like more of a design company and not just one specific person.
When she started to employ others, she invited them into her brand, even if they were contractors! She made sure that their faces were on socials, and the website because she had to set the expectation for people coming in the door to work with BrandWell. If she only ever had her face shown, it would be really hard for the clients to be comfortable with the fact that someone who shall remain faceless and nameless is going to be designing for them.
Reassuring your clients. In the early days of BrandWell, Victoria would reassure her clients that she had her eyes on everything, because she did. She would tell them that she’s not the one to actually deliver the designs, but not to worry, she was still there if they needed her. She told the clients how frequently she met with the designer and really set the stage so it wasn’t a shock to them.
Fall dates for The Branding Business School [42:20]
Starting with the summer dates first, The Branding Business School will be open for enrollment June 17th, 2024 until June 28th, 2024. It will be open for two weeks and once it closes, it will not be open again until October of 2024. Fall dates are not set quite yet, but it will be in October. In case you were not aware, clients of BrandWell get year round access to The Branding Business School, it’s built into your design package. Join the waitlist to be the first to know when doors open!
Getting past self-doubt/ self-sabotage, and showing up as the face of your business online [43:18]
Imposter Syndrome Expert, Michele Charles Gustafson, is the author of the book, “Show Up Confident” and an educator at The Branding Business School. She speaks directly to this issue that so many female business owners face. Victoria also had Michele on the podcast, and you can listen to that episode “You Are Not an Imposter” here! Michele’s module in The Branding Business School is the module that has gotten the most feedback on, such as “This is changing my life”, so that’s definitely something to look forward to inside the course.
This is something that we all have to deal with and come to terms with. Victoria says that it’s been a combination of giving yourself time to wait and see the results, and then those results are what are going to yield a boost in your confidence. If you have something valuable to offer your customers and you’re delivering on that promise, then there’s no reason to feel like an imposter. There’s no reason to sabotage yourself or criticize yourself, because you’re adding value, you’re making an impact on somebody’s life.
Another educator in The Branding Business School is Victoria’s sales coach, Gwen. In her module she talks about how a lot of people focus on selling the features of their services instead of the benefits. If you’re dealing with a lot of imposter syndrome, it could be because you’re feature selling to your audience. When you’re focused on selling features, then there’s always going to be comparison to other business owners and how many features they have to sell and what they’re pricing those features at. Stop focusing on that and really focus on the outcome that you’re giving people. Put those blinders on and do what you were created to do.
KPI’s [46:24]
KPI’s are Key Performance Indicators. This question is asking what KPI’s Victoria looks at in order to promote things, and this was a little too corporate of a question for Victoria. While she definitely looks at numbers and the ROI on different things that she invests in, she does not have a list of specific KPI’s that she follows before making decisions in her business. Here’s what Victoria does instead when it comes to marketing BrandWell. She looks at what is actively working with their existing marketing strategy and then she determines whether or not she continues marketing on that platform or not. Something she looks for is how many leads are coming from a certain platform, and that can determine how much or how frequently Victoria shows up there. Examples:
Email List – Nurture once per week. If there’s a launch coming up, there will be a couple more, but typically just once a week.
Podcast – This is where people spend time with Victoria and she gets to build her know, like, and trust factor which makes people feel comfortable investing in one of her companies.
Social Strategy – Posting five days a week. This is a good example of a shift Victoria has made based on performance. Last year, BrandWell was posting only three times per week, but there was a dip in leads from when they were posting five times a week, so now this year that got bumped back up to five, and they are seeing more leads coming through Instagram.
The most important thing to Victoria when it comes to marketing her businesses anywhere and everywhere is, are her people there? If they’re not, then she doesn’t care about the platform. Could Victoria grow her business by going on TikTok? Definitely, but it’s not where her clientele hangs out and she doesn’t feel the need to extend herself or her team to show up on yet another platform to get in front of an audience that may not be the perfect fit for what they have to offer. Know where your people are and do one or two of those platforms really well.
Another thing that’s driven a lot of leads to Victoria’s business is showing up in a lot of searches with good SEO on Google. This is due to investing in not only a beautiful website, but also investing in continually adding content to the website. Each week, when a new podcast episode is released, The Branding Business School’s podcast manager, Elisa from ZealCast Studios, turns the podcast into show notes and posts them on the website. This keeps the SEO fresh and generates a lot of traffic to the website, and because it’s beautifully designed, it converts that traffic.
ZealCast Studios is The Branding Business School’s Podcast Manager and she is phenomenal! If you have a podcast and are in need of somebody to help you get it all together, hire Elisa!
What’s it like to be married to an absolute stud? [52:14]
This may have been submitted by the only dude that asked a question, but Victoria is here for the Bro’s of BrandWell. Victoria answers this question by admitting the difficulty of having to keep on leveling up her game. James is a stand out guy and Victoria is a lucky girl to be married to him.
Thank you [52:40]
Thank you for listening to Season 7 of The Branding Business School Podcast! If there’s any particular episode that you enjoyed, or if there’s anything you enjoyed about this episode and you want to send Victoria an email, please do at info@thebrandingbusinessschool.com or slide into her DM’s on Instagram! Have a great summer and we’ll see you back for Season 8 this fall!
Key Quotes
“At the end of the day, if you have something valuable to offer to your customers and you're delivering on that promise, then there's no reason to feel like an imposter.”
Victoria Marcouillier
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