How My Summer Off Helped Us 2x Sales | Tips for Maintaining Growth While Taking Time Off
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Welcome back to The Branding Business School Podcast - Season 8! After a 15-week hiatus, Victoria is thrilled to reconnect with you all and share insights from her unconventional summer. This episode kicks off with reflections on taking time off from BrandWell to spend quality time with her children, embracing a flexible and unstructured work routine.
This summer, Victoria decided to eliminate structured meetings and obligations from her calendar, so that she could prioritize being present for her girls. Balancing work and motherhood, especially with young children, poses its challenges, but it was mentally relieving to remove internal meetings and focus on being present with her family. With her team’s support, Victoria could prioritize essential projects while delaying others. Her daily work routine centered around her children’s nap and quiet times, offering a consistent yet limited work window that allowed her to invest in meaningful family moments, including cherished evenings with her husband, James.
The experience of balancing work and family life turned out to be more rewarding than she anticipated. Despite initial fears of a dip in sales, June was a strong month, and July even broke records, highlighting the strength of BrandWell’s systems and team. Pre-scheduling content and conducting efficiency audits were key strategies that maintained business operations smoothly during her time off. By trimming non-essential tasks and focusing on impactful ones, Victoria ensured crucial operations like payroll were always addressed. This intentional shift underscored the importance of building a flexible business that supports family life, and Victoria is grateful for the unexpected success and the divine blessings that made it possible. Tune in to hear more about how taking a step back can sometimes propel your business forward.
Meet your host, Victoria Marcouillier [02:19]
After being away from the podcast for 15 weeks, we’re not assuming that everyone has been a listener for a while, so here’s a brief description of who Victoria is: Victoria is soon to be 32 years old, she has been married to her husband, James, for eight years and they have two adorable little girls, a four year old and an almost two year old. Victoria started BrandWell as a side hustle, almost five and half, six years ago, and it wasn’t long after that she found out she was pregnant for the first time. The day after she had a positive pregnancy test, she called her boss to quit her full-time job, and she went all in on BrandWell. Over the last four years, Victoria has been building her design agency while simultaneously growing her family and while it’s had its hard times, it’s mostly been a great experience for her. She is thankful for BrandWell because of the way it’s given her flexibility to be home with her kids, and she’s also thankful for her kids because they’ve helped give Victoria perspective as a business owner and as an entrepreneur. This podcast has a lot to do with motherhood in some form or fashion, and that’s because her experience has formed her perspective and you can’t just separate them.
Pre-summer break: Work Routine [04:06]
For the better part of the last four years, Victoria has operated BrandWell on two structured work days per week, with the help of a babysitter or nanny, and the rest of the week she does what a lot of work-from-home moms do; work in whatever small pockets of time you can find during nap time or after bed.Over the last four years, Victoria has built out an amazing team of women. She has two full-time employees - her managers, Libby and Lauren - and four part-time designers, and then additional support staff for admin tasks, marketing, podcast management, etc. Victoria is well aware that this team is the reason she’s able to operate a company the size of BrandWell in just two structured work days each week, and for that she’s incredibly grateful.
Deciding to take the summer off [05:46]
Back in May, Victoria’s nanny told her that she was going to go home for the summer, which left Victoria with a big decision to make. Would she look for a replacement that she was comfortable with and one that her girls loved, or was she going to embrace summer with no preschool, no childcare, no babysitters, and really no formal work commitments? Spoiler alert, She chose the latter. But it was a difficult decision for her to make. She kept worrying about what her team would think of this decision. Would they feel like she was letting them down, was she being selfish? Would they slack off knowing that she wasn’t going to be checking in with them as often? Would clients get wind of her somewhat blacked out schedule and be turned off by that? Would sales dip? There was so much unknown when she was making this decision back in May, because outside of maternity leave, she has never really taken an extended period of time away from running BrandWell.
Ultimately, Victoria realized that this was HER business. She built it. Nobody was going to tell her that she can’t scale back in the summer to be with her family. In fact, that’s the very reason BrandWell even exists!
Victoria started BrandWell because she knew that she wanted to have the freedom and flexibility to be the type of mom that she wanted to be, to be home as often as she wanted to be with her children. A huge part of her mission with BrandWell, has been to help women build brands that allow them to command higher prices so that they too, can stop trading time for money and spend more time with their family or whoever they desire. Victoria had to be reminded of the original reason why she took this leap of faith, and it’s a good lesson for any entrepreneur listening.
Areas That Took A Step Back [09:26]
Victoria stopped podcasting all together. She stopped writing scripts for solo casts, she stopped interviewing guests, she stopped recording shows, and she stopped doing any sort of marketing related to the podcast. The podcast is a huge source of leads for BrandWell, huge source of revenue for the business, but taking 15 weeks off of the podcast gave back so much more time for Victoria to be with her children.
Victoria removed herself from all of her internal team meetings for 7 weeks. She usually has a one-on-one meeting with her managers every week, a group managers meeting every other week, and a marketing meeting and designer training at the beginning of every month, but for those 7 weeks she was not a part of any of them. This was probably the biggest change that she made and it was pretty scary to do. Her goal was to have no structured meetings or obligations on her calendar taking up space in her day or in her mind. The only way for her to do this was to decline any meeting that was previously on her calendar.
At BrandWell, Victoria holds an open door policy, where if a team member needs her they can send her a Google Chat, and if she’s free or not with her kids, she will always say “Yes, let’s hop on a call”. This summer though, she had to close that door. That was a really hard decision to make, but looking back, it was the right one and her team has been really gracious, despite the fact that she wasn’t quite as available to them as she normally is.
Going Back to the Basics [13:49]
With the very limited time Victoria had this summer to work, she got back to the basics, and just focused on the most important thing that she needed to be doing in that limited amount of time she had. During the naptime work window, Victoria would check in, respond to any urgent emails, and then the focus was on taking new leads and hopping on sales calls and doing demos. Thankfully, the sales calls do not fall on Victoria alone, and Lauren, BrandWell’s COO, took a bulk of the leads that came in this summer. With a large influx of leads that came in this summer, Lauren stepped up to the plate, and Victoria only had maybe two to three calls or demos a week.
Work-Life Pendulum [18:48]
There’s always a work-life balance pendulum, and it’s never perfectly balanced. In the middle, it’s usually swinging in one direction and this summer it was very much swinging towards the side of life. During this time I kept hearing the phrase “Good mom, bad boss”. It’s feeling as if you’re not showing up for your business and you are showing up for your family. You’re killing the mom game, but then you have a sense of guilt and a sense of not being a good steward to what God has blessed you with, with your business. Victoria has felt these exact feelings but if you have to swing one direction or another, she would encourage you to always be a better mom than boss. You can be good at both, but if the pendulum has to swing towards “life” and family, and therefore cause you to take a step back in business, so be it. If you want to dive more into Victoria’s thoughts of how work-life balance and is it even real, listen to this episode.
Business Results After Taking The Summer Off [22:27]
Victoria did not expect these results when she first made the decision to take the summer off. She actually told her husband, James, at the beginning of June that they were probably going to see sales dip. He obviously was more than supportive of her doing this, to be home with the girls. What neither of them expected was that June was a really strong month, consistent to previous months, and then July was phenomenal. BrandWell more than doubled its sales in July compared to last year! It was a record month! In more than five years, BrandWell has never brought in as many new clients as they did in July.This was incredible and so rewarding for Victoria. Beyond the financial reward of it, she realized that she did it. She has built a company that can operate with or without her, and if you’ve been an OG listener, then you’ll know that a goal of hers in 2023 was to build a business that runs, with or without her. To know that BrandWell can still set records and have really successful months, with Victoria taking a step back to be with family this summer, it’s the entrepreneurial dream. It’s also knowing that she can step away and the business needs are still being met, exceeded even, is thrilling! God blesses you when you entrust your business to him. At the beginning of summer, Victoria prayed a lot to the Lord asking if she should replace her babysitter or step back, and she could feel the sense that God said “hey, you built this business so that you could have flexibility, so that you could have a family, so that you could be the mom you wanted to be, and now it’s time to exercise those freedoms”. Secondly, Victoria gives credit to her team and the way that they stood in the gap for her while she was home with her children for so many days. They all stepped up and for that she is incredibly grateful.
How Can You Take Time Off & Not Stifle the Growth? [27:47]
What happened in the summer of 2024 was only possible because of what Victoria has built over the last five years. She knew that from the day that she went full-time with BrandWell that she was going to be a mom. She started hiring in the very first year of business and found ways to replace herself or systems that she could create. Because of this, she’s been able to continually step back, like she’s been pulling back from business ever since she had her first daughter. Having a business that operates with or without you does not happen overnight, or even in the first year, but over time you’ll start to see the systems you create will start working.
The second piece of advice Victoria shares for you to take time off in your business without stifling the growth, is to create content ahead of time. The further out you can get ahead with your content planning, the better. That way, even if you weren’t technically present in your business, there are still a lot of channels that are driving leads to your business.
The third piece of advice is to cut the fat, meaning a lot of the things you’re spending your time on are not really driving the needle for your business. Do an efficiency audit on your business to see where you’re spending the most of your time and then look at the numbers to see if it’s a needle moving task to drive revenue or not. One thing Victoria realized is that it’ll be okay to not show up every week on the podcast. Even though it’s been 15 weeks since there has been a new episode released, the podcast is still getting hundreds of downloads every single week. Going back to everything that happened is due to what Victoria has built over the years, her podcast is still driving revenue for her business every single week, even when she’s not actively dropping new episodes. Create evergreen content, you don’t have to focus all your time on social media where it will live and die with the algorithm. Sometimes we get so distracted with doing so many things that we’re actually not doing the things that would drive the needle the most, or we’re not doing them well because our minds are pulled in too many directions.
For Victoria, she was pleasantly surprised to find that while she thinks she’s a critical part to her business, she may not be as critical as she once thought. Victoria has been guilty of continuing to push the goal post back, but sometimes it’s just the matter of being grateful for where you are at today and taking time to celebrate where you’ve come from and the fact that you’ve built a business. Hopefully Victoria’s summer off of BrandWell has inspired you, you might be pleasantly surprised.
Key Quotes
“I would always encourage you to be a better mom than boss.”
Victoria Marcouillier
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