Growing a Big Business Fast as a Full Time Mom with Busy Kids

Disclaimer: Transcripts were generated automatically and may contain inaccuracies and errors.

Welcome to today’s, uh, episode of the Beach Boss Influencers Show. Today, it’s Carrie Hiam and Brandy Shaver, and we are going to be talking about growing a big business fast as a full-time mom with busy kids. If you’re watching and you’re listening, wherever you may be watching or listening from, if you’re on the podcast, you’re probably listening somewhere. We might have this streaming on Facebook. Who knows . We never know what we’re gonna do with them as we go. But when it comes to growing a business as a mom, we see this a lot, especially inside our community, where when people come to Beach Buss, they feel like it’s like they have to make that choice between business and being a mom and having children and growing your, and growing a business with children. Right. And they feel like it’s like they have to choose one or the other. They’re,
Or, yeah. Yep. Either or. And I’m sure a lot of you listening have heard the short term sacrifice for the long term gain, right? Yep. It’s total bs. Carrie and I have done both ways. Mm-hmm. , we’ve done the short term sacrifice for long-term gain, and it didn’t end up as fancy as we wanted it to. In fact, it doesn’t work out real well, No. Or your kids and relationships that you really want to keep. So yeah, we’re good talk and let’s get, let’s get authentic. Right. Let’s talk about some of these times. Like when we brand and I first started growing our business. We were building it traditionally, and it was like old school. We were driving all over the place trying to, you know, find our next prospect. That’s what we did. And it was hours in the car each week, and a lot of times we left our children because it’s, I mean, anybody who’s growing a business right, sometimes it feels easier to just leave your kid with the nanny or for us, I mean, we couldn’t afford a hotel room in some of the places we were going, so we were sleeping in our car in like a Walmart parking lot in Vegas and some of these other places. And so I didn’t feel like it was even safe to bring my own kids. But as we were growing this, like those first two years, I had two little boys, um, I guess one little boy when we first got started, I was pregnant with, I was pregnant with the second one, but like, I watched my boys grow up through text messages those first two years of trying to grow my business, and it broke me. Like it got to the point where I told Brandy, Brandy and I were building together. Right. And I told my husband, I was like, I can’t keep doing this. I’m done. She said, .

Yep. And because I don’t know about you, but I, I wanted to, I started this business. I started in this industry because I wanted time freedom and I wanted time with my kids. And here I was trading that precious, those precious moments with my kids in thinking, oh, it’s only for the, it’s only for a little bit. Right. And I, short term Yeah.

Short term. It’s just short term, short, long. I’ll, I’ll get it, bill, and it’ll all be fancy. Yep.

And two years later I had missed, I had missed so much. Right. And Brandy, I know that you have, you know, instances too. Yeah,
Absolutely. Where I, you know, my daughter was in a drill team. The only time she ever tried out for anything her whole high school year, um, senior year, she decided she was confident and ready to, you know, join a, a sports team, you know, dance team. And she was so excited and I missed a lot of those dances and mm-hmm. cause of that short-term sacrifice for long-term gain. And, you know, it damaged our relationship to a point where I had to work at like fixing that. So, you know, it’s, it’s, we don’t, we, and, you know, we had to find a different way. We had to find a way that worked for us because Carrie and I were in the same boat. I couldn’t keep mm-hmm. leaving my kids. I couldn’t keep leaving him with my oldest kids. I couldn’t keep, you know, paying for a nanny and being gone all the time and we weren’t getting the results we wanted in that kind of process anyway. No.

So, no, and honestly, I mean, it, it got to where we, you and I were both resenting our businesses. Mm-hmm. and our kids were resenting us and our business as well. So as we go throughout this episode, we’re speaking from experience . Okay. Yeah, absolutely. .

We were looking for a different way to grow. And it was, that was the number one reason that we were looking for a different way to grow. And that’s, it was like shortly after that, it was January of 2016, when I quit, I told Brandy and Witt, I’m out like, , figure out a different way to do this or I’m done. And it was shortly after that that we discovered influence marketing and learning how to grow an audience and attract them to us and build influence and do these things that we talk about all the time here inside the beach boss influencers. So, and doing it from home where we didn’t have to leave our kids anymore. And Yeah. You know, and that brings another set of like issues if you think about it, right? Mm-hmm. , then you’re just home all the time trying to build a business. So, you know, there’s, and people that build old school, don’t get us wrong, it totally works. You can still do it. Mm-hmm. , um, it, it just didn’t work for us. Uh, it just, it just didn’t, wasn’t a fit for us. So if you’re building old school and you’re loving it, keep doing it, man. Like go . Cause I could not make that work for me. So you, it’s, it’s important to like, make sure that we, you know, draw our line in the sand. We aren’t saying what we do is any better. Well, it’s better for us. But, you know, just so you know, and if, and if maybe you’re joining us for the first time, maybe you don’t even know who Brandy and I are. So this is Brandy. She has six kids, right. And I’m Carrie, I have three kids now, . So we’ve kind of built a business between the two of us in every stage of your child’s life. Absolutely. From a brand new baby all the way to Brandy. You know, she has kids that are in their twenties and so Yeah.

They’re, my oldest is 26 right now, so, right. So we kind of, between the two of us have experience. I haven’t yet, my oldest is 10. But between the two of us, we’ve experienced the growing pains and, and how you can kind, and, and I guess in this episode we wanna talk about ways that you can build that big business with kids without having to sacrifice from home mm-hmm. , right. How to do it from home without sacrificing those moments that you’ll never get back.
Right?

Absolutely. So that, let’s talk about the first one, Brandi, like what’s that first?

So, so step number one, um, is setting a daily mode of operation. And, you know, this, this is gonna boil down to, you know, for us, we chose to build online, so mm-hmm. , there’s certain things that have to happen for you to actually build a business online. Just like there’s a certain things that have to happen if you have a traditional business, right? Mm-hmm. . And so setting a daily mode of operation or a m o as we like to call it, and these are things that get done regardless of what is happening around you at your house, you know, all those. Yeah.

Cause we have found, and you know, we find this in our team when we were building teams, is that a lot of us think about building our business a lot more than we’re actually building our business. Yes. And what I mean by that is there’s certain things that make you money. Um, you know, in the network marketing industry, there’s certain things that are preparatory tasks that have to get done, especially if you’re building online. And there’s certain things that do a lot of different things online that are, you know, that are, that are more beneficial or more effective, right? And so you’re gonna have to figure those out based on, you know, your competition, how that works for you and all those things. But setting a daily mode of operation, what gets done, what makes me money, and those are the main things you wanna focus on. Because let me tell you, you can do a ton of things online, right? You could be sucked into the social media hole Yeah. For hours and get nothing done. So you’ve gotta have a set, what do I do first, second, third, fourth? You know? And how long, that was the biggest thing for me that I think made the biggest difference building from home is having that, that daily mode of operation.

Absolutely. And not only that, but one thing that we teach, and one thing that Brandy and I grasped onto was putting the non-negotiables in first, right? When you’re a mom and you know, your kid has baseball, or they have basketball or dance or gym gymnastics or whatever your kids are involved in, those things are important. It’s not just important to you, but it’s even, I would say even more important to your kid, the kid, right? Yeah. To the kid who is experiencing it, to have the support, to have the parent there cheering them on, it makes all the difference, right? And so for me, it’s like, I don’t wanna miss those games, even if I am so sick of baseball, like it’s the end of the season and I am like so sick of baseball, I’m so sick of going, it’s in my calendar because it’s that important to my child, right? So it’s putting those non-negotiable things in first and working your business around those non-negotiable things. Now that doesn’t mean that we make, you know, everything a non-negotiable thing, right? Right. You have to set boundaries, but when you’re able to put those things that are the most important in first and work your business around it, it gives you permission to mom.

And that’s the really cool part too about building online, is that you can do that, right? Because Yep. There’s people online all the time. But if you’re just like building old school, it’s, people are only awake a certain, you know, certain term during the day, depending on how far you can drive, right? So for me, building online opened up all of the whole world instead of just my little area that I can drive to. Right? So that’s really important to you to remember that. Yeah. Put your non-negotiables in first and then get the work done. Yep. Get the work done is, you know, important too.

Yep. Absolutely. So, and that kind of brings us to the second thing, because we can say, okay, we have all these non-negotiables, but I don’t know if you just saw it. I have told my kids, I told my kids before we hopped on this podcast that mom has to be on a podcast. Like, give me some time, right? Let me get it done and then we’ll do whatever you’re gonna do it. And yet, here comes Xix walking in asking a question. Dems is down here playing with the kids. They’re in the kitchen right now. Right? So it’s training your kids, right? Like, I can look at my kids now, I couldn’t always do this. It took training, but I can look at my kids and I can say, I’m on a call. You right. I’m on a call, give me a few minutes and I’ll get to whatever it is that you need. And so, training your family, and I’ll, I’m here to tell you that training your husband is gonna be a heck a lot harder. the hardest, hard.

But it’s training your family so that they know like, okay, mom’s working. Because when you’re at, when you leave the house to go to an office, your kid knows I’m going to work. But when we work from home, your office is home. And it’s sometimes it can be hard for them, especially when they’re one or two, they don’t get that mom’s working, right? Right. And so, something that I did for myself, and you can speak to this too, Brandy, is I would tell my kids, even Dems as a little baby, right? I would nurse her, I would play with her right before I had to do something for 20 to 30 minutes, and I had that time blocked out for whatever it was I had to get done. And she got to where she knew when mom was done with that 20 to 30 minutes, I was fully done, and I would give her my attention again. Yeah.

You weren’t staring at your phone the whole time or the whole day and saying, you’re working. Right? That’s, that’s not, that’s doing a disservice to yourself and to your family and to your business, honestly. Yep. Like you can get a lot more done if you just set the time and get it done and then go back to your life. So that brings us to the next piece, which is rewarding your family. So when you’ve trained them and you know, they support you as best they can. Right? Now, think about de she’s, you know, a three year old, she’s three, right? Mm-hmm. . Yeah. only so much training can happen.

So much training can happen right now. I can just put my hand up like this to my kids and they know go away and until mom comes out of the office, right? Mm-hmm. It doesn’t work when they’re three. I remember when River was one right? And I had to hold her to do a live video because that’s the only way I could get it done. Right? It’s the only way that it would work. Yeah. So rewarding your family after they’ve, you know, put up with your business building activities for a certain amount of time. And, uh, we’re really good at this now. We used to not be , but we’re really good, rewarding our families now with, um, you know, trips or different things, ice cream mm-hmm. , uh, pizza parties, uh, things like that, that they wanna do. Yep. Is a really great way to reward your family.

Yep. And if you’re like, just starting your business and you’re like, okay, rewards seem great, but I don’t, you know, I’m just getting my business going. I don’t have a lot of money to do a trip or to do something like that. For us, it was like a family movie night. Mm-hmm. that was right. Like, it was like, okay, if if we get this done right, if we hit this goal, or we’re gonna do a family movie night with popcorn and ice cream, right? Like it was, even if it can be as simple as that, but it means the world to your kids and it’s a lot easier to train them. I mean, you think of a dog to train ’em to sit, you give them a treat, right. To train your family. You give them a reward and they reward. It’s, it’s like your business starts to become the family business that way. Mm-hmm. , they don’t resent the business, they don’t resent the time that mom’s working because they know that they’re getting something out of it.

Right. And it’s important for your spouse as well.

Yes. Most important for your spouse, especially when the money’s not coming in because they’re like, we see you spending all this time, you know, building this business, but where’s my reward? Where’s the cashflow? Where is that freedom that you talked about? Right. And so, starting from the beginning with those little rewards, like Carrie said, it could be a simple movie night where you, you know, buy them their simple, you can’t, their favorite candy at the gas station and you make popcorn. Right. Or you, you know, put a tent up in the living room and have a camp out or something. You know, just, uh, some things that kids love doing, or, you know, your spouse, I just want, you know, two hours of your time with no phone in your hand, you know, those kind of things. So Yep. You know, it’s, it’s really cool.

So the next piece is probably one of the most important one, and that is to show up when, even when everything’s not perfect. So when we started this, my dogs were asleep, right? And then somebody came to the door, and so I was like, well, all right. You know, just let ’em bark and move through it. Right. I, we could have stopped it and started over and started re-recording. But the cool thing about just showing up, even when stuff is not perfect, like dogs barking or whatever, is you relate to other people faster. Yeah. Cause they’re like, oh, shes normal. She has a dog that barks when somebody, you know, knocks on the door or Dems, you know, is coming up and talking to Carrie or, you know, uh, Kate’s with her kids, you know, doing things in the background. It’s part of who you are and it will build, becomes the husband.

The husband’s the hardest one to train. .

Definitely. Definitely.

But here’s the thing, like your husband walking in or your kids or your dog, like, like Brandy had said, that makes you real. And when Brandy and I stopped trying to hush the kids, stop trying to push ’em out, that was when our business actually started to grow, when we started to really attract people to us, because they’re like, man, like Brandi has six kids and she’s still able to build this thing and it’s proof, right? Just like me, she’s just like me with the craziness happening all the time. . And that’s, and that’s the cool part about it, is you start to really attract your tribe and people that are turned off because you have your kid in the, in the camera or who are turned off because your husband answers a phone call when you’re right next doing a call. Right? That’s happened in our community, by the way, , right. People who are turned off by that are not your people, and you don’t need those people. Right? So, I mean, it’s about being 100% yourself, letting your kids in on the adventure while you’re doing it so that it becomes a family adventure rather than just Oh, mom’s business.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s important and it makes a huge difference. So if you need more info on how to build online or you need help with your business, and you’re just wondering, okay, where do I start? There’s gonna be a link with this podcast where you can, you know, grab that and you can, um, get some free information and you know, you can, you can join our free group and all those things and get a ton of, you know, tips and tricks and things to, to build your, build your own business. Because I know for Carrie and I, when we found community with each other and the community we built, and you know, friends that we had that were doing the same things, that were on the same journey, then it was kind of like we were on this train together, right? in all the craziness that happens. And so if that’s something you’re looking for, uh, grab the link and we’ll see you next time on the next podcast.

Yep. I’ll see you later.

Bye.