Many lactation consultants are used to working solo, and it can be hard to surrender certain aspects of your private practice to others. But if you feel like you’re spending too much time on tasks that take you away from the clinical work you love, it may be time to bring on people who can share the workload. In this episode, Annie and Leah discuss when to recognize when you need help and where you can hire help in your business. “When you’re pushing and trying to do everything yourself, there will be long-term health consequences that will cost you money down the road.” In this episode, we will cover: -Realizing that time is just as finite as money helps you see that when you have more time for the things you want to do you might actually make more money -Writing down your weekly and monthly tasks outside of your IBCLC responsibilities and assess what tasks might be good to hire out -These tasks are likely things that someone else is more passionate about or proficient in -You can hire out work for your personal or business life: billing, scheduling, clinical assistance, taxes, cleaning, laundry, school pickups, childcare, elder care, etc. -It could be just as good for you to commit to brushing up on your proficiencies and then “hiring yourself” to do those extra tasks -Not being afraid to tweak things until everything is working the way you want it to If you like what you heard today, please follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lactationbusinesscoaching You can email us questions and comments at hello@lactationbusinesscoaching.com.
Many lactation consultants are used to working solo, and it can be hard to surrender certain aspects of your private practice to others. But if you feel like you’re spending too much time on tasks that take you away from the clinical work you love, it may be time to bring on people who can share the workload.
In this episode, Annie and Leah discuss when to recognize when you need help and where you can hire help in your business.
“When you’re pushing and trying to do everything yourself, there will be long-term health consequences that will cost you money down the road.”
In this episode, we will cover:
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About Us
Leah Jolly is a private practice IBCLC with Bay Area Breastfeeding in Houston, Texas.
Annie Frisbie is a private practice IBCLC serving Queens and Brooklyn in New York City and the creator of the Lactation Consultant Private Practice Toolkit.
Many thanks to Stephanie Granade for her production assistance, and to Silas Wade for creating our theme music.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION DETAILS
Customer Name: Annie Frisbie
Date: March 31, 2020
Episode: 21 – Growing your Practice by Hiring Help
Length: 46:36 minutes
SPEAKER(S)
Annie: I'm Annie.
Leah: And I'm Leah.
Annie: And this is Lactation Business Coaching with Annie and Leah, where we talk about the smart way to create a compassionate and professional private practice.
Leah: Let's dive in. Hey, Annie.
Annie: Hey Leah. How are you? How are things down in Texas?
Leah: We're doing good. Still hot. Still hot is the name of the game. We've in that time where it's just so hot and muggy all the time that everything in your car melts and you do too, but looking forward. It's going to get cooler soon. I can't wait. I can't wait and I need it to get cooler soon because my kids have Boy Scout camp outs and I'm like, please, please get cooler. I do not want to do Boy Scout camp out in the blistering heat and humidity. So hoping that cool weather will start heading this way before too long. How have you been?
Annie: I'm good. It's getting cooler here in New York. I love fall. What they say about fall in New York City is true. It's very magical. It's my favorite time of year. So I'm feeling really good. I hate summer so.
Leah: Except for beaches. The only thing you get good out of summer, right?
Annie: Yeah.
Leah: Well, today we're going to be talking about hiring support staff and how to support yourself and your business with maybe having extra people, extra hands on deck or we have some other ways to help support yourself through the business that you do so, but before we get into that, Annie, tell us about our sponsor today.
Annie: Our sponsor is the Breastfeeding without Birthing professional pack. So this was created by Alyssa Schnell who wrote the book Breastfeed Without birthing, and if you don't have it, you should get it. But you should also sign up on October 1, 2019 for her new online course Breastfeeding without Birthing, and there's special intro pricing through October 8th. So if you're listening to this podcast the day that it airs or shortly after, you'll still be in the window to get that intro pricing and if it's after, sorry, but it is still available, and it'll be worth it whatever the price is, because this is great content that is not anywhere else.
Leah: Yeah, it definitely is. And I have read the book several times, and every time I work with a client that might be inducing lactation, I have the client and myself read the book, but what I have found always comes up is these little nuances, just not quite covered, or I have more questions, and I'm so excited that she's created this course to expand into addressing some of those nuances or some more techniques and tips and ways that we can support families that are relactating or inducing lactation. I just am so excited; I cannot wait to take this course. I will be signing up on October 1, like 100%. I'm so excited. I actually have a couple of moms that I'm working with right now that are inducing lactation. We're in the middle of the process so I can't wait to get them like can you hurry up and do it now, because I really want to get the additional information so I can just expand how I can support them and give them all the knowledge so they can be successful. So I'm really excited about this. So if you hear this today, you got to go sign up right away so you can get that introductory pricing because this is going to be an awesome course.
Annie: And you're going to go to www.sweetpeabreastfeeding.com/propack to sign up and we'll have the link in the show notes as well. So Leah, I'm actually a little jealous of you with having so many induced lactation clients. I've never had one.
Leah: Wow!
Annie: Not one person. I've never had anybody work with me that way, and that's probably because maybe I've gotten requests, and I don't really do a lot of prenatals anyway, so maybe that's why but it also could be if I haven't really felt confident about it because I haven't done any. I've only read the book and I haven't done training. So I feel like I could answer questions about it, but as far as actually working with a client, I don't feel as confident with that. So I'm definitely going to be there because I think that this is going to help me get to where I might then put it on my website that I will help you with this, and maybe I will get to have those experiences of working with those families because that is a really special kind of journey.
Leah: It is. it's been really great. The times that I have done it. Not very often; it doesn't come up very often, but when it does, it's been really neat to get to come alongside these families in such a special journey that they're having. So I'm really excited. Yay!
Annie: So before we get into today's episode topic - hiring support staff - I would really like to hear your marketing tip because I do think it applies to the topic for today.
Leah: For sure. I think one area that is most commonly or could be most commonly hired out is help with social media. And this could even be your team. I have literally heard of other LCs using their team. They know so much and they can bebop around Instagram and all these things so fast and I'm still back here, what did you click on? How did you get there? So it doesn't have to be some really expensive VA that has this huge portfolio of things. You can even hire maybe a La Leche leader or somebody who just has an interest in supporting breastfeeding people to help you find articles. I mean, that's another way that you could support yourself in the time consuming parts of social media - putting out new content, can be just sharing great articles. And if you know someone you trust their judgment on finding those articles, that could be a really easy task but super time consuming, but you could hire somebody to do that. So there's lots of ways to get help with social media. And so don't be afraid to reach out and there are the people that will take over your whole social media. They'll do it all for you and those are amazing people too. But if you can't afford that, or that's just not something you're interested in, there's other ways to get help with your social media as well.
Annie: That's a great tip. I've been outsourcing some of my social media and it's a little scary to give up control, but you realize that someone does things way better than you.
Leah: Yes, efficiency.
Annie: And the content is way better. The quality is better when you have someone who knows what they're doing, really helping you hone in on what you want to do. And I do love the idea of finding somebody who is younger maybe and giving them an opportunity. I just got this amazing email from someone just saying thank you for all of the stuff you're doing, the podcast and all the other things and she was a sophomore in college.
Leah: Oh, wow.
Annie: And she was like, I've realized that this is what I want to do.
Leah: Oh my goodness!
Annie: I was like, I want to hug you, and so that's a great way to kind of advocate for our profession is reaching out to a local college, maybe that has a nursing program and posting on their job bulletin that you're a lactation consultant who wants some social media help. And then you might find yourself turning a student into an IBCLC. That would be really cool.
Leah: That would be so awesome. So awesome. I think we need that youth in our jobs because I think so many of us come in after we have kids, so I just think that's a great way. That's so cool that you had somebody reach out to you. That's really awesome. In college, to know that. Gosh, a sophomore in college. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was wanting to do all the things. So that's really awesome. That's really awesome. Well, let's dive into our topic today about hiring support staff and why a lot of us find ourselves in positions that we're thinking, oh my gosh, I can't accomplish all of this. It speaks to if you own your practice and you're running your business, and you're supporting families, you really are wearing literally 20 different hats, and it can be really, really overwhelming. And I think a lot of us find ourselves at a certain point where we're like, I can't keep all these balls juggling in the air anymore and I need help. I'm sure you have found yourself in that place, as I did.
Annie: I definitely have and I'll say that it's a really big mental hurdle to get past the money/ time trap, I guess or just thinking about that, spending money to get my time back and that's scary to do, because you see money and I don't think this is the right way to look at things, but you tend to see money as a finite resource and time as an infinite resource. But time is just as finite as money. It runs out too and at a certain point, the free thing - doing something for free meaning I'm doing it - ends up costing you in ways that maybe aren't quantified like I spent $25.
Leah: Right.
Annie: I lost something that then I had to spend money later to make up for it. And one of the big things is that, and this is not really quantifiable in that direct way, which is what makes it hard. But when you're pushing yourself and really trying to make yourself do everything, there are going to be long term health consequences for that, and that will cost you money down the road. So if you're burning yourself out, and you're working too hard, and you're getting stressed, and then something happens, and it could be 10 years from now, and it ends up being an expensive medical problem, because you weren't taking care of yourself now. You can't predict that. You don't know that that's going to happen. But that is something that entrepreneurs don't think enough about. You think that your abilities are also infinite.
Leah: Right. Yeah, like energy stores will never run out. We'll always have this burning desire to do all the things and that can sometimes drive us into the ground. And I think we all have our skills as a lactation consultant. So obviously, we're going to spend time on that, but deciding then what other jobs could I hire out or what would be the smartest thing for me to hire out? I really think it's good to take a real close look at this, because you might not need to hire out every single additional task in your business for you to have your time back and self-care and all these things that we're talking about. It might just be some small things that you don't have good proficiency with, and you also don't have a passion to do.
I think we mentioned this book last time too was Michael Hyatt's Free to Focus book, and he talks about deciding what tasks to delegate or to hire out, and the things that you should be doing. First and foremost are the things that you're passionate about and you're proficient at. So most of us are passionate about the work that we do, and over time we become proficient and we're good at it, but there's going to be a lot of things that we are passionate about. You might be passionate about working on your website, but it takes you five hours to get one new page up, and you might be really proficient at bookkeeping. You can crunch the numbers, but it sucks the life out of you, and at the end of the time that you're doing the number crunching, you don't feel energized or excited about anything anymore.
So it's finding that ... narrowing down what things am I both passionate about and proficient at? Those are going at the top of the list of the things that I'm going to be doing. And then a step down from there would be like, well, I should probably hire out the things that I'm both not passionate about and proficient at. And then the middle ground is like, well, you might keep doing the bookkeeping, even though it sucks life out of you, because you want to hire out something that you're both not passionate about and not proficient at. You kind of have this hierarchy that you can build in to see. So it might be helpful for you to write down your weekly/ monthly tasks, and things that are taking up your time away from just your IBCLC work, and looking at it in this lens of what you're passionate about, what brings you joy and happiness, and also what you're proficient at, and see if you can find the things that really have no passion and no proficiency to them. I thought this was a really great way to look at where would you want to hire help, where would give you the best bang for your buck, so to speak.
Annie: And I've heard that concept also expressed as identifying your own zone of genius.
Leah: Yes, I like that.
Annie: And staying there. And so when you're prioritizing tasks, it even applies to should I even do this particular project that I want to do? Is it in your zone of genius? If you're like me and you're always coming up with new ideas, and you're like, oh, I'll do that. You learn to filter that between is it in my zone of genius? Not that I'm a genius... you know what I mean? Is it something I am proficient at and passionate about, and if I'm not, is it going to cost me money for support for the parts that I can't do? And that has really helped me send some ideas I had, they were just not the right idea for me, so that's helpful. And in thinking back and my own history as an entrepreneur, small business owner, and just in my personal life, my husband is also a small business owner and I've been freelancing since... I think 1999 is the last time I had an actual job job.
Leah: That’s amazing.
Annie: That was my only job. No, that's not true. I had two jobs that I had that job because I was also working in the daytime for a film producer and nights at the video store and trying to write a screenplay, so maybe not a really a great example. But we've always been in my family and me, people who are doing it themselves and the first big step that it took for us was hiring someone to do our taxes. So I was always like, I do the taxes. I get the Turbo Tax. I would install it on my giant Mac SE or whatever it was that I had, my Mac Performa, and I would sit there and I would plug everything in and I would type everything in, and I would do it and I was like, I am doing this. This is cheap. I can afford it. It's not going to cost me money. And then it nearly destroyed me as things got more complicated. You know, we had kids, and I was still doing it after we had kids. That was crazy. And so we finally were like, okay, we're going to hire somebody do our taxes, and the first time we got that bill of like, that's what it costs?
Leah: Why did we torture ourselves all these years?
Annie: No, no, it was the opposite. It was like wow, so much money. Oh, I bet you're going to say like, but it was like both and then I was like, but I didn't have to do our taxes this year, and that was amazing. And then the second step was when we finally took the jump to hiring a bookkeeper. Again, that's expensive. It costs money. I have to pay that person, but what it means is I'm not doing it. And that was a task where I was looking at the amount of time it actually ended up taking for the bookkeeping to be done. And again, we have a very complicated situation because we have two of us who own three businesses between us, so it's not straightforward at all. And I am more proficient at it than my husband is so it falls to me. And I looked at what is the hourly cost to our family and to my life to do this time wise? It almost became where it felt necessary to spend that money because it was not sustainable for me. And I hit like, what do I need to hire out? It's any task that I'm trying to get done where I'm telling my kids be quiet. I haven't talked to you all day because I've been working all day, and I'm saying, get out of the room so I can do this stupid thing that I hate.
Leah: Right. Yeah. And why do a task that brings that feeling to your life? That doesn't feel good. And if it can be hired out, I think that's such a smart way to think about it. How is it affecting your life and your family's life when you're having to do these additional tasks?
Annie: So what are some different types of tasks, different kinds of help or different types of people you could hire or tasks that you could outsource?
Leah: Yeah, so I think a common one is some kind of administrative work. So that might look like somebody that helps you with scheduling, or taking care of the paperwork kind of stuff like faxing reports and getting super bills out to people, that kind of thing. It could also be somebody that's doing billing for you, whether it's in-house, like somebody you hired to do billing just for you or a company that does billing. Certainly the social media we kind of talked about that. That's another place, whether it's just helping you pull content together, or is it somebody who's actually managing all your social media for you? And then bookkeeping is a big one. Boy, I think a lot of us are just not proficient or passionate about bookkeeping. That's a big one.
Annie: And a good bookkeeper is going to be able to do things that take you a million years to do in a very short amount of time.
Leah: I know. It's amazing. They can just bebop around QuickBooks, and before you know it, everything's perfect, and reconciled and beautiful. And you're like, how in the world? I tried that and it took me five hours to figure out one month of it. So, yeah, bookkeeping is a huge one.
Annie: I use a biller, because in my practice I do see a lot of insurance clients. And again, I got into the trap of well, it doesn't take that long to create a claim in the platform that I was using, and it doesn't. It doesn't take that long, and it doesn't take that long to get the report and see which ones didn't get paid and which ones get processed incorrectly. And then the part where it was taking a lot of time was then I had to call and say you did this wrong, you put it to the deductible, but the Affordable Care Act says it's not supposed to go there and then they're like, okay, our bad, then they would pay. And that was a task where when I first hired the biller, it's because what I was doing was I was going to the playground with my kids and then sitting over in a quiet corner away from everybody so nobody could overhear me, because it was private client stuff while my kids were playing in the beautiful weather and I'm sitting on a hold with Aetna.
Leah: That's such a joy sucker. It sucked the joy out of that.
Annie: Totally and yes, my biller takes a percentage, but you know what was going to happen and what was happening was I was like, I'm just not going to call. I'm just not going to bother and so I was already losing. I was losing that money. So I would rather spend the money because it's tax deductible here in the US, versus just never get that money at all because I never could get around to making the phone call. That feels better to me.
Leah: Yeah, I agree 100%, and definitely you start to really see the areas that you're like, I've got to get some extra help in this area, and billing is a huge one. Because although like you said, that first part is so quick and easy. It's a few clicks, you hit submit, you're done, but it's that follow up that can be so time consuming. So time consuming. I think we might also find people to help us with clinical care too. So like hiring another lactation consultant to join you to be a contractor.
Annie: And you've done this. So how has that been for you? How do you work with assistants or subcontractor lactation consultants?
Leah: Yeah, so I have three other lactation consultants that work with me and it's been a huge help. I think before when I was more on my own, and it was not as many of us, I always had this fear like if the kids coughed in the evening the night before, I would just get like, oh gosh, what if they wake up and have fever and I have to cancel all my clients, and where will I put them? There's nowhere else to put them this whole week, and it was just causing me so much stress to never have backup. I just felt like I was always walking on eggshells. Don't let anything happen so that I don't have to figure out how I'm going to get everybody seen and then especially because we work in a pediatric clinic. It has been so, so helpful for both those instances where it's like a one off, like somebody woke up sick, that we have backup, but also so I can take vacation or say hey, I'm just not going to work today. I'm going to take this day off for some self-care, or going to conferences. It has definitely freed up so much time because then you have backup available. So I think that's been really helpful for me. I know other practices have hired like a CLC who might not be doing full on IBCLC work obviously, but they maybe go back in and do weight checks or some over the phone help, kind of triage and screening. And I think that can be a great way to help somebody get hours and help for their work towards becoming an IBCLC too, so it's another way to kind of bring in some clinical help as well.
And then I love to think not just about helping our business lives, because I can tell you 100% I've got some I'm not passionate about and I'm not proficient about tasks around my house, that I am more than happy to find somebody else to do them, if possible. So I think we could look outside of people to hire for our business, but it might be people to hire for life tasks, like you said, doing your taxes. That's part of life here in the US. You might have a housekeeper or somebody who cuts your yard or helps you pick up your kids from school, those kinds of things that I've definitely tapped into using that kind of help as well to free up time for myself to have more quality time with people I care about and my work.
Annie: And some of those end up being just non-negotiables like child care or elder care, depending on what stage of life you're in and some of you out there might be in that sandwich stage where you've got aging parents who need help, and also children at home who still need you, and that ends up being something that does cost money. You need childcare if your children are too young for school or whatever it is, or after school can sometimes cost money, and one thing that is, and this was kind of really cool and that I have been involved with since... so my older daughter was born in 2007 and in early 2008, I was invited to join the Sunnyside Babysitting Co-Op. Sunnyside is the neighborhood I live in here in Queens, and it was just starting up. It was a bunch of families who got together and said, I think we can make things better for all of us, and we read a book and created this whole system. We have an economy.
At one point, we had a little bit of a recession. We kind of managed that but basically it's like a point system and you spend points to have people take care of your kids. You earn points by taking care of other people's kids. We ended up expanding it into getting points for cat sitting, or I used babysitting co-op points to have somebody turns some PDFs into fillable PDFs for me.
Leah: Oh wow!
Annie: It's crazy, and all I have to do is go to your house on a Saturday night and watch movies on your couch while you go on a date and your kids go to sleep. Done! Because that's like a break for me. I get to go be in somebody else's house, and so we've been involved with that since then, and I've got two kids now and I cannot tell you how many times that collective just saved my life and saved me money and really helped just makes so, so many things possible.
Leah: That's amazing.
Annie: Yeah. And I've been very, very fortunate in that way. It does kind of show that there is a place for community to fill in the gaps for some of these things where you're using ...it's still time, but it's somebody else's time and you're giving time when you have time, so I was in a stage of my life where I was homeschooling my two kids and working in the late afternoons and in the evenings and on the weekends. So I had friends who needed to work in the morning and I was watching babies in the morning.
Leah: Aww!
Annie: That was really magical couple years where we were having these older babies and little toddlers coming over. My girls loved it and then I was getting points to use for time. So I'm like, Okay, I want to go see a client at 3 o'clock. Can you take my kids to the park?
Leah: That's so awesome.
Annie: It was great, and you were never feel like you owe an individual person, because I think at our highest point, we had 28 families in the group. It was all really spread out so I’m just going to ask for what I need. I'm going to give what I can give and it all came around.
Leah: That was so cool, and it literally doesn't cost you cash money.
Annie: At all.
Leah: That's so cool. That's such a neat way to help support that community aspect. We can all come together. It takes a village, right?
Annie: Yeah.
Leah: That is so neat. That's just really thinking outside the box. I love that. I wish that my area had stuff like that. But thinking about the things that we can help hire out for our life too can make a really big difference, because it doesn't just have to be getting help for your business only. And one of the things that I think trips a lot of people up is that you're thinking, well, I can't afford somebody, or I'm not going to be able to pay somebody and that might actually be the case. Like hey, I am the sole breadwinner in my family and literally I don't have any extra cash and I don't feel like I can hire out. I feel like there's still some ways that you could get help, maybe in smaller ways or helping yourself do things more proficiently, and that's something that I've done as well.
It might be as simple as maybe taking a low cost course on QuickBooks, so that when you do get on QuickBooks, it's not going to take you forever. You still might not be passionate about it, but now you're proficient with it. So you still give yourself back that money as time; you're getting more time back because you're not spending as much time doing it. Or it could be you're not really good at Excel and creating a spreadsheet so that you can keep your claims organized or something like that. You might not be real proficient at that so you could have somebody just set it up for you and then that way that's done and you can be more proficient in that time. So it even can be as simple as finding hacks to make yourself more proficient and like basically, hiring yourself. Like okay, I can't hire this job out, but could I hire myself and train myself in such a way that I could get it done more proficiently?
Annie: I think that's a great way to look at it, because there are going to be seasons in your life where spending actual money is not going to be an option. So now you've got to be smart about spending your time and treating your time the way you treat your money and seeing it as that finite resource. And so going back to our previous episode where we talked about productivity, organizing it and really saying okay, I only have this amount of time. How am I going to use it most effectively and most efficiently, kind of treating it like money, like you do money, budgeting it, allocating it, cutting the things that are not worth it, that are putting you over budget, and there are certain time things that are going to fall into that category.
And then looking for those hidden places where you can use pockets of time. So maybe it's like say you don't have laundry in your house and you don't have laundry in your building, which is our situation. So our only option for laundry is to go somewhere. So we can go to the laundromat and do our laundry and to do laundry for a family of four, that's a lot of laundry. Take hours and hours and hours. So if I'm going to be spending hours and hours and hours at the laundromat, and I'm stuck there but the actual physical time I'm spending with my laundry is not that much, so now I can budget more things in there and then I can make that time work really hard for me so I'm doubling up. So in a sense, I've cloned myself. I've said okay, I have one Annie who's doing laundry, and then I have one Annie, who is the biller, and I'm wearing my biller hat and then I'm folding clothes and I'm back to putting my biller hat back on. Like you were saying, I've hired myself for these time slots.
Leah: To do these tasks, yeah.
Annie: And as you do that, the goal I would hope would be that as you free up more time and you get more organized, you do make more money, and then you can say I finally hit that point where I don't have to do laundry anymore because I've gotten so organized and created more revenue for myself that I can now pay for the laundry service where I drop it off and I pick it up and it's folded. Don't be jealous.
Leah: I'm so jealous of that. I'm so jealous. I have never in my life had a laundry service, and every time you talk about it, I just feel like that would be like the clouds opened up and light shone down and they just bring the package to you, all folded and beautiful. How amazing would that be?
Annie: I mean, you really do end up ... like our kids have heard many times 'be careful with that. We pay to have it folded' and you have to get over that personal boundary of you're just going to know all our business. Yes, that's it. You just like hi, [unclear; 34:24] the laundromat. We're going to tip you really well because you know all our business
Leah: That's hilarious. I never even thought about that aspect of it. But yeah, having you set it up like you would if you actually hired somebody. So if you actually hired somebody, you'd be like, Hey, you know, I have this task for you to do and I expect it to be done as efficiently as possible and in this timeline, and if you're hiring yourself, one - you have to train yourself to make sure you can be proficient at it. So taking that time to maybe take a course. There's tons of free stuff on YouTube so you don't even have to spend money on that. You can find so many trainings on so many different aspects of running a small business on YouTube, and train yourself to be proficient and then set up that time that you're going to hire yourself to do it. But as you move along, like you said and you're more proficient, you're able to generate more income for yourself, then you're able to then hire out. And I always thought of it...at first, it was really hard. I'm like, how am I going to afford this, but that workload being off of me giving my time back, I was able to add in more consults. So in the end, hiring somebody actually allowed me to make more money. I was spending so much time doing those kind of office-y tasks and the stress level. You know, I just couldn't mentally take on more clients because when I got home, I also had all this workload that just came with running a business, but then once I was able to farm a lot of it out, it freed up mental space, and also just time so that I could see more clients, which meant more income and which meant I was able to diversify my income by doing things like this fun podcast that we get to do together.
Annie: Yeah, and that's really the big benefit of thinking about tasks that you're not proficient or passionate about, and just treating them as something that you have to spend on. So until you have money, you're going to have to spend time and energy. And when you're looking at these tasks, you can be really ruthless with what you have going on and say if the thing I am currently spending time and energy on - time and energy being finite resources - if those things are not moving me towards being able to pay for those things to be done, then should I really be doing them, and just take a look at it and some of them you're going to look at and say yes, I still need to do my taxes every year. Okay, no getting around that.
Leah: No.
Annie: Other things you're going to look at and say, you know what? That's actually a super inefficient use of my time and energy. Why am I actually still doing this thing that I'm not proficient at or passionate about that isn't actually leading me to where I can make enough money to stop doing it, and it's not necessary? It's not feeding my soul. It's not feeding my stomach, and it's not feeding my business.
Leah: I think you really have to take a good inventory of how you spend your time to be able to really hone into these little, oh, gosh, I did spend two hours doing this task and it really didn't move the needle anywhere. I think it's great to spend a couple weeks just taking an inventory of really where your time is being spent the most, because I think sometimes when we do that, and actually I just found out there are apps that will help you time track so that you can have more awareness of what you do with your time. I thought that was really interesting. Well, there's an app for everything. There literally is, but ...
Annie: I want to say something with that. I love that time tracking. And here's what I also want to say is that if some of your time is being budgeted to doing things like watching your favorite TV show, or staring at your phone, don't automatically look at those as bad things.
Leah: No.
Annie: Just budget them, just like if you have a finite amount of money, and you're budgeting your money. But nobody is saying you can only budget your money for things that are good for you. You're still allowed to budget your money for things that make you feel good, so don't feel like when we're saying time tracking, it's so that every minute is going to be about the hustle. Keep that phone time in there. But if you're like, you know what? I thought I only spent 30 minutes looking at Facebook and actually it's two and a half hours. That's an area you can say that time is now costing me money, costing me quality of life, or you might say, I am actually making money by being on Facebook. Maybe I need to do this in a more organized way. Maybe I should look at it and say, I should actually be spending that two and a half hours on Facebook at this time of day, when I can actually increase the amount of money I'm making. So whatever it is, maybe you run a group, a support group and that's important. Maybe there are better times of day for you to be on your support group. So instead of doing it at 11 o'clock at night before you go to bed, saying, you know, this is actually good for my business. It's growing my business. I'm actually going to do it at a peak time of day when I've got more mental and emotional and physical resources available to me.
Leah: Right, right. That's a really great point for sure. I think there's a lot of ways that we can help support ourselves as small business owners and IBCLCs, and hiring out or hiring ourselves are really ways that we can give our give back to ourselves in so many ways.
Annie: And also seeing that either one of those scenarios - either hiring yourself or hiring someone else to put a system in place where you're checking in regularly. So say you do hire someone. Say you hire an admin to do some scheduling for you or you hire a biller. Don't say, okay, now I've hired a scheduler, I've hired a biller and now this is my new reality. Make the contract with them that says we are going to check in in three months and see if this is still working. So give yourself an out. Do the same thing if you hire yourself. Say I'm going to check in in three months and I'm going to do an audit and I'm going to say, am I working for myself and to make changes if you need to make changes, and if that biller is not making you money, then change what you're doing. That's totally okay, and good and healthy to do.
Leah: Yeah, I think that's an important point. And I also think as you're working with people, you'll have less time spent, but you also need to think about there will be some time managing the people that are working for you, and that needs to be budgeted in as well. Like with my admin, we have weekly check ins. There's definitely time that I am spending passing the tasks over to her, so it's not like you'll get zero time but the tedious parts of those tasks are now taken away and handed off to somebody who is good and proficient at them. So I think this is just so important for us to be thinking about as we move forward and grow our businesses. But I know Annie, you have a tech tip for us as we wrap up here and that has to do with hiring. What do we need to know?
Annie: So, you know, any lactation consultant who's been doing this for any amount of time knows that you're going to have to have hard conversations with people, and you're going to sometimes have to tell people things they don't want to hear. So you've had to do it with your clients. You have to tell them something that isn't quite exactly what they expected to hear, and they're going to have to do something hard that maybe is a little uncomfortable for them. And I'm talking about how to tell that support person you just hired that their free Gmail account is not going to cut it for their work for you. And free Gmail here in the US, it's not HIPAA-compliant, but anywhere you're using it, free Gmail is just not secure or private. It's free because they're advertising to you. And holding yourself and your practice to high standards for privacy needs to extend to the people who are working for you as well. And so it can be really hard to say to somebody, you might need to say I need you to get a HIPAA-compliant email address and then we can start working together. Or depending on what your relationship is with them, when I hired the admin, I started out by saying, I'm going to give you an email address to use, which costs me money. But then she decided she was going to get her own email address for her business, and then I just told her how to make it HIPAA-compliant because she was using G-Suite and that's very easy to do.
When I hire an IBCLC to subcontract for me, I am paying for her email address so that's part of our arrangement is that I'm paying for that. So depending on the person that you're working for, if they are somebody who's got their own… like a virtual assistant who has their own VA company, and so they're not necessarily there. They have their own business. They have their own email address, but they're using free Gmail, you might want to say I can't use your free Gmail. And they might say, Yeah, actually, that's pretty shady anyway for my business. Let me upgrade. I should upgrade myself anyway. Or you might say, well you're going to be doing a lot of work for my company or in my company or contracting for my company, as part of what I'm providing for you, an email address will be included. But you really need to just have that conversation.
Leah: And just make sure when you're communicating on all platforms that you're communicating in secure ways. I mean, sometimes, certainly like with social media, it might not be as applicable, because you're not talking about any client information. But 100% if there's any client information being passed back and forth, you just have to be careful and really thinking about privacy. So that's such a good reminder. You're always good at giving us those reminders of keeping our privacy standards high. So I really appreciate that. Well, it's been great talking today about hiring support staff and I will keep this conversation going. Definitely share with us if you guys have any additional questions about who to hire, where to hire them. We can all keep this discussion going because I think there's a lot of you guys out there that have utilized some great resources for additional help and we need to share that with each other. So let's keep this conversation going.
Annie: Definitely, and make sure to follow our Facebook page because later this fall - this is going to air in October 2019 - later this fall, Leah and I are going to have an announcement about a new thing we’re brewing up for everybody. So just make sure you're following our page because that's going to be where you'll find out first what's happening.
Leah: Yes, yes, I'm super excited about that. Well, it's been great talking to you again, Annie. Can't wait for our next round and I hope you have a great week.
Annie: Thanks Leah. I'll talk to you soon.
Leah: Thanks. Bye.
Annie: Bye.
Leah: Thanks for listening to Lactation Business Coaching with Annie and Leah. If you like this podcast, please leave us a rating or review on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, wherever you're listening right now, and don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode.