Building a Business that Fits Your Family

In this episode of Disrupt Your Money, we sit down with data visualization powerhouse Ann K. Emery to talk about what it actually looks like to build a business that fits your family, not the other way around. From soul-sucking corporate jobs to a thriving business that takes summers off, Ann has redesigned her work to support the life she wants—rather than the one capitalism keeps trying to hand her.

If you’ve ever wondered whether you have to choose between being present for your family and building serious wealth, this conversation is your permission slip to question the whole setup. Grab your notebook (or your passport), and get ready to imagine what your business could look like if it was designed around your life from day one.

⏱️ In This Episode:

00:00 Introduction: Why building a business that fits your life is part of financial liberation
00:41 Meet Ann K. Emery & Depict Data Studio
02:15 What Ann’s business looks like today: school-hours schedule and summers in Europe
06:23 Ann's story of corporate burnout at 22
09:31 Doing “everything right” and still struggling
11:49 Planting seeds with blogging, YouTube, and conference talks
14:01 The Uganda workshop that proved the math of self-employment could work
18:23 Starting a family and a business at the same time
20:33 Balancing business and caregiving
24:00 Designing your ideal week
30:00 Systems instead of stress
32:31 Digital nomad life with three kids
41:26 Staying open to wild opportunities and Ann’s advice for building a business that truly fits your family

🔗 Mentioned in This Episode:

👉 Depict Data Studio – Ann’s data visualization training & consulting studio
👉 Connect with Ann on LinkedIn 

💬 Connect with Us:
🌐 Website → https://equitablemoneyproject.com
📸 Instagram → https://instagram.com/equitablemoneyproject
🎧 Podcast → https://equitablemoneyproject.com/podcast

🚀 Your Next Step:
Ready to make your money match your values? Download our free Wealth is Resistance Action Kit → https://equitablemoneyproject.com/kit

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:07

Well, hey there, I'm Meg Wheeler, CPA, entrepreneur, and political activist. And you're listening to Disrupt Your Money, the podcast that's pursuing liberation through financial education. Let's face it, our economy and financial institutions weren't built to support the majority of us. So if we're going to achieve financial equity and justice for all, we've got to build our own. So let's do it, my friends. Let's get ready to disrupt your money. All right. Well, welcome back to another episode of Disrupt Your Money. And I am here today with a very exciting guest, one of our clients and community members, Ann Emery, uh of Depict Data Studio. So Ann, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me, Meg. Oh my gosh, I'm super pumped for this conversation. So as you're gonna learn, Anne is a really inspirational person. Um, she has uh built an incredible business. Remember, this is video. People can see your face. Uh so this is uh really, really um incredible business, but she's also done it while I think doing a really great job of balancing family and home and self. Um, and that's one of the reasons why I wanted to uh share Ann's story here today. Um, because I think it's really important as we are talking about building our businesses and building wealth and building or working towards economic equity that we remember we don't have to always do it. Um, we certainly shouldn't do it at the expense of um the things that really matter in life. So, Ann, thank you for being here. I'm just really excited to dive into this conversation.

SPEAKER_00 1:42

Great. Um, well, Meg, you've been my accountant for a couple of years now. So you actually know some very private financial, you know, all my financial details. You and my husband are the only two people on the planet, but um I don't know how much you know about kind of what else I'm up to nowadays. You know, I I know it, but maybe you see a little bit on Instagram or a little bit in your weekly money meetings and stuff.

SPEAKER_02 2:07

Yeah. No, I don't I see the numbers and I see the the that kind of stuff. But yeah, I don't feel like I have the full story.

SPEAKER_00 2:15

So nowadays, 2023, I'm in my ninth year of self-employment and solopreneurship. So I'm not brand new, but I'm not one of those people who's been doing this for decades and decades. I'm kind of in the middle experience-wise. So I figured a good number of things out so far. I mostly do data visualization, consulting, and training, which means all of your spreadsheets that most people hate, except you and me, right? Except people like us. We love our spreadsheets, we geek out over our spreadsheets. Um, I'm mostly helping government agencies, universities, hospitals take their spreadsheets and make sense of them with better graphs and better dashboards.

SPEAKER_02 2:53

And by the way, you're the only person in the world who has prettier spreadsheets than I do.

SPEAKER_00 2:58

So that's a huge compliment. I'm gonna take that as a huge, huge compliment.

SPEAKER_02 3:02

I think one of our first meetings, you were like, let me just send you this spreadsheet I made. And I was like, Whoa. It was fact. I knew I knew I loved you from that moment.

SPEAKER_00 3:13

I love your spreadsheets too because they're all set up in templates where I can just select my thing from my drop-down. It's very neat and tidy. It ensures anyway. We could geek out about spreadsheets all day. Um but I think you know, because you've seen my numbers, my take home pay is quite nice and stable these days. My take home pay nowadays is about six times my old salary when I was a data person in downtown DC by the White House. So, like what I made with my master's degree in a great consulting firm, going out on my own little by little, being able to, my my goal early on was like, I'm just want to make 20,000 a year. That was my goal because that was the gap between my husband's salary and then I had to make 20,000 so that we could just afford our studio apartment in the DC area. And I was like, great, I'm just gonna make 20,000 a year as a self-employed person. And like, to my surprise, it's been much more than 20, like, what a wild ride, right? Um I work very little. I work during the school day. I've got three kids, so I work while they're in school. I go to gymnastics on Monday nights. I go to the art class on Thursdays. I can take them to their haircuts. I get to do like midday playground breaks. If I'm bored or tired, like let me go with my husband, who's a stay-at-home dad, and the son to the playground. Like, why not? I have that flexibility now. As you probably know, kids are sick all winter long. So um, whether I want to work part-time or not, in the winter, I've I've had to work part-time, but like what a blessing, right? Because a lot of corporate jobs don't give you much sick time at all. Um, and then the latest thing I've added is that I'm taking the summers off. So I kind of started that a few years ago and I've built up to just going for it the full three-month summer that my kids are home from elementary school. So this year we're doing two months in Europe. We're gonna do four different cruises. Like life is nice these days in in year nine of self-employment.

SPEAKER_02 5:11

And I I I I love that you shared that. So thank you, because I think that is really inspirational for a lot of people. But I also know that there are gonna be people sitting there going, well, yeah, but there's something about her that makes it possible, you know, oh, she comes from a wealthy family, or oh, she's this, or oh, she's that. You didn't start out with that on day one. And so can you talk a little bit about how you got to this spot? Because I think it's really important that people understand. No, we're not saying you can have this tomorrow. We're saying there's absolutely a journey here, but it is possible. So I'd love to hear a little bit about what that journey was like for you.

SPEAKER_00 5:44

I don't have a rags to riches story. My parents, they did that. So they were the first ones in their families to go to college. But then I got the luxury of being raised in the DC area with college-educated parents who both worked full-time. I went to great public schools and everything. So, like I did absolutely have that massive advantage in life. Um, and then I did the typical path, right? Like you go to college, you graduate, I started working in my first corporate job. And they were like, Great, you get what did I get? The first benefits package. It was like 10 days of vacation and five days of sick leave or something. I mean, it was it was nothing. It's what you get your first year in a company. And um, I don't think I've told you this, but my mom got cancer almost as soon as I got that job. She had cancer four different times. And when they're like, you only have five days of sick leave, I just thought, but I that means I can't even be with her when she's going to surgery and I can't even be with my dad to help him take care of my mom. And it just wasn't enough. And I just instantly thought, this is not working. Like this system's gonna break me. And I was instantly burned out, you know, at the age of 22, 23, instant quarter life crisis of just thinking, like, this can't be all there is. This just can't be all there is. Like, there is no time off, just working around the clock, working around the clock. Um, I think a lot of people can relate to that. I think we all unfortunately had jobs early on, and maybe even maybe even now. A lot of us have those types of jobs for a long time, unfortunately, where it's just like really soul sucking and just no time for your personal life.

unknown 7:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:22

I mean, I my last corporate job, you know, I was pregnant and I had my son, and I came back and I would have to leave the office at four just to get home to get him by daycare before they started charging you. But if I left it for my boss, you know, would read me out for it. Um, I had a granddaughter who was sundowning at the time. So if I wanted to see him when he was still able to engage, I had to leave at three. I mean, it just it it didn't work. And I constantly felt like I was shuttling myself from one obligation to another and never feeling like I was completely there for any of them. And I I hated it. And it was a big part of why I left. So I think a lot of us can relate.

SPEAKER_00 8:02

I think it's really hard for the high achieving people too, which is like a lot of the people that we know and work with because you know what you're capable of. And it's just, I feel like we have all these external factors then that just they just felt like really heavy on my shoulders for a while. Like I know I can do better work than this. I know my family, my mom at the time, or my kids now deserve better than that. And I just like couldn't do that. Just the environment wasn't set up for me to actually do my best at anything. And that, um, I mean, I know my perfectionist tendency is my own problem, but like a lot of us deal with that. We're like, I'm just not performing well on either end. Like I'm just sucking at everything right now, basically.

SPEAKER_02 8:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:43

Um, well, it's it's survival.

SPEAKER_02 8:46

It's it feels like we're just working to survive. And and it's um, you know, we talk a lot on this show about you know what we're trying to achieve, which is economic equity and wealth building and all of that, but there are so many factors that are making it harder for us to achieve that. And I think sometimes we have to be willing to step outside of the box and and recognize that the current systems that are set up just don't work for us. I tried really hard to make corporate work for me and it just didn't.

SPEAKER_00 9:20

You know, I was thinking this is where I could say some fancy success story, right? And be like, don't worry, there's a light at the end of the tunnel. But actually, well, I told you, you know, I graduated college and it was just soul-sucking corporate life. I loved my coworkers. We worked on great projects, but it was just the structure I was in. And um, then I decided, let me start grad school part-time. Let me add that in the mix. And my initial dream was go to a PhD full-time, do the professor track. That was life plan A. Um, but I couldn't afford it because I I had to pay for it all myself. I didn't even have a thousand extra dollars to like apply to the grad school programs. I had to work and I had to go to school part-time. Um, no, no, I take that back. I could have taken out loans, which is what all my friends did. A lot of my friends had, you know, 50, 100,000 or more of loans. But I I was also married at the time and I was like just so terrified of doing that to my husband and I's finances. So luckily, I didn't take out grad school loans and I just did one or two classes at a time, which was all I could afford. It was like, oh, I've got$4,000 extra. Great, that's one class. Oh, we just got annual bonuses. Now I can take two classes this semester. And I just pieced it together and I did super slow grad school for five years of driving around the beltway in DC, like go to work, go to class at night, get home at 11 o'clock, have to study on the weekends. It was not glamorous. It was, it was not the my ideal way to spend my 20s, but oh my gosh, you know, I did it and I thought never again, never again will I live like this because it was so challenging. It was just so much harder than it needed to be.

SPEAKER_02 11:03

So, how did you make the leap then from that? From five years of grad school, which I wow, good. I just back just finished paying off my my second to last grad school owner of one more. So I really appreciate that. But how did you go from that to becoming a business owner?

SPEAKER_00 11:22

Well, around the same time, I'd been speaking at conferences for part of my day job. I would just go assist my boss or assist somebody more senior on the team and, you know, help them with the presentations. So I was getting that speaking experience, which was great. I was also, this was back in the early 2010s, like 2011, 2012 era when YouTube and blogging were just starting to be a thing. Podcasts weren't like really a thing yet. Online courses weren't a thing. It was YouTube and blogging back then. So I started YouTubing and blogging just for fun. And I got lucky, like right around spring 2014, just as I was finishing grad school, it was like all the stars aligned, and I was at a conference speaking about dashboards, which buzzwords and data come and go. But at the time, this was peak dashboard mania. Everybody wanted to hear about dashboards. I didn't know that. I had no idea. Like I'd only been to a few conferences. I had no sense that this was this really fancy topic everybody wanted to learn about. So my coworker and I are giving this presentation to a standing room crowd, standing room only crowd. They're not here to hear Anne. They weren't here to hear from my coworker, like she's brilliant, but they were just there to hear about the topic. And immediately that same day, I started getting emails from people at the conference saying, and I look at my phone during the conference, I was like, what is happening? This is what is going on with my phone blowing up. And people would say, that was an amazing presentation. You just did such a great job explaining dashboards and what they're for and how to make them better. Can we fly you out to give the same presentation at our company? Or can you do a webinar at our company? Can you do a whole five-day workshop on that? And it just was the topic that kind of started everything. And I said no to those requests at first because I was still had, you know, a few more months of grad school left. I was like, I have zero time. Like, I have no sick time to take. Like, I can't do that. It was a conflict with my current job anyway. But then once I did finish my grad school program, I was like, let me say yes to some of these paid speaking events. And the first one I actually said yes to was in Uganda. It was a woman from Germany who was doing an international development project in Uganda, kind of like our version of USAID. Yeah. And she read my blog and she said, Your blog is so helpful, really practical data tips. Can we fly you out to train all of our analysts in Uganda who crunched numbers for parliament? And it was like my people in Uganda. It was like my DC analyst mindset people who crunched numbers for Congress. It was like those exact same personality types who just happened to be in Kampala, Uganda. So I did that. It was a two-day class that paid more than my monthly salary at my job.

SPEAKER_01 14:08

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 14:09

So I do the rough math and I'm like, if I just did one workshop a month, I would make my old salary. And then I thought, well, I really, I told you, I really only needed to make 20,000. So I thought, well, I'll just do like a few projects and there's$20,000. And like, I guess I'll just do nothing the rest of the time. Maybe I'll ride a bike. I don't know what I'll do. Um and it turns out you actually just work full time or whatever hours you want, and then you just make more than your old salary. And it just like is this perfect math equation that works out in your favor when you do consulting like this.

SPEAKER_02 14:44

But I love what I love about this is that you weren't necessarily looking for you weren't set out to build this business, right? You were just doing your thing, and but you were open to this opportunity. And I think that that's really important for folks who are not currently in the business world, or even if you are in the business world, to just always be open to whatever opportunity may come your way because you never know who you talk to, what event you go to, that could be this massive opening for the next part of your life. And so I love that. So, all right, so you got the one. What happened? Did you make the 20K in the first year?

SPEAKER_00 15:23

I I made my full salary the first year, more than 20K and take home pay because I had to make more than that because I had what were my business expenses at the time? Like maybe I bought myself a laptop. I mean, it was it was nothing. I was working out of a little tiny desk, which I've told you about because I deducted it on taxes back in the day. I was like, Yeah. I told my HR block person at the time, they were like, What are this? What's the square footage of your office? It's like, I live in a studio apartment. We have 600 square feet. My desk is four by five feet. Like, can I just deduct that that, you know? Um, so it's not like I had a lot of business expenses, but the first year I did make my full salary, which um I realize is actually really rare. Like some people do that, but not everybody does that. Many people need a few years to get up and running to more of a break-even point. That's the much more normal path. And I did have those few years to get up and running. I had kind of accidentally was doing YouTube videos and blogs and speaking at conferences for fun or as part of my regular job. So I absolutely did have those ramp up years. They were just um not on purpose, you know. And nowadays, people people ask me, like, how do you get started blogging? How do you get started YouTubing? And they put so much pressure on themselves thinking, like, I want to turn my podcast, TikTok channel, whatever, into a full-time job. How do I do that? And like, I have no advice there. Um, hopefully, people aren't listening to the podcast for that because mine was this happy accident.

SPEAKER_02 16:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:57

And I kind of think it had to be because if I went in thinking like, I'm gonna master YouTube and I'm gonna write the best blog posts ever and make a living off this, it almost would have been too much pressure and it probably wouldn't have worked out as successfully as it did. So I don't know. Just ramp up years are totally normal. If you can get some ramp up years while you still have the, you know, the safety net of a full-time job. That's absolutely my recommended route for sure.

SPEAKER_02 17:26

Well, and I think you you gave advice there, which is to just start. I think people do spend so much time fixated on how do I do it. And I mean, I uh we've talked about this before, I think, with people who make online courses and they spend eight months, 10 months, 12 months building the thing. And it's like, just start. Like it's people are so afraid to just leap into it. I, in fact, I got my start in this business. I was running another business and people were asking finance questions. And I was like, okay, I know the answer to this. This is so easy. And I started blogging and I started answering people's questions, and I never, in fact, the time I said I'm never doing taxes ever again, I swore up and down I would never touch it. Um, because I hated it before because what I really hated was the environment and and not the work itself. And so, but you you just you just start. Um all right. So, how did that first year transition into nine years later? We're not working in the summers, we're not working a lot during the week, and we're making a ton of money.

SPEAKER_00 18:29

What is that like? Well, right around the same time that I finished grad school, left the corporate world, started doing consulting and training for us my job. I was gonna say a side job, but it kind of accidentally became my job. Um, my husband and I said, you know what? We're almost both 30. It's time to start a family. So then we threw kids into the mix. So I think I got pregnant a month after I became self-employed. I mean, it was really quick. We didn't think it would happen that fast. I thought, oh, it'll take a year, like the story that all my friends have. And it's just like, oh my gosh, this is happening now. Um, which was really hard because raising a baby, especially if it's your first one, is the most challenging thing, I think, on the planet. So is starting a business. And I did those at the same time, which was really, really hard. But I'm also really glad it worked out that way because then it forced me to build a business that supported my parenthood goals. Like I had to build a business that that fit family in, where um a lot of my friends now, like in their 30s, 40s, 50s, are like, okay, I already have kids. I want to go be self-employed. And that's hard. That's hard. My heart goes out to them because it's like it's just diff. You know how hard kids are because you already have them. So then to work that into self-employment, that's a little trickier. So I kind of got lucky and just went right in the deep end and did some of the life's hardest things at the same time that very first year.

SPEAKER_02 20:04

So, what were some of the things that you did to balance business with family? Because that is a something, I mean, it's something I struggle with. It's definitely something I know most of our community struggles with, whether it's kids or relatives or just whatever. We all have something that is that needs our time.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

Yeah. There are probably two very intentional things I did early on. One of them's realistic for everybody in the audience, one of them's maybe not, or maybe it's specific to mine. Anyway, one is I purposefully looked for short-term projects with clients. I had had one of those 12-month contracts of working maybe 20-ish hours a month. And that doesn't work when you're also pregnant and taking care of a newborn. It was just, and I have friends who are like, oh, I've had to hire a helper and I've had to hire this person. And there are absolutely ways to deal with it. Parents deal with that all the time. Yeah. But I just thought I that sounds so stressful to me. I'm just only going to do short-term projects, which is one of the reasons that over the years, I started with doing half consulting, like, I'll write your report, I'll crunch your numbers, I'll make your graphs. And I was doing half training, like full day workshops or two-day workshops. And I purposefully focused on training because it was all short-term. So I knew like, oh, if I'm pregnant and I'm going to be eight months or nine months pregnant when this client wants this workshop, I'll just have to decline. I'll have to like wait a, you know, I just planted around my pregnancies. Um, so I don't know how realistic that is in every industry, but in my industry of doing a speaking and consulting, it's very realistic to just say I'm only doing short-term projects so that you're not committed to stuff too long term. And then you have something with life come up and you're like, oh, what do I do now?

SPEAKER_01 21:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:50

Um, and the other one too.

SPEAKER_01 21:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:54

The other one I started doing was really early on with my first baby. I started taking field trip Fridays. Her daycare was we got so lucky, they let you do four days a week instead of five. I would have never paid for five, but not taken her on Fridays. I don't think. I don't even think I would do that now. I just think that's financially like unreasonable because daycare is wildly expensive. Um, but ours let us pay for four days a week. So I just took off Fridays and we just drove everywhere within an hour of our house. So we went to the zoos, we went to the museums, we did the all the children's centers, we did play dates. And that was just so nice. Not that she remembers any of it. You know, she was like six months, she was 18 months at the time, but I remember it. I have those really good memories of us bonding, and I just am so glad I made the leap and did that for myself early on, was just saying, like, I'm just gonna fit my work into four days and I'm gonna have a full day devoted to families where I'm not checking my phone unless there's some fire I had to put out, which is very rare. But like I'm mostly just, you know, mentally present for my kids on field trip Fridays.

SPEAKER_02 23:04

I love that. I I do a similar thing. I generally don't work on Fridays, and it's again, if something comes up, I'll do it. But I like it actually for me, maybe this makes me sound bad. I don't spend time with my family, I use it for myself. That's not bad at all. You have to. When else are you gonna go to the dentist and get a haircut? Like I do. I use it. I I play tennis, I get a massage, like I use it for not every week, but you know, I use it for I do I try to do at least one thing every Friday that's kind of a self-care thing because it is so important. And I just and and it came out of when I was in corporate, I never functioned well on Fridays. I really struggled every Friday to be productive. So when I was in this business, I was like, well, then why am I working on Fridays? If that's not a day when I'm not gonna be productive, let's just call it what it is. I'm so much better working harder Monday through Thursday and recognizing that about myself. And that's what I love about being self-employed, is I can adjust my schedule that way. I do calls on Tuesdays and Wednesdays because on Mondays, I need to just focus. I don't talk to anybody on Monday. Don't talk to me on Monday. On Thursdays, my brain is shut down enough where I can't have a conversation with a person. So it's it's nice to be able to design your life the way that works the best.

SPEAKER_00 24:18

I was having a very similar conversation with a self-employed friend just last week. And she was debating, switching her, and she has a small team. There's maybe five of them in her company. Um, she was debating moving the whole company to a four-day work week because she'd heard such promising results. There's been like this study here and this study there, especially in Europe, of how much more effective and productive and happy and rested and more healthy you are if you don't work a billion hours a week, like duh, right? Americans are just finally catching up and realizing this, like the rest of the world. Um, and I was telling my friend last week, I said, my brain, I can only be on beast mode, like in the zone, focused, working in my zone of genius. I can only do that about 20 hours a week, about eight months out of the year. And that's that's when I work. I only work when I'm on. I could work year round on mediocre mode. Yep. Part-time beast mode, full-time mediocre mode, you get the same done workwise either way. You get the same done. But when you work part-time on beast mode, you have so much more time for tennis. Like I go bike riding, I I'm into my plants. I've got my garden in the backyard that deserves my attention, you know? Like I can do that a couple hours a day if I want. Yeah. So it's it's not really a trade-off because like you said, none of our brains are best on Friday mornings. Everybody's got ebbs and flows to their energy. So I think that's the beauty of working for yourself, is that maybe not on day one, but over time, you can very, very purposefully craft your schedule. So you're only working when your brain is on. Like if I find myself scrolling social media nowadays, I'll just stop and say, like, what am I even doing at my desk? I should be playing with my kids right now. I should be exercising.

unknown 26:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:06

There's just no point of being at my computer unless I'm like doing something that matters.

SPEAKER_02 26:11

Well, and I think that is critical right there. I've I've recently started to tune into that so much more, which is what I'm doing right now the most beneficial thing. It doesn't mean I have to be producing something for work, but is it the best thing overall in my life? So if I'm scrolling social media, is this really the best thing for me right now? Probably not. I could be doing something else. And same thing with work. If I hit a point where I'm like, I am not being productive right now, I'm not gonna sit there and force myself to be productive. I'm gonna get up, go for a walk, have some lunch, you know, take a break, whatever it may be. Um, and that I think is how we get to build these businesses that you're talking about by actually working less in a sense, which feels very counterintuitive and is certainly against the message that we've been taught our entire lives. And that society pals into us. So um really glad to hear you talk about that. And I also want to point out, because this may be surprising to a lot of folks listening, you don't have a big team. Because I think some people might be sitting there going, oh, sure, she can do that, because I'm sure her team takes no, you don't, in fact, who who is on your team?

SPEAKER_00 27:16

So a few years ago, I went to a conference and I heard a lot of other creator and solopreneur types talking about virtual assistants, which I had kind of heard of, but I just thought, oh, that doesn't apply to me. Like, I don't know, I just it didn't seem relevant, but I just kept hearing people say, virtual assistant, virtual assistant, virtual assistant. So I go home from the conference the next week and I hire one. I had two different virtual assistants for about two and a half or three years, and they were great. They were great for a while, for a season. Um, I think they would work between five and 10 hours a week, not both at the same time. Like I had one virtual assistant and then I had another virtual assistant. And they helped with all of the administrative tasks, which is different for every business. Like some things that I would call administrative tasks. Um, you in a past money meeting have called a CEO day or somebody else did like, no, that's that's not admin stuff. And that's actually really important CEO paperwork. And like, so I've had to trick myself right into realizing that everything is administrative. I just think either I'm making graphs or I'm teaching about graphs, and everything else is like blah, you know, I don't want to do it. So basically anything I just that wasn't my favorite thing, I tried to offload as much as possible on a virtual assistant. So that was great for a few years. But then I also at the same time, I started purchasing software and technology to save time. Like, um, oh gosh, I'm gonna say the name wrong on air. It's either Zapier or Zapier. I have no idea.

SPEAKER_02 28:46

I we use it, we use it in our business all the time. And to this day, I still have no idea. And I'm constantly I'm constantly calling it something different.

SPEAKER_00 28:54

Okay. Well, for people listening, go to Z A P I R Zapier slash Zapier. And what it does is it connects all your other platforms. So I pay, I want to say my package is maybe$20 a month, and it replaces like 20 hours a month of VA time for me. So I started purchasing things like I have this workflow where for client workshops, they register through a Zoom registration page, and then Zapier enrolls them in a teachable course. So they also get the recordings of their private trainings. Gumroad sends them all of their digital supplemental materials like chart templates and ebooks and handouts. Convert Kit sends them welcome messages, friendly reminder messages. So I set that all up, which takes because I've done it a billion times, takes like 25 to 30 minutes. Like I can just knock it out when I'm when I'm on beast mode. When I'm on beast mode, I just knock it out. I can just set that up for a yeah. I set that up for a Upcoming client training. And then Zapier just does its magic in the background for only$20 a month, which as far as software goes, is pennies for how much time it saves. So I started doing things like that. And just over the years, I thought I've kind of eliminated any recurring tasks. I've eliminated a lot of administrative tasks. I just didn't need a virtual assistant anymore. So my team now is I need higher level support. I need like strategic, super highly skilled specialists. So I have thankfully finally got a real accountant. You finally, that was years overdue. Um you convinced me, even though I was super stubborn. Thank you for sticking with me to upgrade my Excel spreadsheet of all my projects and my invoices that I was manually doing, waste hating, hating every second of it. Um, I finally have an accounting system which saves hours. How many hours does that save? I just don't have to work full-time anymore because like Zapier and you and my accounting system and a couple other time savers, like it does all the work for me because I've purposefully structured it that way. I'm trying to make as much as possible automatic about my work.

SPEAKER_02 31:12

Yeah, and I really I love that because I think if there is any hope of us accomplishing the big things we want to accomplish in this world, we have to get smarter and tighter about how we work. And you know, I'm a mom, I'm a business owner, I'm in politics, I'm involved in the community. There's so many things. And there and I I often get this question of like, how do you do it all? I don't do it all. I figure out a way to outsource it, whether that's to a tool or a person or a team or something. Um, but I love in your case that you didn't automatically outsource it to a team. I know you got a VA, but it's not like you built out this big team, which your business numbers could certainly handle, but that wasn't your knee-jerk reaction, which it is for many of us, because it's what we're constantly told. In order to grow, in order to scale, you must build a team. You need a team, team, team, team. And I just love with you, you were like, well, let me, let me see about that. Can I really, do I really have to do it that way or can I do it a different way? Um, and I think knowing you the way you've chosen to do it is more aligned with who you are anyway and and your style. I think you would not love, we've talked about that. She would not love having a big team because that would add more of that burden, that weight to your shoulders. Um, so I just love that you've done it that way.

SPEAKER_00 32:27

The one piece of the equation of my trajectory that we haven't talked about yet is that I used to travel full-time for work as a digital nomad and brought the family along, which we can talk about. That's that's a whole like really juicy part of the story. Um, but you and I were in the same business coaching program for a while, which was a great program. But I remember the focus of that program was like build a team, get subcontractors, get full-time employees, preferably was a big push. And I was in this coaching program for a year, two years or something. And I kept hearing this message of how effective it was to hire, hire, hire. And, you know, work in your zone of genius, work on the thing that only you can do and don't do anything else. Like that part made total sense to me. Like, why am I doing trying to do my own taxes when that's Meg's zone of genius? Yeah. Why am I trying to send invoices when there's a software program that handles almost all of that for me for like pennies a month? Um and I I just I just didn't like this idea of having a team. It just didn't fit. And I worried a lot that I was self-sabotaging myself, to be honest. I worried, is this really the right path for everybody? And I think, like, oh, this doesn't apply to me. Like, I'm special and different in the like kind of snowflake problem. Yeah. And I really don't think having a team applies to me because I told you I used to do a mix of training and consulting. Well, my trainings were all over the world. So, like I mentioned I went to Uganda. Well, I've been to like a dozen other countries. I would zigzag back and forth in airports. I was on the road every single week, like every single week. And even within the US, I do like Chicago one day, get on a plane, go to Pittsburgh the next day, then go to Miami, then go back to the DC area. I just went like boom, boom, boom, all over, which was great pre-kids. Yep. But then you add on one and two and then three kids, and you also have a husband you'd like to see, and it just wasn't practical anymore. And it also wasn't practical because how could I possibly manage a team when I'm in different time zones and I'm in airports? Like going to Africa is like a 40-hour flight. So I remember I would be standing in line, or even going to like, I used to work with the UN in Geneva a bunch of times. I went there four or five times, and like I'd be standing in line ready to step on the airplane, like waiting for my zone to be called. And I'd be furiously thumb typing on my phone, trying to upload attachments on the terrible airport Wi-Fi, like sending people things to meet client deadlines. And it just didn't, it just didn't make any sense. It was just so much work, it was so much stress. I would land and have a full inbox from all these projects. It just didn't make any sense at all. So I did try like subcontracting and having more of an agency model for a while.

SPEAKER_02 35:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:16

But combining that with traveling to all the different time zones didn't make any sense at all. I love it just being me responsible for everything, plus my software programs and like high-level support that I hire.

SPEAKER_02 35:30

Just Anne and her software and her Excel spreadsheet.

SPEAKER_00 35:34

It's so simple this way. It's just so simple.

SPEAKER_02 35:37

I love it. Well, all right, I do want to dive into the digital nomad thing because I think this is a really interesting part of your story. Um, so talk talk to us a little bit about what that looks like and also this idea of taking your family on the road. Because I know more and more people are thinking about ways to travel and to spend time with their families in non-traditional ways. I'm seeing more people do the thing where they're travel, you know, doing road trips. In fact, I talked to somebody who said last summer I road tripped with my daughter for three months. You know, why not? Like I realized I could do it. Why not for the summer? So I'd love to hear a little bit about what that looked like for you and your family.

SPEAKER_00 36:14

Yeah. So let's see, where are we timeline-wise? So 2014, finish grad school, get pregnant with the first kid, start my own company. By 2018, we had baby two. So I'd already kind of been working for a while. The income's growing a little bit and learning about retirement. I'm putting a ton of money into retirement, like every extra penny. We're still living pretty frugally to try to kind of catch up on the retirement savings that we certainly didn't do in our 20s and should have. So I'm like getting all the pieces together, right? Kind of building the foundation to have a really solid future someday, but we weren't there yet. And the frequent travel, I told you, was like great pre-kids. It was super glamorous pre-kids, like, oh, I'll just have a glass of wine in the airport and then I'll just, you know, go to a nice dinner when I arrive in the city. But when you have kids, I was just homesick the whole time. And I was just wanted to be home as soon as possible. So I'd play in and out really fast. And yeah, it was just awful. So by the time we knew baby two was coming, my husband and I were like, I can't do this with two kids. Like, I'm gonna miss them too much. I don't want to miss them all the time. This isn't this isn't fun anymore. Like something's gotta give. And this was pre-pandemic, right? So this was before things were virtual or before groups I worked with were open to doing trainings virtuals, things were still very much like in person. Like conferences were almost all in person, like in person, in-person, in-person. A lot of the technology for doing virtual work just hadn't been invented yet. So we thought this felt really logical at the time. Okay. And in hindsight, I'm like, what were we thinking? We said, rather than me flying to a city, coming back home, flying to another city, coming back home for 24 hours, rather than doing that, we'll just sell our house. My husband will just quit his job. He worked for the FBI for a decade. Like it was this was a big decision. We were giving up his pension. We were giving up like his whole career that he had worked hard to build himself. We'll just take our kids out of daycare. He'll just be a stay-at-home dad now. We'll just not have a car anymore. We're caught, we had like two, three cars at the time. We'll just not have any of that. And we'll just live out of carry on luggage and we'll go wherever mommy's job takes us. And that felt really logical at the time. Oh, there's a solution. Like, I don't have to be homesick. My kids and husband will just come with me. So we did that. We we spent a few months right after my second daughter was born. My first daughter had like heart issues and a heart defect, and she had all the surgeries and everything. So we had to make sure the second kid was like not needing heart surgeries. She wasn't. So we immediately got to work selling pretty much everything. We had a storage closet with um quilts that our moms had made, you know, like the sentimental items. And maybe I had like, I don't know, a bag of kids' toys or something that we could go to the storage unit and swap things out as we needed to, as they developmentally needed different toys. And that for a a year in 2019 was amazing. It would that was amazing. It was so great. And then, oh, there's a pandemic. What? What are we gonna do now? Um, and I so we decided to stop traveling because I took all the public health guidance. Like, I mean, I work at the CDC all the time. I took that very seriously. I thought, okay, we need to stay home and keep our germs to ourselves and not go infect everybody else. So we rented an Airbnb outside Orlando, loved it, put an offer in on a house a month later when the prices were super low. Imagine house prices in April 2020. We got under-asking. Yeah, it's crazy inflation since then, but we we at least that worked to our favor with everything else going wrong and us having no place to live for a while. Um nowadays the digital nomad lifestyle is a lot more common. Maybe not with kids, that's much more rare. Um yeah, I do see a lot more people doing it now. I highly recommend it, you know, if people are in the fence. Yeah, it is difficult with kids though, for sure.

SPEAKER_02 40:20

Well, what I love about what you did is you you did it, you had a great experience from it, but you also recognized when it wasn't working anymore for, in your case, a global health pandemic reason. But, you know, for for any of us, it could be any reason. And I think that's what is really great about your story is at every point you were both open to opportunity and also recognizing what I've been doing up to this point was great, but now I have to pivot in a different way. And that's okay. It doesn't, it's not a failure, it's not it's it's just it's just a course correction, and that's that's a really great thing to to be aware of.

SPEAKER_00 40:56

It's it's funny because I feel like personality types like mine and yours, I think it's a data spreadsheet thing. Maybe it's just a high achieving type A personality thing, but I do like to plan everything. I love planning. I don't have like specific like monthly goals and quarterly goals, but I generally have a plan for what I'm gonna do. So when things happen and throw my plan off, like that is extremely stressful. So I've just tried to be kind of open to, like you said, just open to opportunities to see what comes up. Um, this morning, a woman from Tanzania emails me and she's like, Hey, can you come train our global public health partners in Tanzania? It would be six days of training. So I'm like texting my husband, you know, like he's downstairs. I don't like to holler down the stairs. I'm like, Do you want to go see Mount Kilimanjaro for a week? And he's like, How are we gonna take the first grader out of school? I'm like, we'll deal with those. What is she gonna learn in first grade? Right is as helpful to her overall education as a human being, like as going to Africa with mommy for a week or something. So um I just kind of like see see what happens and just try to say yes to a lot of good things that have come my way.

SPEAKER_02 42:07

I love that. And um, I think that's a really good message. I because I am very much like you. I'm a planner. I get stressed when things change. But I think that's a really good uh reminder because the only way, I shouldn't say the only way, but the the way that we will achieve what we want to achieve is to be open to these things and is to believe that what life looks like tomorrow is very different than what life looks like today. Because I think so many of us feel stuck in our current situation, you know, no matter what that is. And um, we can either stay stuck or we can be open to whatever tomorrow brings. So I think that's a it's a perfect message and I think a perfect way to end this um incredible conversation. Um, so thank you so much for being here. I'm so grateful for you sharing your story uh and all the great tips that you shared, all the tidbits throughout. Um, I would love to help shout you out. Where can folks find you if they want to learn more about you, want to invite you to Tanzania? How do people do that?

SPEAKER_00 43:07

I'm very easy to find online if people Google Anne K Emery and LinkedIn is where I mostly hang out. So if people are on LinkedIn and want to connect, go for it. We can definitely connect. You don't need to write a message or anything like that. I will absolutely connect with everybody on LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_02 43:22

I love it. Perfect. Well, and thank you so much for being here. Thank you to everyone for being a part of this conversation. And we'll see you back here next week for another episode of Disrupt Your Money. Thanks for listening to Disrupt Your Money. If you have a money question you'd like answered in a future episode, go to disruptyourmoney.com. To support the podcast, please rate and review it wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want access to all of my free templates, checklists, resources, and guides, click the link for the Biz Money Library in the show notes!