Episode 5: Bella In Your Business: Motivation, Podcasting, and 4 Helpful Tips

In this episode of Bella In Your Business: The impact that podcasting and Shannon Hernandez has had on me and fellow pet sitters. How to get your motivation back and your staff! My top tips: 1. Evernote 2. MeetEdgar.com Transcript: Before we get started with today's episode, I want to know, are you burnt out trying to hire employees? Or maybe you want to hire employees, but you're just terrified of that boogeyman that does not exist in the closet. Well, this episode is sponsored by my free three-part webinar series, Jump and Scale Your Business, and I would love to see you there. It's a must-have attend if you want staff, you want to grow, you feel like you're held hostage, or you have high turnover. Signing up is as easy as going to jumpconsulting.net/scale. Welcome to Bella in Your Business, where Bella will discuss anything and everything about your pet sitting business to help you land on target. So get ready, Bella's got your chute. Let's jump. Welcome back jumpers! This is Bella Vasta coming to you on Bella in Your Business. Thank you for joining me for episode five. Before we go forward, I'd appreciate it if you could jump on over to iTunes and type in Bella Vasta or Bella in Your Business and go ahead and subscribe to my podcast. That would be fantastic. Then you can get all the updates as they come out. I hope you guys have been doing great. It's been a little while since our last podcast, but I have found a whole new motivation to get back on target, so to speak, and I'm going to tell you a lot about that today. I have a couple of announcements and then I'm going to talk to you about two quick topics and then follow up with three awesome tips that are really going to help you in your business. And I can say that because they've helped me and my business. So let's get started. I was asked a couple of weeks ago to join this amazing expert hiring panel. It's actually on Monday, March 31st, and it's called Hiring in the Pet Industry. Basically, I have the pleasure of being interviewed by Mike, who is the owner and operator over there at Black Dog Marketing, and it's going to be quite fun. What's going on is that myself, along with a handful of other experts, are also going to be answering the same exact questions. They include: how do you know it's time to hire someone, an overview of how the hiring process works in the organizations, where to look for talent, what to look for in a good candidate, and how to structure compensation. I think it's pretty awesome that we're all going to be answering the same exact questions because it'll be really different to hear the responses. I'm sure my responses are going to be quite different than others, and I know that you will learn a lot and take a lot from it. So it's a free thing; you'd be silly not to listen to it, whether you're thinking of hiring, thinking of switching from ICs to employees, or just want to hire more employees. Hiring is something that once you get involved with it, it's always something that you're doing. It's never something you're not doing or ever fully okay with. So get on board with that. In the past three weeks or so, my good friend Shannon Hernandez, who is known as Shanman here on local radio KUPD in the Phoenix market, has been in the podcast realm for a little while now. Not only has he been a radio DJ for over ten years, but he also has been a teacher. So you combine those two amazing skills together and you have the most amazing podcast and performer that you could really get. He's a really great person to learn from. So naturally, I joined his group, I joined his flock, so to speak. Remember how I always say birds of a feather flock together? Well, that's definitely one flock I wanted to be a part of. About three weeks ago, I got this email and he was launching these four modules, and I wanted in. So I got the product and it's pretty amazing. It helps with podcasts and it walks you through everything you possibly need. Not only is there audio on it, of course, but there are also videos, workbooks, time sheets, and a module for podcast programming. It's really neat how he gels together his understanding for radio and segments and also performance and what goes into a good performance, and why calling up on freeconferencecall.com and then just posting it on a blog doesn’t really cut it and sound professional. It's kind of the difference between doing your own website and hiring someone to do it. He really shows you how to be awesome at it. That is what helped me be re-motivated. So I started talking in my private coaching group to everyone and finding out who actually has a podcast, if anyone does or if anyone’s interested. A whole bunch of people responded. So I went back to Shannon and said, “Hey Shannon, I've got this community and we'd really like to learn from you.” We set up a webinar and Shannon packed our brains in one hour. It was even over my head, but I wasn't too worried because I knew I had these awesome modules to go through at my own pace. He only releases one module a week so that you don't rush ahead and you really soak it all up. I thought it was really cool. At the end of that presentation, about five pet sitters joined his podcast and performance class, and they're all in this other private Facebook group with me now too. It’s kind of funny because Shannon had this great little group of diverse people and then boom, here come all the pet sitters and we are just chatting it all up about pet-related podcasts. It's kind of fun. If you're interested, I'd highly suggest that you connect with Shannon at shannonjhernandez.com. Find him on Facebook or Google Plus. If you actually go to my YouTube channel, which you can find by typing in Bella Vasta, one of my first webinars that’s posted is actually with Shannon, and we talk about Google Plus and also podcasting. That was from about a year ago, and you can just learn so much. I love learning. I get bored when I drive, I get bored when I walk, I get bored when I do laundry. So I like to listen to things and feed my brain and it also kind of gets me excited. It’s kind of like what people who work out experience — I don't exactly go work out — but it gets my endorphins going, and it makes me excited. Which kind of leads me to my second thing I wanted to talk to you guys about today: motivation. How do you get back your motivation? Because once you lose it, gosh, it's pretty hard to get back. You ever have those days where you have these thoughts and you want to execute them but there's just no way on God's green earth you actually can do it? Then you get discouraged because you can't actually execute. Or maybe you just have the time but you have no idea what to do or where to start or how to go about it. Being stuck in a rut is really hard, and I've been there. I am there right now, in fact. My life has kind of been turned upside down for the best, and I want to be really clear I am not complaining whatsoever. I have my beautiful baby daughter. She is alive when she had less than a one percent chance of being alive, and she's going to be just fine. In fact, she's sleeping and I can hear her sucking in the other room. So what happens when you lose that motivation? First thing I want you to do is don't get so down on yourself. Get rid of that stinking thinking and that negative Nancy in your head. Tell her to shut up and go next door. There's no room at your inn for her because that’s one of the biggest things that leads into my second rule when I coach, which is: you are your own worst enemy. So please don't give in to the thought of “I'll never get it done” or “It's going to stink” or “I can't do it.” You have to keep pushing forward. When I first sat down to tape this podcast the very first time, I thought I was ready to go. And I had to keep stopping because different things were happening. I tried to splice it back together and I messed the whole thing up. So this is actually my second round doing this podcast tonight, and it's actually kind of good because, first of all, I didn’t let it stop me, even though I really just wanted to lay on the couch and watch TV. The second thing is, now I have a dry run so you guys are getting everything that I have to say the second time. Lucky you. So why do you do what you do? Because that’s also going to help you with your motivation. You're going to get back to the why — the so what factor — the reason for your being. Why do you do this? Why do you work day in and day out every single day in the grind, answering the phone, dealing with people's problems, playing with the pets, walking the dogs, listening to your staff complain maybe, listening to your husband or wife tell you that you're a workaholic, feeling like you're so tired, feeling like there’s no end in sight. Why do you do all of this? For me, it’s because of my beautiful daughter and my handsome husband, my family. I want to do it for my family. And I have no idea how anyone could ever go through what I went through, am going through quite frankly, and have to go to work or have to have daycare. There’s just no possible way. And I cannot explain to you how much of a blessing my coaching company and my pet sitting company have been to me. The obvious reason is that we still have income. But the other part is that it's an escape for me. When my life gets hectic and I just want to stop being mom for 20 minutes and feel like I'm making an impact on someone's life, I can go sit down, do a podcast, write a blog, do a status update, or come up with a profile. I can allow my creativity to run, and it's kind of like a mental sprint. That’s what works for me. You might be completely different, and that’s okay. I encourage you to figure out what exactly that is and how you can motivate yourself, because knowing what motivates you is something that's really important. What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses?...