In Episode 52, Susie Liberatore brings us the scoop on how she balances her business, family life, running her household, and making sure her son gets all of the care he needs. This amazing mom will change your perspective and help you prioritize your life!
You can connect with Susie here:
5 Things a Single Mom Entrepreneur Does to Keep It All Running with Susie Liberatore
Welcome to The Determined Mom Show. The only marketing podcast dedicated to guiding moms CEOs into tranquility wealth and multiplying those precious moments. Amanda Tento here and I have an amazing guest today. Her name is Susie Liberatore and she is the owner of Visions to Images and she helps small to medium sized businesses to conquer their branding. However, today she’s going to be talking to us about five things, a single mom entrepreneur does to keep it all running.
Susie tells us the five things that you do as a mom entreprenuer to stabilize business and family life. The five things are:
- Time Management
- Mindset
- Outsource
- Asking for Help
- Quality Time
Time Management
So you really have to be smart about how you take on time management. For example, if you think a lead is not a good lead but you want to talk to them, then only arrange for a short 15 minutes to just talk on the phone. So that way you can confirm them as a client or not. Also another great practice is to have office hours and email hours. It’s always best when boundaries are set. So when I onboard clients as well, I provide onboarding documents that set the pace for what to expect contact time wise and turn around times for projects or tasks as well.
MINDSET
So mindset has been such a hurdle for me going through so much mentally and this kind of goes back to my self coaching, because there’s a lot of stuff that you have to overcome as an entrepreneur.
I’m grateful for every single day to be able to grow as a parent, a person and an entrepreneur, because we can’t sit here and beat ourselves up every single day. So it’s best not to be in a negative state. There’s just been so many times where I’ve tried to turn the negatives into a positive because we can only do what we can do and that’s the way life goes. So it’s important to have gratitude and that helps to set the right mindset for work and personal life.
Outsourcing
So outsourcing can be tough for sure because you want them to be the best but they are not your employees. Finding the right fit is like the hardest thing and understanding what you need to outsource. A popular mindset is that you want to make the money that you could be selling to somebody but then you literally wear yourself down and you’re drained out mentally, physically, emotionally. Then it may be too late to realize you have to outsource some stuff.
However at the end of the day, as long as you have everything in place legally, you know the work’s gonna get done so you have to kind of let that go. I did and my experience with outsourcing got much better. Especially now I see more opportunities to make more money and now I can just give this to a freelancer to execute.
So there’s a lot to think about such as what to outsource, when to outsource, who to outsource to and all these different things. The biggest thing is seeing what’s gonna free up my time and make me more money. So I absolutely encourage people to outsource when they can.
Asking for Help
Asking for help is great. It kind of like it’s different from outsourcing because it’s personal. Let’s say there are a lot of external issues that are affecting you as a person and you are the business. Therefore, things in life can slow you down so it’s important to ask for help with small things because it can go a long way. Some of us can be really shy and try to do everything on our own and I learned to get over it and ask for help.
Even if it’s about independence, How much do you want to handle? How much do you not? When issues come up because we’re adults and we have to deal with them, just ask for help. Even if you don’t even know what the problem is, just call somebody. You’re going to probably have to pay something in some way, shape or form but it’s better that you catch things and you are proactive before it costs more.
Quality Time
Susie goes on to tell us “Finding quality time was a struggle for me because I had to find the time for myself. I remember telling others I worked with that I was going to take some time off just to relax. So I really kind of figured out, okay, I need to take this day off and I literally did not schedule anything and told clients like, look, I’m out of this office for today. When you think about it, in reality, everybody needs to take a day off. Sometimes they don’t have to know you’re taking a personal day. Just say I’m not in the office.”
So when you’re a single mom or even a parent or an entrepreneur, you’re just on the go and you’re thinking about a million things. Even if you just have one or two hours, when you need to readjust and re-manage things, that’s amazing. My parents come in from Rochester every now and then they’re actually in right now and they just kind of helped me with my son. This allows me to catch up on sleep and stuff, because sleep is just so important. Finding time to relax and spend time for yourself separately from work and family is also important to create the right mindset.
We should be giving each other that credit. “Like you are amazing. You are killing it.” Like just getting that credit and looking at what you’ve accomplished. Look at what you’ve accomplished in a year. Look at what you’ve accomplished in a month. Like, however you want to break it down, really give yourself that credit.
That can be a really powerful thing to just look back over the course of a month and notice all of these amazing things and you can do it for personal, business, parenting, whatever. Just write it all down and it helps you when you write things down, it changes your mind and perspective.