Building a Business that Lasts
Building a Business that Lasts
Transitioning to Your Passion with Lauren Bateman
Lots of entrepreneurs start out working desk jobs that just don’t feel right. But knowing how to transition from a comfortable career to following your passion can be fraught with challenges. In this episode, I talk to Lauren Bateman about how she started a music school out of her spare bedroom and grew it to eight locations and 450+ students.
Listen to other episodes and see videos of the podcast at http://buildingabusinessthatlasts.com
Transitioning from a career to what your actual passion is, can be very hard. But it's the ideal dream for a lot of entrepreneurs. That's exactly what Lauren Bateman has done and what she shares about on this podcast. She graduated from college with a very different degree than what she ended up doing and found a way to follow her passion and grow that into a successful business with multiple locations, many employees and hundreds of customers. If you want to build your dream life and transition into something that's actually your passion, this is an ideal interview for you. Without any further ado, here's my interview with Lauren. Hey Lauren. Thanks for being on the show. Hey, how's it going? Great. I'm so excited to have you on today and have you share a little bit about your story and get, just give some insight to others, uh, to help them grow their business. So it's great to have you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well thanks for having me. I appreciate being here.
Speaker 1:So before we get started, I, you know what I always love is just to have you tell a little bit about your own entrepreneurial journey that something different to everybody and in that story is unique to you, but it also kind of speaks to how you got three yard. Everybody's kind of going through their own journey right now. So look to hear from your perspective. Just tell us a little about your own journey, how you got to where you are as an entrepreneur today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so my journey is I think like most entrepreneurs, not, not a typical straight line. I actually started, I went to school for my degree was in biology and archeology. I ended up working for a pharmaceutical company for many years and you know, was just, it really wasn't what I was passionate about. I liked the people I worked with and I was like, I just can't see myself doing this for the rest of my life. And I had always light music. I would had, you know, I played guitar through, through high school. I took piano when I was younger. Music was just something that I always loved. So I, I ended up finally going on a vacation because I was a contractor at the time and you don't get paid to go on vacation. But I was like, I need to just like go out in thanks for a moment about what I want to do with the rest of my life. And I was about 26 at that time and I went on this cruise that was a, like a folk festival on a cruise ship and there were lots of musicians there, some people that I really liked. I brought along my guitar and I did some performing on the ship to, and when I got home after this 10 day cruise, I was like, this is what I need to do with the rest of my life. Like how do I do that? So I pretty much did some research and kind of figured out, you know, how do you phase out of a job to do, to do music full time. Now I didn't have a degree in music, you know, my background was in science, so I was trying to figure out how do you go from being someone who was trained in college to be a scientist, to to being a musician, which was what I actually really, really loved. And I decided for me that outlet was, was teaching. I would be able to teach people to play music and that's how I would, I would make money because you know, musicians always a bad rap that there they're going to be poor and they're going to be, you know, begging for money in the subways, which I've done. I bust in the subways, I did it. So you got to make money in the beginning. It's all got to make money, the cashflow. But strangely enough it actually turned out that teaching it, not that it was music that was my calling, it was more teaching. I guess it turns out that I'm very good at giving instruction and teaching people how to play an instrument. So, uh, I started building this teaching business kind of out of my spare bedroom in my apartment and I got a lot of students and I was like, Oh wow, this is, this is really going great. So I gave my three month notice to my work because the job I did was very specialized for the pharmaceutical company. And My boss was like, listen, if you ever go off to be a rock star, can you just give me three months notice? Uh, so I went into her office, I think this was, I think it was may. And I went into her office and I was like, listen, I was like, this is it. I'm giving you my three month notice. I'm going off to your lungs. And she was like, okay, let's, let's figure it out. So, um, first of all, it's very kind of you to give her three months notice, will she, I mean she knew and, and you know, I'm still friends with her today and I think that's a, you know, a very important thing about being successful in life is not not burning your bridges. So we're, we're still friends today. It's so funny. But yes, I went in and gave her my notice and I'm like, okay, now I really gotta get this thing going because I'm going from making, you know, like$65,000 a year, which was pretty good for someone at the age of 26 who had like no bills or no overheads. I think my first month in business I made$400. So the comparison of what I was coming from and going to, so I really had to get this, this business going and really kind of put that fire by giving my end date. So August 1st, 2010 was my first day of being completely self employed. And again, I'm just running this out of my house. I think my first year in business I made$10,000 was, that was my first year. So that was phenomenal for me. But then word of mouth started spreading. Like I said, I, I guess I had a gift for teaching. I ended up moving and going to like a bigger studio. And one of my students, he was trying to start teaching and I said, you know what? I said, I'm getting really full. I said, why don't you take all of the students that I can't take because he was more of an electric guitar player and I didn't really do a lot of stuff on that. So I always had to refer those clients out to someone else that was more suited to electric guitar. So he started taking all the extra guitar students that I couldn't take because the whole point of me kind of starting my entrepreneurial dream, and I think for a lot of entrepreneurs is that that dream of freedom and what that means to everyone is different. But for me, you know, when I was younger, I actually, um, I cancer when I was younger. So for me, a big part of the journey is making sure that I had a business that if for whatever reason I got sick again and I wasn't able to work, that I wouldn't have to worry about where my money was coming from, that I would have a business that could run itself and pay me if I had to ever go through do treatment again. Cause it's definitely not fun and you definitely can't work when you're going through that. It's, it's really tough. Um, so that's a big motivating factor behind me. So I ended up hiring this teacher so he starts taking all these other students and I'm like, well he's working for me. I think he was doing two days a week. I'm like, maybe I can hire another teacher to do the other two days. And this was again out of the second bedroom in our apartment that we had moved to my fiance and I. And so now I have two teachers working out of my home and me in the upstairs attic studio. And I said, you know what, if this is the way this is going, as you probably get this outside of the house. And fortuitously, I was walking my niece one day and I'm right around the corner from my house. There was a building that had a for rent sign, so I called the person, it would had been an old tanning salon. And so I knew there were rooms in there and went into Gullah, got it, signed a lease and started a music school with like five little rooms. And that's pretty much how the whole thing got started with our first commercial space. So that was November, 2012 so within like a couple of years, I had built this, this music school at the time, they weren't employees, they were contractors when I first started, but it was pretty cool. And now, now we're on three locations. I have about 25 staff members and I think we have over 450 students now. So it's, so it's, it's grown quite a bit from when we originally opened our doors. Um, so that's kind of the big journey. And, and I, there was something that happened in the middle of this that when we talk about challenges later that that I will bring up that we'll kind of finish the story a bit more, but that's kind of the abbreviated version of how I went from getting started to where I am today.
Speaker 1:Wow. I just absolutely love that story. The idea of transitioning to your passion might be like, I think I'm at am I go, the title of this podcast is, is transitioning to your passion. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Be More like how do you do that? Do you go from being something to something else that you have? No, I like no teaching degree. I have no music degree. Like I really just went from doing something that I was not qualified to do it all to being probably one of the most successful people in my area doing what I do. So it's very
Speaker 1:different. Yeah. I mean, but what an opportunity that we have in the country that we have with the freedoms and liberties and opportunities that we have to kind of go figure these things out and, and go make them work. I think what I love so much about your story is, is the idea of going, hey, I realized that something wasn't right and that I wasn't really doing what I was supposed to be doing. I wasn't fulfilling my passion, I wasn't fulfilling my dream. I was just doing a job and he might even been a, it might even have been a good job and you might even have been good at it, but if I think that each of us are uniquely suited with particular gifts, which you thought was music, but it turned out to be teaching may have actually been both, but it's this idea that you really can find what you're really good at and go after it. I heard this great podcast this morning and they were talking about the idea that so many times we're so focused on figuring out what the customer needs and wants, which is really important, but sometimes we forget to build the business around what our strengths are too and was like, that's kind of exactly what you've done. But also telling the story of, Hey, I want to start, it only made 400 bucks the first week and we only made 10 grand the first year. I mean, I remember the first year I started designing extensions. I mean I was only 17 years old, but we only made$5,000 that year would be millions in sales this year. And but that didn't happen overnight. It's been, it's been 20 years since I started, you know, and, and same thing with you like your first building in 2012 but even before that, like working out of your home and everything else, it actually reminds me a lot. Have you heard the story and Gosh I can't remember her name, but the lady that started orange fitness or orange theory fitness. Have you heard that story before?
Speaker 2:I have not. And there's actually an orange theory right up the street from you.
Speaker 1:Look that story up because it reminds me so much of you and she has built like a mega multibillion dollar higher at this point, but there's an episode of her, I think it's with Tony Robbins on Tony Robbins podcast and she tells her story and it's the same exact story. Like she found this passion, she knew she was into fitness, she thought she could do it better way, which worked out of her home. She shouldn't ended up having like people like driving in like one customer at an after another in her driveway. And she was like, okay, at some point I got to actually make a change here and it's, this kind of reminds me when she started her first building and one building turned into another to another alternative, another. Now she's franchising and all this kind of stuff. And so you talked a lot about cashflow, figuring that out. You're talking about not burning bridges in the past. I'd love to kind of like dig into some of those things a little bit because you went from like a sciency background into a music background and none of those things really teach you how to run a business. None of those things teach you about cash flow. None of them teach you about how to necessarily build relationships in a way in which will help you grow. So how did you learn those things?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I guess I'm, I'm a little fortunate in that some members of my family are, are fairly entrepreneurial, so it wasn't like I actually didn't know what the word entrepreneur was until like my late twenties they, you know, they don't teach you that in school. Right. I think for me, a lot of what I learned about being a leader, if we go back to that manager that I gave the three months notice too, I think she was a fantastic example of, of what a good leader and what a good manager was. And I said, you know, if I ever became a manager, I said I want to be just like that. So I think it's important to find good examples of, you know, why do I like this person? You know, what's the reasoning behind why like this person, I liked her because she was fair, she had good communication skills and you know, she never made me feel less than, you know, she was always very appreciative and supportive and I said, you know, when I become a leader, that's what, that's what I want to be because that made me feel good as a person. So that's where I learned some of that. But for me, a lot of it was reading, you know, I read a lot of books when I was 23 I mean I kind of knew, obviously went to college, did the whole thing and graduated college, got my first job in realized this is not me, I can't do. So at 23 I started reading like retire early books, how to retire early. And I'm like, okay, all these books are like the traditional way of doing it. Like you go until you're 65 and then you collect on your 401k and I'm like, okay, what? That's like 40 years. So I'm like, no, literally I may not have 40 years. So I'm just like, I gotta figure out a way to do this differently. So I read a lot of books on finance, want to, I think one of the quintessential books that I read that changed my mind on everything was Rich Dad, poor dad. I was listening. This was when, you know you had cds. I'm not that old so you know, I think I was 23 or 24 and I'm listening to the cds in my car and there was something he said in that it is the definition of what it takes to be rich and or financially free. And they basically said when your cashflow matches your expenses, basically you are as free for as long as your money can last. And they're like, when your cashflow matches your expenses you are technically financially independent. And that just totally blew my mind. I was like, wait a minute. So technically like for them, rich wasn't having to have like a hundred million dollars in the bank. Rich was being able to have your life and that was such a cool concept to me. I was like, all I have to do is figuring out how to make enough money to pay for my expenses. And that totally changed my view on everything in terms of cashflow and money.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I just love that. Then that book two is one of those things that, you know, for me, I grew up with my, my dad was a ups driver and, um, we weren't poor by any means. So we had a nice, we had a house and we had you know, food on the table every night and we had cars to drive and you know, but we were certainly lower middle class we'd ever, there's five of us and, and I think that that all ideas, it's understanding how wealthy people or even this wealth mindset, an abundance mindset kinda changes the way you think about things and even think about money and what is a lot of money versus not a lot of money. Those things are hard to overcome. One of the things you talked about, which I think is really important is this idea of modeling success. Cause you talked about kind of seeing your old manager going, hey, these are the, these are the attributes this person has, these are the way they do things that I want to mirror and mimic. And I heard a great talk the other day. Somebody was talking about this idea that so many times it was Marcus Buckingham, he wrote this book called nine lies. We tell ourselves about work. Really excellent book. They talked about rich Dad, poor dad, and I love that book because when I was younger, you know, my dad was a ups driver. We poor by any means. We had food on the table and a house to live in and I'm very thankful for the opportunities that I had as a kid, but we certainly weren't wealthy and as a result, seeing money in certain instances was hard because even in business I would see certain amounts of money, they're like, oh, that's so much money. And I would undervalue myself and learning to think differently about money and about wealth or really changed my perspective. The other thing that you talked about was modeling success. You talked about your old manager and how you know they had so much of an impact on you and you kind of looked at them and studied what was working and what wasn't working and you want it to mirror and mimic. A, I heard the other day, a guy, his name is Marcus Buckingham, he wrote a book called nine lies. We tell ourselves about work, super smart guy and he was talking about modeling success and what he said was we spent so much time interrogating our failures to figure out what we did wrong and we don't spend enough time interrogating success to find out what went really right either in a process or in a person. You look at somebody and it's easy to look at their failures and go, hey, they did this wrong, this wrong, this wrong. What did they do right and how do we copy that? I think that's really important, so I just love that you kind of brought those two things in because I think they have so much value for people that are listening. The next thing that I'd love to hear from you on, I think this is one of the things that many business owners have the hardest time with and that is you identified, you had passion for something which is music. Then you realize you were good at teaching, which is great and you started teaching. You became successful at that. That's where most people start and that's where many people finish. What you've managed to do now is open multiple locations and have 25 people that are also teaching release staff members that are involved with your organizations. And so what you're doing now is you're multiplying yourself, which is allowing you to scale the business beyond what you would normally be able to do, which is however many hours you can teach in the day. That's not scalable. Right. So how did you learn that transition and what kind of hiccups came up along the way? Because I think that building a team is one of the hardest, but most important things that anybody can do to scale their business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's definitely, it's definitely not easy. You know, managing people and managing various personalities is, is never an easy thing. But for me, like if we go back to the, the freedom aspect for me, my whole business is about freedom. So there were, there was only so many hours in a week of my life. I was willing to give up to teach other people. And that's where I'm like, okay, but I still want to make more money. I'm like, how do I make more money? And that's how I kind of brought on those, those first couple of, of contractors to work for me. And that kept growing and I was like, okay great. I can just get other people to do exactly what I'm doing and you know, just pay them a portion of what we're charging for these lessons. And you know, obviously I had no experience with interviewing people or hiring people. I was never a manager myself. So there was a lot of things I was kind of learning on the fly and some of the early mistakes I made was just in the hiring process itself. I mean, I've definitely refined my hiring process over the past decade, you know, before I, you know, I didn't know what questions to ask people that they got one on Google and like googled great interview questions to ask people, but not really knowing how to read into the answers because obviously people in interviews will always give you the answers you want to hear. It's the listening. It's, yeah, it's listening for what they're really telling you in the interview. And in the beginning I used to do a lot of the question asking, which I think I was leading people to the answers that I wanted to get. And now I, I asked very little questions and I let the interviewee do most of the talking because sometimes they will talk themselves. You, you won't believe, I mean you probably know, but you don't believe the things people tell you in an interview. You're like, did you just really tell me that? Cause that's not gonna work here. So you know, I, I've found asking more kind of open ended questions, more things about, you know, how they feel about their past jobs, their past managers kind of gives me a little bit more insight to their, their personality. So for, I would say in the beginning I was hiring on the skills and now I hire more on the personality, which I think is way more important because you can't train personality, but you can definitely train skills. So that, I think that's an important thing that I learned and something that I did, I did wrong in the beginning. And obviously, you know, I had a fire, some people, because we have some people who came on, they have very negative personalities and we're acting like a cancer with staff. I mean I had staff members that were like, I think this person hates me or they were walking on egg shells or the whole room would change when this person would, would walk through the door. And it's like, okay, we, we got to get written. And it was hard because she was one of my top teachers and she had a lot of students and she works for me a lot of days and I had a fire her and you know, we lost some of those students by, by firing her. And I had another teacher who stepped up and kind of took on some more of the responsibilities. But yeah, I mean those were kind of pluses and minuses. And then eventually once we got big enough, we converted people from contractors to employees because there's all these, there's contractor law and you know, in Massachusetts they're very, very strict about contractors versus employees. So, you know, I hired an employment lawyer, we had a discussion and they were like, listen, you're doing everything great on the federal level, but the states not very friendly to business, so why don't you change everything to employees? So we did that when I incorporated the business in 2015
Speaker 1:yeah, I'm fortunate to live in Florida where our employment laws are pretty easy on the employer. So I'm thankful for that. Yeah. But the reality is like I think that hiring, firing and building a team is one of the hardest skills to learn. And you talked about they're having to let go somebody who is one of your best performers from a personality standpoint, they don't fit in. What kinds of things do you do in those early stages? Because I think interviews are so hard because they, they often are just not the truth. And it's not that people are even intentionally lying. It's like any of us. We're just trying to put our best foot forward and sometimes our best foots, not our everyday foot. And, and some, I'm curious for you like do you still do all of your own hiring? Do you have other team members that are involved in that? And when you do what, what's kind of the, some of the actual practical steps and processes that you go through before you go, yes, you have a job.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I do have help on that and I think, you know, something I should have mentioned when I was talking about hiring people, I think a hard thing for an owner to learn is how to trust other people because you know, I'm the only one who can do this. And what if they make a mistake if someone makes a mistake? That's how they learn. That's how I learned was by making mistakes and you learn from them. So I think that's a hard part for people to go from that step of being a sole proprietor to having employees. But now to answer your question, yes, I do have people who help me in the hiring process. They've worked with me for a long period of time. So I do trust their judgment and I know that they know the mission of the school and what we're looking for in a person. So we do have a number of stages that people go through. So the whole interviewing, the whole application process itself is an interview. So just to get your application and we, so we post on sites like indeed and all those, you know those jobs searching sites and we post our ad but we say we will only accept resumes that are submitted through this link and we put a hyperlink in the the ad that they'll have to go and we have an online application that they fill out through our website. So if they just respond to the ad, they've already failed. They told me that they don't one, they either didn't read the ad and they don't care, they don't follow directions. So that weeds out a lot of people right from the get go. So anyone who's sending in the actual application form that's getting emailed to me and you know my other staff that do the hiring, those are the people we call and we say, hey, we'd like to do a 10 or 15 minute phone interview. And that's usually what we do for teachers. Now for front administrators, what we do is anyone that comes through we say, hey great, we got your application. Awesome. Can you call this phone number? And it's usually a cell phone number and could you leave a one minute or one to two minute voice mail? Because we say we say your phone voice is actually a very important part of the hiring process. We want to make sure that you have a great phone voice. Could you call and leave like a one or two minute message with your, your name, your phone number and a reason why you would like the job. And that's, that's all we do. And then we go through the voicemails and we just delete the ones that are like, I am so excited to work for you. And it's like, no you're not. So that's how we weed out a lot of people on the Admin side. So you know, we'll probably weed out as high as 70 to 80% of people just from that alone because most people won't even call. Yup. And the people who do call, probably half of them don't have great phone voices so we won't bring them in. So at once that's done, we'll do a preliminary phone interview, which is the last 10 or 15 minutes. That's more to check, hey, what's your scheduling? You know, does the scheduling match up? Cause there's no point in us bringing you in for an in person interview if, if the scheduling doesn't match up from the get go. So we'll do a phone interview first and then we'll bring them in for an in person interview. And usually for admins they'll do two interviews. They'll do with my staff first and usually I get the final interview because if they haven't got, you know, in order to get to me they got to go through everything else first. Yeah. Which saved me a lot of times. So anyone I'm interviewing is really kind of the cream of the crop that has gotten through all the other stages.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that is absolutely amazing. And I think a lot of people that are listening are probably might be thinking, gosh, that's a lot of steps to get somebody to, you know, end up in a job. But man, it's a way bigger mistake to end up with somebody in a job that you don't want there and then have to deal with them leaving. I always say as it comes to putting, adding people to a team, it's like adding ingredients to a soup and as soon as you put an ingredient in the soup, it changes the flavor of the soup. Even when you try and take that out, the soup is still changed, you know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I, something we do now that we have multiple occasions, so if someone's applying for a job at our first location that's closer to them, I'll ask them, do an interview at another location that's further away. And, and, and I've had people be like, oh, can we do the interview at this location? Because it's more convenient for me. And I'm like, hmm. No, no. And that's something as simple as that. You know, if someone's not willing to drive 15 to 20 minutes for a job interview, that that tells you something, what else are they not going to be willing to do if it becomes like hard?
Speaker 1:Yes. Yeah. And I love that what you've done to as you, as you screen people out, and it's always amazing to me when I'll have people that will apply through indeed or something like that in the bike all, I really want this job, blah blah blah. And then we'll send back. What we do is we send back a list of bird of like six questions that we want them to specifically to reply to. And it's amazing to me how many people never even replied to that first list of questions. And you're like, and I even like in some of these tools you can see that they saw it and they just haven't taken the time to reply cause it's too much work and you're like, it's too much work for your reply to these six questions. I assure you that you're not going to be a good fit for this job. But I think what some people do as well as what is is the opposite is that they try and in person interview, everybody are way too many people and they're burning someone's time. Or what you're doing is kind of similar to my process where I'll have our team interview first. I want them to, to determine like what is this person something that I actually want to work with, you know, to, you know, do they have the skillsets to actually accomplish whatever the job is? Like clearly, you know, I believe exactly like you do, which is essentially hire attitude over aptitude and we've all heard that, but they have to have a certain level of aptitude in order to accomplish the job. But then after that, the, the personality stuff is really what separates people because, and if you get the wrong person in there, it doesn't matter how good they are at their job, it can just miss everything.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Yep.
Speaker 1:Gosh, that's so good. I think that that just think hearing your process is actually helpful to me. I love the whole call and leave a leave a one to two minute voicemail. I think that's brilliant.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Especially for admin because I mean we'll get, you'll get over a hundred applications for an admin job. So it's like how do we weed through all of this to really get down to the people that are really good? Well let's, let's put this little gate in that they have to call a phone number and it surprises you how many people won't just pick up the phone and dial a number.
Speaker 1:Right. It's amazing. And the other thing that, that has been really helpful for us in certain roles, it depends on what the role is, but in some cases we'll actually give people an actual paid job. So I will assign a client project to somebody. We just did this with a copywriter. We had two different copywriters. We came down to the end on, we're actually still making the final decision. We gave them both the exact same project with the exact same instructions. And in those situations, some people will ask them to do this free, actually choose to pay them. I want it to be a paid contract project and they're going to deliver that work. And then we have projects side by side. So we're comparing both personality, we're comparing apples to, we're comparing all those things when it comes down to the final details. But those early applicants, I mean, gosh, it's easy to eliminate 70 to 80% of them, um, without anything. And people that are listening who are wanting jobs and wanting to be hired by business owners and just follow the instructions, read the details, like fine, it's not that hard to stand out. That's what's crazy to me. And most people just won't even take the energy to, to stand out in the crowd of a hundred people that are applying for the same job. Absolutely. So one of the things you talked about earlier, which I want to circle back to, cause I think this relates to a lot of people is this dream of freedom. And I think that most people start working for themselves where they start a business because they want more freedom and they want more money, one or the other or both. And usually they're kind of overlap in some ways. And you talked about this dream of freedom and, and I'd love to hear like along the way, I'm sure that you had some pretty serious roadblocks or things that didn't go the way that you wanted them to go because while your hiring process may be pretty well ironed out right now, my guess is it wasn't at the start. While you have a great team right now, my guess is you probably didn't at the start. So, so what were some of those big roadblocks and hurdles that you had to persevere through in the early years of business?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I was very fortunate in that I had a major kind of wake up call almost two years into my, my commercial space. I actually had a car drive through the front of my business and completely destroy the entire business overnight. And this is, you know, people always talk about like business plans. I'm like, this is not something you put in a business plan. And to this day I don't, I don't have a business plan. You know, I've never written one and I, there's pluses and minuses to both, but you don't put this in a business plan. So we had been in business, it was almost exactly two years. You know, we have about 150 students at this time. I maybe have like eight to 10 employees at this point and this woman drives through the front of the business and, and basically the building ended up being condemned. So overnight I have to figure out what do I do, what do I do with this? And this is probably the most trying point in my entire life. Cause it was also that year we had that snowpocalypse where it like snow 20 feet. It was ridiculous. So we ended up, because the school was very close to my apartment that I used to teach out of and some of the students had taken lessons there already. So I said, okay, well we're going to go back to my apartment and we're going to, we're going to teach lessons out of there. I also got help from a church up the street. So we taught lessons at a church up the street who, who let us rent out some space there, some rooms and we were running my house. So it gave me my first kind of experience of running two locations at the same time. Now at this point I was still pretty much in my business and I think this is a point that a lot of, you know, entrepreneurs get to their working so much in the business that they can't do all these other things to work on the business. And I learned this almost instantaneously cause I mean when you're trying to talk to insurance companies, lawyers, you know, you're trying to be in two places at once. And I learned very quickly that that's not possible. So I almost instantly dropped about half of my client load and gave it to other teachers. I'm like, all right, I needed delegate because I learned that my time was more valuable doing other things and it was too stressful to be teaching in the business and trying to do all these other things to keep the business basically alive at this point. And there were so many nights that, you know, I almost every single night I went to bed saying, okay, I can just do this one more day. Let's see what happens for one more day. And I woke up every morning saying, I'm going to, I can't do this anymore. I'm going to quit and go back to just working for myself. But the thing that that kept me going through this, because it's probably, like I said, one of the most trying points in my entire business so far was that freedom was that if I go back for working just for myself, then I will never have freedom. So that's really what got me through. I also had employees that were counting on me to get this through. So there were a couple of reasons I wanted to, to keep this pushing. So I cut down a lot of my workload. I brought on more staff. So some of my teachers that were maybe just working a couple of days, I said, hey, do you want to come on here five days a week? I will pay you to help out doing some admin stuff. And I had people start helping me doing some of the things that I didn't need to do. So that was very important. So I learned very quickly how to delegate in that moment so that I could take some of the stress off my plate. And we did. We work through it. I found a space, you know, it took us eight months. We were, we were out of a school for eight months. Wow. I mean I had people, we had a shower curtain in my, in my living room, like a split living room, dining room with an archway and I put up curtain rod across the archway to make a room out of my living room. We actually, my fiance and I ended up having to move out of the house. We moved out of the apartment temporarily so that we could use all the rooms in the house for lessons at one point. I mean, it was crazy, but I mean those are the things I was willing to do and I had, I was nice. I talked to the city, they knew what was going on. They were like, we're not going to bother you. Don't worry. So it took us eight months to find a new space and we actually, I had a build out a whole entirely new space. I had to invest$40,000 of my own money to get the school back up and running and we built it out. And that was that because the insurance company didn't pay me money until even a year after the school was back up and run it. So it literally came out of out of my pocket. So an important lesson and also having cash flow and savings in your business too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right. You know what I love about that story is I think that so many people have similar situations at some point in life. Years is the probably the most extreme I've heard in awhile, but, but I think it's that reality that if you're going to be in business and you're going to make it work at first you may have less freedom, not more. Exactly. And along the way, at some point there is going to be a moment where you go, what have I done? You know, it was this the right decision and now what am I going to do about it? Am I going to persevere and push through this or should I close up shop? And sometimes the answer might be that you have to close up shop, but most of the time it's you've got to pivot, adjust, figure it out and push through. And that's where most people that have lasted the test of time, they have these stories where they go, here's what happened, here's how I got through it. It was tough. But here we are today as a result of that. And now you know, it's almost becomes these horrible stories become like funny anecdotes in the future because you're 10 years out from it and you're like, well you know, it was horrible at the time. But now it's just amazing that we made it. They'd like hang in a shower curtain and you're living,
Speaker 2:I mean it's funny cause you know, this time of year, you know there's a lot of transition for teachers and stuff. A lot of them work part time for us. So we have people who are, you know, moving to different states and you know, some of the schools are in flux and you know, a couple of the managers that helped me out at the schools, they're like starting to get a little stressed. I'm like, Hey, there's not a car in our, in our waiting room. And both of them worked for me when that happened. I said, there's not a car in the waiting room. Like we're totally fine. So I think it gives, I guess a good amount of perspective too. It'd be like, okay, well, hey, at least you know, the business is still operating at this point. So
Speaker 1:yeah. And it gives you perspective to look back on the past and go look at what we have gotten through to get to where we are. And I just love those stories because it's, it's the reality that starting your own business, very hard work and anybody that thinks it's going to be like a cake walk along the way is lying to themselves and they need, they need a reality check so that when they get to those hard days they go, oh yeah, somebody told me this was going to be hard and here's how I'm going to push through it. And having the right people around you to be able to push through it, we'll support you and help get you through those seasons is really important.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that's too at, you know, they got people, I say it's good. It's good to know your reason why you're, you started the business in the first place because if I didn't keep going back to the freedom thing cause I was like I could just wipe this whole thing. I was like I could just send everyone home and cancel all the school students and just keep teaching my people and I'd be perfectly fine, but I'm going to have to start all over. All the work that I put into building this to where it is now basically goes down the drain and I didn't want to let that happen.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I've had those same exact thoughts before it, certain seasons of going, Gosh, I'm in a certain point right now where I could just close the whole thing up and just do random consulting on my own and probably make plenty of money. But that's not what I want to do. Like I want to create a business where other people have opportunities to have jobs that are dream jobs. I want to create opportunities for, you know, clients to help them grow their businesses. And the only way I can do that at scale is with a team. And you went back and do that. One of the big things I'm planning for next year as my own 20th anniversary gift to myself is I'm gonna take a whole month off. And one of the big brain shifts I've had lately is the last couple of years I've been focused on how does the company survive without me here and what I've been changing that thought process to literally as early as this morning is as the company thrive without me here because that's a very different reality. And I think that's the dream of every entrepreneur to some extent.
Speaker 2:Definitely.
Speaker 1:So as we kind of get towards the end of this episode, I love talking to people like you because you just have like, I don't know, this kindred entrepreneurial spirit where you go, man, I, I just, I feel Ya. I know where you're at. Like keep pushing through it. One of the things I love to talk about in every episode is work life balance. And that means something different to everybody. I don't even really like the term, it's just the most relatable that people understand. So first of all, what does work life balance even mean to you and how has that changed for you through different seasons of life?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I mean, obviously when I started my business, there was no work life balance. And I think that's an important thing for people to understand when that, when they're starting a business is there is no work life balance. Like just throw that out the window for the first five years cause it's, it's just, it's not going to happen. Uh, you have to put in the sweat equity into building the business and building it in such a way so that you can have some work life balance down the road. So what does that mean to me? I mean, at this point now it means, I mean, I, I literally just opened a third location in January, so I'm back in the business a little bit, but more from, from the, the big standpoint. So that's what happens. It's like there's going to be times where you have to jump back in to the business to do some of those things that only you can do, but it's temporary and that's the good thing to remember, you know, oh there's this little bit of pain, but it's gonna help me grow so much that it's just going to be, it'll be worth it. So, but I mean before I opened the third location, when I just had to, I mean a work week for me literally was a few hours because I have people in place at the schools that run a lot of the day to day stuff for me. And I think that's important if you want to achieve that work life balance, which, which for me is basically I can go to work if I want to and if I don't, if I don't want to, like today it's a beautiful day outside. If I don't want to go to work, I don't have to, I'm going to go down to the beach. So that for me is what work life balance is. Being able to actually have decisions about what you want to do for work that day. Um, and I tend to be a workaholic myself. I was the person who always brought the laptop on vacation, which wasn't really a vacation cause I work the entire time. It was just, you know, it was my workcation someplace else. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs have done that when they start a business. So I think to achieve work life balance, you first need to learn how to, to trust people and delegate and not, like I said before, not be afraid to teach people to do what you know. Cause I know a lot of people are like, Oh, if you teach people, like they'll go off and they'll start their own business and there then they're going to be your competition. It's like, does that happen? Yes. And I know people that that's happened too, but that's really the minor percentage. And if you run your business scared. I mean if you've built up a business and it's a good business and you have competition, that's not a bad thing because if you really have a good business, it doesn't matter if there's competition because people like you for what you've built. And you know there's a lot of people out there, you know, being an entrepreneur, like I said, you go from, they say entrepreneurship, it's the only job where people will quit working 40 hours a week to work a hundred hours a week. And that's what is in the being in a lot of people don't want that. And there's a lot of risk involved in starting a business. So I think it's important too to find employees one who want a little bit more responsibility. Cause I've had people ask like, do you need help? And it's like, yeah actually I do. I have this, this project here. Would you like to help me on it? And you know, finding the things that you don't need to do, like admin stuff, you know, answering phone calls, email bill. I don't even do billing. I check the billing, but I don't even, I don't do billing because I can pay someone else way less money to do that and not bother my time. Right. I think that's an important thing and I think something that's hard in the beginning is for people to actually invest that money into someone else. Because when you're working by yourself and it's just you and you know you're making$100,000 a year, now you gotta pay someone 20$30,000 to do this other work, you're like, crap, I just, I just gave myself
Speaker 1:the 23rd is$30,000 pay decrease. Yeah. And that's what people, they see it as a loss of income as opposed to, you know, a temporary dip that will allow them to grow that income further. Yup. Absolutely. Without the help, you're just stuck at 100,000 yeah. And so many people, that is the mentality. If that's you, if you're okay with that and you're happy with what you're doing, good for you, go for it. Like I, you don't have to do any of the things that we're talking about, but I think that, you know, if you really want to scale, grow and create real actual freedom for yourself, you have to be able to empower other people and give them opportunities. I actually just did this probably three months ago now. I hired an executive assistant just for me. Now we have an office admin who does billing and all kinds of other ramps stuff and she helped me with a lot of that kind of stuff, you know as well. But now I have somebody who, she's just part time right now, 15 hours a week, but she's in my inbox all day long. So like right now my emails getting checked while I'm on this podcast, but somebody else can, it turns out, can check my email, somebody else can schedule my thing, somebody else can help delegate things for me. Nobody else can record this podcast. And, and ultimately that is what I've really tried to work on. Which sounds like the same thing for you is figuring out like what are the things that only I can do that are also in my desire zone, in my competency zone that I'm actually good at that I want to do and delegate everything else. What you were talking about there of not wanting to hire that person even though you know, help you scale. It's just such a short mentality. So many people get caught in this. Like I'm trying to run a sprint and to me I'm like, I'm running a marathon, I'm doing a marathon, I'm running an ultra marathon, you know this long, long game that I'm playing and every decision that I make is built around what does it look like 10 years from now, not next week or next month. So have you like, we're like, you know, just on the same page. I love it. It's good stuff. I'm going to have to hire someone to read my emails for me. I'm telling you, I kid you not. I thought it couldn't be done in a, I was a little bit of a side tangent, but I really thought it could not be done. And I was at a conference in January, another guy who runs an agency similar to mine. I was like, hey, how's it going? You know, what do, what do you guys do in new? He's like, Oh man, I hired this executive assistant in October and she, he's like, I barely even check my email anymore. And I'm like, that's impossible. Nobody can do my email. Like it's my email. Like I'm the only one that can reply to my email. Plus isn't that kind of an invasion of privacy and all these other kinds of things? And he's like, I'm just telling you, he's like, it's the best thing I've ever done. And I'm like, okay, going back a little explanation, do a little research, find a company, hire somebody. And she's actually a virtual executive assistant and she checks my email and it turned out what was, what happened after that conferences, every email I got after that, I thought to myself, could somebody else do something with this email? And all of a sudden I realized that probably 80% of my emails, somebody else could have done something and to multiply it, what's happening now, which is has so much power, is she's delegating things that I probably would not have delegated. And it's actually great because I'm going, well, I could have dealt with that. And then I'm like, wait,
Speaker 2:why?
Speaker 1:Because somebody else can deal with it. And I'm just limiting somebody else's opportunity by me being the one that deals with it. So anyway, if you haven't done that yet, anybody that's listening or even you learn, I would encourage you to check it out because it has been like, oh, it's, I feel like I'm like on a new planet of freedom all of a sudden the last, uh, last couple of months. Awesome. As we wrap up, I'd love to hear from you, like how you continue to pour into yourself. You mentioned early, early that you were big into books in the early days is that story you get your morning as a kind of a mix of places. You're obviously pouring into a lot of other people as a leader. So how are you kind of keeping your tank full and keeping your education and kind of mind and spirit head of the curve where it needs to be?
Speaker 2:Yeah, for me, you know, a big thing is it's, I'm always reading books. I'm always reading new books and you know, there's always people recommending books. So I always, you know, I, I feel as a leader you can never stop learning. If you stop learning, then I think your business starts getting affected by that. So I'm constantly reading books. Um, I also, you know, I, I attend conferences like webinars and other stuff online just to, just to keep learning because you know, even if you listen to a podcast, something like this and you get one cool idea from it. I mean, here I am, I'm doing the pot, you're interviewing me and it's like, great, I got to go hire someone to do my email. It's like I actually learned something by putting the podcast with you. So, so you never know. We're going to pick up, you know, one or two if you, if you read a book and you can pick up like one to two things that you can actually go and implement in your business than it was worth reading that book.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's so true. I mean I think people try and like they want to feel like they need to take all the knowledge out of an event or a book or anything else and I feel exactly the same way I'm even about this podcast. The whole idea of having an admin type role call and leave a one to two minute voice mail, like that one little nugget from this interview for me has so much value. And so I always tell my team like, look, selfishly for me, all these interviews are just like me having a chance to talk to the owner for an hour and we get to kind of talk through shop and business and hopefully we both learned something out of it. And then hopefully the people that are listening learn something out of it too. And then everybody's winning and that's where it's good time. Spin as far as I'm concerned. So I love that constant learning mentality. What people want to learn more about you? Where can they do that online?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I actually have a website's Laren bateman.com. Um, you can go and visit that. It's a, I am a guitar teacher. I do online guitar lessons as well and I have an online program there, but I do, I do do business coaching with people as well through through the website. Um, you know what I'm active on, on social media, Instagram at the alarm Bateman is my Instagram. I do have a youtube channel and all those fun things, but usually my website and Instagram are like the big ones to touch, you know, to reach out to me and say hello.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Lauren, thank you so much for being on the show today. I will put your link to your website in our show notes so people can get to it and I really appreciate your time.
Speaker 3:Awesome. Thanks Jay. I appreciate it. I hope this episode has given you some ideas or inspiration that will help you grow your business. If you found it helpful and you know somebody else who might benefit from it as well, I would greatly appreciate it if you would take the time to share this with them, maybe on Facebook or Twitter or Linkedin, or even shoot an email over to a friend, uh, with a link to this podcast in it. And if you haven't already, make sure you sign up for our email list@buildingabusinessthatlasts.com.
