Fractional
Fractional
Lindsay Dagiantis: Portfolio of Impact - Parenting, Caregiving, Post-Covid Reality and Reflection
Today we were joined by Lindsay, a fantastic guest who shared her own journey as an HR Fractional leader. We dove into the tension between HR supporting people in the company and the company itself. We also discussed the fractional community she supports, parenting as a fractional, the value of risk versus reward as a fractional, and what she describes as a "Portfolio of Impact".
Slack: https://fractionalpeoplepeople.com/
Website: https://www.blueprinthr.co/
Email: lindsay@blueprinthr.co
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindsayharrisondagiantis/
Hey, Quincy, welcome. How are you doing?
SPEAKER_01:Good. How are you?
SPEAKER_00:I'm doing fantastic. I got a run this afternoon out and didn't go into the snow. I was too tired. I ran along the road, but it's nice and sunny down here. So we have Quincy Robbins on here. We wanted to bring you on to talk about your music, which is now part of this episode that you're hearing. Welcome. And I wanted to just hear from you whatever you want to share, but your musical journey, what your thoughts were for the song, because this is kind of a new thing for us to have music in our podcast. So yeah, take it away, wherever you want to go with this, Quincy.
SPEAKER_01:So it took me a while to decide what my song was going to be. I had to go through a lot of different Examples, but I, I really liked that one. That one was kind of catchy. So I thought that one was going to be good.
SPEAKER_00:So we talk about careers on here. I'll start with the first question. We'll make this a little mini interview if you don't mind. What is a career that you know you will not do? Like you're just not going to do a specific career. First of all, that's my first question.
SPEAKER_01:Be a doctor.
SPEAKER_00:I don't know. I'm really into animals
SPEAKER_01:and music, so I'm not sure. Probably do something with animals. Do
SPEAKER_02:you think you'll combine the two, animals and music, as a musical animal band? Oh, I
SPEAKER_01:don't know. I have no idea how that's going to work.
SPEAKER_02:All right. Well, she has to deal with the dad jokes because I'm her dad. Quincy, how old are you?
SPEAKER_01:I'm 12. 12.
SPEAKER_02:And how long have you been playing the piano?
SPEAKER_01:I think I started when I was five because I've been playing by ear for a couple of years before I started lessons.
SPEAKER_02:Any other instruments that you like to play?
SPEAKER_01:I started cello lessons, but we had to stop for the ski season. And then I play guitar and ukulele.
SPEAKER_00:There was a picture which your dad texted me during recording for the piano. It looks like there were blankets all around the piano with the microphone. That's awesome. You did your best to get a good sound set up there. And the clip I heard sounds like it's going to come through really well. It's
SPEAKER_02:your first recording studio experience, so we can only get better from here.
SPEAKER_00:It's great. Hey, I'm glad you made it on, and I welcome any feedback you may have on our future episodes. You know how to email us? Well, you also know how to reach out directly to the co-host, Lance. All right, last question for me. What do you think about your dad's podcast? Do you have any just rough feedback for him as he does this?
SPEAKER_01:I don't know. I haven't really listened to it as much, but... I don't know. I think it's pretty cool.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, no pressure to listen if you're a family member listening to this, which we know you're not. That's it from me. Anything else from you, Lance? No, just excited that we got Quincy involved in the podcast. Proud of you and the hard work that you're putting in with your music and the growth I've seen in you doing that. And really proud to have your original voice piece of music as the intro to our show from here on out
SPEAKER_01:yeah I'm excited about it too
SPEAKER_00:I love it thank you so much Quincy really appreciate your efforts
SPEAKER_01:you're
SPEAKER_02:welcome Hello and welcome to episode 45 of the Fractional Podcast. I'm your host, Lance Robbins. I'm here with my co-host, Joshua Wold. And we are super excited to have today our guest, Lindsay, as a Fractional HR professional joining us. And Lindsay, I'm not going to even make an attempt at your last name because I know I'll get it wrong. I should have asked you this in the pre-show. But yeah, Lindsay, introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit more about who you are. and what you do. We're so excited to have you here.
SPEAKER_04:Sure. So my last name is Dijontis. It's Greek. I married a Greek guy. And yes, thank you for having me. I'm so excited to talk all things fractional. I'm a fractional HR leader. I spent my 15, 20 years now in all things HR. I started out on the recruiting side and Accidentally got into that, accidentally got into the HR side, and I'm so glad that the universe threw me into that direction. I do feel like it's a little bit genetic. My father and mother were both HR leaders, as well as my grandfather was the head of HR for a steel mill in Ohio. So I feel like maybe it was in the blood a little bit, but I've been mostly... Here in Chicago, where I live with my family and working, doing HR for marketing agencies, tech startups, professional services. And now I am in the fractional space and it's like part two of my career and I'm really excited about it.
SPEAKER_00:So I've got to ask, when Lance and I worked at a startup before, it ultimately led into this podcast and lots of other conversations where I would just vent to him as an individual contributor and He did a really great job of saying, I hear you, that's frustrating, all the things. And then some things he was able to fix, some things he couldn't. How do you, just as a, like, just throwing a question out there at you, when you see a need and you feel that constraint of, well, for various reasons we can't fully do this, how do you juggle handling, like, just as a baseline, that kind of a A concern from someone acknowledging it, but maybe not being able to always resolve it. Like, how do you juggle that tension? That's something I'm always curious about with HR.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, I don't think I've solved that ever in my professional career. And I've been proven that I'm poor on that topic because I have a five-year-old and negotiating with a five-year-old is fun, especially when they're a toddler during the pandemic. And I'll talk a lot about kind of parenting and all that. But I think with HR, moving to fractional has really put a new perspective on a lot of things in my HR career. And I think I'm a recovering people pleaser. I am, for many HR professionals, we like people, we want them to be happy. I wasn't a cheerleader in high school, but I probably could have, I was just that type of person, but also I just really want people to be happy in their role. And I felt I took all that on. And there was a maturity missing in my career and in my life where I struggled with that. And I also played around a lot with the from my mentors or my boss or people around me and more senior levels were a little bit more hard lined. And I would like skew way too hard line and to be like, well, that's just what we're doing. And like authoritarian. And So when you ask like, how do you balance that? You just try it. You just keep going and you'll fail and it'll kick you in the butt at some point. And so I think when it comes to, especially in a startup world and startup capacity, I'll never forget, I had a wonderful recruiter and she was asking, well, we should do this and let's go to the social media department and like ask them to help us with some social content. And I was like, fun fact, you're the social media department for recruiting and you know, all things talent acquisition. And she looked at me like, but we can't go to marketing. I'm like, no, they are marketing a whole different bucket of content. Now you can go find and repurpose some of that content, but you know, that was, that was an interesting challenge to balance that. So I'm still learning. I think as a fractional, I see, have a little bit more confidence and maturity to run that line and more clarity and But earlier in my career, that was a struggle bus for sure.
SPEAKER_02:Early career. I'm curious. I also accidentally found my way into recruiting, which led me into, you know, a lot of HR stuff. How many HR professionals do you think stumbled into recruiting at some point? Is this like more common? Like that's the gateway career choice?
SPEAKER_04:I mean, I don't think there's like... No, there are... really good programs. I am here in Chicago. DePaul University has a wonderful HR program. I've hired interns from there. They were fantastic. This is not a quash on any bachelor's or master's program in HR. Yeah, we all worked retail. We all were communications or English majors or whatever, and we needed a job. And 15, 20 years ago, HR was still in the personnel admin space, and it paid better than my job at said retail mall. And so I was like, okay, well, this sounds great. And also my parents were in HR. So I'm like, this is a thing. You can make a career out of this. So I interviewed, I went to school to be a high school English teacher. And I did have a point of maturity early in my career where I was like, this is a horrible idea. I am not ready for 17 year olds. And I respect the profession of teaching way too much to put my face anywhere near it. So I bowed out and just was like, I need a job. So I got into retail. Wonderful. I loved it for odd reasons. I hated it and loved it for odd reasons on both sides. Applied to a, but I went to be a high school English teacher. So I had an English degree and an educational degree. I applied for a marketing coordinator role because I was like, sure, marketing, English, same, kind of. They brought me in for the interview. I got home, took the L home. I was like my first like big girl kind of interview in the got a call saying like, we'd love to offer you the position. It's this much money. And you'd be joining our healthcare recruiting team. And I was like, cool. I don't know what anything you said because they interviewed me and sent me the wrong job description. So I actually interviewed for a recruiter role and not the marketing coordinator, which then made a lot of sense because I was like, I was wondering why they were asking so many questions about me making a lot of phone calls and all these things. So they're like, do you still want it? I'm like, Yeah, it sounds great. Again, I had to Google like what staffing recruiter meant, and I didn't look back. And that was my entree into staffing, executive search, tech recruiting, career services, and then kind of the leadership track.
SPEAKER_00:So this is probably revealing more about me with my question than anything else. But how do you not get burned out on people? Just you've got to talk to people all day long. How do you handle that?
SPEAKER_04:So I was single for a long time. I think that's my answer to that. I spent my life 10 hours on the phone. And so I was like, I don't want to talk to people. But no, I think how did I not get burnt out on people? I don't know. I think there was just an intrinsic part of me and my life curious about what people did and trying to just figure it out. I think a lot of my early career was like, again, being a recovering people pleaser, what am I supposed to do? And I put so much value into my title and my compensation. And I was so fortunate to grow up in a house where my mom worked for the first part of her career before she had kids. And, you know, it was the 80s and she was fortunate where she didn't have to work. And my dad supported us. And my dad worked with very strong women. He exposed me to women in the workforce. My dad was head of HR for various different companies and then went over to Coopers and Lybrand before and then went through the PwC merger. So that'll take a few years in the 80s and 90s. So he was HR. He ran an HR consulting practice here in Chicago and introduced me to And just showed me it was just like, oh, you know, Randy's daughter is coming into the office. And it was like through osmosis that I saw women in senior leadership roles and how my dad interacted with them. And that was a big factor in getting to your question of like, how do I not get burnt out on people? I was just insanely curious and insanely driven to get the title and get the comp. Like that was the end of that was where I was like, I'm OK with people. And I spaced it out. Getting married and having a relationship didn't factor into like less people. I was actually a very like kind of quiet, reserved person. And then I married a Greek guy and it's very loud and lots of talking all the time. So I got to I got to embrace it and enjoy the people. So
SPEAKER_00:I love that. And yes, having having kids, having a significant other, the house is never quiet and you develop a different level of calmness and I have my wife and I, we have a six year old and a 10 year old in the house. And there's just a lot that goes on. There's a lot of things that you navigate. And for me, Lance is quite aware of this. You know, if everyone's finally in bed, everyone's sleeping, except for me, that's fair. That's where I spend the next hour or two just doing something to decompress for me. I don't really like watching movies. So I like play a game or something. And that's kind of how I handle having a little bit of alone time, even though I love people. I also love alone time. So thank you.
SPEAKER_02:Awesome. I love this. I want to dig a little bit into, you brought up family a couple of times. So being a fractional, how does that impact you as a caregiver, as a mother? Tell me a little bit about how this fractional choice has interacted with the family side that you described.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, so there are a lot of things that happen. And I'm going to say the universe pushed me in this direction. I'm spiritual. I grew up in church. I'm just kind of like finding a lot of things. And I think a couple of things happened in a very short amount of time that really kind of drew me or pointed me into fractional. And I am not alone in this story. This story, for anybody who's listening, everybody's probably going, yep, yep, yep. One, I felt like I had peaked or reached the height. I'd had three companies in a row, similar titles. Nothing wrong with that. Like if you want to be a VP of people ops like three times in a row, great, good for you. But a couple of things happened. One is there were some family illnesses and it really made me kind of take a step back and kind of observe. Number one. Number two, I had my first kid, my only child. I had my son. And three, COVID. Oh, and four, I turned 40. So all of those things happened in a very short amount of time. And I'm not blaming me turning 40, but it's just like this weird moment. And I've enjoyed, like, I was looking forward to it. I was like, yes, I'm 40, whatever. So all of those things happened in a very short amount of time. And how that came into parenting is I was the breadwinner. My husband was building his company, and we were very much equals and peers, but at dollar-wise, I was the breadwinner. I was the one with the corporate kind of stabler job. And then I got laid off. I was, it was, I don't know, 2022, got laid off. I sucked at my job, like straight up. I was just not, I was so burned out. I was so tired. There were other things going on. And I just said, I went back to something that I told my husband. I was like, there's going to be a time where I'm going to need to, and I didn't say take a break, Or maybe I did. But the point was, I need to just shift. I can't be driving anymore. I need to like be in the backseat taking a nap or whatever. And we realized my son was, I don't know, three at the time. I said, it's summer. It's Chicago. I have this perfect opportunity to go do fun adventure day summer with my son and live it up, like just live in the moment. And I knew that, you know, COVID was kind of like over. over, whatever. You could go outside, you could socialize, all those good things. So parenting came into play and it truly is more of a conversation of like, not the balance, but someone said to me earlier this year, it's like, what's your portfolio of impact? And this goes back to so much of my identity before going fractional was my title and my salary and like the company that I worked for and all these things. And now it was more like, and I'm looking up because there's my little vision board for 2024. It says, who are you? You know, and says, you're Lindsay, you're a mom, you're a wife. You've got Blueprint, which is my company. You've got this Slack community that you're co-founding and leading. I'm a business coach for high school kids. And there's so much more. And then I do my job with my clients and stuff. And so that's been a really interesting way to put things in perspective when it comes to parenting. I don't know. I mean, it's just like now it's just more ingrained into my every day and I'm not like, OK, it's five o'clock. It's time for family stuff. It's just it's more fluid, I think, is what fractional has allowed me to do as a parent. Still adjusting, still figuring out how that all works out. But I feel like much more of the time I'm able to say, you know, yes and no to things that before were a little bit out of my control.
SPEAKER_00:And you pointed to something, a pattern I've seen from others as well, that you get lateral move after lateral move after lateral move at a company, if you're working a corporate job, and you have a decision to make. Accept it, find a way to push above it, or do something completely different, which is what you've done, which is realizing, as a parent myself, there's a sacrifice to make if you want to push above it, or you can find a way to just do your own thing and kind of kind of have a way to get both in a different way. And it sounds like that's where you've been exploring.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, it's it has been a fantastic journey. So I started my kind of fractional just about a year and a half ago and kind of really saying, OK, this is it. This is what we're going to do now. And I don't know. It's not like I have a five year plan to be like, OK, if in five years it doesn't work out. It's just like you just go and you just You're so much more living in the moment. And I take a lot of guidance as a geriatric millennial. I take so much value from like the Gen Z of just being in there and I'm loving it and I love everything they do with it. I have four nieces who are Gen Z and I'm just like so enamored with their expectations of their life. And so I'm very, I'm like, I'm like, tell me more about this kind of cool work-life balance thing that you have going on. So yeah, the balance, I'm still trying to figure it out. And I still come back to like on those days where I'm just like, what am I doing? Like the money is not where I thought it would be. There is not, you know, you just are learning so many things. I'll give an example or like a really good anecdote. So in Hawaii, it was on Maui. I don't know. You can drive the road to Hana. So on our honeymoon, We went to Hawaii. We spent two beautiful weeks in Hawaii. It was great. And we did, we drove the road to Hana, not the scary part, but like the actual kind of paved road, not like off the cliff side. And everybody said, it's not about the destination. Like Hana is beautiful, but it's not like some, you know, utopia that you find. And you're like, that was totally worth the two hours of like butt clenching in your Wrangler, like going over the like bridges and stuff. It is the journey that's more important. And so I've looked at my career as, okay, I got to wherever I was. I made it to the top of the mountain. I took a deep breath and I said, great, let's do something else. And for me, that's just so much more than like my job and like work-life balance. And I don't want to say work-life integration because that's cringy or whatever the cool kids are saying now, but it's much more of a portfolio of like, I can do a lot of things. and then some. And I feel like I'm way more effective at my job and what brings in the dollars by having many things to focus on versus my nine to five and my not nine to five.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I heard the term identity stack. And yeah, you're describing that, right? You're all these different things and you can be all these different things. And it sounds like fractional is giving you a way to... Be your true self in more categories at the same time, as opposed to just looking at what's my title, what's my salary? Because if I don't have that, who am I? You're so many things.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. And Gen Z has it spot on with that. And I'm loving it. I'm not fully there yet. But yeah, identity stack, portfolio of impact, however you want to say. And I think fractional leads to... I feel like my proficiency as a business partner or a business leader has just skyrocketed in what I'm able to see and truly have conversations with my clients about is I'm like way more focused on what they're trying to accomplish versus like, well, that's cool, but I'm your head of HR. And so I'm going to do all these like fun little things that do impact the business. And I'm not saying that people who are in like a corporate HR job aren't doing that. You're just, it's a different, perspective. It's just so different. And when you're getting beat up day after day in a kind of corporate HR job, you just become numb to things and you just are like, whatever, just get it done. And that's not fair to anybody. That's not a way to live. And again, this is coming from like a very privileged spot in life. There is a point, like my husband and I look and we're like, there is a point of fit. Like, where you might need to turn around and get back on the corporate bandwagon. But we're aware of that. The basic Maslow's of hierarchy of needs are being met. So we're good there.
SPEAKER_00:Well, and I love that way you're describing time and impact where I've gone from in the past trying to figure out a way to justify my full-time job to an employer. And so you're trying, maybe you're not clear. So you're trying to come up with things that get noticed. And that just... is a way to get burnt out pretty quickly. Versus when I've been fractional, I'm not there to mess around. I'm there to solve problems, have impact, and cut out useless meetings. I will not show up for a useless meeting. And my goal is, what's the actual business problem? How can I help solve it? Who do I need to solve it with? And that's the fun. And then often you can actually tell founders, hey, Here's what I'm seeing from other clients right now in the industry. Here's what's actually happening, and you are a source for them. All that said, for anyone who's listened to past episodes, I'm currently at a day job because I loved Fractional, and then it all dried up for me. So I fully admit, it's okay if it doesn't work forever. I might be back on that at some point, but I had to take it for a while and then not take it, and that's okay.
SPEAKER_04:Totally. I think there's... a very real risk reward conversation that you have to have with yourself and whoever you are tied to financially, let's call spade a spade. This is a dollar revenue generating endeavor that we're all here for. The mortgage doesn't care. The bank doesn't care. And so I think there's a very real reality. And I look at this as a head of HR who's I've seen resumes before. I have a totally different view on like, oh, you did your own thing for a while. Like, I now have different questions that I'm going to ask. And I think the reality and the validity of that, we saw this with a couple of endeavors into like the mom space and the parent space, you know, 10, 15 years ago, which is still going strong and I fully support it, which is, and I'm not going to say their name because I don't. I'm not sponsored by them or anything, but you know what I'm talking about, where it's like these community groups of people who are mothers or parents returning from caregiving. And I think I remember at the beginning of COVID talking to my parents, I was like, there's got to be something good that comes out of it. But right now it sucks like real bad. And the silver lining was it highlighted so many things that are broken in how we work and the expectations and the systems that are set up in how we work, particularly around my passion points, which are parenting, mothering, women in the workplace, benefits, affordable quality childcare, like all the things. And I'm very vocal about it to my clients to say, this is where you have to be to attract talent, period. And I totally agree that having many different clients allows you to see faster what other companies are doing or what other industries are doing. And you're by necessity having to be very super connected into either the HR space or the fractional space or both to keep that pulse on. You can't read large publications that come out monthly about things that are lobbyists or whatever.
SPEAKER_00:What is some high level guidance you like to give to companies if they see it as a goal to be a more attractive place for moms, for people returning to the workforce. What are some things you try to advise them that maybe they're not even thinking about?
SPEAKER_04:Oh, man. You have to see, like, where are they? Do they have, like, a review? Do they have a policy? Do they have any framework for that that's more than FMLA?
SPEAKER_00:Sorry, what's an FMLA?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, FMLA, Federal Medical Leave Act. Wow. So it really kind of screwed everybody. And let's be honest, it's not that great of a benefit.
UNKNOWN:All it is is that we won't pay you. We'll just not fire you.
SPEAKER_04:We also just won't fire you for happening to have a baby. But we'll find
SPEAKER_02:out. But when you come back, you might get fired.
SPEAKER_04:But you might get fired because you weren't doing the things. That's for another day. So going back to how do we create for a client like, hey, Lindsay, we want to be an attractive place for moms or parents. Well, moms. And then I'll say, you mean parents or caregivers. So I'll pause them very quickly and say, no, like we're so far forward. And I will push as far as I can and say, this is where you need to be going. And I'll calibrate. I will reluctantly agree to various policies that may prioritize the mother over the parents or caregivers or adoption or fostering or whatever. So I try to just open it up, first of all. Then just put a policy in place and be really realistic. This is what the benchmark. There's so much data out there. Apparently, Cocoon, there's so many tech platforms that are starting to help organizations navigate state paid leave things. I just did one in Oregon, which is one of the more kind of It mirrors very similarly to FMLA. And I didn't really know what I was doing, but I was like, what's in the best interest of the employee? And what are all the ways that we need to make them feel safe and secure and taken care of? For me, when I had my son, I had, I don't even remember, I think it was like 14 weeks, 12 weeks, 14 weeks, plus a month ramp back. There are companies now And I'm apparently is one. There's a couple of others out there that are really good at consulting with you and coaching you and coaching your managers. And like, what does pre-leave look like? What is post-leave? Also, fun fact, babies don't come on their due days. So how do you navigate early kids, you know, trauma, all those things, adoption? That's a whole nother side of the kind of coin if you're adopting or you have there's new laws coming out that are like NICU related. So As a HR, I kind of like information bomb them a little bit to say there are a lot of things, and that's why you need me to help you navigate on what program or policy makes sense. And as a leader, as some companies have learned recently about poor management of their parental leave, and I won't say their names, but navigate it, figure it out. Well, don't rely on the policy as black and white. If you're the leader of an organization and you wrote a policy with your HR and then something breaks that policy, i.e. an employee in a situation, figure out what's the best for that employee in that moment to make them go at the end of whatever it is. Dang, I'm so fortunate for that. And that is now my expectation of Everything. I remember there was a woman I worked with. We didn't have a parental leave. This was like 2014, call it 2015. A woman we were trying to recruit into the organization was like, well, what's your parental leave policy? And I was like, deer in the headlights. And quickly, the CEO's like, what's the best thing that we can offer? And we put together some things and it was like, okay, everybody, parent or mother or father, let's just be really like Mother or father, birthing parent or non-birthing parent, everybody gets four months paid, done. Like, just didn't want to mess around with it because he was so focused on attracting talent. So she forced the conversation. She made it happen. She's like, I need this to sign the agreement. So I remember those kind of pivotal moments to say, there's a lot we don't know. There's a lot of laws that come out state by state as a fractional H.R., have enough knowledge and enough resources, but we have to be on the same page of like, you write that policy. At the end of the day, as long as you're doing the best for the person, you'll win.
SPEAKER_00:This is so refreshing to hear, just that you're advocating for that, fighting for that. Most of my career has been being a 1099, not being a W-2 employee. And so when my son was born, I took off time because I had no work at the time but when my daughter was born I think I took off a week and that was it and both of them were via cesarean so that wasn't great my wife just the what she did is amazing and thankfully for the second child I was remote which basically meant frankly I worked as little as I could during that time just to help support the craziness that we were dealing with but you can't really say that openly or else you'll lose your source of income and That's just the reality of at least I was remote so that I could hold the baby during a meeting if I had to. I could go to change a diaper in between. And I didn't change
SPEAKER_04:diapers on the call.
SPEAKER_00:That would have been great. Like we might have shortened the call. I'm not one of those people that says, oh, we did it tough and other people should know. I do not want other people to have to go through what we went through. My wife is absolutely amazing, but I don't wish that on other people. I would love for it to be easier for other people because having kids is so, so hard.
SPEAKER_02:It's
SPEAKER_00:so hard to worry about income beyond that. It'd be nice to have a company that cares enough to say, hey, we're going to invest in you for the long haul a couple of months. Who cares? Like, go take care of yourself.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. I mean,
SPEAKER_00:it's not a vacation. It is not a vacation.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. I mean, I think I would not have been able to truly see the impact also because my husband was working remote for a company in Spain. And I think he took some combination of like six to eight weeks off. And I don't think it was ever really off because when you're an entrepreneur, you're kind of just always going. But the point was, I saw so much of how having caregiving expanded beyond and being compensated or acknowledged to take time off, how that impacts companies' abilities to retain talent. And I'm not saying this is a loyalty. This is not a quid pro quo, like, well, we did all these great things for us, so you need to stay with us for three years. It's more of just like the brass tacks of this is the standard. And I think we need to demand it and expect it. Now, again, as a fractional, I don't have those same benefits, but I think just I yell as loud as I can to whomever I can that it's a non-negotiable now and it needs to include a wider variety of people. And it's no longer like, well, it's because this person qualified for short-term disability or whatever. I I had a friend who was asked, are you having this child naturally or C-section? So we know how much short-term disability to grant you. And she's like, I'm not answering that question. And I was like, I would have fired my employees so fast if I found out someone on my team said that to an employee.
SPEAKER_00:It doesn't just impact the person, right? I've had situations where fathers and mothers were completely shafted by the company and they all right, maybe it didn't happen to me directly at that time, but I've watched it. I saw the pain they went through. I saw the struggle they had and realized, okay, the leaders of this company obviously do not care at all, or maybe are unaware. You could maybe grant them that in some situations. So that does affect the morale and the faith of everyone else around them, not just that one person.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. It's just, it's fascinating. It's so interesting to me that I've had conversations with employers that are so behind. And I'm just like, as a fractional, you know, in various ways, I've been like, I can't work with you. I can't, I can't support this. And that's another, during the fractional journey, that's another thing that you have to like be very, you know, dollars talk, but also be you now have so much more of a like kind of unencumbered voice. I felt very silenced and very like, you know, just again, burnt out. And I was scared to say things or speak up or speak my mind. I was afraid of failure. I was a people pleaser, you know, all these things. And in 18 months, I'm like loud. I'm just loud and refined, right? Like, well, I'll say things that later we look back and we're like, oh, that's probably a dumb thing to say. That didn't age well. And then you just acknowledge it and say, yep, I know, because it was 10 years ago and we don't say that anymore. And you just give yourself so much more grace.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. I had a similar thing happen where the extreme timidity went away because I had three or four clients and I just started telling founders, actually, this is unethical or this is not smart. And I would say it usually one-on-one privately. And they started saying that they had so much more respect for me for being willing to call them out. And I did not do that before. And I'm hoping that I've retained that way of thinking. That's a whole other conversation topic for another podcast.
SPEAKER_04:Totally agree. Totally agree.
SPEAKER_02:The fractional journey may not necessarily be for everybody. So I'm wondering how you decided, yeah, this is something I think I can do. What are some of the things that, you know, if there's somebody who's kind of on the fence, like if you don't have this X, Y, or Z thing in place or working for you, or in your tool belt, like maybe it's not for you, but if you do go for it, what are some of those factors for you? Oh
SPEAKER_04:man. So when I first started, I was so obsessed with how my time, it was just bleeding for two or three years. My time just did not exist. There were no boundaries for anything. I was using the old adage of like, just work hard, just do more work, like more inputs, more inputs. So when I went to fractional, the first tool technology that I got was like time tracking, how and really prioritizing and piecing together this client, these tasks, these projects, like, and, you know, you build it, you're like, oh, that's a new task. And sometimes I do. I also was measuring domestic labor because I was like in this journey to find myself and rebalance my own brain. Because my husband was like, and this is not his, I agreed to it. He's like, you'll be the chief of staff, chief operating officer of the house. And I'm like, great. We have one kid. We have a dog, two cats, and a kid. And I'm like, this isn't that hard. We had just moved in, all this stuff. And I was like, this is not my jam. I cannot take on home management this quickly. I can't do such a career shift to do that. I still need to do HR things because I am shifting out or shifting into a new who am I. So I got a time tracking platform. There's tons out there. I use one that I particularly like. It's very low cost or I pay for the more advanced version. And that's been a lifesaver for so many reasons. I did a project where I did an HRAS implementation. I had done that so many times, I felt like I could do it in my sleep. So I was able to really scope it very well. I knew every step of the way what was going to happen. I knew kind of what to look out for. So I priced it and I did this big Excel spreadsheet of like, okay, these tasks are low effort, low brain, you know, intensity. So I can like price them lower, you know, okay, that's$50 an hour. Maybe this is$80 an hour, da, da, da, da. Cool math, cool math, all at the end of the day. And I'm like, all right, I priced it at X, meaning like my time into it. I upcharged it a little bit to like put wiggle room on there. The client agreed to that cost, that fee. And that also aligned me to say, Lindsay, you can't mess around and just be like, la, la, la, la, la, with your time. You got to get this project done, not only on like a time from like, you know, December to March, but But you have to get this done in a certain amount of time because I know me. I can also do 100 hours like all along the way. So for me, going fractional meant getting a really tight grip on time. It's just like very like, you know, spacey conversation with myself about like time-space continuum thing. That was part one. Part two, I think, was, I don't, I mean, it was just the little things. It was like, okay, build a website. Okay, like I had the mentality of like, if you build it, they will come. So I like did the headshots. I like found a guy down the street. I was like, he does headshots. That looks great. I invested. I put dollars and not like, you know, exorbitantly. I was like, I'm going to buy the website, you know, do the website. I'm going to do, I'm going to pay the rocket lawyer, you know, whatever it was,$29.99 per month to get like a bunch of contracts and like put together legalese because I wanted, the journey or the experience when a client came and they asked me, so what do you do? Or who are you? Or where's your website? Or how do I like interact with you? Or how do I schedule a meeting with you? I wanted all those things at the top of the funnel to flow very quickly and to make it look like, oh, she knows what she's doing. Even though my little fractional thing was like two days old, I got a professional, you know, email set up. I wasn't going to do Gmail because that wasn't my vibe. I was like, no, I want it to be a particular thing. It also helps that my husband runs a Gmail company. I got a discount, friends and family discount on that. But I think those time was my first big thing. This year, my big thing is content and being more vocal and being more assertive in and productizing what I'm offering. Like, what do I do and what do I not do? Because what I noticed is as I've said, you know, recovering people pleaser, I need to have boundaries, not just on my time, but I'm not good at everything. Like, no, that industry is not going to get me up in the morning. It sounds like a cool job, but I can tell you, I'm not a fit for that industry. Or, you know, just being more assertive to be like, this is what it costs. I've gotten, you know, engagements through Upwork or various other resources, and they're like, we need this done. And I'm like, okay. Here's the price or here's what I feel my time, value, relationship, whatever, is going to be worth. And you know very quickly, like, is this going to be a good thing or not? So you get very assertive and very scrappy with balancing. Is it worth less money for a really good engagement or is it worth really, you know, sticking it to them with a higher price and hoping that they bite and then, you know, dealing with it? Or that they don't. Yeah, worry that they... Or just say, oh, thank goodness that they didn't take that
SPEAKER_02:because... Yeah, pitch it so high that they'll say no. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:Exactly. And then
SPEAKER_02:if they say yes, then deal with it because you're making killer money.
SPEAKER_04:You're making sick money and you're just like, okay, I'll manage. So there's some good journeys that happen in the fractional piece. And I look at it much more with like, I built all the systems that I've needed. I built a pricing tool for myself. I... built a capacity tool to say, how many clients can I actually take on? Like, what's realistic? If I had every billable hour in every hour of my day was billable, what's my max? And I was charging like a decent dollar amount. How many clients can I really take on? And what's my max profit? So I'm just having a different relationship with like time, money, you know, kind of thing. I'm in a pivotal standpoint or point two, where in the maturity model is like, what are those, where can I stop trading my time for like one hour equals one, this dollar amount? And how can I do more value, value add and value selling? I think Lance and I have talked about this before, but I'm, that's my new discovery is like, where is that? And where does that go? And how does that model out? But yeah, I did a lot of, building the
SPEAKER_00:infrastructure for sure. you can only actually do 20 valuable hours in a week for clients. And then you can build backwards from that. And I've talked to people about this before. It feels overwhelming. Just try it for a short period of time because you'll find... So I've been running the timer now for a year and a half. And I know when I was doing fractional, a 20-hour week was hard. A 25-hour week was exhausting. A 30-hour week would burn me out. And a 15-hour week... actually was still pretty great because I felt like I had calmness and attention because you're still building a business. You're still doing sales calls. You're still, in my case, having a family. And so that 15 to 20 hour spot is actually all I could really do for client time. And sometimes I'd have a conversation with Lance like, actually, I'm going to have a hard week this week, but it's worth it just for a little bit because of some extra money. But I would always complain to him afterward it wasn't worth it. I love that. I highly recommend time tracking is the basis for getting into value-based pricing or expertise pricing, you have to at least know what you're capable of first.
SPEAKER_02:Totally. It's an interesting kind of a paradox there because we don't necessarily want to sell our hours to our customers, but we do need to know for ourselves. So you have all this internal data that's never going to see the light of day because you're selling your 15, 20 years of HR leadership experience. You're not selling one hour of Lindsay's time. That's not how... That's not how it works. And I see, Lindsay, you said that we talked about this before. I see people who are just starting their fractional journey. They come and they join the community that you're a leader at, fractional people people. And they're saying, how do I price this? Like, I counted up my hours. Should I just, you know, give them a quote, mark it up by 15%? And I'm just like screaming at the screen. No, don't do that. Don't tell them your hours. It's definitely not how it works here. It works in fractional land. So... This is such an interesting topic and we've talked about on here at length, but I think it's just really great to hear that reinforcing of, yeah, know yourself, know your hours, but that information stops right there. You're not selling your time. I mean, it is a viable business model, but I think as people move into the business of expertise as fractionals, that's something that I would love to see the community leaving behind.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, I can't agree with that more. And I'm, you know, for me personally, figuring out what are those products and I've heard so many people who have been in the fractional space particularly with HR related you know expertise it's hard to translate that into like well what is the value of said expertise or product well let's figure it out like let's just start start figuring it out and get smarter with it and I'm having a conversation with another person about like how does AI impact how we price things and how do we get smarter about that I'm like yeah but you're still 15 20 years of experience you know doesn't doesn't necessarily mean that like it makes you bill less it's just you're looking more at what is the end goal you're having much more smarter conversations on like what does success look like with your client versus build us a performance management program. And you're like, okay, let me build it in a box. That's how we've gotten ourselves in trouble and burnt ourselves out because HR goes in their corner and builds this product without actually knowing how a product development cycle actually works. And we build it because it looks pretty and it's all functional and sometimes it works. But at the end of the day, if I had a really good conversation with a client, they were like, okay, I know the tool that we have isn't great, but it gets the job done. Should we go to Google Forms and like filter? I'm like, don't stop. Like we're making this too complicated. It's gonna, and we, I know I'm being a little bit vague on this because I can't reveal everything that the client tells me, but I was like, y'all need to be more concise with your performance evaluation. You can't have 72 questions in your performance evaluation because no, it wasn't 72. It was... It was a lot. There was a lot of detail. And I was like, it's just not, it's not realistic. And I think that was a really good exercise in me being like, I'm not building Google forms for then those Google forms to like filter in back into the HRS. When the HRS has a tool, I was like, I can do it. I don't want to. So I'm much more wrapping my head around value-based pricing and then working backwards from there.
SPEAKER_02:Cool. We're coming down to the end of our chat here. Is there anything that we missed that you wanted to say, something that's important to you that you want to get out here before we wrap up? It's been great having you.
SPEAKER_04:Oh my gosh. Well, thank you. This has been fantastic. I love talking about all things HR, people, fractional journeys, self-discovery. I would say that if you are on the fence of going fractional, and you have questions, particularly if you are a fractional people person, you can email me or find me on LinkedIn, and I would love to tell you more about our free Slack community. We create a safe space for fractional people people in their journey. Many of us have just started our fractional journey in the last five years, so we're all new and figuring it out. It's a very safe space, very quiet. If you're well into your fractional career, I would love to connect with you on LinkedIn and learn more. I'm also part of Fractional United. But yeah, I welcome it. I welcome companies to rethink how they think of their pools of candidates. And I think there are so many opportunities. If I was a head of HR, I would be screaming and yelling to my leadership, like, we need to bring in fractionals. And that's not consultants. That's not temps. It's a totally different bucket of talent that is undertapped, underutilized. And I think everybody should be leveraging fractional talent in this kind of like funky market to scaffold their business to that next level.
SPEAKER_00:That's fantastic. And we'll put the Slack community, your LinkedIn and your email all in the show notes so that people can click on that. Thank you. It's been so great having you here and chatting.
SPEAKER_02:Thanks, guys. If you want to send us questions, if you have questions for Lindsay, we can route those to her and you can always hit us up at email at fractional.fm. So thanks for listening and we'll catch you next week.
