Hello, hello. Welcome back to another episode of Daring Made. This may be my last walk and talk as a pregnant lady. I am of course going on one of my daily walks. I try to do a daily walk and I am moving slower than usual. So I feel like maybe I can get away with actually doing A little cutie shortie episode for you guys and not sounding super out of breath and today I really Just want to give you like a sneak peek around What's kind of happening for me as i'm preparing for?
A newborn preparing, preparing in quotation marks, because I'm like, what the fuck have I done to prepare? Not a lot. It's so different. Your second one really does feel so different. Like, I don't know, maybe I've been just keeping myself so busy with work and other things that I'm like, not really doing as much of the nesting as much of the like nitpicking as I did with preparing for my first but it's definitely a different ball game.
Yeah. But I want to talk a little more about what's going on for me as I think about business, because I've been having a lot of the same kind of conversations with my friends, other women in business, by the way, today is International Women's Day, March 8th. This is probably coming out later than that, but happy International Women's Day to those of you listening.
What's funny is the conversations I've been having with friends, like, none of them are pregnant, no one is expecting a kid but me. But it feels like, you know, there's just common themes and so every time I'm hearing common themes or I'm sharing advice and then coming back to that advice and taking it, I always feel compelled to share that with you on the podcast because who knows, maybe you're going through the same thing.
So, the theme that I'm hearing a lot about, the advice that I'm getting, also the advice that I'm giving, but of course having a hard time taking, is around slowing down. Slowing down so you could eventually speed back up. You guys have probably heard me talk about, like I'm not a huge fan of messy action, do it messy, because what tends to happen is not that like, I'm not saying that you need to do things perfectly.
But what tends to happen when we don't take the time to think about where we want to go. As we end up running in circles, we end up just running, right? Just taking the action, hoping that that illuminates the path forward. And, listen, I am not an expert on the whole, like, feminine versus masculine energy type thing, but as I've been observing more and more, it feels to me Like my opinion on this, also the conversations I've been having with friends and peers and colleagues is this constant action, action, action, action.
It really falls in this masculine energy of doing and going and taking, you know? It feels like for some reason that's like, more valuable than slowing down and strategizing and feeling and thinking and being.
Because as I'm thinking about, okay, what is life going to look like with a newborn? I don't necessarily want to take our child. To daycare very early, like I want to be home, maybe we'll have like a nanny for support. I'm not even a hundred percent sure what that's all gonna look like.
But I know that I want to spend more time with my kids while they're younger and with Daring Maid, obviously the podcast you're listening to. I've got one digital product right now, the Profitable Engagement Masterclass. We have Daring House, which is still evolving. Honestly, we need to come back to it and really kind of figure out what does that look like because it hasn't been done before what we're trying to do, which is really this merging of business strategy finances and branding and marketing.
And the reason because I'm married to a finance guy. It's because we really feel strongly after working with hundreds, at this point, over 200 small businesses in the last three years, which is a fuck ton of clients in three and a half years or whatever it's been, what we found is our most successful clients are the ones that have the foundation in their strategy, their finances, their branding in order for them to be successful.
They're marketing to then help them grow their business, right? And the piecemealing of all of this, while I have this bookkeeper over here and I have this random logo, and now I have a random social media manager. All that does is hold the business back from growing how quickly and effectively it can.
And so trying to figure out what the heck Daringhouse actually looks like, not just from a messaging perspective, but from my role. Has been something that I feel like the last couple of days, I have been really forcing, and I had two friends yesterday tell me like, girl, three friends actually, like you are literally about to pop in 11 days.
You are still working. You are really spending so much time and energy trying to figure all this stuff out. I'm like, you don't even know what it's going to be like when you have this second child, you know, your time, your energy, whatever, because I've been asking myself, like, okay, do I want to be just the CEO?
Do I want to be CMO for the company, like doing the marketing, doing the selling, making the connections, managing the team of most likely just contractors. We're not at the place where we have full time employees just yet. Or do I want to be really slowing down and truly taking like one client a month, but making that client a high ticket client.
Or having maybe two or three clients on a high ticket retainer, because like, I definitely know I'm worth it. We get results and you know, we already have raised our prices and are working with really great, amazing clients in all different industries. All that to say back to the feminine masculine thing, it's like I'm spending all this time trying to take action, right?
Spending all this time trying to force this like square peg in a round hole. Or maybe it's a round peg in a very small square hole. Like I don't even know what I'm doing. But I know that I'm spending a lot of energy trying to figure things out. And taking action doing all these things. I've got the podcast.
I've got the digital product. We've got all these agency clients. We're wrapping up. I've got my child at home and my marriage and my house and all of these things. And there's just so much doing. And even the thinking feels like doing right.
Because I'm not, really planning. I'm not really strategizing. I'm not really being and like asking myself these questions. Like my friend yesterday was like, what do you really want? What do you want your time to look like? What do you want your days to look like? And I'm not asking myself those questions .
I'm thinking of everything or taking, taking action. On things from a business perspective and what that's doing is truly draining me like draining me I am beyond empty. I'm like beyond fused I don't even know how this I don't even know how this car is going on There must be some like people just like pushing me and i'm in neutral and so Why I'm sharing all of this is, I just think that it's so important and I'm really committing to taking some time off to try to get more into this feminine energy of listening to myself, of being, of caring for myself.
You know, there's a lot of different back and forth on feminine energy, masculine energy, and I did listen to this podcast once where it's like, it's not about finding a balance because that just puts you like in neutrality. And if we're all just like neutral, like half feminine, half masculine energies, like there's no attraction.
There's no polar opposites. There's no, like vitality to that. And as a woman, I don't think that it's something that necessarily you have to only be in your feminine and that masculine is bad. That's not what I'm saying at all. But I know that for me personally, when I am leaning into the doing, into the taking care of everything, into the being the control freak, into the constant action, I'm going to be Into the never resting, you know, into the never slowing down, never taking care of myself side of things, you know, being the one that's got to be in charge of everything all the time that really does makes me a not nice person.
To be honest, like I get to a point where it's like. I don't feel like myself. I get to a point where I have a hard time in interpersonal relationships. I get to a point where I just want to shut down, to be honest. This is when you'll see me get off of social media for a few days. In general, like, I feel like just not me, like, I feel like a prisoner, not like the person who, I don't even want to say I was sold on entrepreneurship for the freedom, but I think a lot of us. Literally, we're like, well, we want to work for ourselves. We want to be in charge of our own schedule, whatever.
And then we find ourselves literally being just enslaved to our businesses. To the point where like, it's Friday. I desperately want to get my nails done before this baby comes. Like they literally hurt. They're so long. They don't look good. And I'm like, Oh. But taking that hour and a half to myself, like I just have to wait for the weekend.
I can't do that during the week when I have things to do for clients or for their business. And I know that this is self imposed, but I know that a lot of you feel the same way where it's like that freedom of your schedule. It doesn't really happen if you are just constantly in the taking action phase.
If you're just constantly I gotta go, I gotta go, I gotta go. And I think that this happens to those of us who, I think it happens for a couple of reasons. One, if we don't have a well thought out strategy for how we want to have our businesses and our lives integrate. Right. We go into business to make money, right? To work for ourselves. But sometimes we don't know what we don't know, whether it's the financial stuff, the business strategy stuff, branding, marketing, whatever. So then we end up spending all this time and all this money learning how to run our businesses.
And then what happens is our businesses run us. Right. And this can even happen if you do know a lot about branding and marketing. I mean, hell, I've been doing this stuff for 36 years old since I was 20, right? Even before that in, in college and grad school and my career. And I still struggle with this. I struggle more on the business side of things, slowing down.
Reviewing the numbers, thinking about the strategy, thinking about services, offerings, those kinds of things. And I think that is because I'm creative and historically, I have wanted my businesses to be around things that light me up. Cause we're, we're told as women that like.
We should be passionate about our businesses. There's plenty of people who own car washes, right? Or have like the randomest fucking business of laundromats. They don't care about that. They're making bank. So now I feel like I'm kind of rambling. But I think that there's just a lesson here around, I think, especially for women, especially on this day, like business doesn't have to be so soul sucking and it doesn't have to be so personal and it doesn't have to be, you know, your entire passion doesn't need to be your business.
I mean, I, I wish my business was just a business and then I could be passionate about life. I could be passionate about the things I used to care about going out with friends, working out, cooking, cooking used to be my passion. I hate cooking now. I hate eating, like not from an eating, eating disorder kind of thing, but like it just feels like more things to do.
And that's because I spend so much of my energy and so much of my existence worrying about my business and so much of that masculine energy drains me because I'm constantly doing, doing, doing. With cooking. I used to think of it as like, not as not another thing that I had to do, but now it's another thing I have to do.
So I've lost my passion for that. And so I'm just, I'm having all these thoughts, you guys, all these thoughts around how do I want to come back? Because I do want to take time off. And there's part of me where I've taken some really not good advice from some mentors that I recently kind of broke up with.
And I'm working on getting some of the things that they've said out of my head. And really trying to think about business. I'm really trying to think about business from a business perspective. And also trying to incorporate this work life integration. Because again, I'm not sure if it's really a balance. But thinking of it more in terms of how do I want to feel every day. How do I want to spend my time?
What's really important to me. And of course I don't want to be spending 20, 30, 40 hours a week doing something I have no passion around, but the reality is I think the more that I I moved into that masculine energy, the more that I moved into, you know, letting my business kind of take over everything for me.
Like actually the more unhappy I became making the, you know, making the 20 grand a month or 30 grand a month or whatever. It's like, it doesn't matter. Right. It's like, what am I doing with that? I'm too afraid to even go live my life because, you know, I'm constantly doing stuff for the business. So this is what I'm going to be thinking about when it comes to the future of Daring Maid.
I truly enjoy this podcast so much. I love branding. I love marketing. I love talking to you guys. I love your feedback. Every time you listen, you let me know. You know how you felt about an episode or that something helped you or you had a question. It truly makes me so freaking excited. I'm so passionate about women stepping into their daring power.
I'm passionate about that whole mission. In terms of the agency side, I think that's probably where I've got the most questions for myself. Like again, what does that really look like from a business structure and from a my time standpoint? But I will leave you with this, and this is something that a good friend of mine told me yesterday too.
As I was saying, I just go back to the model of like fewer clients, me doing most of the work, like that's going backwards, right? Like I built up this team, we've built up these processes and systems, and I've realized I don't really love managing a team, especially when I'm dealing with hormonal things that are outside of my control, it's really difficult. It's really difficult to manage a team, manage your children, manage your own emotions, manage a marriage. At some point, like something breaks, right? So managing a team might not be the best thing for me for the next year.
And, you know, saying that gave me a lot of guilt, gave me a lot of shame, made me feel like, oh, I'm going backwards if it's just me. But the thing my friend said was, shout out Anna Laura, if you're listening, I love you. The thing my friend said was, this business is yours. Like this is your thing. No one else gets to tell you how to run it.
No one else gets to create meaning around what's quote unquote good or bad or going backwards or going forwards. And so personally, working on a lot of those limiting beliefs around, you know, what's me doing everything versus what's a team of contractors doing. And, and what does that look like?
Right? What is, what is maybe having 15, 000 months versus triple that? Like, how is that going to affect me mentally? Right? Especially if I'm in this agency, running this agency, that's all about growth and supporting, you know, taking established businesses to the next level. And then here I am doing everything myself, right?
So there's a lot of stuff like that, that I'm working through. I probably, I don't want to say I shouldn't be honest with you about because it's just, why not? Why not let you in? I'm doing more and more of that. But if you have those similar kind of thoughts, I would say, you know, just take the advice from my friend, like this business is yours.
And ultimately, if the business is not making you happy or not making you money, You've got to do something different, but don't force it. You know, take time. You've got to take the time to really think about it, to really feel about it, to really explore what it could look like. And for some of us, you know, we might not know what that looks like.
So I will say, I am very privileged that I do have my husband who is literally going to be doing financial modeling for me and forecasting to say, what do these different options look like, right? To have a team. And make what we want to make. What is that going to look like from a team management and a project management perspective?
How much do we need to sell? How much do we need to, you know, what does that look like financially? And what does it look like if we go down this other route and only take on maybe one project a month? You know, what is that going to look like? And how do we align the business to that? So I'm very privileged that I have that.
But you guys have that too. You know, he is part of Daring House. He does offer free consultations. Hopefully you'll hear him on the podcast one more time before season one wraps up. But of course, I did not get a short episode. I guess this is pretty short. 20 minutes is good for me. But anyway, all that to say, happy International Women's Day.
I hope you're having a great one. If you're going through it, you're not alone. And I think that there's something really beautiful and slowing down. And if that's where you're going to be at over the next couple of weeks, I will too. So you can message me and we can be slow and think and feel and all those good things together.
But anyway, I will see you guys on the next one with hopefully an update of kind of where we're taking things and And where i'm at. All right guys. Thanks so much for listening in and i'll see you at the next one.