S2E6: A Pioneer In Digital Resource Creation - SLP Jenna Rayburn Kirk

In our 6th episode of this season's "How I Built My Speech Path Business," Kim and Mary talk to Jenna Rayburn Kirk, a pioneer in the world of digital creation and blogging and owner of Speech Room News. Her story begins in graduate school, with a literacy intervention program that set the stage for her online venture.   Working as an SLP in the schools for many years, Jenna has created hundreds of resources that can be accessed by other speech therapists.  As she shares her experiences, you'll learn how crucial it is to keep publishing and nurturing connections within the SLP community—a powerful testament to the rapidly evolving digital landscape of resource sharing.

Jenna takes us through her process of creating resources that she personally needs for her clients, and then looking at the bigger picture on how that resource can be used for multiple kids by many different speech therapists.  This process has helped her create an online presence which offers much needed resources for therapists all over the world through Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT).  Jenna walks us through pricing resources, getting reviews, building a TPT store, using SEO for her business and website, and how her blog and other platforms generate income.  She also shares her go to subscriptions she couldn't live without for all of her creating processes. 

Jenna currently stays home with her 2 little boys (although she has taken over a maternity leave for a SLP at a school), and runs her Speech Room News business.  This consists of continued digital resource and course creation, blogging, speaking engagements, professional development and more.  She's focused on prioritizing her time with her family and is always open to new ideas and paths this field has to offer. 

You won't want to miss all of the information and details Jenna shares in this episode.  It's truly gold!   

Check out Jenna's website - Speech Room News and her IG Account!

Also, if you haven't done so already, follow our podcast!  You will be the first to know when new episodes release.  We would also love for you to leave a review and rate our show.  The Speech Source appreciates your feedback and support!  Follow here!

Follow Kim and Mary on IG here! - https://www.instagram.com/thespeechsource/
For more information on speech, language, feeding and play - visit The Speech Source Website - https://www.thespeechsource.com/

Also, if you haven't done so already, follow our podcast! You will be the first to know when new episodes release. We would also love for you to leave a review and rate our show. The Speech Source appreciates your feedback and support! Follow here!

Follow Kim and Mary on IG here! - https://www.instagram.com/thespeechsource/
For more information on speech, language, feeding and play - visit The Speech Source Website - https://www.thespeechsource.com/

Transcript

Jenna: 0:00

I think if you continue to publish your work and put goodness out into the world, those kind of relationships will find you, and that's what happened for me early on. It's different now because there's so many people publishing so much good information, but I do really feel like if you keep putting yourself out there and keep making content and trying to help other speech therapists and build your business at the same time, those kind of relationships can be made.

Mary: 0:30

Welcome to the Speech Source Podcast. My name is Mary Brzeek.

Kim: 0:40

And I'm Kim Dillon. We are two pediatric speech-language pathologists with a combined 25 years of experience.

Mary: 0:42

We are your source for speech, language, feeding, play and much more in between. This season on the Speech Source Podcast, we are going to be interviewing 12 incredible SLP entrepreneurs who have all built their own businesses. Some of these women are app designers, content and digital course creators. Some are podcast hosts, speakers, coaches, business owners so much more. These women are going to give us all the inside scoop on how it's done as a speech pathologist, going off and building your own business. So join us each week as we hear their journey and how they built their SLP business.

Kim: 1:28

Welcome to today's episode. We have Jenna Rayburn Kirk and I'm sure many of you are familiar with her. She is coming on to tell us all about being a speech therapist and all of the businesses that she has done. You are one of the original TPT creators. I can remember, jenna I was in the school 10, 15 years ago and getting a hold of your resources and they were huge. We're so excited to talk to you about how you started that and just where you've gone from that, cause I know you've done so many amazing things. So welcome. Thank you for spending your time with us, thank you, thanks for having me.

Jenna: 2:06

Yeah, my name's Jenna and I still consider myself a school based speech therapist, even though I'm currently not one. Sorry about the cough, I have a sickness that I'm getting over right now. Of course, my kids brought that home from preschool, so of course, I'm going to do my best.

Jenna: 2:21

So I became a speech therapist about 12 years ago. Course, I'm going to do my best. So I became a speech therapist about 12 years ago and when I was growing up I lived next door to a family of three boys and their youngest kiddo had autism and so I babysat the older kids a lot of days when the local children's hospital therapists would come and do therapy with a younger kiddo, like early intervention and then through preschool and elementary school. So my family and I were around that kind of therapy universe a lot and I would always tell my mom I wanted to be a teacher and she was like I don't think you want to be a teacher. She probably knew me better than I knew myself and she's like what do you think about like shadowing some of these occupational therapists and physical therapists and speech therapists and see if maybe one of these would be a better fit for you, because you have a little more flexibility and moms know best.

Jenna: 3:08

So here I am, 12 years into my career, and I love being a speech therapist. So I always knew I wanted to work in pediatrics and I went to Ohio State and then started right away working in an elementary school and a preschool and I would say that's where my most joy is found in the preschool age, early intervention and preschool programming and I had this really cool graduate school experience where one of our professors was a speech therapist in an elementary school and he came and he taught like the school-based class, and that school lost their Title I reading instruction and so they were looking to start a program based on literacy and speech therapists in schools, and so I jumped at the chance to do that. So I got to spend an extended year like a whole year in a school district in Ohio doing literacy intervention in addition to my speech therapy placement. So it was part-time and we did this training for parents and then the parents did part of the intervention too. It was just a really interesting experience.

Jenna: 4:13

And I showed up there on the first day and he's like okay, here's a reading A to Z login and now you need to do this language and literacy intervention with these kids and you need to develop the resources too. So I started making resources during graduate school and I watched this mentor of mine, steve, have a website dedicated to downloadable digital resources and then, of course, I caught the spark and the bug and I was like, yeah, we could share resources so easily. And then, after a year of being a speech therapist, I found out about TPT Teachers Pay Teachers where you can have a store and have your resources downloaded by therapists all over the world, and the rest is history. That's how my business got started.

Kim: 4:56

As a child and growing up, do you feel like you just had a passion for creating?

Jenna: 5:00

Yeah, I like creating things and problem solving, but I'm also like, not artistic. I cannot draw to save my life, so luckily I can purchase clip art, but I can still design things and solve problems. That's my favorite thing is. My favorite thing is to get a new client who so far the team is stumped by we haven't figured out that thing that works for them. And then I make something or I handwrite something and I draw something and it works for that kiddo. And then my brain goes to okay, now how could I make this work for more kids on my caseload? And then how could I make it even more accessible for everyone? Maybe somebody else has a student like this who needs the resource like I do.

Mary: 5:40

That's such a great creative process because I guess it all starts from that one child who really benefited from it.

Jenna: 5:47

When you're a speech therapist, you feel like there's nobody else in the building to talk to who has the same problems. You do the same kind of goals that you do for your student and you just wish you could pick someone else's brain. And that's what this whole world of downloadable instant resources has given us is the ability to be like oh, so that's what's working for your student. We didn't have to wait for 10 years of a research lab to ask a question and write a paper and get it published and then tell us here's a strategy and this is working. Instead, we can more collaboratively try things and find out what's working for our own students and then share it. So that's how all of my resources have started. They've always been something that's a time saver for me.

Jenna: 6:31

I make a lot of parent handouts and all of those conversations I've had with hundreds of parents over the years. I streamline that into kind of the way we talk about different disorders or interventions and then I make it into a handout and hopefully that saves someone else time. Or an AAC resource, where I can't get a kid to be engaged at all with their device, and then I figure out if I could rewrite the picture book that the class is reading into, something that uses their symbols, and then I have adapted picture books resources and it works for my student and then I expand it out so that everyone can use it with their students. So all of my best resources get started from that space of wanting something that works for my students and then it grows from there.

Mary: 7:17

I love that because so often when you see a caseload of kids, you feel like you're really reinventing the wheel again and again and having the same conversations with parents. But when you have a full caseload you don't have time to make a beautiful parent handout and all the things that you want. How do you feel like having parent handouts and having just that paper and that reflection of who you are and your knowledge on paper? How has that affected your credibility? With other teachers and parents.

Jenna: 7:48

Yeah, I don't know what it is about having something written. That does give you more credibility, but that's such a valid point. Also, I just think being a parent now, it is so overwhelming. I go to my kids' pediatrician appointments and the pediatrician laughs. She's like get out your list, because she knows me, because I'm going to have a list, because I cannot remember the things I've been worried about for four months unless I write it down. And then when I leave there I can't remember to tell my husband unless I have written it down. Her answer it's just like in the moment of dealing with so much, we're all dealing with so much in the world, every single person has so much on their plate. To have something written down makes it feel way more likely to get used. That information. I do think it gives you more credibility and more structure. It also just helps you stay organized.

Jenna: 8:37

As a therapist, I worked on the evaluation team for my preschool, so we did all the incoming evals. It's 100 play-based evals a year for a preschool team, including our summer evals, and it's stream lines are speaking to them because we don't want to be using jargon to these parents. We don't want to overwhelm them with information we're not trying to give them a 10 page written report. We just want to have a conversation that shows okay, here's where I see your kiddo's strengths, here's where I see their needs. These are the kinds of goals we're going to write and this is the progress we want to see in a year. And so, if you can help yourself be more clear, it gives you that credibility to break it down into something manageable for that parent to walk home and understand.

Kim: 9:21

Mary and I just had that conversation this week with some things that we were using with parents because, especially with the younger kids and the play base, a lot of it is so anecdotal. It's not as easy as when you can pull out a standardized test and look through and show numbers and point out exactly where they're having a hard time, and so when you do have something to show them, you're giving them a plan, you're giving them a process, and that encourages parents and empowers them when they're like OK, I can take what she gave me and I can use this.

Jenna: 9:51

I have two boys. One is three and one is one. They're almost two and four and my older kiddo is getting speech therapy. He has apraxia and my younger kiddo just graduated from physical therapy. So we have been in the early intervention world and it's been wild to be a parent on the other side of this whole scenario and I've learned so much. One of the things that I have taken away from it is the value of those parent handouts are just the communication.

Jenna: 10:16

The speech therapist who was coming to our house for early intervention would send me a follow-up text in the evening after she came to our house and she didn't come that often, like once a month, and it was just like strategies that I was supposed to be carrying over and it was so great to have another speech therapist to talk about all the things I was trying and what wasn't working and problem solving that out.

Jenna: 10:36

And she would send me a text with like just three bullet points of things that we wanted to focus on.

Jenna: 10:40

And then in two weeks, when I had forgotten what I was supposed to be focusing on because I had my own ideas, I could return to that centering note, which was pretty much the same thing as a handout. She just did it in text form for like ideas for how to focus our energy and time and I think that's really valuable as a therapist to be able to be a very clear communicator. It's hard when a child has so many needs to be a clear communicator to parents and when you're thinking about your business and how you can be the best communicator to those parents on the other side of the table, I think that handouts or just having a system her system was texting me every week and that was great. Right now I ask our school speech therapists to give me a post-it note with the target words that they've worked on, because I'm trying to align a private therapist, a school therapist and myself to get on the same apraxia target word. So there's lots of ways to do that, but I do think the parent handouts are pretty useful.

Mary: 11:37

One of the questions with entrepreneurs in the speech therapy world is it's almost like this chicken and egg thing of what should come first. There's so many people who maybe, like you, will create materials and they're not sure really what to do first. There's an Instagram page, there's your blog, there's Amazon storefront, you have all of those things. You have YouTube, you have all the different platforms. I would say, but can you tell us kind of the progression of what you started with first and then how you added other things to your business?

Jenna: 12:15

When you're thinking about starting a business, you see other people having success in all these venues and you can't help but wanna dabble in all the things and I think it's more helpful to be focused on what you really enjoy and what you think will be profitable first. And that's pretty much how my business started. I started with a blog where I was writing about just what I was doing in therapy, and then I started making digital resources right away because I was using them and I started sharing them just as downloads on my website for free, and so I started with a blog. And then I switched over to TPT and I didn't have any social media at that point. And I remember one time there was a company they were like a third party speech therapy staffing company, but their social media was used to share ideas. So she wanted to share my idea and my website didn't have my email on it. She found me somehow through like the whitepagescom or something whatever.

Jenna: 13:09

We did 12 years ago and I didn't have any social media and she was like are you Jenna from the speech room news? I just wasn't contactable because I didn't have any of that social media or stuff going on, and it was a very different 12 years ago than it is now, where you would probably start with social media and then branch out into some other stream of income or channel or someplace to put your content. But for me, a blog is a great place to have my content housed. For other people it might be TikTok or Instagram. I think you need a place where your home base is, where your content is, and then you can recycle that content for all the different types of media you're going to do so. Over the years, I've added social media and a YouTube page and just different things, but I would say I still focus on getting the bulk of my content onto a website, where then I can repurpose it for other things.

Mary: 14:00

It's so hard for therapists to think about income streams as not just being direct patient care. And that's how you get your income, but just in a really simple way. How do blogs make money? How do all these things make money for your business? Yeah, that's a great question.

Jenna: 14:20

You can use your blog in a couple different ways. You could have advertising money straight from your blog, which I still choose not to do because I find that is not a high enough revenue to overcome the annoyance of ads on a website. So for my blog it's still not strictly. Every time you click on my page you're not gonna get a pop-up and an advertisement, because the content on my website is supposed to be my contribution to the speech therapy world. It's free content that I don't monetize like that. I use my blog to route people to my other income streams, like affiliate marketing, where I might advertise an AAC course for someone else and then every person who registers through my website I get $10 back or something like that. So you can use your blog in that way for income generating and then, obviously, writing content that gives value to speech therapists. That also directs them to your paid resources.

Jenna: 15:12

That's mostly how I use mine. Like, I'll write a resource with my favorite wordless picture books and I'll have 30 of my favorite wordless picture books and I'll sort them by age and content and give summaries. So hopefully that's really helpful. And then on that blog page I'll have links to Amazon. So if you buy the book from Amazon, I get five cents back. Probably the Amazon affiliate rate is low, but that every little bit helps. And then hopefully you'll also see oh my gosh, jenna has three wordless picture book companions. I could just buy one of those. So I'm steering my customers that way. You could also link, you could have your YouTube videos embedded onto your blog if you have a lot of YouTube, and that would create money for you if you have an income generating subscriber amount on YouTube. And yeah, that's really how I focus on using my website to monetize.

Mary: 16:02

I love that because so many of speech therapists we got into this field because we're helping and so we want to help the world. But also, if you're an artist and a creator, you also have to be compensated for your time, or else your passion project might just not be able to be sustainable. It is really important to figure out how to generate income for your time and your creativity.

Jenna: 16:26

And I think that speech therapists because so many of us love to help other people. That's why we got into a helping profession. Sometimes it's too easy to be walked all over. When I first started my blog granted, it didn't have that much information on it, but I had the little donate here button on the right side of my page. But I had the little donate here button on the right side of my page and the grad professor who I had worked with during my program said take that off and start charging these people $2 for your download. What are you doing? You don't need to do that. You are working hard. You're buying clip art to make this resource. You're spending your time and it's saving them money and saving them time and effort and all this hard work, so you deserve to be compensated. I needed a little pep talk about that, but that was before people were doing this. I didn't know anyone else on Teachers Pay Teachers who was a speech therapist at that time.

Jenna: 17:16

So I think, hopefully we're reshaping that we deserve to be. We wouldn't go give regular speech therapy to someone for free. We might want to, but we couldn't afford to if you're going to pay your own electric bill and so I think creators deserve to be compensated, and I think hopefully the market has gotten used to that now. I think they have.

Kim: 17:36

Thinking about writing your blog. I know so much goes into that, because someone might just want to sit down and say I have all these thoughts and I'm creative and I'm going to write this blog, but then you start learning about SEO and making sure you're getting keywords in there. Do you feel like you were able to just sit down and write really what you were creating and then that was sufficient enough to hit all of those keywords and get what you needed in there? Enough to hit all of those keywords and get what you needed in there? Or did you have to learn and be more strategic about how you were writing your blog?

Jenna: 18:11

Yeah, I think if someone is going to start a business and their pillar content is going to be on a written form in a blog, which I think is very valuable, I think you have to take an SEO course or learn about SEO. Do a deep dive onto YouTube and at least do some background information about SEO to figure out how to write things that perform well, because otherwise no one's going to read it. You can do all you want to send it out into the universe, but really you need Google search engine to find you and if it doesn't, we're not doing the most we could with our content. It's not going to access the most people. It's not going to help the most people because no one's going to find it.

Jenna: 18:47

I still, to this day, just sit and write what I want to. I only have a couple of people who work with me that I hire out some tasks to, and one of them is helping get things into pretty SEO, so like I'll write the bones of a blog post with the speech therapy content of it and then she'll go in and add the things that we need to use that help the SEO part of it, like making sure we have whatever our keyword is using it seven times in the post, or making sure that the very first line of the search is the way that we need it to be, to pick up those words. And then things like turning maybe what I wrote in paragraph form into a list, because Google loves a list where they can say oh yeah, here are the seven steps to fix a K and G, making it more search engine friendly. So that is one of the things I do invest in. My business is someone who helps me with that every month.

Mary: 19:41

And is that a virtual assistant?

Jenna: 19:43

Yeah, she's a virtual assistant and she specializes in SEO. We work pretty well together. I'll write the outline of it and then she helps me make it SEO friendly.

Mary: 19:54

What a good partnership Because, wow, as you step into the world of entrepreneurship as an SLP, you realize you need 18 more degrees to understand. There are so many things.

Jenna: 20:04

Before we got on this call I was trying to fix there's like a new email rule about Google to show up in your email. For someone who's sending mass emails. There's all these new rules. So I'm like trying to get my email list and I'm going this is not on the agenda for today. I thought I was gonna make a speech therapy resource today.

Jenna: 20:23

The amount of things that are in the background can be really hard. I think that's why having a virtual assistant who focuses on that helps me to prioritize that. You could get lost in 1,000 little tasks to be an entrepreneur and do the background work of running a business, but I find if I don't make myself prioritize what's important and that would be delivering new content to all my streams to keep my social media and to keep my email list and keep everyone engaged and my business at the top of their mind I have to have that new content and that stuff that is helping the speech therapist. Why are they going to open my email twice a month? Hopefully, it's to get some new ideas and new content, and so if I have a VA working on that, it helps me focus on making sure that always gets done every month.

Mary: 21:13

Your TPT page is incredible and I know you've had it for 12 years, so can't get frustrated or discouraged if you are starting off, but you have almost 40,000 followers and you have almost 130,000 five-star reviews. That did not happen by accident.

Jenna: 21:33

It didn't happen overnight.

Mary: 21:36

No, or overnight. So how did you grow your following and then? How did you create resources and then have those people come back and write a review for you?

Jenna: 21:48

That's a really good question and really important when you think about your business, and it's actually one of the things I see people doing. There's not much online that I see. I'm like I don't think that's a great business strategy, but one of the things I do see is a lot of people opening TPT stores and having 40 free resources right away and then three paid resources because they're trying to get their name out there. They're trying to get people to engage with them, and that has been something that I have seen over and over again is that a free resource is not going to be treated the same way that a paid resource is, and that can really backfire for somebody If you build your store out.

Jenna: 22:26

If I was going to build a new store right now, first I would search for some courses. There's lots of TPT authors. Most of them are teachers who sell courses about how to get started. I would do that. You would save yourself so much time where I had to learn things the hard way. It's going to tell you about copyright, information and how to get started and what clip art to buy and what things to include and your directions and all those kinds of things that like are the extra. They're not the speech therapy part of it that you're going to already know. And then I would just work on building my store with 50. That sounds like a lot and it is a lot. I would just work and work and build 50 resources that are really valuable, that you would pay money for, that look really good, that don't have errors, that are meaningful and that are not oversaturated. I don't think I would start a store right now and make articulation worksheets because we have 1 million of those right. So I try to find something that's worksheets, because we have 1 million of those right. So I try to find something that's not super popular and I would just build my store with paid resources, with some freebies that demonstrate your skill, what you have to offer, and then slowly you will start to see people find you and if they buy something, they're going to have a much different experience with you than if they download a freebie that's 50 pages long and they're going to nitpick that apart and then you're not going to get great reviews back.

Jenna: 23:53

I'm not sure what it is about a free resource that consumers feel like they don't have to leave reviews, they don't have to be kind. They're like oh, it wasn't editable. Zero stars they don't like it. If people pay for a resource, they've invested in you, they think your resource is really good and then it's a great resource. They're going to come back and leave you a review. That will be a better way to grow your store and that is what has always served me well.

Jenna: 24:16

To provide a resource that is well thought out is not just what I made for my own student. I've thought about expanding it to a wider variety of kids and then it's done well, hopefully very few errors or no errors. Hopefully Hire an editor that's what I do and then build out from there, rather than trying to start like just trying to get all these freebies into hands that hopefully maybe you'll come back and purchase from you. I don't think that's what buyers are doing. I think buyers find someone they're willing to invest $5 in something if they think it's going to be a good resource, and then that's how you start to build those positive reviews.

Kim: 24:54

Is there a follow up that you're doing to get those reviews, or do you think buyers are just coming back and want to leave a review? This is a great product.

Jenna: 25:01

I think the only reason people leave reviews most of the time is that they're really happy and they're going to go buy the same thing, or they're unhappy and they want you to know about it, or if they're trying to get credits. So TPT has a credit system where, if you leave a review, you get a few credits towards your next purchase. So that really works well. At TPT we don't have the option to do like a retargeting email, like you would if you were trying to sell a course or sell on your own platform, but the fact that they get credits towards their next purchase most savvy TPTers who regularly purchase know that, so they'll review.

Kim: 25:40

So you have your TPT platform. Do you also have all of your resources on your website for direct purchase to get more information from buyers?

Jenna: 25:49

Yeah, I have it set up on the backend but it's not live, and I've chosen that for a few reasons.

Jenna: 25:55

Number one I want it to be built on the backend so that if there's an issue, if TPT goes up in flames Zulily and what's the other Janecom who just went under, if that happens I want wanna have somewhere where I can immediately transfer my buyers and I don't have all my resources on there yet, but my big guys are on there. I have 800 resources on Teachers, play Teachers, so it's a lot of content to move over there. But when you're doing it from a buyer's perspective, there's two things that TPT handles that really make it worth using their marketplace for me, and that's customer service. If someone can't get the download to work, if the credit card declines, if there's 1000 customer service things that they handle, which is nice. And then the taxes. They, as the marketplace, they take out the taxes and pay each state, which is a really big expense. So for right now, since I started on TPT and that's where all my buyers currently are for me I don't think it's been worth it to try to move them to my own domain.

Mary: 26:56

That's really what everyone recommends is saying, okay, what happens if Instagram is no more?

Jenna: 27:02

or what happens if and you've got to have some evergreen yeah plans and that's why I like building my own content out on my own website. I would be devastated if my Instagram went away and all the videos and content and lives and things that I have made are gone, but at least I have all the content still on a place that's on the internet that can be recycled. I think that building out from a website is really smart in that way, because you have all that content.

Mary: 27:30

While we're still on TPT, tell me what is the story behind how things are priced, because, just as a buyer myself, I'll go on. And some things are $2, some things are $35, some things are $125. So how do you price your items? And then how do you, also as a buyer, figure out what kind of product you're getting and what kind of classifies as those different price ranges?

Jenna: 27:58

Yeah, that is so specific to each seller. I think and sometimes I think that can be one of the reasons you get repeat buyers is because you develop a relationship with your customer where they know what to expect for your price range. Like for most of my packets, you're going to pay $5 for something for a reasonable use it for a whole season packet or a book lesson they're going to use for because I feel like that's a comfortable price point for me. And then your price changes in the last few years have been because things have been made digital and pricing with the digital aspect in mind is very different. And let's say, we're talking about the pandemic and I took a lot of my resources that were print only and added a digital component to it. So then I have to decide how am I going to reprice this? Okay, it was a $5, $4 packet of handouts or whatever it is, or it's interactive books. I sell a lot of interactive books, so the product itself would be laminated. They would have spent a bunch of their time to recreate it and I didn't think it was right to have everyone repurchase a digital version of that who had already purchased it. So for my business, I bundled the new digital product that I had made my original, and then I increased the price, for everyone buying it new would have to increase, to pay two more dollars or something for it.

Jenna: 29:21

So I think, as a seller, you have to decide what you think is fair for your investment in your time versus your buyer who's. Am I going to use this once? Am I going to use this for one day with one student, or am I going to use this for a whole year? How am I going to settle whether this is worth it to me? There's no like golden rule. It's not.

Jenna: 29:40

People will throw around things like 15 cents a page or something like that. I find that doesn't really work, because I charge a lot less for some things that take more time, because I just think they're more single use, and I think that's one of the things you have to really consider is how often will you be able to use something, something like an RTI packet that they, the speech therapist, would use with every teacher in that whole building and maybe two buildings that they work for, like my license is set for one speech therapist. So if a speech therapist buys my RTI packet, I know they're probably going to use it with hundreds and hundreds of different teachers over their career. That's going to be priced a little higher than something that's an Esplin's homework packet.

Mary: 30:22

And you mentioned digital resources. Initially, before I got into all this, I really thought digital just meant you have it on the computer or on a screen.

Jenna: 30:30

But can you?

Mary: 30:31

explain the difference between a printable and a digital resource, and then what that means on your end.

Jenna: 30:37

When I'm thinking about creating something and then marketing it first. All my resources are digital. You're correct in that I sell them online only I'm not printing anything and shipping it, not manufacturing anything, so they're all instant download. But my printables, you have to print them and use them, or you have to print them and then assemble them and use them. You might need to laminate something, and then I also make digital resources that are not meant to be printed. So that might be things like using Google Slides. You might be using Boom Learning, which is a website that hosts what they feel like task cards. To me they're like pages of interactive activities that I build on the back end and then someone purchases and can use, and so I think of those resources the things you're not going to be printing, as no print or digital resources that are used differently.

Mary: 31:32

There are just so many different avenues that you could create.

Jenna: 31:37

Yeah.

Mary: 31:37

What are your MVP? Subscription services or things that you could not design without.

Jenna: 31:46

I love using Adobe Pro in a lot of my resources because I can do things like make my resources so that the customer can swap the image. I make a lot of AAC resources like that and so they download it. And I have Smarty Symbols, which is a symbol company that I have a commercial license for, and I can put the symbol for Go in there. But then their student might be using Lampords for Life as their AAC device and I want that therapist to be able to swap the symbols, and so using Adobe Reader, which is free to all the customers, is a really wonderful way to make resources more useful.

Jenna: 32:27

Same with Google. When I first started, I made resources that were like smart board specific, so they are meant to be used with that brand of smart board technology and that really limited everyone who didn't have an exact smart board in their building. I made them like that because that's what we had in my building, and now that Google is so widely used Google Classroom and stuff I like making resources through them. If I'm just making a worksheet, I'll whip it up in PowerPoint really quick because it's just the fastest for me Can't turn it down.

Mary: 33:01

Are you a Canva?

Jenna: 33:03

person too. I love Canva. Yeah, we use Canva for all of like my visuals and for lots of things. I like to use Canva when I'm making presentations because it's just so easy. Yeah, I love Canva.

Kim: 33:15

The way that you're able to not just think about what would be beneficial to you, but you're thinking across the board the students and the other teachers. So I know that your brain has to be just working all the time and you have two little boys now, so your time has probably shifted to mom mode. How are you managing still having this passion and this desire to want to create and put stuff out there and understanding that you have to manage that differently now? Yeah, I don't think I'll ever be great at this.

Jenna: 33:46

It's so hard to manage everything in a way that gives everything its appropriate amount of time. I just think it's really hard. I don't beat myself up about that because I think that's and maybe being a little bit older of a mama like being in my mid-30s when I had my kids has really helped me have that perspective. I think too Certainly I was like a workaholic before I had my kids, because I was working a full-time speech therapy job at a busy school once a month or a progress report time, those kind of things where things add up, but I was able to keep work at work and then I would come home and do speech therapy, speech room news all the time. And when I had a baby, that immediately changed, really when I was pregnant, because I was very sick, and so I've readjusted my priorities.

Jenna: 34:41

For sure, my priorities are my kids and my family. Right now, I think I have a good ability to step back and say, okay, my babies are tiny. Right now I want to be home with them as much as I can. I had a baby March of 2020, when the world shut down, so I didn't go back to my school job, and then I had a second kiddo, so I haven't been back. I'm going back at the end of next month to cover a maternity leave, so I'm really excited to be back in person again.

Jenna: 35:05

But for now, from our family, I am mom most of the time, and speech room news is just a very small part of my week, and that's changed how we prioritize things. My kids go to the babysitter two days a week and then those are my work days, and if I can't fit it in during that time, I have to do it at night after they go to bed, which is exhausting. So I really try to get everything prioritized. It's really changed how I prioritize everything. If I have a product that's due to be out, like right now, in two weeks I'm supposed to have a product published in a growing bundle, and so everything else has to wait. Really, I'm doing things. I have commitments on phone calls or podcasts like this, but everything else is just going to have to wait. It has definitely made me prioritize in a way that I didn't do before, where I would try to do it all.

Mary: 35:56

Another thing you've done is you have written several articles for the ASHA leader. How did you get connected with the ASHA leader and have that as a way to get your name out there as well?

Jenna: 36:07

Yeah, when I first started doing TPT there was no one. It was a lonely desert of me, but really quickly several people started selling on Teachers, pay Teachers the same time I did and we formed like a little alliance group, like a Facebook group. There were 37 of us when we all first started, like 10 years ago, and now there are hundreds of speech therapy and occupational therapy sellers, which is just so wonderful to see. And that group and I started going to ASHA conventions together and we have the little table in the corner where you don't have to pay as much when it's your first year. But we really got to know each other and we would promote each other and ASHA is looking for content.

Jenna: 36:46

Got to know each other and we would promote each other and ASHA is looking for content.

Jenna: 36:48

They just, like us, need content and they have to have a variety of different kinds of content. And so they started reaching out every once in a while to republish something I had written. And then one year that we did a deal where they had me write about going to the ASHA convention a few times before and they gave me my conference attendance for free, which was nice, I think, if you continue to publish your work and put goodness out into the world, those kinds of relationships will find you, and that's what happened for me early on. It's different now because there's so many people publishing so much good information, but I do really feel like if you keep putting yourself out there and keep making content and trying to help other speech therapists and build your business at the same time, those kind of relationships can be made. Asha has a social media manager, just like every other company, and you can always email them if you're interested in writing for them or talking with them more.

Jenna: 38:11

And you've done so many presentations as well Do can tell if someone comes in and does a presentation, that they have had two clients in that situation and it doesn't feel authentic. If I want to sit through a PD, I want it to be very hands-on, full of ideas. Throw me 100 ideas and I'll take four of those home and do them with my students and that will have been a great PD for me because I will have learned something functional. So that's the kind of PD I try to do. So I really try to limit it to things that I find I'm very knowledgeable on and I'm very interested and excited about too. I get emails like hey, we have a full day training we need to fill, and it's about AAC. Virtually I didn't do virtual therapy, I had two babies and stayed home. I'm not going to accept that opportunity. So what I do is try to write a couple new PDs a year. And then if someone emails me and says, hey, could you come to the? I'm going to the Kentucky Speech and Hearing Conference next month. Could you come to Kentucky and talk to us about language and literacy or something? Usually it's those broader topics Then I'll say yes, and here are the PDs I've written Would you be interested in any of these?

Jenna: 39:14

And then I think you can market yourself to other places If you really want to become a person who does a lot of PD training. I don't want to do that right now because of my kids. So I open a few calendar spots in my mind. Okay, I want to present six times this year out of state. Or I only want to do local. This year I'm only going to drive places that I can drive in four hours. I think going to ASHA or trying to present at one of the ASHA conferences does give you a lot of credibility in doing that, because they will vet you and also they have published lists of who has spoken at their conferences. So if you're a person who's trying to become a PD speaker, you've done research, you're very into this one topic and you want to start doing that. Thinking about how you can get your name out that way is one of those things you could do is try to speak at a national convention, because that will lead you down the road of having people hopefully finding your resources.

Mary: 40:07

That is such great advice.

Jenna: 40:09

I know.

Mary: 40:09

Because no one knows that these things are out there. I know.

Jenna: 40:12

How do you become a person who spoke at ASHA? That is a weird, crazy thing. You have to apply to speak at ASHA and I've spoken a couple of times. It's been wonderful. I've done their summer conference too. There's a lot less competition to speak, I would think, at the summer one, and it's a nice conference too, so you can always try to go that route to get started if you're looking. And then I did a really interesting kind of bucket list thing. I got invited to be on a panel that spoke and did one of their three-hour intensives where you have to pay extra at the conference to go to one of those sessions. It was about social media, so that was really interesting to be able to do.

Jenna: 40:50

All the different kinds of ASHA presentations I really like to present hands-on. In Ohio we have a school-based like coalition and then we have like our state coalition too and I like to go to the little school-based one and do like hands-on make and take. That's my most favorite PD to do. It's impossible to prepare for because, like, my basement gets full of all these weird things that I'm going to do, like a make and take session and books and just all these things, and I never keep the budget right. It's, but it's so exciting to have the therapist leave the room with a bunch of stuff. So I think if you can make the PD something you enjoy doing, it's going to go well and then you hopefully will get those glowing reviews you can use as testimonials on your business page. My husband is always like are you going to try to do more speaking this year? And I'm always like I don't know. I feel really good about just doing a couple a year right now because I don't want to travel a lot and be figuring out childcare for my kids and it's just a lot. We always joke at our house what is our five, your goal? And it's just like surviving right now. I think sometimes people feel like their business has to have this huge goal and they're only going to succeed if you have this one goal. And that just hasn't been my business process. I've slowly added things and built things as I go when they interest me.

Jenna: 41:57

I got really interested in like helping people switch to schools from medical settings. I love that process and I was emailing with all these people trying to help them interview and then how to figure out just the ins and outs of being a school SLP and how that's different than medical. And then I wrote this course that people can take and I open it a couple of times a year where it's a self-paced three-hour course and they learn about all the little things you don't remember from graduate school. If you've been a med SLP for 10 years and you're switching to the schools, and then I morph that into a CF course too, okay, if you're not feeling confident going in maybe you had a non-traditional grad school experience with a school and you don't feel confident going into your CF you can take this course. So then my interest went there and I made that course and now I sell it. And then I think I'm starting to get interested in maybe doing some more YouTube stuff, and I'm going to try to do that in the next couple of years.

Jenna: 42:48

But for me my priorities right now are to have a business that still inspires me, still helps other people and pays my bills frankly, and so I think it's cool that it gets to morph and change. But I still want to be able to take my son to preschool. He has speech therapy twice a week with other people plus his mother poor kid and I want to be there when my two-year-old almost two-year-old is getting all these new words. So for right now, my business goal for five years is just to have a business that's flexible enough that we can pay the mortgage and I get to be home several days a week. It doesn't have to be a business goal. Where it's, my income stream will be certain amount of money or I'll have launched 14 new courses. That's not my goal right now.

Kim: 43:33

I feel like we could pick your brain forever, but I know I don't want to take it's the non-traditional brain I love it, though, because what Mary and I have been hearing as we've been doing this series is letting yourself ride the wave of what's happening and what's coming, and that's really encouraging for other people to hear that are wanting to start it, because it is really hard work and you do have to put in the hours and the time, but also that's a lot of pressure when you feel like it might only work if it's this hustle hustle. So to hear from people that are just no, keep your passion in it and go with that, it's encouraging.

Jenna: 44:09

I still feel like right now, all the business advice that I hear I'm in all these different groups and I listen to podcasts and things and it's always focus on one area. You have to niche down, you have to do all this and I'm just like over here floating like a little ADHD butterfly who's just. I love helping CFs, I love switching to the schools, but I'm really a preschool therapist at heart, but right now I'm not one, but I have apraxia at home in my living room. So now I'm interested in that and it's okay. That's why I became a speech therapist and that's what a school speech therapist is someone who has a lot of different experiences. So if you are thinking about building your business and you're like, but I don't only want to do I don't know speech sound disorders you don't have to. I really don't think you do. I think you can do whatever you're passionate about and then that will come through. It will come through. I think that's great advice and you don't have to start all the things.

Jenna: 45:02

Oh yeah, don't start all the things. Oh yeah, Don't start all the things.

Mary: 45:04

Yeah, like you have so many things. Eva remembers only Facebook group and I know the digital courses. I identify with that so much because I have never been in the schools and I can't even talk to parents about their IEP or ARD and things because I just don't know all of the ins and outs of that.

Jenna: 45:23

I think it's amazing Just how I would feel if I talked to a medical, slp or another kind of position where I haven't done it since graduate school. It's really cool to have lots of different opportunities, and if you're a business owner, it's hard to put all your eggs in one basket too. I think it is worth a little bit like okay, here's my home base, here's the things I'm going to try this year and see what works out, and if something starts making you money, you do more of that and you like it. You can keep focusing on that.

Kim: 45:52

We have a couple of just rapid fire questions we've been doing with everybody because I think people enjoy hearing this. But I'll just ask you a couple real quick. What do you do for self-care? What would be your number one thing to go to?

Jenna: 46:06

I used to be reading books and now it's listening to books, because sometimes I just pop that little earbud in when everyone's being crazy and I just float away. I'm going to be listening to a book at the same time.

Kim: 46:15

Laundry dishes get all those other things, all the things yeah. Yeah, do you have a go-to dinner?

Jenna: 46:20

that's easy with all the stuff going on. We sheet pan dinner at least once a week over here where you just cut up whatever meat is about to go bad and whatever vegetables you can find in the freezer or in the vegetable tray and just do a sheet pan dinner, usually with a packet of ranch seasoning on the top. Or we have this really good Traeger seasoning that I bought my husband for Christmas last year. That turned out to be like our favorite. I don't know the name of it, but it's a Traeger seasoning, so I bet all of theirs are good If you were not a speech therapist.

Kim: 46:49

What would your Jane job be?

Jenna: 46:51

Oh my gosh, I don't know. I think a librarian, I love kids' books. We didn't talk about books that much but, like, I have a passion about books, so I started a second Instagram where I talk about just books. It's called Speech Room Library and I go on there sometimes for four months in a row and post a lot, and then I haven't posted on there probably in four months now because that's just one of those side passions I like.

Mary: 47:13

So I think if I was going to be something else, I'd be a librarian, children's librarian, has that just had a whole new meaning, now that you have preschool kids and can share these books with your own children.

Jenna: 47:24

Oh my gosh yes, I thought I had a problem before buying books and now I'm just like good gravy, jenna, we don't need another book in this house. So I've really been trying to go to the library with them more and less into our own shopping at Barnes Noble, because the kids' books are just like so wonderful and both of my kids are really into books. My second one took a little longer than my first, but he's almost two and he's really starting to get into books now, which is fun and he could say book now. He doesn't have any final confidence but he tries and last night he was awake at one in the morning just living his best life, and he was like trying to get me to stay awake with him and he was for books and I was like man, you have me pegged, don't yeah, he was like I know, what I'm sure

Jenna: 48:09

let me turn the flashlight on and we'll read a book, and then you're going back to bed, okay.

Mary: 48:14

Last question then what was your favorite childhood book from your own?

Jenna: 48:20

boy. Where the wild things are has always been one of my favorites from childhood. I loved that book. My my first kiddo's first birthday party we did when the Wild Things Are, and my husband. That's the only book he can remember from childhood. Well that feels like a good sentiment. That's great. Thank you so much, thank you so much for having me letting me chat about business and all the ways it has grown over the years. It's so fun, Very thankful.

Kim: 48:46

Thank you.