This is how motherhood has completely changed my business.
Hey there, I’m Jillian Kendrick and welcome to the Momentum Marketing Podcast. I’m a mama, a wife, an entrepreneur and a three time best selling co-author. In each episode, you’ll get real world, practical advice and strategies and maybe a parenting tip or two along the way. If you’re ready to create a business that supports your family and your lifestyle, then you’re in the right place.
Welcome back to another amazing episode of the Momentum Marketing Podcast. I am so excited that you are here with me and if I didn’t tell you last week, I think I did, I just celebrated 10 years in business. Like a full decade in business. Now, I’ve been doing this for a really long time. I’ve been in the digital marketing, automation, email ads, operations, all the things kind of space for a very, very, very long time. But it was February 7th 2014 that I officially got my LLC, got myself away from clients who didn’t do what I wanted to do, clients where I was just trading dollars for hours. And I wasn’t particularly happy with working with them and I officially went into business for myself. This is a massive milestone. Not only because not that many businesses period, ever make it to a year or two years or five years, let alone a whole 10 years. But female businesses are especially at a disadvantage and to have profitably run a small business for a decade,who, is an incredible feat and it’s certainly not all me. I posted on Facebook and said, thank you to the naysayers for the inspiration. Thank you to all the people who did believe in me for the enthusiasm. Thank you to all the contractors that I’ve ever worked with. I hope that I have left a mark on them as much as they have left a mark on me. And thank you to all the clients good and bad that I’ve ever worked with. They have taught me so much and it really is an incredible privilege to be sitting here after 10 years of being in business, still going strong, new things happening. And I wanted to make sure that I shared that with you.
And coming into this decade-long milestone has not only given me an opportunity to reflect on all of the work that I’ve done, but it’s really helped me to reflect on the lifestyle that I’ve been able to lead because of owning my business. I have financial independence. I get to take Fridays off to be with my son. I have the luxury of being picky about who I work with and the projects that I take on, I get to hand pick my own team members. Like sure there’s downsides to it too, but there’s a lot of good that I’ve done in the world that my business has been able to do in the world and helping other small businesses get off the ground and helping nonprofits do what they do. It truly has been a privilege. And as I reflect over the last decade and realize what entrepreneurship has done for me, for my life, for my family, it’s allowed me to reflect on the ways that my business has impacted who I am as a wife and a mother. And it’s allowed me to reflect on the other side of that, how motherhood has changed my business. So I want to share six thoughts with you today on that impact.
Before I get into that. Don’t forget that the moment of marketing podcast comes out every single week. If you haven’t subscribed in Apple iTunes, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts go now and make sure that you are subscribed so that you get the most up to date episodes every single week. And if you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review on the site that you get your podcasts from. It actually helps me a lot and tell any friends and colleagues about it that could benefit from it as well. Thank you.
The other thing I want to make mention of as well. I am gonna have a free training coming up at the end of February. So I think it’s February 26th and it’s hosted through Verizon Wireless Small Business Digital Ready. So if you go to digitalready.verizonwireless.com, you can actually sign up 100% free as a small business owner, you can register. You don’t have to be a Verizon customer. And when you register, you get access to all different kinds of training and videos and different modules, courses, coaching, you also get discounts on different things through Verizon and other vendors. And now and again, they even open up opportunities for small business owners to win some cash, which is pretty nice. So if you haven’t already go to Verizon Small Business Digital Ready and you can sign up totally for free. My webinar is coming up February 26th. I hope I get a recording to it. If I do, I’ll definitely let you know what that’s gonna be. And of course, I am talking all about scalability through automation. So I hope to see you there.
So these are the six ways that motherhood has completely changed my business and vice versa.
So number one in 2019/2020 when I was pregnant with our son, our first child, I had this very clear, very vivid realization that I had two due dates. I had a due date for this baby to be born and I had a due date for my business to be prepared for me to become a mother, for me to prepare to go on a maternity leave and kind of hand over the reins to my team and sort of give everything up for a time so that I could focus on being a mom. And so my entire first pregnancy, I worked towards automating as much as I could, delegating tasks to my team, making sure that my team knew how to do certain things or how I wanted different things done, making sure that they were empowered and felt empowered. Because both of those are two unique, different things that a person needs to have in order to make decisions and move forward. They need to be emboldened and they need to feel it as well.
The things that I was doing in my business, I’ll be totally honest, had everything and nothing at all to do with motherhood. It had everything to do with motherhood because it was leading me up to taking a maternity leave because I recognized that I, the business owner, was the bottleneck of a lot of pieces and parts inside of the business. And that if I no longer wanted to be that and couldn’t be that going on a maternity leave and taking care of an infant, I needed to give that up. I needed to empower somebody else to be that. So even though I was making all of these decisions and changes in preparation for motherhood and in preparation for our son to be born. The reality is that the things that I was changing, the decisions that I was making and the systems automated or otherwise that I was implementing had absolutely nothing to do with motherhood. The truth is they were things that I needed to have done years and years ago, years earlier than my son being born. There were things that any business owner at any stage of business, whether you’re preparing to go on maternity leave and be absent for several months or you’re not, you’re just trying to get yourself out of the business and not be the bottleneck anymore or you’re trying to get yourself out of the business so that you aren’t working 12 and 24 hour days all the time and that you can have the kind of freedom that you were looking for when you started your business in the first place. All of those things were what I was doing in preparation for motherhood. But the reason that I did them then was because I no longer had the excuse of quote “I’m comfortable this way” or quote “we just do it this way” or quote ”this is how it’s always been done.” Those were curtains that I hid behind in order to protect myself and make myself feel more important. And the reality was that I only learned until I made the change and went on maternity leave. The reality was those things only held me back. They only prevented my team from feeling good about the work that they were doing. They only prevented me from doing the projects that I wanted to work on and doing the passion projects and other things that were really important. The clients didn’t care. I mean, they cared. Right. They want to know that I’m there and that somebody is taking care of things and that their work is getting done and but it doesn’t have to be me. It didn’t have to be, it never had to be me. But I was so comfortable under this protective blanket of, I have to be there for them, I have to do everything. They have to see my face, they have to hear my voice. No, they don’t.
When I passed the baton off to my right hand person in preparation for maternity leave. There wasn’t a single client that came to me while I can’t speak for what they said in their own minds or behind closed doors. There wasn’t a single client that came to me saying Jillian, we don’t trust this person, Jillian, we wanna cancel because we want you and only you and nobody else. It was all in my own mind. That’s it. It was all inside my own mind, my own head, what I was doing what I felt comfortable with. And the second that I gave that up, everything changed. And I’ve said this so many times before, but my son saved my business because having to do that and make those hard decisions and make those hard changes was something like I said that I should have done years prior and never did. And it was because of him that I finally made those changes because I had two due dates. I had a due date for my business to be functional without me. And I had a due date for my baby to be born.
Oddly enough, a few years later, now that baby number two is on the way, I feel the same thing I feel like, man, I’ve got to get these other projects out there and running and humming or July is gonna come really, really fast and there goes that opportunity because it’s never gonna be as easy. It’s I’m never gonna have as much time as I have right now. Just not at least not in the near future.
Thing number two, that changed my business when it came to motherhood was that everything was finally put into perspective, everything aligned with, does this fit who I wanna be? Does working with this client fit the work schedule that I want? Does it fit and align with what my team is capable of? Does it fit in a line with who I wanna be as an entrepreneur with who I want my business to be? And if it didn’t, we didn’t work with that client. There are plenty of clients I said no to. So it really helped to put everything into perspective and to align what I was doing with the lifestyle I wanted to lead, the mother I wanted to be. And all of that.
Number three, kind of along the exact same lines. It helped me prioritize, because when I had the perspective of OK, this is who I wanna be. This is who I want my business to be. This is where we’re going. This is the direction and anything that doesn’t fit in that direction, it’s not going to happen. Then I was able to better prioritize. Hey, do you want to come speak at this conference? Well, no, it’s on the other side of the country and I’m not gonna take my two month old infant there. Or hey, do you wanna come speak for this thing about such and such about talking to gym owners? Well, no, I have never worked with gym owners and even though I know a lot about marketing and can help anybody, that’s not really my industry and that’s not what I’m going after. So here go talk to this person. It helped me prioritize and in doing so, I was able to then align my team with those priorities and then along those same lines, the priorities that we aligned with then became the goals that we set. So I was able to define, here’s the kind of mom that I want to be. Here’s the business that I wanna have. Here’s what I want to sell. Here’s what we want to do. Here’s how many days a week I wanna work. Here’s how much time I want to spend with my son. If not more, here’s how much money I want to make in the business. Here’s et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then every goal that I had, then had this trickle down effect of, ok, well, that client doesn’t align to this and working this many days a week doesn’t align to this and so on and so forth. It all lined up pretty perfectly once I became clear because nobody else was going to tell me what I should or shouldn’t do should or shouldn’t be. And for me, for the past four years, taking Fridays off was nonnegotiable. I’m going to do this and unless somebody’s life is in danger, unless there’s bloodshed, it can wait till Monday. Period.
And again, that leads me to item number five, which is decision making. Making those decisions based on the goals based on the priorities based on the perspective, saying something like, hey client, I understand that this isn’t going so well and that’s ok, but I’m gonna take care of this on Monday or this person on my team is gonna take care of that and I promise it’ll be ok. Right. We made hiring and firing decisions. We made delegating decisions, we made management decisions, we made client decisions based on those goals, based on our priorities, based on our perspective. And also having the perspective of the reality of what we do. I am very fortunate that the kind of work that I do is not a life or death situation. Certainly, I’ve had some moments when clients websites go down or like Facebook kind of dropped off the face of the earth a few years ago or, you know, something really major and kind of scary or unexpected happens and it can feel intense, it can feel like that life or death sort of situation. But the reality is when it comes to digital marketing, none of this is life or death. Nobody’s bleeding, nobody’s in triage. Ok? Your website was down or this email didn’t go out or something happened or didn’t happen, but it’s ok. We’re all human. We are all still breathing. It’s all right. And having that perspective really only came when I became a mom, when I held that little life in my arms. And what was and wasn’t important anymore, just sunk into me so clearly. Now there are people in the world who have very much life or death jobs, don’t get me wrong, I’m not forgetting them or excluding them. I’m just saying from my perspective, that’s just not the world that I work in. And I’m grateful for that.
The last one, item number six, and the way that motherhood has changed my business and that business has changed the way I parent as a mom is that everything in parenthood is a reflection of you. If you scream and lose your temper and throw fists and are unable to process things very well, your child will see that and will model that behavior if you have slightly better coping mechanisms and maybe you teach your child how to take a breath, how to say that hurts my feelings, that makes me sad. Hey, you did a good job. Hey, you’re trying really hard and I’m proud of you. The child will recognize those patterns. They will see your behavior and they will model it.
We’ve gotten to the point now with our son’s vocabulary that he started to say and mimic a lot of the things that my husband and I say to the point where when I laugh really hard at something, when I’m kind of done laughing, I sort of give a kind of sigh and he’s, he’s picked up on that. He started to sigh and I think it is the cutest thing. I don’t think it’s gonna last long, but it is so adorable and I love anticipating it and waiting for him to do that because I kind of know it’s coming right now. He’s heard me do it and he’s picked up on it. He’s heard me say, great job, Nathan. You are such a good helper. Now that when my husband or I go do something. He goes, great job, mommy. You are a good helper. It’s so cute. But everything my son does now, there’s some exceptions to that, right? He is his own independent, free thinking person. He is not me, he has his own desires and thoughts and bodily autonomy.
But a lot of what he does, at least in this phase, this stage of life, is a direct reflection of the way that my husband and I behave. The things that we say, the way that we react to stress, the things we say to each other, to our son, to ourselves. He sees that, he picks up on it. He mimics it and he’s a direct reflection in a lot of ways of our own behavior. And business is no different as an entrepreneur or a business owner, your business, the health of your business, the longevity of your business and the quote unquote success of your business. However, you define that for yourself, that is a direct reflection of who you are, of the energy that you put into your business, of the time, the dedication that you put in, of the things that you do, the work that you do, the leadership that you have within your team. They’re the same as far as the reflecting goes, parenthood and entrepreneurship are exactly the same because your business is a reflection of you and the work that you do. Your child is a reflection of you. And the parenting that you do.
If you are a parent, soon to become a parent, want to be a parent or have any feedback or thoughts on this or other episodes. I would love to hear from you. You can email me hello@jilliankendrick.com. I’ve also been getting a lot of submissions of people lately asking for them to be on my podcast or me to be on theirs. I am going to be setting up an intake form for that through my email response very very soon. So if you have sent me an email, I’ve read them. I haven’t ignored anybody. I’m just still in the process of deciding exactly how we want to vet those and who we’re looking for, who would benefit most from our listeners and vice versa.
Anyway, I hope you have an amazing day and I’ll talk to you soon.
Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of the Momentum Marketing Podcast. If listening to this has brought you value, improved your life or given you insight on how you can build your own momentum, then please share this with a friend. And if you’re ready to grow your business on autopilot, then I want to help you get there easier and faster with a free copy of my entrepreneur’s survival kit. Just leave a review of this podcast wherever you’re listening right now. Hopefully, it’s a five star review and you love it, then screenshot the review and email the screenshot to hello@jilliankendrick.com Once we confirm the review, we’ll send you a copy of the survival kit totally free. Thank you so much for joining me and I’ll see you on the next episode. All content is written and recorded by Jillian Kendrick Copyright 2024. All rights reserved.
The Momentum Marketing Podcast
By Jillian Kendrick
Episode: #53
Topic: How Motherhood Changed My Business
Contact: hello@jilliankendrick.com
Follow IG: instagram.com/automatedmama
https://jilliankendrick.com/link-pineapple/
