This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - 045 / The Good & The Messy Of Running A Business with Claire Myers Vitale

Episode Date: February 10, 2021

I am SUPER passionate about women chasing their dreams and living their passion and purpose. One of the ways I’ve seen women do this (and experienced it myself!) is by starting their own business. In this episode, I welcome my friend and badass business owner Claire Myers Vitale - Founder and Principal Consultant of Claire Myers Consulting. Claire talks to us about the challenges and triumphs she faced early on in her business, and shares some great tips on how to grow and scale your business. What would it look and feel like to be the decider of your income, how and where you spend your time, your career path, who you get to work with, and the people you get to impact? Being a business owner requires hard work, but if you’re already working hard for someone else, you might as well do it for yourself! This is Woman’s Work. To learn more about what we are up to outside of this podcast, visit us at NicoleKalil.com

Coming up on this episode of This Is Woman's Work. I'm more motivated to set a sustainable platform for this business and continue to do that and continue to grow it and continue to bring in new business and continue to serve clients because I know that it's going to impact the women on the team and their families and kind of a ripple effect from there. In this episode of This Is Woman's Work, we're going to talk about what it takes to start, run, and scale a business, both the good and the messy.

I am Nicole Kalil, your host, and I am super passionate about women chasing their dreams and living their passion and purpose. However that looks for you is great, but one of the ways that I've seen women be able to do this and really have experienced it myself is when you decide to start your own business. Because it puts you in the driver's seat. A dear friend of mine, Karen Dry, calls running your own business the great equalizer. Why? Because you get to be the decider of your own worth. You get to be the decider of your career trajectory and the opportunities that

are available to you. You get to decide the time you want to put in and the income you want to pull out and who you get to work with. You become the deciders and there is no wage gap when you run your own business. So this episode is for those of you who've maybe already taken the plunge. You're already a boss of your own business and you want to think about how to take it to the next level or how you might scale your business in 2021. Or for those of you who might be thinking about starting your own business. And even if that's not on your agenda or your plan for your life, I still think you're going to find a ton of value in our time together today because I've invited founder and principal consultant of Claire Myers Consulting, who is not only a good friend

of mine and a partner in business, but also just a complete and total badass. And I think you're going to hear some really great tips for success. So let me introduce Claire Myers Vitale, who started her own business in 2017 and has built it up to a team of eight where they are still generating so much business they can hardly keep up. Claire, I'm so excited you're here today. Thank you for joining us. Thanks, Nicole. Thanks for having me. Oh, my pleasure. All right. So let's start with some of the good lessons, some of the victories you've experienced in running your own business. What have you learned and what do you love? Absolutely. Well, there's so many things that pop up in my mind when I think about that, because, you know, we all get into running a business for the traditional things, right? I

want control of my income. I have that. It comes with, especially when you scale a team, we'll talk about that later, but it comes with some risks too, if you want to scale. The flexibility, you know, that's a really good part of owning your own business, although it is earned. You know, you can't just come in and start a business and then all of a sudden have every Friday off. Or, I mean, you can do that. That's not necessarily how I did it. But I would say the things that stand out to me the most when I think about the good things that have happened over these last few years is I was able to create an environment where our team was able to scale. And our team was able to scale in a way that created an environment that women, specifically working moms, could have the flexibility, earn decent income, and really create their own work schedules.

So when I think about the best thing that has come out of the last three years, it's the team. You know, I really started this completely just wanting to do this on my own. I did not have dreams of having a larger team. And it really morphed into something a lot bigger than I thought we would ever have. And frankly, we're only three and a half years in and we're still growing. Right now we're looking for a social media intern. We're going to be growing by a couple other people over the next few years too. So excited about that. And the other thing is the good parts, you know, your stress level. I know that sounds weird. Like stress is not necessarily termed as a good thing, but when you own your own business, like, yes, of course there's stress involved, but man, it's your stress. I'm not stressed because

somebody else is telling me what to do or made a decision that I'm really doesn't sit well with me. And I'm a really empathetic person and I use my gut a lot. I really, I am stressed sometimes, but it's completely my own, not anybody else's. And that to me is empowering. Yeah. I think that's such a good point. Stress, all stress is not created equal. And I think, you know, having it be your stress, it's sort of like your mess doesn't seem as big of a deal as somebody else's. Right. And so I think that's a really good distinction. I also failed to mention, I'm so glad you brought it up that not only, you know, do you have a team of eight women, but it is your company is women run. So you're right there with me with being passionate about women and women's

opportunities and women's work and all that. So that's another thing I really love about your business. You got to choose who you worked with and you chose to empower not just women, but a lot of working women with children. And I didn't know that that was going to be my bigger motivation. You know, if you had asked me that question three years ago when I was starting this, I would have said, well, it grow it and continue to bring in new business and continue to serve clients because I know that it's going to impact the women on the team and their families and kind of a ripple effect from there. And every time I kind of look inward, that's always what comes back to me as, yes, it's great for me, but why couldn't I do this for, and set the foundation to be able to give it to more people too. Yeah. I have a feeling as women are

listening to this, they're thinking, I wish my employer or the person I report to, or my boss felt the way you just expressed. I mean, that is such a cool environment to work out of. Kudos to you on that. So what about the messy parts and things you might've learned the hard way? I'm sure, you know, we've all experienced that. Oh my gosh, this will do so much longer. So, you know, it's interesting. So life is messy right and I think what people forget when they start a business is like life happens regardless of if you're running a business or not so I will tell you my business started the day the day the fires broke out in Sonoma. And by the way, I live here in Sonoma. I literally was driving into San Francisco to announce to my team that I was leaving the

firm, starting my own firm. And I am driving out of my neighborhood five in the morning. I'm like, my goodness, it smells like smoke. And we had a crazy night and the fires were like, there were 70 mile an hour winds that night. My gosh, it smells like smoke. And I'm driving out of our neighborhood and I look in the rear view mirror and there's just fire on every hill around surrounding our house. And if that doesn't make you nervous about starting a business that the whole world is on fire around you. I'm not sure what will. Well, it can get in your head like, is this an omen, right?

I don't. I'm like, oh, my gosh, is this the right decision? This is the universe telling me. Pretty sure a big wildfire is not the universe telling me anything. Right, right. But you can certainly get in your own head. But it really did start me off in this couple years of life's going to happen no matter what business I'm running. Life does not care. I mean, in the first six months of me running the business, my boyfriend, now husband, got very, very ill. I almost didn't

make it. And that was first six months. So I'm running the business out of a freaking hospital room. You just have to do it, unfortunately. The fires, we've gone through two, three major fire seasons during this and power outages. And I mean, I've done this business sitting in the car trying to steal Wi-Fi from the only place an hour away that had any sort of juice, just trying to get on the phone with clients. You know, I was diagnosed with mono. I got mono a year into the business and just wiped out. And then, of course, 2020, we don't even need to talk about all the things that happened in 2020, but the reality is every year, our business continued

to grow. We continue to bring on good people and we continue to impact clients, which is really the most important thing. Um, and we get just as good feedback when life is happening than when it's not happening in the background, honestly. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's a tough series of situations regardless of what you're doing for work, right? And talk about a choice in perspective. You could look at this and think of it as a reason not to, you know, invest time into the work or build the business or take a pause, or, you know, there is an opportunity to look at it and go, well, building a business doesn't seem that hard compared to all these other things that I'm going through, right? Absolutely. Yeah. I know you had some tough times at the start of your

business. How were you able to overcome? What were some of the mistakes that you may have made? And what are some pointers that you can give to our listeners who might just be starting out? Check your ego a little bit when you're hiring. Do not hire people like yourself. When we hire four teams, the biggest mistake I see people making is they want to hire somebody exactly like them. And our team, specifically Christina and I, so Christina Thompson's my managing director. She's essentially my right hand. We do everything together. While in a lot of ways we both had very successful recruiting careers before being at this firm and all of that.

In that way, we're the same, but personality-wise, we're completely different. And frankly, she's way better than me in certain ways. And I'm better than her in certain ways, you know, with specific things. And we know that and we play and use each other's strengths to make ourselves even stronger. And we've heard feedback from multiple clients that they appreciate that about us. So I guess one of the ways that I was able to overcome was hiring people that were better than me, as odd as that sounds. But then also being thankful and looking for the silver lining in any situation. So some of those crazy things

happened over the first few years, but even more so, right? I did the classic in the first couple of years, I didn't charge enough. Actually, and I have not told very many people this, but I will share it because I'm being transparent. Over the first year, well, I would say second full year in business, I calculated that I undercharged, I basically left about a hundred plus thousand dollars on the table. That is a huge number for a small growing business. And when I sat back after all that, the craziness of that year happened and I was, you know, initially I did that calculation. all that, the craziness of that year happened. And I was, you know, initially I did that calculation. In fact, my husband did it. And I did that calculation and we were sitting there and I'm like, trying to just, I'm beating myself up a little bit going, I cannot believe

I left a hundred thousand dollars on the table. Do you know what I could do with that? And we started looking through the clients and it was actually John, my husband, who said, yeah, but you wouldn't have had that client. And then that client led to these five others that are actually really profitable for you every month. And I guess my point in saying that is when there's quote unquote mistakes or big hiccups that you've had that have to do with the business, there is some sort of silver lining in it, even if you cannot see it right at that moment, truly. Yeah. I mean, that was one of the big ones. I definitely did not charge enough. The other one that people kept telling me was a big mistake your first year, first couple of years, really, is I said yes to almost everything.

Can you hire me a assistant? Can you hire me a blank? Can you put together an HR performance plan for me? Can you teach this technology? Can you whatever? Can you recruit an architect? Can you recruit anything? And my answer the first year and a half was yes.

Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. Let me figure it out. And I was truly the year, couple of years of figuring it out. And now we're super well-rounded. The advice that I got a lot was stick with one thing. You know, I came out of financial services. We're really loyal to the one company we recruit for in financial services. So that would have

pigeonholed us a lot and didn't feel right. And when my friend's companies are growing and they're asking me to recruit for them, I'm going to say yes. And then they referred me out to other people. We got to do some really, really, really cool projects over the last couple years because I said yes um so it was a huge lesson for us but also something that was technically a mistake nobody can see me doing this but air quotes like technically it was a mistake to go in so many directions but it actually has made our foundation a lot more solid. Yeah. Somebody gave me that advice early on of like, think about what you don't want to do, like what you won't say yes to, and then, you know, be open to all the other stuff. Cause I experienced the same thing. Some opportunities I could have never foreseen that didn't fall

directly in the idea I had when I started the business ended up creating a new relationship or a new opportunity or something else that I loved. And I was so grateful for that. But there were certain things that I knew starting a business that I could do, but I had no interest in doing. Like I was so burnt out or so done with it, or I didn't enjoy it. And that can be really hard as a new business owner. Because you want to say yes to everything, right? Well, and some of the things that you coach on, you feel are repetitive, even though it's your clients first time hearing them. And for anybody who knows me

that's listening to this, they know that I'm like a huge nerd about sourcing. So when I first started the business, I would charge very little to help offices source because I thought it was quote unquote easy and I thought everybody could do it. And the reality is, no, my strength is that I love sourcing. I love finding candidates. I love coming up with cool search strings and like recruiting language is my love language for sure. And so once I finally understood that and understood that that was an actual value add to people, I ran with it. I monetized it, not in an unfair way, just got paid for what it's worth. And we're really proud of it, honestly. And it's a big part of our business that we continue to get feedback that it's beneficial. So it's just one

example. No, so good. I think you made such an excellent point. Just because we're good at something or something might become easier to us or we're comfortable in it doesn't make it less valuable. It's probably more valuable because it's a strength of yours, a unique talent or ability, and that's both marketable and something you can monetize, which is a great thing. But sometimes I agree we undervalue it because it comes easier to us, right? Oh, absolutely. On the subject of pricing and communicating your rates and things like that, any tips, lessons, advice in addition to what you've already shared it goes back to just trusting your gut and not necessarily listening to the majority all the time um the majority of my friends who own recruiting firms said, you have to charge 20 to 25%. You have to charge a huge retainer upfront. And while I had to move the business around to align my gut with my pricing model, I did eventually get there. And I'm really proud of it. Frankly, we were able to work something out where, for

example, in a growing startup, I'm not going to come in and charge a percentage necessarily of their fee. I'm actually going to come in and I will serve as their internal recruiter. So I set it up where they essentially pay us a retainer per month, and we'll look for basically up to a certain amount of roles and then just a small performance fee at the end. To me, that feels more like a partnership versus kind of a top heavy approach. But again, that's me. Like my gut couldn't get there and not necessarily because I wasn't confident. I am really confident in what we do I just couldn't get there from a from a business owner perspective I couldn't imagine paying some of those prices to hire my first person yeah so I had to sit back and say how can I still help these

people and make it and yes make the finances work for, but also make it work as much for them as well. And I do feel like our clients really appreciate that. Yeah. I think that's also a good example of what I know I've made the mistake of and is, you know, it's important to ask the questions, do your research, get advice from people who are doing what you'll be doing or similar to what you're doing or something like that. And pay attention to what the successful people have done. Having said that, it's important you don't just go out and try to mimic it, right? So just because a successful person took these five steps to get to, that doesn't mean that's your right five steps.

It doesn't even mean that the outcome is the same that you want. So I love the, you know, trusting your gut and bringing your authentic self and what's important to you to the business while also, you know, gathering advice and information from other people. So talk to us about revenue and profit. You don't obviously need to give numbers, but at what point did you really realize the difference before starting the business after? I'm just curious because I know when I figured out the difference and it was not before, let's just say that. No, it's not before. You know, for example, if I just throwing a number out there, so, you know, in my mind, I'm like, okay, it would be so amazing to run a million dollar business. But then now I see what expenses are and scaling and all of that, you know, a million dollar

business. If you, if you have a million dollar business, but if you have a million dollar business but your expenses are 1.1 million it doesn't really matter right like like that's cool but you didn't make any money so um there's a little bit of a balance there that you have to look at and and it's tough right because one of one of the pieces of advice that i that i guess one of the mistakes also that I made, um, going back to that was hiring before I was financially ready to, um, and I actually took, um, some cash out of some cash value life insurance I had. And that was the way that I was able to hire my first person. And I was okay with that. And everybody was like, oh my gosh, well don't hire before you're ready. I'm like, but it's a one plus one equals four situation.

Just with that one other person, we were able to actually double our revenue in one year. I mean, it just, it worked. We were both, we both earned income. And you just have to know though, when you're scaling a team, your revenue is going to go up. If your revenue is not going up, that's a problem because you really should, you have to do that, but your profit may not go up. In fact, it might drop and you just have to be prepared for that.

And there's different ways that I can share on how to prepare for that, but definitely like mentally prepared for that, emotionally prepared for that. So sometimes it can also kick you into a, is everybody doing enough work? And am I doing enough work? And am I bringing like all those weird doubt monsters start creeping into your mind and they're unnecessary. Yeah. So, so get really solid about your plan, get solid about what each person on your team is going to do, how that's going to generate revenue, even if it's a non technically a non revenue generating role, like an executive assistant or something like that. And I can't live without my assistant. She's amazing. Yeah. Technically she's not in a revenue generating role, but she generates a lot of revenue for me in the background.

Well, yeah, because she frees up your time and other people's time, right. To go and generate that's I always have a little bit of, sorry, I'm getting really passionate for a second here, but I get really, um, I have a lot of beef when, when people talk about non-income generating roles. Like, I know what you mean, what anybody means when they say that. I just, um, I'm like, well, every person you hire should generate revenue or they aren't like, then you probably shouldn't have hired him hired to them. Um, because of the way that they generate revenue is by freeing up your time, taking all of the minutiae, the behind the scenes or the details or the logistics that might, you know, take a ton of time. I just had this conversation

with somebody recently there, we were talking about, you know, whether or not to hire somebody to manage like the bookkeeping. I'm like, well, how much time are you spending on it? What's your hourly rate? Like if you were, and then like, does it make sense financially? You know, like, it's just funny. I think we live so much in fear. So, okay, let me get to my question about scaling the business. How do you know when to hire somebody or when to do the next hire? Walk us through the decision-making process. Actually, it's kind of, it kind of goes back to exactly what you were just saying. In order to prepare yourself mentally, again, have a really solid plan for what those people

are going to do, like what those hires are going to do. But if you ever feel that anything's off kilter, do a time study. So we've been doing that the last six months or so, just if we find that something like one person on the team, for example, is supposed to be working part-time, but she's really working full-time because there's so much work. So we had her do a time study just to see what part of our business is taking up her time. And then, yeah, we added hours to that. We also added it. Okay. So she took away hours from somebody else on the team who charges a higher hourly rate. So if she can take those hours, we actually can generate more income. It's kind of an interesting thing to do to have somebody

really track every 15 minutes of their time. And I didn't do it because I was micromanaging her. In fact, I completely trust her. I just wanted to know where we might be able to hire somebody else. Like, hey, if you're spending 25 hours a week on scheduling interviews and I'm paying you X dollars a month, and it's really, it's a role that I could be paying a little bit lower for. Can we move you over here to do this role, generate more hours, aka revenue, on one side? And then can I hire somebody to fill in the gap who might be a little bit lesser cost? And that seems to work. In regards to like next, how do I know if we're ready to hire?

It's such an interesting question because sometimes most of the time we've hired before we really needed it. And then we kind of put a hiring freeze on for the last about six months. We've had a little bit of a hiring freeze where we just almost wanted the team to shake out. Meaning it was like just having to settle is probably the best analogy for it. Everybody in very specific roles, doing very specific things. Everybody was really happy. We just wanted some consistency for six months to see how that went. Prior to that, if we needed administrative support, sometimes we didn't hire before. If it was subject matter expert work, it was honestly when really good people came across our doorstep, I would find a place for them, even if we weren't ready because I didn't want to lose them. Yeah, that's smart, too. You know, I sometimes think one of the biggest jobs of a business owner is acquiring and retaining talent. Right. And you don't always know when you're going to find that talent to being ready. What are your thoughts on like shared services or outsourcing? So not necessarily hiring an employee in all cases, but like, you know, buying some time for somebody's expertise in what they do just absolutely okay

yeah yeah yeah so actually i would say if you're looking to scale the first if you're just looking to ease into it and not ready to make the plunge into having a salary and and by the way if you have a salary in their w-2 there's a lot of taxes involved there and et cetera, et cetera. It's all good stuff, but there are other things to worry about. So, hey, if you're not ready for that, outsource a contractor. I always suggest for people, like if you need some administrative support, go on Upwork or Fiverr. And both of those websites have incredible administrative assistance. In fact, I found my EA through Upwork. She was just going to do 20 hours a week and now she's full-time

and essentially is our director of operations. Absolutely though. And then you can put your budget in there. You can say, okay, I can only afford $250 a week. So that means I should find somebody who is $15 an hour, who might be in a lower cost of living part of the country and hire them, see how it goes, work through some of the tweaks. And if you like them, hire them full time. It's not this huge, like you don't have to go zero to 100. You can really ease into this pretty nicely.

The other thing I would say there, and this works a little bit more nicely in my world than maybe some others, but also think about like splits. So, for example, one person that I brought on board, she actually said, hey, I want to get paid when you get paid. So if we so in recruiting, right, normally it's you place somebody and then you get a placement fee on top of that. So she we basically just had a essentially a pretty even split on I would bring the business in. She would close the business and then we'd split it evenly. And that was something she wanted. That was a very unique situation, but also another opportunity. If you know somebody who's, I've known her for a long time. If you know somebody who is a badass that you want to work with, and they may have an entrepreneurial spirit too, but yet they just don't want to go out and build the business. Give them an opportunity because they have some serious skillset that you,

you are going to want to use. Yeah. I love that. That splits and that brings to mind even like collaboration too, where you can, you know, work with another person and another expert or another business and work together to create something exceptional that, you know, would have just been good if you did it on your own, right? Yep. It comes back to surrounding yourself with people who are, that push you, I always say are better than me, but are different, better than me. They just have different skill sets. They're very diverse in opinion. I just, I love that. I also going back to the humble, being humble and checking your ego at the door. Like if you pulled my team on the team, I'm probably the one that's most open to feedback.

I, and I really think that that's important as you're growing and scaling a business, because if you've never done that before, like I didn't know some of the HR things. So my executive assistant would be like, um, I think you need to do an offer letter for that. I'm like, oh my God, do I just silly examples where I'm like, oh my like, I think you need to do an offer letter for that. I'm like, oh, my God, do I? Just silly examples where I'm like, oh, my gosh, I didn't even think about that. Or, hey, you didn't word that correctly next time, word it this way. Hey, you need to do this today versus tomorrow because last time you were late with this or whatever. I'm probably one of the most coachable

people on my team. And I, and I really think as a business owner, you need to be. Yeah. Yeah. And you bring up something that I think is important too, is when you start a business on your own, one of the things that's a little challenging at first, at least was for me, is not having people to give you feedback or to get feedback from or to bounce ideas off of or collaborate. You know, when you first start and you're on your own, that independence can be both a blessing and a curse. And so I can see for other reasons besides just revenue and business growth, building a team can make you better and also make having a business a little more fun. Is that your experience as well? 100%. So when I started the business on my own, I really, that's why the company's

called Claire Myers Consulting. I literally thought it was just going to be me. I joined a mastermind group here in town. And that was, if I could pick top five things that I did, that was the best decision and the best investment I've ever made. Hiring a coach and joining a mastermind, I could not afford either at the time. And they absolutely paid for themselves within the first couple months. The mastermind made me think outside of my one box. They were part of the reason that I scaled pretty quickly. And, you know, they were almost like my board of

directors. And now that we have the team, I still have a coach, but now my coach coaches my team too. So we are able to collaborate. We have our kind of scope of services, but then we have a coach that helps us hone those grandiose ideas that some of us have. And then we work all together with the people that are more strategic. And then those of us like Christina and I, who are like dreamers and we're like, oh, this would be cool. This would be cool. And then a couple of people are like, oh my gosh, but how are we going to do that?

And the coach really helps facilitate those conversations so that we can be really diligent and again, add value to the clients pretty quickly. Yeah. Claire, all really good things. I feel like, again, this is a topic we could talk about for hours. So I'm going to share with people how to follow you, but could you tell us a little bit more quickly about your work? I know, you know, recruiting, consulting, what does that mean? And I know a portion of your work is that people can hire you like we talked about, like hire you as a consultant, not only to help them, but sometimes to do the work for them. Share with us a little bit about that. Yeah, absolutely. So we have essentially two parts of the business that run simultaneously.

So one is we're consultants and coaches. So we can come in and we help recruiters and leaders be better at recruiting and leading and finding better talent. That could be a brand new recruiter or it could be somebody very tenured. And then we also find talent for offices and for firms. So we are pretty general. You know, we're generalists in that we can recruit for almost every role. And of all different sized companies, you know, we've helped people find their first person. And I've had contracts with huge multibillion dollar firms.

So we can run the gamut there, really. Yeah. Okay. And ClaireMyersConsulting.com is your website, yes? Mm-hmm. MyersConsulting.com is your website. Yes. So C-L-A-I-R-E-M-Y-E-R-S consulting.com. Or you can follow Claire on Instagram at Claire underscore Myers underscore consulting, or find Claire Myers consulting on LinkedIn. Claire, thank you so much for your insights and your transparency in both the joys and the challenges of starting your own and scaling a large business. Of course. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. My pleasure. Okay. I would never suggest that being a business owner is the right fit for every woman. I don't believe anything is the right fit for every woman. But if you've always wondered or have been thinking about being your own boss or fall

in the category of you already are your own boss, but you want to take it to the next level, or maybe you're just letting fear and doubt stand in your way. I am challenging you now to take some steps forward in action. Remember, action builds confidence. Overthinking leads to inaction, which ultimately chips away at your confidence. So whether it's making that next hire or grabbing some people for some hourly work or making your 17th hire or wherever you're at, I would encourage you to get into action steps towards that goal versus just sitting and thinking. One of those action steps must be connecting with your confidence. So quick plug for the This Is Confidence digital course. If you're thinking about starting your business or letting fear and doubt run rampant in your brain, this could be a helpful tool. But I'm going to

leave you by asking this, what would it feel like? What would it look like to be the decider of your income? How and where you get to spend your time, your career path, and who you get to work with, and the people, the employees you get to impact. Being a business owner does require hard work, no doubt about it. But if you're already working hard for someone else, you might as well do it for yourself. Closing the wage gap, stepping into leadership with confidence, betting on yourself, and taking risks all fall under the category of woman's work. This is woman's work.