Everyday Processes Bridging the Gap Between Daily Life and Entrepreneurship
Feb 09, 2024
Anthony & Jhanilka Hartzog
Striking a balance between the relentless pace of entrepreneurship and the tender moments of family life is an art form we explore with heartfelt honesty. It's easy to fall prey to the myth of perpetual availability when you're steering your own ship, but through our own trials and triumphs, we've discovered the truth about setting boundaries and savoring the precious time we have with our loved ones. This week's candid discussion peels back the layers on fatherhood, the language we use to frame it, and the vital role it plays alongside our business ventures. We also dive into the world of education, sharing our meticulous quest for a Spanish immersion program that resonates with our family ethos—providing a blueprint for listeners who are navigating similar decisions.
Our journey continues as we revisit our evolving school search, now with an older, ever-curious child whose educational needs are in flux. From the eight schools we visited to the comprehensive criteria we developed, we lay bare the process, hoping to arm you with the knowledge to make the best choice for your own family. As we unpack these stories, we encourage you to engage with us, leaving a review that not only warms our hearts but also helps us connect with more listeners who are charting the same waters. Your insights and experiences enrich our community, and together, we learn how to better blend the demanding world of entrepreneurship with the nurturing needs of our families.
Striking a balance between the relentless pace of entrepreneurship and the tender moments of family life is an art form we explore with heartfelt honesty. It's easy to fall prey to the myth of perpetual availability when you're steering your own ship, but through our own trials and triumphs, we've discovered the truth about setting boundaries and savoring the precious time we have with our loved ones. This week's candid discussion peels back the layers on fatherhood, the language we use to frame it, and the vital role it plays alongside our business ventures. We also dive into the world of education, sharing our meticulous quest for a Spanish immersion program that resonates with our family ethos—providing a blueprint for listeners who are navigating similar decisions.
Our journey continues as we revisit our evolving school search, now with an older, ever-curious child whose educational needs are in flux. From the eight schools we visited to the comprehensive criteria we developed, we lay bare the process, hoping to arm you with the knowledge to make the best choice for your own family. As we unpack these stories, we encourage you to engage with us, leaving a review that not only warms our hearts but also helps us connect with more listeners who are charting the same waters. Your insights and experiences enrich our community, and together, we learn how to better blend the demanding world of entrepreneurship with the nurturing needs of our families.
Podcast Sponsor: If you are interested in a spot shoot us an email at info@thehartrimony.com
Speaker 1:
that comes with entrepreneurship is that people think that you're always available.
Speaker 2:
Right.
Speaker 1:
Just because I control my time doesn't mean I'm always available. So sometimes like it's like I have to be strict, which is very hard for me. I try. I pride myself on being actively available.
Speaker 2:
I'm like no, he ain't available.
Speaker 1:
Like you could shoot me a DM, I'll respond, or the VA's will respond. I usually respond before the VA's respond. Or you shoot us an email. I try to be responsive on there. Or you shoot me a text I try to be responsive. Or you call me. I try to pick up on the first ring. And that's one of the challenges where you, when you are that responsive to other people, that means you're less responsive to somebody else or something else. So it's like if I'm always available for everybody else, then it takes away from me being available for Elani. And during this past month I want to say we probably got a lot closer than we normally would have you and her, me and her yeah.
Speaker 1:
Because we've spent a lot more time together. So, let's say, my meetings are done at 12, I'm like are in that rest of the day we're going to go to the park or whatever, or we're going to go visit this gymnastic place, whatever. So I was playing. Yeah, you were doing the activities with her Daddy Daycare.
Speaker 2:
I tell you you can't say that, why not? Because I can't say mommy's daycare it's my child. Yes, there's no daycare. Daycare means you're taking care of someone else, like being paid for it. That's how I look at it. At least You're not getting paid for it, it's your child. There's no babysitting my child like that type of concept. So a lot of people say that I think it's foolish. I don't think they're taking it in the technical sense, but I try not to use those two-dose terminologies Because you never say a mom is babysitting.
Speaker 1:
So it's just a dad.
Speaker 2:
So people say, oh, the dad is babysitting. So it's like a deadbeat dad situation. Yeah, you don't babysit, it's just your child. I'm home with the child. Like what it is, what it is, I'm home with my kid. Yeah, I'm home with my kid, I'm not babysitting it you get paid for those things? I guess those services.
Speaker 1:
At least so deadbeat dad, that's how I see it. At least so deadbeat dad. Stop saying you babysitting your kids. That's what Janoba's saying.
Speaker 2:
You're not a deadbeat if you're like, I'm not using it in that sense, but just be mindful of terminology. That's all I'm saying. That's all I'm saying. If you show up, you show up. It is what it is. But yeah, activities he was able to go to. But in the meantime, it was that hard decision of are we going to look for another nanny? Do we want to look for another nanny or are we going to put her into school? So the school search started. Something like I mentioned that's big for us is her speaking Spanish. So a school that has Spanish immersion, that brings our window smaller and smaller. I just want to make this Was Spanish immersion.
Speaker 2:
Spanish immersion means that in the classroom, that's all they speak is Spanish. They tend to see Spanish immersion and Mandarin immersion are at a lot of some schools. They'll offer those services, so that means that's the only language they speak in that classroom, maybe twice a week. They may get English right. So that's what we want, because we know that we will speak English with her. She needs to continue to learn the Spanish, especially as her vocabulary continues to expand. Why was that important? That's important because I don't speak Spanish.
Speaker 2:
My family is from Panama. All of my cousins, all of my uncles, everyone speaks Spanish fluently and English and I do not. I only understand it, so I don't speak enough to teach it to her at all. So we want to make sure that she knows the language and is fluent. I don't care if we don't understand what she's saying. That's fine with me, but that's why that's so important for us. So family I'm like speak Spanish to her, like everybody needs to just be speaking Spanish to her, which she understands. So she's at a good place.
Speaker 2:
But we have to make sure she continues with that and that was really important for us. So Not many schools offer that. I want to be clear about that. Yeah, then during the time that we started to look, a lot of the schools were closed due to the holiday season, so they were closed out until January 2nd or January 9th, so that was another two weeks that she would just be home, because we couldn't even visit certain schools that we were interested in the search of, looking through reviews and looking at their website, and diversity is another big thing.
Speaker 1:
So that's kind of I want to kind of put this in a tangible way where, because we get, we use, the way we use our businesses is the same way. We kind of have the same process for looking for a nanny or looking for a daycare school or a daycare. It's the same exact process when we're looking for Contractors for our cleaning business or whether looking for a nanny, we're looking for a daycare, looking for a babysitter, and it all comes down to a Few steps and I want to give the people tangible ideas for this.
Speaker 2:
So okay so that. I do want to like name the first step thing that I did before we went and went into a classroom.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I want to, I want to give them a breakdown, because I think a lot of this stuff translates across many things and it's not just for. You may be thinking, oh, I don't have any kids, but this the same process that we use for this, the same process we use for our businesses, our teams, our members, contra everything. So I want to give them that, that tangible breakdown, which is important.
Speaker 2:
I think the first thing that I would look at is why would just like? Search daycare is in my area, right, I literally put that in and I would start to look at reviews of the school. Then I will also go on their website see what information I could provide there. Many of the schools do not provide pricing on their website. That's just some of them do, but most of them do not, and I understood that Some of them.
Speaker 1:
Share so with the website part, so you do daycare my area so that's SEO, that's urge search optimization right there. So you're, if you're in, if you're air and you, if you're in a certain area and you type in daycare, my area, based on your search Agent optimization how you rank on Google is where your website is going to rank. Yeah, so more than likely, we're not going to the second, third, four, fifth pages.
Speaker 2:
I don't need to go that far. So many show up before so many.
Speaker 1:
So if you are a local service business, now we get into the business side of things. If your local service business and you, let's say lawn care, you type in lawn care my area, the first ones that gonna pop up are the first ones you're gonna click, the first ones You're gonna check out. So that search engine optimization now there are some things you could do to kind of beat that process on whether it's blogs, whether it's backlinks, you could go into all that. We talk about that stuff in cleaning business university. We teach you how to start and scale a remote cleaning business without cleaning in houses. So daycare, my area would be the first step. And then now go into the website. So you said there's a few things you're looking for in their websites.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so also it depends that we were looking for Monastery type schools. It wasn't a must-have, but it was something that we were interested in, so that may narrow down your search. The type of school that you're looking for if, if you, if you care about that was a monastery, montessor is a type of learning, basically on their end, of them Operating independently and people kind of encouraging them that way, versus you just telling them what to do. So so that's a.
Speaker 1:
for my people, that's a quick check.
Speaker 2:
You can Google it. But I'm gonna give you guys a break, now break down.
Speaker 1:
When I first heard it's her monastery and they started breaking it down, I was like this is gentrified schooling. So if you come from the hood Montessor, is. Maria Montessori is the name of the monastery is exactly when your parents were working at. Your parents were working full hours. You go home. You have to figure all this stuff out by yourself. You're doing stuff that you shouldn't be doing by yourself at a certain age. So when you about eight years old, you probably shouldn't be taking a bus or the train by yourself in New York.
Speaker 2:
That's my mom's here in Montessori learning.
Speaker 1:
You get home, you cooking dinner on the stove. That's a monastery. You, you were literally using the stove. You're using a knife that you probably shouldn't be using no, but they give them a safe knife.
Speaker 2:
They're cutting apples.
Speaker 1:
It's in a guided environment. Yeah, that's like to get hurt, but Montessori schooling is essentially gentrified schooling, where a you didn't have the money growing up and you had to figure this stuff out alone. But it's good because coming. I mean this is more from New York because we're from New York, but I learned a lot of skills and tools that I use later on in life that the people who didn't have that same upbringing was a little bit more I don't want to say sheltered, but maybe Montessori gives you a lot more freedom to kind of roam and figure things out a lot.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, but obviously a teacher's in the class in the garden.
Speaker 1:
It's not all right.
Speaker 2:
You don't know what you're doing at all. But yeah, so that was another part of it.
Speaker 1:
But yeah, I would go bed, you pulling your bed out on the floor, you sleep on the floor too. You're not saying.
Speaker 2:
Let these people do their own research. So, yeah, I would check the website. A big thing for me would be diversity. If they shared their director and Instructors information. Not all of them share that on the website, but a lot of them do. So I was like, okay, let's see who's in whose instructors there. That would be important. What else I also look for extracurricular activities. A lot of them don't allow you to do anything until they're about three, but I just want to see what they had like soccer, piano, violin, yoga, whatever. Did they offer anything, even though it's an additional fee? That was important, but otherwise they're pretty much standard in. You know, they include lunch or this is the structure, so on and so forth.
Speaker 2:
So we had done a search when she was one years old originally, so we had an idea of what we were looking for going in again this time. So we didn't visit the schools that we didn't like last time. So this time around I think we visited about eight schools, or six. Eight schools. Thank you for tapping in with us again. As you know, we always ask if you guys can please, please, go ahead and leave us five star review. Go ahead and write something if you're enjoying what we speak about. If you listen to us week to week, please be sure to let us know that helps us to continue to grow and for other people to listen to our show as well.