Transcript of Episode #1:
Welcome to The Blissful Mompreneur Podcast

Cristina: Hello and welcome to the Blissful Mompreneur podcast. I’m your host, Cristina Hall and I am so grateful you chose to spend your precious time with me.

I am on a mission to help mompreneurs or entrepreneurs who hope to be moms in the future like you, scale your businesses for more profit, to create and document systems in the business so you can easily delegate to team members, freeing up your time to spend less time working in the business and more time working on the business, which will then give you more time to take care of yourself and spend quality time with the people you love, such as your significant other or children. Today I’m going to share with you my personal story and my journey as a now mompreneur.

About 12 years ago, I opened a music school and at the time I was doing everything. I was cleaning the bathrooms, teaching almost every lesson, manually creating and sending invoices. I mean, basically you name it, I was doing it. And it was a lot and it was a little bit overwhelming, but I was able to manage it all because I didn’t have any children. Fast forward to about five years ago, I was pregnant with my daughter, my first child. And I recognized, because the pregnancy is really difficult and also because I knew once my daughter came, I wanted to be able to spend some quality time with her. I knew I had to hire some help and start delegating.

So I put together a job posting, posted it on Indeed, brought in a bunch of people to interview, hired someone, trained that person. I’m saying trained, like almost with a question mark because I didn’t really know what I was doing. So the training wasn’t very good. And then basically threw her to the wolves and she started working. Well, after about two days, I had to let her go. It was a complete disaster. She was making tons of mistakes. It was just…it was a complete nightmare. My stress levels were through the roof. And so I had to let her go. But I was in a tough spot because my daughter was coming in about two months and I really needed to get some help. So again, went back to the drawing board, started interviewing people. Fortunately, I found the perfect person who’s actually still working for me. Even though I still didn’t really know how to train, she was just so smart and intuitive that she was able to figure out what she needed to do to best support me and the business and to keep things running smoothly. I am so grateful for her, but I got really lucky and sometimes we don’t get that lucky, right? And then everything falls on us.

Even though I was able to hire help, when I did take my quote unquote maternity leave, I was still working all the time. I wasn’t teaching necessarily, but I was doing a ton of stuff from home. And that made it so that I wasn’t able to be fully present with my daughter. And that even carried into when I returned to teaching, working full time. I just felt like even when I was physically present with my daughter and my husband, like I just wasn’t present. I was always worried and anxious and, you know, thinking about what I needed to do at work and on my laptop and whatnot. And it just wasn’t how I envisioned motherhood, right? And motherhood is hard enough as it is. And then you have the stress of running a business that really isn’t set up to support you. It’s just a recipe for disaster.

So I recognized that what was going on wasn’t sustainable, but really couldn’t do anything about it because I then lost my lead teacher. And as I was trying to recover from that, then COVID hit and the whole world shut down. And I frantically pivoted and moved all the lessons to virtual, lost a couple of teachers in the process and lost a whole bunch of students in the process. It was a complete nightmare. And I didn’t even have like the emotional bandwidth to consider how to grow the business through all of that. It was just…I was in survival mode. Then when things reopened, we returned back to in-person lessons. However, there were still some people that were nervous about that. So we still did some virtual, but again, very difficult to grow. It was just a really tricky time. And I remember thinking that I had to make a decision pretty quickly. And I was between basically, do I try to fix things and get things back on track? Or do I just give up? Give up on my dreams of having a thriving music school that just helps a ton of people and changes their lives through music, right? And it was, it was a really tough decision and I didn’t want to give up on my dreams, but I just didn’t know if I could sustain that kind of lifestyle anymore. So after thinking long and hard, I decided I was going to go all in and I was going to give it one last go.

I hired a coach and things were just a complete disaster. But slowly over time, I started making changes and things started to improve. The business started to grow. Our revenue increased. My team increased. I was able to start scaling back my teaching hours so that I could spend more time working on the business. The customer satisfaction improved. Just everything started getting better. My anxiety level started to just reduce. I was able to really spend quality time with my daughter and be present just like in the ways that I had always dreamed. And then I got pregnant with my son. And during that pregnancy, I was only working three days a week, which was half of what I had been doing with the first pregnancy. And when I took my maternity leave with my son, I was really able to completely unplug from the business and the business thrived, which was just incredible. It was incredible to see that. And then also so great to have that time with both my son and my daughter. And I want that for you. I have been there. I know how awful it is to just be doing everything and just anxious and overwhelmed and not even sure where to begin. And I want you to know it doesn’t have to be that way. And that’s why I’m going to be coming to you dropping a new episode each and every week to give you some insight into what has really helped me so that I can help you. Because motherhood is hard and beautiful and so is being an entrepreneur. And I want you to know you can have it all.

So if you like what you’re hearing and you really resonate with my story, please like and subscribe so that you never miss an episode. Thank you again for your time. And I’m really looking forward to connecting with you.