#1 - Managing Your Team with Keelie Reason

In this episode of the Morning Upgrade podcast I talk with Keelie Reason about her business and how she manages her team, her love for writing, her morning routine and more. 

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Announcer:

Welcome to the morning upgrade podcast with Ryan Cote, where we feature casual conversations with entrepreneurs about personal development and growth.

Ryan Cote:

Hey everyone. This is Ryan Cote, for the morning upgrade podcast. I’m excited, you’re here with me today. With me today is Keelie Reason. Hey Keelie, how’s it going?

Keelie Reason:

It’s going well. How about you?

Ryan Cote:

We’re going down the shore for vacation so the family’s excited about that. So good things to come. Why don’t you start out by telling my audience who you are, what you do, and then what you enjoy, what your interests are?

Keelie Reason:

Well, again, I’m Keelie and I’m the owner of R5 website management. I started this business by accident because I just fell into it basically and it’s been growing ever since. I’m married to my husband, Austin, we run the business together now, we’ve been with each other married for 17 years, been dating since we were 16 so always together. And some of the things I love doing, just creating, anytime I can create things I love creating for my clients. I also, just in my personal life, like to make stuff, crafts and art and food, whatever, I just love to create and create with other people. So I like to get the kids involved in a lot of that too.

Ryan Cote:

Absolutely, you have a good profession for that and you create a lot of content with R5. So you kind of, your career is your passion. That’s a good thing to tie those two things together. It doesn’t always work out that way.

Keelie Reason:

Yes, It’s been such a blessing.

Ryan Cote:

The morning upgrade podcast, it’s about personal development and growth, entrepreneurship. So we can go in different ways here. I’ve got some questions I want to ask you, and then we’ll just see where the conversation goes. The first thing I’d like to know is, I’m a huge fan of morning routines, hence the morning upgrade name. I’ve got my own set routine that I do that I’ve kind of refined over the years. Can you tell us a little bit about, well, if you have a morning routine, what it looks like, and if you don’t, are there any habits that you’ve created for yourself to help your business?

Keelie Reason:

Well, actually, I learned this from you, reading about what your morning routine looks like and your whole philosophy behind it. Cause I thought morning routines were for people who needed help waking up in the morning or also who needed to like draw their energy from solitude and quiet. So I didn’t think I had one, but I actually do. I have had insomnia since I was a child. So I’m always awake anywhere between two to five in the morning. And for a long time, when I was a kid I’d get up and do things and my parents would yell at me to get back in bed. So I forced myself to stay in the bed. And when I started the business, I worked from home in my bed during those hours, but about two years ago, I was like, I got to stop this. This is stressing me out. And I became more intentional in what I do. 

Over the last year, I just spend a lot of time reading and working on, you know, reading resources that’ll help me to develop the things that are most important to me on a personal level, which is being a person who’s more loving and kind, and patient and service-based. And those are the things that I really want to grow in myself. So I spend time every morning focusing on that. Then I have to be very intentional to push away, like everything that floods at me for the day, like all my task lists and to-do list, anything that stresses me out or I won’t come back to sleep. But I often find that at the time of the morning I have a lot of people in my life come to mind. So I’m usually very motivated to get up and tell them that I’ve been thinking about them or whatever. Whenever I get up in the second part of the morning, I try not to text people at two in the morning, sometimes I do. And that’s pretty much what I do. And I’m just going to throw this in there but I told my kids part of my morning routine was looking at hedgehogs on Instagram. And they told me that I couldn’t make that be part of this.

Ryan Cote:

We’re into that. I mean, I think everyone has their own morning routine. Like, you know, I think just getting up there and getting out of bed and putting your feet on the floor and taking some deep breaths and thinking about what you’re grateful for, whatever the case is or who you’re grateful for. I think that could be a morning routine in itself. I think there’s a lot of similarities with what you said and what I do. So I think in terms of creating a morning routine, it really just has to be like, what works best for you and what goals are, and how the morning routine ties into your goals. So thanks for sharing that. So what does a perfect day look like for you?

Keelie Reason:

Well, you know what’s amazing is that we worked very hard and made a lot of sacrifices and hustle quite a bit to be able to have our perfect day, most days. Now obviously, the pandemic has made a little bit of change in what my perfect day would look like every day, but mostly we still get to live that. And for me, flexibility, the thought of a nine to five job really does give me a lot of anxiety and dread. And I did work a nine to five job for about two years when I was in college and I hated it. So I was like, I will never do this. I want a life where I can be available and flexible, work on things that I want to work on every day, and still have the ability to be there for my kids. So I am, right now they’re remote learning because the schools can’t reopen or whatever. And because of the job and life and vision we’ve always had, we’re here for them. It’s not affecting my ability to work, but also I can be there for them. I don’t have to leave them at home and hope that they just make it on their own while I’m gone.

Ryan Cote:

I think being crystal clear on what a perfect day looks like for you, I think that’s really important. Something that I didn’t take too seriously until semi-recently like literally writing out like, okay, what is… Not that every day is gonna be perfect of course, but what are the elements of a perfect day that if you checked off all the boxes of each element, by the end of the day, that means you’ve had a perfect day. So I think being crystal clear on that is very important. So let’s talk about R5. You said it was accidental. So it sounds like you didn’t mean to obviously start the business. It wasn’t intentional, but it sounds like it just grew. Can you talk a little bit about why it was accidental? Like what did that path look like to get you to where you are now?

Keelie Reason:

You know, I always wanted to be a stay at home mom ever since I was a teenager, my mom stayed home with us. I mean, it was just so beneficial to me, I could just feel that even at that age. She went to work when I was 16, I was the youngest. So I kind of felt her leaving. And I was like, I really want to be home with my kids and make that my main priority while they’re being grown. So I always expected to find like five gig kind of work cause I watched my mom do that. She was a self-taught seamstress and she would sow for people and teach piano and she was self-taught in that. So I just watched her teach yourself how to do things and then turn that into side money. So I always wanted to do that and it was very hard. I couldn’t find anything. I tried all kinds of stuff, embroidery and I mean, I just did all of this crafting. 

I did all these things and one day I found an outlet that people paid me to write. It was fantastic, I didn’t even know this. I wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, but I never pursued it because when we were kids, you would have to be a professional to do that. Like you’d have to work for news stations and magazines, but then here came the internet and anyone can add content to the internet. So the flood gates opened. I had no clue, anything about this industry, and it just grew and grew and people would ask me if I could do stuff and I would always be like, sure. And then I would like, get off the phone and go Google how to do whatever the thing was because we really needed the money. I couldn’t say no. So I just taught myself how to do everything. If they said, can you do it? I was like, yes.

Ryan Cote:

What’s been the hardest thing? Obviously, most business things aren’t super smooth. So I’m actually going to hit you with a two-part question here. What’s the hardest thing that you had to deal with in the business and then throughout the business, have you learned any sort of tips or tricks or it can be from the way you process the work or the way you manage your team or anything like that?

Keelie Reason:

I would say probably the hardest thing was changing my mindset from being a DIYer in the business because I am a DIY person. Like that’s my nature, I want to do it myself. I don’t want to rely on other people, which is part of it. And that’s just like an emotional issue. But in the business, I’ve found that if I couldn’t do it, I had to find people who could, or if I didn’t want to do it. And that’s where it eventually grew. Like if I don’t feel like doing a tap, I won’t say no to the client. I just get someone else who likes doing that kind of thing on my team to do it. So being able to realize that I couldn’t limit myself or shouldn’t limit myself because I didn’t know how to do things or didn’t have time or didn’t want to, I needed to be willing to pay others to do that. 

So that’s very hard. I feel a lot of business owners struggle with this. They say they can’t and they’ll say they don’t have any money either. And I’m like, okay, hire that out and you have more time to make the money. I mean, that’s like, you know. It’s a very, very hard concept to get through, especially for an accidental business like me. You’re just like, I’m just trying to buy groceries with this and shoes for my kids, but now I gotta like do things. So that was definitely my biggest challenge. What’s your other question? I forget now

Ryan Cote:

The other question was, well, I think you may have already answered it with the delegation part, which we didn’t dive deeper into, but it was basically, you know, what have you learned? Have you learned any tips or tricks in running your business in terms of mindset or the way you manage your team? Obviously, delegation, that’s a huge takeaway right there, but is there anything else that you think is worth mentioning?

Keelie Reason:

Yeah. As far as choosing my team, I would say that I go about this very differently than most companies. Instead of looking for someone that possesses the kind of skills that I’m looking for. I actually look for people that are in their right kind of situation, the right demographic. Because I find that we are definitely going to keep them longer if they fit a certain demographic. Usually, they’re stay at home parents and they have two motivating goals. Either they really desperately need the money or they need to feel like a grownup and this job provides that for them. So as long as they have that, I can find work that they will like. I think most businesses don’t look for people in that way. They look for people who can fill tasks. And I just look for people who are willing to show up and do the work and have the motivation to do it.

Ryan Cote:

I liked it a lot. I think it’s very smart. It’s sort of, in terms of like managing people, everyone’s got a different style of how they should be managed or how they like to be managed. You’ve taken that kind of approach to managing people, to, you know, the roles that they fill as well. It sounds like the team if I had to guess, is pretty fulfilled as well. Cause they’re doing what they’re good at and that leads to fulfillment. Is that correct?

Keelie Reason:

I think so. I mean, they all seem happy and they’re not leaving me. I mean, they do, sometimes they have to because their kids, you know, life changes and I expect it. I just have this revolving door. I say, Hey, things are crazy for you right now, come back when they aren’t.

Ryan Cote:

Yeah. Well, I want you to tell everyone, we’re going to wrap up one last question and you can tell everyone how they can reach out to you if they want to connect with R5 or you. So my last question for you is around personal development habits. Do you have any personal development habits that you do every day that you feel help you grow as a person or grow as a business owner?

Keelie Reason:

I do. So I am not like a novel reader. I don’t really have the attention span to read something super long. So I definitely relied very much on blog reading and I always try to read at least one industry-related post every day, whatever that looks like, you know, whatever I’m dealing with. So I always read something that’s the latest in the news. And if there’s ever courses that are offered to me or I look around for courses, I always take courses, whether it’s marketing related or productivity, whatever it is, I’m able to take a lot of courses as part of my job. So I make time for that, which I think is very hard to do because then you have to be like, I’m not going to make money during this time, but I am going to be training.

Ryan Cote:

Self-education I love it. You may not be making money doing it, but it’s going to lead to, you’re investing in your future self so eventually the money will come as a result of the skills that you’re improving or learning. So I love that answer. All right. Well, thanks Keelie, for being on the show. If someone wants to reach out to you, what’s the best website for them to go visit.

Keelie Reason:

They can always check out R5websites.com and that will take you to our website that just shows kind of what we do and how we help our clients.

Ryan Cote:

R5websites. Perfect. Well, thanks for being on the show, and everyone, thanks for listening. Talk to you soon.

Announcer:

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