← Call Her Creator with Katelyn Rhoades
Call Her Creator with Katelyn Rhoades
Ep 80: What I Wish I Knew Before Scaling: Balancing Business, Boundaries & Motherhood
00:20:37
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Hey, friend, welcome back to Call Her Creator. Where we turn your content into cash and your ideas into income, all while keeping things real, human and sustainable. This podcast is powered by Stand Store, the All in one digital storefront I use to sell my products, book calls, and literally grow my business without needing a huge tech team behind me. If you're ready to turn your content into income, you can start your own free 14 day trial using my link in the show notes. Trust me, this is the one tool you'll wish you started using sooner. All right, guys, what's up today? I'm talking about a topic that a lot of people don't talk about when it comes to success. What happens when your business starts growing, but you start falling apart behind the scenes? I think it's something that we all kind of do. Like, it's just something that it's almost like everyone has to do it to get to where they're going. You have to fall apart at least once. So. Have you ever heard the phrase new level, new devil? I had not until I was doing research for this podcast episode. But let me tell you, hitting my first 10,000 month, or getting booked out, or scaling your team, it does not automatically come with more peace, more money, more problems is honestly what it comes with. But sometimes it. It's just. There's more pressure, there's more decisions, there's more exhaustion. So. So today I wanna share the hard lessons that I've learned while scaling my business and how I eventually found a way to grow without losing who I really was inside. Burnout is not the price of success. So let's just get into it. All right? Here's the lie. More growth equals more freedom. Totally not true. When I first started gaining traction in this space, more followers, more clients, more money, I. I thought that things would get easier for me, that I would work less. Like I left my nine to five to work less. And that was not the case at all. When you start working for yourself, you realize that you're actually working double what you worked in your nine to five. Things get heavier. They're not as easy as, you know, doing something for someone else. When you're growing something for you, there's just so much more that goes into it. Like your emotions, your bank account, your family, your name is on everything. And so I was still saying yes to everything. I was checking emails at 10pm I. What all did I do? I was a little bit crazy. And honestly, up until like, literally this summer, when my kids are now at the age where, you know, my Daughter's not in preschool. She used to do preschool over the summer. This year was her first time not being in preschool for the summer. So I've had my kids home all summer and I've promised myself, like, I'm gonna be a better mom to them this summer. I'm going to delegate what I can focus on them, still grow my business, but, like, not be up at 7am checking emails and, you know, being on a phone call at 6pm Those things, I'm not doing that anymore. I can't. If I want to have that work life balance that I always talk about. If you want that work life balance that you dream of, you cannot be taking phone calls after hours or scrolling on Instagram, you know, at 10pm at night instead of watching the movie that you promised your kids you'd watch. So I just, I felt guilty for feeling overwhelmed because this is what I said I wanted, right? I wanted this successful business. But what I learned is that freedom doesn't come from more money. It comes from better boundaries and better systems. For a long time, I had neither of those. So today I'm going to walk you guys through kind of what I've done since the beginning, in the last almost five years of running this whole business, how I've kind of scaled. Scaled without burnout, the systems that I put into place, what I wish I would have known sooner, all the things. I'm gonna spill it to you. So let's talk about the boundaries that I wish that I would've set sooner. Again, I am literally coming to the realization this month, July 2025, I wanna be able to look back at this. Caitlin, this is the first month in your entire life of this business that you've literally in your heart, said, I'm going to sustain. I'm not gonna hustle, I gotta keep things how they are at least. But I'm not gonna hustle my butt off and miss out on all these wonderful times with my children or my husband. So let's talk about what I wish I would have done earlier with all this. Because this is where a lot of entrepreneurs hit their breaking point. And I think that's where I got. I got. I hit my breaking point. I had. If you listened to last week's episode about the spiral wasn't last last week. It was a couple episodes ago, actually. I want you to listen to this. If you haven't. It was episode 78. Hold on. Yep, episode 78. The Quiet Spiral of self sabotage. If you go listen to that, like, you'll learn like where I was and why I feel like I'm at this point in my life where I have to decide, like to set boundaries or I'm going to lose myself in this business. So here's a few non negotiable boundaries that I'm taking control of now that I want to live by, that I push my employees to live by because I want that work life balance. I want me and my employees to love coming to work and I want us to be able to shut it off too. It's really hard when you work on social media all the time because you're literally on your phone all the time. So we have to take mental breaks or we will go crazy. So first non negotiable is office hours are real. If a client messages my employees after 5pm, it waits. I tell them all the time, do not answer that text message, do not answer that email. Because to me we're not a 911 operator. And social media really like there's no like crazy 911 issues. Has there been something, you know, maybe once out of the blue? Yes. But most of the time there's not a 911 emergency when it comes to social media. I want other business owners to feel this way too. And I tried to push this on my husband too. He's a realtor and that poor man is up at 6645 answering text messages and he's going to bed at 11 and answering phone calls. And I'm like, that's not how it's supposed to be. You need to have office hours set. So putting office hours in place. I've been doing this literally. Stop saying literally, Caitlin. I've been doing this since this month where after a certain timeframe I'm plugging my phone into the wall and I'm not allowed to touch it for the rest of the night because again, I'll just doom scroll or something or I will go in and check my email over and over again waiting for some opportunity to arise. Like that's, that's not healthy or normal. I don't think. It's almost like I'm afraid to just rest sometimes. But we have to rest, guys. We have to rest and recharge and we have to have that work life balance or we're going to go crazy. So have office hours in place. Hours are 9 to 5. At Influence Marketing Studio, I sometimes will reply to an email earlier in the morning, but I try my best to hold off if I can. And I have told my employees if someone texts you at a Certain time, because most of the time they freak out and they're like, oh, we have to do this, blah, blah, blah. They'll send me a screen screenshot. I'm like, you're not doing that. This can wait till tomorrow at 9am and then they breathe and we're fine. But I encourage other business owners to put this into place with their employees too, because you want them to know that you care about their wellbeing as well. So office hours, not just for you, but for your employees as well. Next boundary is be okay saying no. Not everything has to be a yes. I used to say yes to absolutely every opportunity that came my way. Every opportunity, every collab, every DM and every can you teach this to my class? Every. Can you. Can we pick your brain? Every. Can I go to lunch with you and talk about this? Like, no. Now I filter all of these requests through this one line. Does this align with where I'm going? And if it doesn't, I give them other options. You can't say yes to everything. If you say yes to everything, you are going to burn yourself to the ground. Or you're gonna end up saying yes to something that really steals your joy away. And like, that joy that you would've had could have gone to something way better. So this is probably the biggest boundary to set. Like more than office hours. This is the best boundary I could give to anybody is not everything is a yes. Number three, response time expectations. So I actually had to put communication boundaries in my contracts. If it's not urgent, it's not urgent, period. This even goes with email. So before I started my own business, I was working for a creative marketing agency, and I would get requests from clients, like all hours of the day. So I was trying to do my work, checking my email, getting all these one off things from client requests, doing those, then going back to my work, then going back to my email. So I. I finally one day just started crying hysterically in the office. Like, so embarrassing. And my manager at the time, Chris, he pulled me outside and he was like, what's going on with you? And I was like, I'm crazy. There's just nothing to it. I'm. I'm a crazy person. He's like, no, really, what's going on? And I was like, honestly, I can't keep up with this job. This job is too much for me. And he's like, no, it's not. Let's talk about this. And we ended up talking about it and he's like, caitlin, you do not have to check your email every second of the day. Here's what you're gonna do. You're going to check your email three times a day. Once in the morning when you get to work, once around noon and then once around like 4 o' clock before you leave. And if I did, that changed my whole life, guys. It changed my whole life. It made me 1000% more productive. I've tried my best to take that lesson and teach it to my employees now because again, not everything is urgent. It's not, it's not urgent. And someone might send you an email and you know, they might, they might expect a response right then and there. But you have till end of day is what I tell my girls. If you're checking your email at 9am and you can answer it, then cool. But if they message you at like, I don't know, 11am and you're busy in client work and you don't get to that email till later in the day, that is okay. Set the response time expectation. So again, I ended up putting that in our contract just so that my clients knew when you work with us, like we are not there at your beck and call. We are here to strategize and create really good content for you and take care of you. But you cannot call us all hours of the day and expect us to answer. If you need that, you're gonna have to hire an in house social media manager on your team. So that's something to think about too for your team and for you. Number four. No last minute fire drills. We plan, we prepare, we do not panic. If something's last minute, it likely gets pushed, not prioritized. Now I say this, but at the end of the day, I know Gracie, if you're listening to this, she's gonna be like, girl, you do fire drills all the time. Client just snaps their finger and you're doing it for them. And it's true. But I do try to set the expectation. Like this is another thing we have in our contracts. Most of our content is pre planned and scheduled. We do have times where we have a last minute fire drill, but you have to give us, you have to know that if you send in a last minute fire drill, we have, we have the right to hold, hold on to that for 24 hours before getting you something out. Right? Because it's like if we had these last minute fire drills and every client is sending something in last minute to us, we're never going to get our work done. One and two, it's like you're all paying the same retainer, right? So it's like, if. So if Joe Schmo is going to come over here and send in these last minute edits and I was supposed to get out Tina's stuff, like, that's not fair. So key takeaway through all of these different boundaries that are set is you teach people how to treat you and your time and, and if you don't protect it, no one else will. And it's not because they're trying to take advantage of you. It's just sometimes people need these boundaries put in place or they're just going to take, take, take what they can just because they can. So very big part of something in business that I learned is that setting boundaries has to be done for you to have a successful business and for you to be mentally, well, running a business. The third part of all of this was that first hire in your business. Oh, I almost said literally again, changes everything in a good way. The biggest game changer in my business was getting help. So for the longest time, I believed the lie that no one can do it like me. It's faster if I just do it myself. I can't afford to hire help yet. That sound familiar to any of you? Well, the truth is staying in control of all of that kept me small, kept my business small, kept my mindset small. It kept me stuck in the business instead of working on the business. So a couple months into my business growing, I finally sat down with my husband, was like, it's time to hire. Like, I am so overwhelmed. I am drowning in client work. I knew something had to give. This was not how you run a business. And so my first hire was Darby. And she has been with me since the beginning. She's freaking amazing. I did not have perfect SOPs put in place for her or an onboarding process at that. I just knew I couldn't keep doing it all. So Darby came in and truly helped me breathe. She took things off my plate that had been weighing me down for months. And that single decision to hire her opened up space for me to lead instead of constantly reacting in my business. So we learned a lot together. Like me and her will laugh about the first early days of Influence marketing studio because I barely knew what I was doing. She didn't know anything about social media. I've taught her a lot since then. She's amazing. She now handles a lot of our internal marketing content and emails. She's so great. She also deals with client work now, but I've moved her into director of operations and marketing of Influence Studio. Because she's just the bee's knees. And one day I want her to be our coo. Like, she's that good. But I had to pull her in to work in the business so that I could work on the business. And now she manages our other employees and manages the. The marketing studio so that I can focus on getting us clients for the marketing studio and then also doing things that light me up and bring me joy. Like this podcast. I could never do this podcast if I would not have hired helped. So to say all that, this is what I've learned you. You don't need a huge team to get started. You don't need a fancy organization chart. If you can't hire full time, hire a va. At least to. To. To begin with. But you have to stop doing every single thing yourself. And I will give you one more example of this. My husband is a realtor, and for the last couple months, he has been so stressed because he's so overwhelmed. He does really great in business, but I'm like, you need to hire. Help. Hire a VA. Hire a VA. Hure a VA. I will, I will, I will. Never did. Finally, he's hired. He hired an assistant more so than a va, and she helps him do a lot of stuff. And. And yes, he's now having to pay her. And, you know, that means we lose out on a little bit of that revenue. But it is so worth his sanity and it's so worth him having some stuff taken off his shoulders. Bless him. He is literally the best thing that ever happened to me. I love him so much. But the same with me too. Like, I knew, you know, hiring employees is an expense and you will lose some of the money that you're making. But it is so worth my sanity to be able to delegate stuff to other people and not have it all on me, especially as a mother as well. Hiring doesn't just lighten your workload. It expands your vision on your business too. It forces you to step into the CEO role instead of playing assistant or designer or scheduler or inbox manager all at once. You can delegate whatever you want. Social media, marketing, content creation. Delegate it to an agency like Influence Marketing Studio. You need a videographer. There's a ton of them out there waiting for you to hire them. Taxes. We've got a tax accountant now. We've got. I think that's not a tax accountant. We've got a cpa and then we've also got an accountant with our expenses. Like we're now at the point in our lives and in our business where we can hire help because we need it. And it's just such a game changer for you to have your sanity back. Another easy one was like Stand Store. Before Stand Store, I had three different processes for invoicing people, and it did not work. And then Stand Store comes in and, like, it collects the payment, it sends the product, it does all the things it, you know, the taxes, all that is all set up for me. I don't have to do it. And it's just so nice. So if you want to grow, you can't do it solo. And honestly, you're not supposed to. All right, so a couple of systems that saved my sanity because this is how I stopped spiraling every Sunday night. The first one was my CEO weekly planning day. So, like, every Monday, I sit down and kind of map out my priorities. Not just tasks, but my priorities for the week. And then I have themed days that I work. So, like, I don't like to switch between strategy, filming calls all in one day. It's too much. It's really not good for your brain. There's, like, scientific evidence about switching between tasks, how. How less productive it is versus you, like, planning and time blocking, I guess. So, like, Mondays are my business days. I'll get my hands dirty with the agency, my employees. I don't take any sales call on Mondays. I work on my team and our systems. And then Tuesdays are typically podcast days. I'll record, I will promote, I'll put my email together, I'll set up the podcast to go live the next day, all the podcast things. And then Wednesdays is. I mean, Wednesdays are a little bit of a mix, but it's mostly like content creation and then getting back to, like, I check my email every day, several times a day. But Wednesdays are kind of like me getting more organized, I guess. So just having these theme days really helps me get stuff done. If you don't have. If you can't do an entire day for each thing, you could at least do time blocks where you do, like, you know, in the mornings, you only focus on this. In the afternoons, you only focus on this. Whatever works for you. It just really helps you streamline your process better. Your business should not depend on you being on 24 7, because that's not sustainable. It's actually a ticking time bomb. So you have to put these processes into place for yourself. Now, the emotional side of all of this, let's be real, scaling is also an emotional process, you stop being the helper and you start being the leader. That's a big identity shift. You'll feel guilty for resting. I feel so guilty sometimes. And you'll worry that delegating this piece of your business means that you're lazy, or you'll miss the days when things felt scrappy and personal. But the truth of all of that is that growth will always cost you something. What you can't afford is for it to cost you your peace or your health or your joy. I'm giving you full permission right now to do all of this differently, to build something sustainable, to lead without losing yourself again. It's emotional. I am in a much different headspace than I was five years ago, but it's a good headspace and I have learned and grown so much through all of this. But if you are feeling like a different person than you were when you first started all that, that's totally normal and it's actually supposed to happen. And it's actually a good thing. So remember that if you're in the middle of growth and it feels really heavier than you thought, you're not alone and you're not failing. You're evolving. Your next level doesn't have to come with burnout. It can come with support, with structure, and with sanity. If you liked today's episode, I really want you to DM me today. DM me after listening to this podcast episode and let me know, like, what was the eye opener from this episode? What was your biggest tech takeaway you can DM me on? Call her creator or the Kaitlyn Rhodes. I'd also love for you to share this episode with a fellow founder or a mama who's going through the side effects of being a business owner and a mama. And if you're ready for more content planning, Instagram Growth Funnel Strategy Club Influence is open right now. I'll link it in the show notes for you all. We are also accepting full service social media clients right now at Influence Marketing Studio. So let the experts handle everything from content creation to caption writing to scheduling. Delegate it girl, so that you can do what you do best and that's focus on your business. Until next time, keep going, keep growing and keep building a business that actually supports you.