“Becoming a mom for the second time has helped with boundaries as well because you start to quickly learn that you really can't pour from an empty cup. Like with my first, I was like, oh, I can, everyone else can't, but I can. And then you learn, no, you cannot. So, setting boundaries has certainly helped.” - Jennifer Herrmann

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The Work From Home Mom with Jennifer Herrmann

Welcome to Imperfection In Progress, a podcast for ambitious women who are people pleasers, perfectionists, or procrastinators. Want to feel less stressed and more joy in your life? Then this is for you. I'm your host, Dawn Calvinisti.

Today I am joined by my co-host for the month, Jeanine Hauck, mom of 3 littles as we talk with Jennifer Herrmann, another entrepreneur mom who is a lifestyle content creator sharing inspiration in home styling, parenting and business.

Jennifer shares what it was like in the beginning of her business and how she has managed to balance life and work as her business has grown. Her scrappy ways will inspire you as you manage your own life.

Episode Transcript

[DAWN CALVINISTI]

Welcome to Imperfection in Progress, a podcast for ambitious women who are people-pleasers, perfectionists, or procrastinators. Want to feel less stress and more joy in your life? Then this is for you. I’m your host Dawn Calvinisti.

[DAWN CALVINISTI]

I love that this month I get a wonderful co-host and friend, Jeanine Hauck, to join me as we focus on the aspect of being a mom and an entrepreneur. Jeanine has been my business accountability partner for almost 2 years now. She has 3 kids under 6 and is also an amazing coach to women looking to create their best life. Jeanine can really relate to being in the thick of things when it comes to building a business and being a mom.

Today Jeanine and I are joined by Jen Herrmann. Jen is a lifestyle content creator sharing inspiration in home styling, parenting and business. She's also the co-founder of The Marketing Greenhouse, a marketing consultancy that empowers women to start, scale or better structure their business.

When she's not working at her day job (The Marketing Greenhouse), you can find her gardening in the sunshine, playing games with her family or creating content that inspires people to try new things and be the best version of themselves.

Whether you are at the beginning or further along, you’ll find what Jen shares of her journey refreshingly candid. She admits it was hard but also shares what she implemented to make life more enjoyable and less exhausting along the way.

You’ll want to check her out on Instagram at jen.naye, that’s j e n . n a y e

It always amazes me to hear where someone started from as compared to where they are now. Jen’s story is so good and she shares so many awesome ways to keep things working when you have a lot on your plate. Here’s our conversation.

[00:00:00] Dawn Calvinisti: I'm excited to be able to host, not just by myself this week, but with my co-host Jeanine Hauck, who is a really good friend, accountability partner. She's really a living life on purpose coach. That's how I'm gonna term you because you really are somebody who's intuitive and yet, you know that there's more for women than just going through the daily rigamarole, and rinse and repeats.

So I love that you're here to talk through the month of August about entrepreneurs who are also mums, and you are in the thick of it with three very young kids. And our guest today is Jennifer Herrmann, who is also a mom and an entrepreneur. And so I'm excited. Thanks for, for being here, both of you.

[00:00:44] Jennifer Herrmann: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:00:47] Jeanine Hauck: This is gonna be so much fun today.

[00:00:50] Dawn Calvinisti: So, Jennifer, can you tell us a little bit about what you do and how you got to the stage in your life?

[00:00:57] Jennifer Herrmann: Sure. It's easier to share how I got here. I really wanted to work for myself, my mom. As an entrepreneur, she actually just retired after 35 years working for herself. My grandfather was an entrepreneur and my great-grandfather started one of the first grocery stores in Little Italy in Chicago. So I come from a long line of entrepreneurs. I spent about 10 years in corporate America working in brand management on big brands like Coors Light and Dyson Vacuums. And I started a blog with an Instagram account back when you could make friends on Instagram easily. And I grew a following that then allowed me to just start doing work on my own. To be totally transparent with you, people asked me like, Hey, do you plan parties your Instagram looks really great. And I was like, well, yes I do. I do do that. You know, any, basically anything that anyone asked for that I was remotely comfortable doing, I was like, yes, I do have that service, I'll get back to you with pricing. And that's how I got into it. So my path was super unconventional. I did some wedding planning. I did party planning. I'm now I'm very much a marketing consultant and strategic business advisor. I do not do party planning anymore. I do, I run my own blog and do some brand partnerships.

But my goal is to work with women to run more women owned businesses. And I specifically tend to work with moms. Most have little kids, some have older kids, but I love dynamic women who are trying to do more.

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[00:02:45] Jeanine Hauck: I love it. I'm so curious. Like you were talking about how you're like, people are like, oh, do you do like party planning and you're just like, yes. Yes I do.

[00:02:53] Jennifer Herrmann: Yeah

[00:02:54] Jeanine Hauck: How are you able to like just jump into the taking action? Like did you feel that resistance leading up to it or are you just someone who just like both feet in?

[00:03:03] Jennifer Herrmann: So, you know, let's be clear, it was wildly uncomfortable. And I went through a period of several years where I felt so uncomfortable every time someone was like, so what, what is it that you do now? What? I, you know, I, I go to tell people about you and I'm not quite sure what title to give you, and that's when, honestly, I just set my ego aside and I wanted to be able to work for myself so badly that I didn't care about the repercussion of that.

But I don't wanna shy away. I feel like people always gloss over the beginning it was really hard. I worked a lot of nights and all weekends. And that's what it took to, to get to where I wanted to be. Everybody's journey is different but I personally chose the path. I have a firm belief that when you start out, you can either sacrifice your time or money and you know, obviously it takes a little bit of both, but I was not comfortable sacrificing money as much as I was time, so I chose the path of saying yes to anything that came my way so that I could have that money in the bank to then take the time to go do the other things I wanted to.

[00:04:15] Dawn Calvinisti: I like that you mentioned that you worked, you know, evenings and weekends that was also the beginning of my journey with kids because I wanted to be there during the day with them. And my husband could be around in the evenings and the weekends, and that's what worked. And I think sometimes people don't realize, like it doesn't have to look a particular way.

It doesn't have to be how somebody says. You do what works for you and your family.

[00:04:38] Jennifer Herrmann: Yeah, I actually had, it's interesting that you bring that up because, so my daughter's now, she'll be turning five in the fall. When I first had her is when I took my business full-time, and I actually started, I was pretty much working full-time, but I only had two days of childcare a week. So now I love the term, there's the Work From Home Mom.

I'm not sure if you guys have heard this term. I love that term. So a Work From Home Mom is essentially a mom who works around their children's schedules. When I first started full-time, which was only four and a half, five years ago, it was like, You either work or you're a stay at home mom. There wasn't any kind of a balance between the two, and I love how that's evolved because women are super dynamic.

We have the capability to do so many different things. And I initially started, I had two days of daycare every week, and then I would kind of get babysitters as I could find them and just work and cobble my work together that way. And I did that for a couple years. I've leaned on I don't know if you guys have gyms where you get childcare for like two hours a day.

I took that approach. I mean, I've done a lot of it. I'm a pretty scrappy individual.

[00:05:55] Jeanine Hauck: It's incredible how resourceful you can be if you like really wanted, like now for this interview, Dawn's like, can you do the thing? I'm like, well, it's not a childcare day, but I'm like, It's that time I can have both the kids down for nap. One of them's at kindergarten. Yeah. Like if it's a yes, it's just like, okay, now how do I get to make this work?

[00:06:15] Jennifer Herrmann: Right. And I think what's important too, I still work nights and weekends. That's because I want to, so I take my daughter to gymnastics or ballet class. And we, you know, we do have, we're fortunate where we have help with a nanny, but I flex my schedule so I can be at the moments where I want to, and then I typically will work one night a week or I'll pop up early on the weekends before the rest of the house is up cuz it's nice and quiet and I can get some stuff done.

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[00:06:46] Dawn Calvinisti: So I wanna ask you something because on this podcast, usually we talk about the three Ps, which is people pleasing, perfectionism, procrastination, and I definitely in the entrepreneurial world, in that journey, we see all of those show up. But for you, you were creating a business saying yes to kind of whatever came up that worked for you.

Did you struggle with any of that?

[00:07:10] Jennifer Herrmann: Yeah, I have so. I have always, and I still do operate within a world of fear of like the bottom's gonna fall out. I'm at, I've been at this for five years now, full-time. I meet my goals every year and it never fails once or twice a year, I'm like, oh God, I'm gonna have to go get a job. It's over and it never is.

My business partner's, like, here we go with the quarterly saga. But yeah, I mean, initially I was saying yes to things and you know, you say yes to something and the money gets comfortable, right? And then you hit a point where your time is either worth more or it's holding you back from other goals.

And we've been through this quite a bit actually. My business partner and I own the Marketing Greenhouse, which is a marketing consultancy, and we work with a lot of women owned businesses that are looking to start scale and structure. We launched. I always laugh. We launched the business on March 13th, 2020, which was during 14 days to flatten the curve as the pandemic started.

And we thought, you know, it's only gonna be two weeks. Let's just get started cuz why would we wanna lose time? Well, huh jokes on us, here we are three years later. But the beauty in that is we started the business and our clients have naturally been across the country because everything was virtual.

But over the course of those three years, we've gone through three pretty significant leveling up phases where the clients that were originally serving us were no longer serving us in a way that we were strengthening our skills or making the amount that we wanted to make. You know, you're investing all of this time and energy in someone's business to some degree, that's a mutual relationship.

So you get to a point where you have to decide what's the opportunity cost of saying yes. And I feel like a lot of my people pleasing came in. As we started the business. I did not hold to scopes very well. Anytime somebody asks for something, I would say yes. And so what's helped me with that is I try and outline everything very clearly in emails and in scopes so that everything is tied to a deliverable, like how many rounds of review there, there are, and what to expect because it is, it's really hard to say no, and especially when you own the business and you're working with another founder, there's a lot of emotional connection there, whether you're trying or not. So that I think has helped with some of the people pleasing tactics and just working on boundaries. And honestly, becoming a mom for the second time has helped with boundaries as well because you start to quickly learn that you really can't pour from an empty cup. Like with my first, I was like, oh, I can, everyone else can't, but I can. And then you learn, no, you cannot. So, setting boundaries has certainly helped.

[00:10:17] Jeanine Hauck: you can, like in your second with your second child, you can like, oh, I can still do everything. And like it's so easy. Like you definitely can do that. I just think like what you're saying, like it's just not healthy or beneficial or it's not that you can't do it all, like I've seen the stuff you've been putting out, Jen, like it's incredible.

It's not that you couldn't do it, but it's actually not beneficial for anyone in the equation if you did.

[00:10:44] Jennifer Herrmann: Yeah. And then I've also found two in particular with certain clients. You know, some of 'em may, let's say that maybe your prices typically started a thousand dollars and they say, well, I only have 500. Can you help me? The fact of the matter is you get to a place where you're watering down your work so much because you're operating within such a tight scope that it's not good for anyone.

So we have learned, you know, it gets easier as you get more experience but we have learned there are certain thresholds that we need to be at in order to best serve our clients.

[00:11:19] Dawn Calvinisti: Do you find as a mom, are you, are you taking these decisions that you're making and teaching that down yet? I know your kids are really young, but setting boundaries, you know, starting to make those choices, whether you're going to do something and somebody asks just because they asked. Does that come out yet?

[00:11:37] Jennifer Herrmann: Yeah, so it's funny that you asked that question. I certainly pay attention to how I speak about work. I was playing dolls with my daughter one day and she had a new baby. And I said to her, I said, oh, that's so nice. What? Do you stay home with your baby or do you work? And she's rocking her fake baby. And she said, I stay home now.

I had some really bad clients, so I fired them. And I thought, oh, I need to pay attention to what I'm saying. Hahahaha.

[00:12:09] Jeanine Hauck: I love in that scenario. She has no space for anyone that's gonna suck her energy. Like you're outta here. I'm sorry.

[00:12:16] Jennifer Herrmann: Yeah. But no, I do pay, I do pay attention to that. And you know, I grew up with my mom ran her tax business out of our home and I saw her clients and I saw her working, and I love setting that example for my children as well. And so when I have clients in my office, you know, Emmy's always welcome to pop in and say hello and meet the client and whatnot, but I am very mindful of how I speak about business.

[00:12:41] Jeanine Hauck: You spoke about like your business partner like kind of keeping you on track, like, oh, this is your quarterly like moment kind of thing. I know like they say it takes a village to raise a kid. Do you have that community and support? Have you created that in all areas of your life or what does that look like for you?

[00:13:01] Jennifer Herrmann: Yes, I have, and I will say it has taken years to get to that. So I'm always mindful of that because I think people who are just starting out think, oh my gosh, I will never get there. You will get there just one foot in front of the other day after day. My sister-in-law lives five minutes away from us and she's wonderful and helps us out all the time.

We have a nanny who's with us. My husband and I have a weekly family meeting where we talk about who's got what meetings on what days, and we literally have a paper schedule that hangs up so we can keep ourselves organized. We also have grandparents that are nearby, so depending on the day. We always have different help.

You know, and I, I also like to sit down at the beginning of the week usually on Sundays, and take a look at my work week and what do I have coming up? Do I need to work any nights to get everything done? What day am I'm always with the kids on Fridays? Do I have any other days that week, et cetera.

[00:14:03] Dawn Calvinisti: I like that you have that. Like that meeting, that family meeting. That's something that we've implemented in our family as well because we're both entrepreneurs and I think it, it just smooths out so many hiccups and bumps and potential, you know, conflict that could happen. Are there other things that you've done in order to make those kind of things smooth?

[00:14:22] Jennifer Herrmann: Yes. So first of all, I think it's important to have a family meeting because, especially for someone like me, I have one of my poor traits is that I will just say yes and take everything on. So if we have a family meeting, it's more evenly divided. The second thing is if there are things that we try and accomplish, and we're consistently not getting done between the two of us, or it's a big time suck. We'll outsource it. So I'll figure out whatever that cost is, plan for it, and then outsource it in the coming months. Two of the things that we recently did actually was we've hired someone to help us keep the house clean because we couldn't keep up with it.

And also cutting the grass, like those were two things that we did it ourselves the first year in our new home, and it's not that we don't wanna do it, it's just that all of our free time was going to doing chores. We were like, that's not really a healthy way to live. Like we're constantly burnt out, so what would it cost to outsource that?

I also outsource a lot of our food. We do daily harvest to help with a couple meals a week. And that way we've always got healthy food on hand. I love that it goes in the freezer. And we'll have a, we have some other meal delivery things as well, just to cover a few nights a week. I feel like someone has then cooked for me.

[00:15:46] Jeanine Hauck: I love that you're getting into outsourcing and you're talking about that because a lot of times we'll invest in our business and we'll do all of these things in our business but, and maybe I feel like, especially as a mom, but that could possibly be cuz that's my experience.

We don't value it our time as well in our personal life as well as we do in our business. Has that been your experience?

[00:16:10] Jennifer Herrmann: Yeah, I, you know, I struggled. I feel like during the pandemic especially, lines got blurred so much because everyone was home and there wasn't as much to do. So people started working more, and then the lines started to creep outside of work and redrawing those boundaries of a difference between work and home, even though they may operate in a similar space was important to me. And that's where I realized, and it's something I'm still working on, making sure that I have enough downtime to be a happy, productive human.

[00:16:45] Dawn Calvinisti: Jen, one thing I wanted to ask you is it seems like you're capable of like picking up whatever needs to be done and you will do it if it makes sense, but have you ever felt like I really just need to do it, to do it. Like I, I hear a lot from moms where like, I, I wanna do this. I think this might be a good idea.

Maybe I wanna go this way with my business, but I haven't got it down perfectly. I haven't got it completely fleshed out. And yet you were saying yes to people if you thought it was even possible. And I'm just wondering how do you make yourself take that action? Because so many people would be waiting for the perfect, you know, everything to be in place.

[00:17:25] Jennifer Herrmann: It will never be perfect. It doesn't matter how. How hard you work on something, it will never, ever be perfect. You have to be confident enough that you're not gonna screw it up. You keep, you know, I take, you know, any client that we take on, because it's a lot of people's personal investments I take very seriously.

So I have to know enough to be dangerous. I'm always honest if I'm not an expert in something And I'm really good at research, so if I can't find the an, like if I don't know the answer, I know I can find it or find someone who will find it, but you have to be like 70 to 80% confident and run with it.

In my opinion, it's the same thing for yourself. I feel like people do this, especially when they're trying to start their own business. They're like waiting for everything to be pulled together perfectly, and that's never gonna happen. Also, no matter when you start, your first post will never be as good as your 10th post.

So in my opinion, just get the first one over with and keep on moving.

[00:18:29] Jeanine Hauck: There's so many things that you can never plan for. Like you can never expect. And some of the things can even be like the feelings you feel when you're actually writing that 10th post or that first post, and the transformation, the transition that you make in that time from the experience you gained.

So I think that's so beautiful because yeah, you'll, you'll never be fully ready and in business or motherhood, it's, it's the same bag. Like you had nine months to prepare for motherhood. Did you guys feel ready?

[00:18:59] Jennifer Herrmann: No.

[00:19:00] Dawn Calvinisti: No.

[00:19:01] Jeanine Hauck: No.

[00:19:02] Dawn Calvinisti: Jen, I know that you're giving us a freebie and it's called the Personal Brand Discovery Workbook. I'd love to hear a little bit about how this is gonna benefit our listeners.

[00:19:11] Jennifer Herrmann: Okay, you guys, this is the best workbook. It goes through, I literally, I honestly feel like it's life changing. It's this 10 page workbook that walks you through yourself and what you're trying to build. It helps you think about your values, the key words about yourself. You can essentially build your entire personal brand by using this workbook. And for me personally, I did it at the end of the year last year. Doing some self-reflection, and it really helped to highlight some goals of things that I want and things that I really don't want to do, but I felt so grounded and present and ready to conquer things after I completed the workbook. We get rave reviews on it, so I'm really excited to share it with your listeners.

[00:20:07] Dawn Calvinisti: If you're looking for that, it'll be in the show notes. You can go there and grab that. You can find all the contact info for Jen and get to know her. I think this is the awesome thing about podcasts is you get to know people and find people to support you and women who are also in this journey. And you are one of those people where I feel like you're just so supportive and great to listen to and hear from and get tips from and ideas from, and you're living it.

You're living what we're doing.

[00:20:34] Jennifer Herrmann: Yeah, I'm always happy to help. You can find me on Instagram at jen, jen.naye, Jen Naye and slide into my dms. I'm happy to give you a pep talk anytime.

[00:20:48] Dawn Calvinisti: Thank you so much for being a part of the podcast today. It is awesome to be able to talk with women who are doing the things and living the life and creating what they want in, in a way that's purposeful and meaningful and fulfilling and still being a mom and still having that time and trying to I guess do it all, which we all can, but it's what do you want that to look like for you?

So thank you Jen, for sharing what it looks like for you in your life.

[00:21:13] Jennifer Herrmann: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:21:16] Dawn Calvinisti: and thanks Jeanine for co-hosting with me. It's great to have you along for the month.

[00:21:21] Jeanine Hauck: It has been a complete delight. 

[DAWN CALVINISTI]

Thanks for listening to today's show. If you found value in what you heard, please share it with a friend and rate and review us on whatever platform you listen on. It really helps get us out to other women who could benefit from listening. 

Check out our show notes for details from the show and to connect with me or our guests. Want to continue the conversation? My website is www.pursueprogress.com or DM me @pursueprogresswithdawn on Instagram. 

Until next week, pursue progress no matter how imperfectly.

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