Business Reflections Podcast Episode #28 - Tangible Tips to Prevent Burnout with We Love Messes

Episode Transcript

Meredith Matics: Welcome to Business Reflections with your host Meredith Matics, and we are here to reflect on the business topics that are affecting you today and how you can better run your business. Today, I have Tammy Schotzko, Founder of We Love Messes. Tell us more about what led you to the journey of starting your own business. We Love Messes is such a unique name. Tell me a little bit about that too, if you could.  

Tammy Schotzko: Absolutely, so I will flat up admit that I love messes. There's nothing more exciting to me than to walk into a messy or cluttered situation and just be like, Oh my gosh. 

I can fix this, but to be honest... 

Meredith Matics: Come to my house sometime. 

Tammy Schotzko: Yeah. I have always been like overly organized and it's always given me personally a sense of relief. Tidying up gives me a sense of calm and eases the anxiety I might be experiencing elsewhere in my life. What I did not know early on in my life was that being able to organize and to see the path and the steps that you need to set to get to the goal wasn't like a skill or talent everyone had. I just naturally assumed that everybody could do what I did.  

In 2009, I kind of ventured into the world of helping other people get organized. And then in 2011, I attended a conference in San Diego of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals. And I sat in a room with 600 other people who were organizers and had this aha moment where I realized like, I was home. This was my thing, my super power. I knew how to do this and I didn't even have to work really hard at it cause it just came naturally. 

From that conference, I started working towards becoming a Certified Professional Organizer, which I did in 2013. I decided to get a Master's Degree in Human Behavior because of the psychology and reasoning behind what we do and why we do it with our stuff is huge in this industry. 

I find that a lot of times the clients need to, they need to articulate the story of their stuff in order to let it go. They need to tell me the why, the how, how it came here, that kind of thing. The passion I have for holding that space and helping them figure out what it is they want to do versus what they should do or what others want to do with their stuff is just, it's so rewarding. I can't even hardly articulate how enjoyable the work can be.  

Meredith Matics: Well, that's really awesome that you found something that maybe on the surface to some people wouldn't seem like a career path like, Oh, I'm going to go clean people's houses. But when you do it with a passion and with this emphasis on the storyline and bettering their lives, you're really bringing something that could be needed for many, many, many people beyond just cleaning, but rather like this different aspect to it. That's very unique.  

Tammy Schotzko: Absolutely. And we talk a lot about the difference between again, articulating what cleaning is versus what organizing is and how they are kind of the same but they're kind of different.  

Meredith Matics: Yeah.  

Tammy Schotzko: We don't necessarily, I don't necessarily clean up like grimy messes when I'm onsite doing an organizing job. 

I might bring my team of residential cleaners in at some point to assist with that process, but we're mostly focused on how can we make the space functional for the space you are in, in your life right now. Most of my clients when they come to me are feeling overwhelmed, they are burnt out. They just can't do it anymore and they need to get unstuck. And that's where we step in and help them.  

Meredith Matics: Yeah, I think that's really cool. We're excited to have you on and discussing burnout, especially with some of us, solopreneurs or smaller entrepreneurs. Let's start with, tell me what you've experienced in noticed with this issue.  

Tammy Schotzko: It's wide and varied the experiences, but I do want to be like 100% transparent and say that everything we're talking about, I've experienced firsthand. Sometimes I have to sit back, take a minute, take a deep breath and say, okay, what would Tidy Tammy, tell her client in this situation and then do that. We all just kind of get stuck down into that space.  

Meredith Matics: I think it's completely normal as a business owner to be expected, to do so much and to bring so much of yourself to work, and to your life that's all about the business that it's easy to get lost in it.  

Tammy Schotzko: Totally. And then what I find for my female solopreneurs, particularly, I find that when I work with the female solopreneurs - they're wearing all the hats in all the areas of their life. 

They might have employees or helpers, but they're making all the big decisions every day without any feedback or backup. And that's, that's exhausting. And then they go into their personal lives and they're carrying the same weight and it just becomes too much for them. They lose the passion that they had and just get overwhelmed because they weren't ready for the back office responsibilities like payroll and scheduling, taxes and client interface and customer service and all that stuff that none of us really want to do.  

It's like me, I started the organizing business because I love to organize. Do I love all the back office stuff? I do not, but it's part of running the business.  

Meredith Matics: I hear you there.  

Tammy Schotzko: Yes, I bet you do.  

Meredith Matics: I was on my own for quite a while, before branching out into having other people. Even that transition of taking on payroll and stuff, I had no problem with that, but the aspects of like marketing or whatever were not my thing. My thing is to just do my job, which is very admin based. 

Tammy Schotzko: And at what point did you feel like, how did you step into that decision to hire marketing?  

Meredith Matics: Let's see. So I did initially try to just market myself based on what I knew about others in the industry. With working in particular mental health revenue management, I had been an operational director for a counseling center previously, and I knew that my therapists that I worked with were very if they didn't have it in their hands. They were going to forget about it. You send them an email, they were going to forget about it. They had too many things going on.  

I kind of just took what I knew with that and initially just sent off flyers to individual providers in my area and hoped that would help get the name out. 

And it did enough to get a certain amount business, making the flyers, keeping them updated. I just didn't have time for it. And if my main goal of my business is to be a good revenue management or manager. What I figured out is if I have to slack on that to do something else, then I'm not giving the whole purpose of my business what it's meant to be doing. 

So if I can't manage your revenue, and I'm selling that, because I'm too busy marketing, then clearly it's interfering to a point of disaster. Before it got to the disastrous point, when it started to interfere, I was like, okay, time to step up and bring someone on.  

Tammy Schotzko: That's perfect. Does it seem looking back that was very clear cut? But yet when you were going through it, it maybe wasn't quite as obvious that it was time.  

Meredith Matics: No, it definitely wasn't obvious that it was time. It was a gut feeling I had... 

...and it started slow with, can you do a few marketing things for me on the side to now you work for me. It wasn't overnight, especially when you're coming from such a small place to a bigger place you can't necessarily make that giant jump overnight. There's a middle ground of like crawling there.  

Tammy Schotzko: Exactly. And I think the majority of the solopreneurs I work with are stuck right in that middle ground like they know they can do it. They don't necessarily have in their opinion, the revenue to hire someone, but then they get overwhelmed and there's too much to do. 

And then they can't do what they're passionate about. So it's like that endless circle, and we sit down and really talk about. How are we going to balance all this? What are our goals? How are we going to get there? Like, it becomes more apparent that you can take those baby steps and hire someone maybe part-time to do or parcel or delegate or whatever it takes to get that weight off your shoulders so that you can focus on what you're passionate about.  

Meredith Matics: Exactly. And this is industry specific for me, but in the insurance industry, they measure things based on what is the amount of, like, let's say premiums, they collect to amounts that they've put out for services. And basically your return on investment has to do with less risk and less to put out in the future, but you don't know that going in. If you are 99 years old, granted you would have Medicare, but like, let's just say you'd be a higher risk than like a 13 year old. And so the premiums change, right? Because they're gauging that risk. As a business owner, we have to gauge the risk of what does it mean if we don't take that jump? 

It's a really hard thing to see when you're not thinking of it because it's not a direct return on investment.  

Tammy Schotzko: Exactly. And it's so intangible for most people. Not, not always, but for most people like that. That return on investment is not something that's black and white, and there is no ledger sheet that says, if you spend X dollars here, you're going to get X dollars in revenue. We just get stuck in that space. 

Meredith Matics: And so it's scary.  

Tammy Schotzko: It's very scary.  

Meredith Matics: So we take it all on.  

Tammy Schotzko: We do, and then we leave our business behind and we go home or into our personal lives. There's a whole other host of responsibilities there that generally we, as women shoulder. They get burned out and they get overwhelmed and they just want to give up. I hate to see that happen when someone starts a business because they're passionate about something.  

Meredith Matics: Yeah. What do you think when our entrepreneurs get to that step of starting to feel that burnout? What do they do?  

Tammy Schotzko: It's a hard question because each one of us is super different. A strategy that might work for me like I do like to tidy things up like that just helps me. That might not help other people. When I'm working with them virtually or in person, we talk a lot about what are their goals? What are their priorities? What kind of self care are they doing? 

Those are all things we know we should be doing but we often set aside those things to put out fires and there's always fires to put out. I think identifying goals are, is a huge part of avoiding the burnout. 

And when I'm talking about goals, it could literally be as simple as I really need to pay these bills today. It can be that easy to get unstuck. I shouldn't say easy because it isn't easy. And when they're in that space, nothing's easy, but it's identifying what are the tiny tasks we need to do right now to get us out of this hole. 

And then how can we start building that ladder and crawling out so that we can go back to what we're passionate about and return to that space.  

Meredith Matics: That's huge. What I do every morning when I first get in is I make a list of all the things that I think I need to get done. I pick the two that have to get done.  

Tammy Schotzko: I love that. That's perfect. 

Meredith Matics: And focus on those two first. Everything else can come later.  

I've heard a really interesting thing where somebody said, when you're procrastinating, what you should do is basically speed date your tasks. And I have not tried it to be totally fair, but they were saying basically pick your five items that you have to get done, set your timer for 10 minutes each, and you just keep going through them. You start with tasks number one, spend 10 unlimited just totally focused minutes to that. When that timer goes off, move to the next task. And then you're at least getting some of each of that task done.  

Tammy Schotzko: I love that. And that actually is you jumped right into my tangible tips. Thanks. Timers are huge. Some people don't like the constriction of the timer. Generally what I tell clients is use the timer. There's a whole bunch of different kinds, like some are very visual. I tell them to at least set the timer and make themselves do it for 10 minutes, whatever it is, whatever, whatever we're talking about. 

And if at the end of the 10 minutes, they're like still going strong and they have the mental bandwidth to do it. They should keep going. They should complete it. But the other side of that is if at the 10 minutes the timer goes off and you're just like churning and chewing on your pencil  and nothing's happening. 

Then it would be time to walk away. There's multiple ways to look at that. But again, you have to tweak it to what fits best for your personality.  

Meredith Matics: Well, that takes it back to a little bit to what you started to say before we kind of got off topic, was that to set goals. Even a timer in itself is it's somewhat of a goal. You have the set limitation. My understanding is the reason we pick goals is because once you hit them, you can feel accomplished. 

Tammy Schotzko: Exactly. It's just one bite at a time. So when we have these really big goals or even little goals, we chunk them down into steps so that they don't get completely overwhelmed. I do think it's super easy to set a goal and then not know how to get there. That's where I step into be like, okay, that's an admirable goal. How are we going to get there? And then we start brainstorming and brain dumping into the steps it takes to get it done and the accountability piece.  

Meredith Matics: What do you think that small business owners could be doing to avoid burnout and being overwhelmed in the first? 

Tammy Schotzko: Well, people talk a lot about setting boundaries and I do think that that's admirable and something we need to do. Something I've noticed since COVID hit is that people who are now working from home because of COVID are experiencing what many solopreneurs starting out experience they're working, playing and living in the same space. 

It's a challenge. Setting those boundaries so that they can move on to the next step when they're done at the end of their work day. Whether it's as simple as shutting the computer lid. I know it sounds funny, but that's small step can signify the fact that, okay, we're done for the day here. Now it's time to move on to, making dinner, playing with the kids. I think if we want to avoid burnout and overwhelm, we have to be aware at a very early stage in the business that it's going to take a lot of hard work and a lot of investment of time and energy. 

But that we have to know how to balance that out. And I don't necessarily know that that's something that we all actively think about when we're in the heat of the moment.  

Meredith Matics: Well, I think it's hard for a lot of business owners who go into it with some kind of talent, drive, or desire to bring a product or a service to the world. You have one or two clients to start out, you want to give them your full attention and you want to be there for everything that they say, but then as you get bigger, you can't do that with everybody. 

That's just not going to be practical so making that transition seems to be a hard spot.  

Tammy Schotzko: I have literally been in that spot that you're talking about right there. It's scaling your business. When you decide to take that step into, I am going to grow enough that I cannot be everything to everyone. There are some growth pains there. That's when those boundaries come in and that's where that talking through, how can we mitigate these situations where these clients are expecting 110% of you, but now, because of the scale of the business, you might only have 80 to get them. 

What can we do to make that shift so that you don't lose that client, and you keep your sanity?  

Meredith Matics: Yes. Even within small businesses, sometimes our employees probably feel some burnout since they have to wear multiple hats. One of the things that I've at least tried to implement with some of my staff is, we use Microsoft office, it has this feature where you can tell it, after a certain hour you put it in quiet hours and I tell them like put your emails in quiet hours, because there's a chance like I'll get something late but I don't at all expect them to reply or to read it until their hours here at the office. 

If it's an emergency, I'll be calling you, but if it's an email, it's not an emergency.  

Tammy Schotzko: What a gift you're giving to your employees though to give them that space and to actually talk about that expectation of what you expect from them. That is one of my tangible tips that I can share with you is that literally it's resisting the urge to respond immediately to every request because it's those boundaries of this is my personal time, this is my professional time. I know that they're not always as clear cut, but there are tiny little things, tiny little tweaks that we can do to kind of make that a little clearer. 

For example, you mentioned a couple of episodes ago that it was hard when clients messaged you on the weekend. I think because you wanted to respond so you didn't forget, but you also wanted it to be the weekend. My hack for that, because I feel like I'm in the same situation, is that most text platforms have the ability to schedule a message to go out later. 

If a client texts me on a weekend and it's not something that I have to take care of right now, but I don't want to forget, I will type a response and set it to go out on the next business day.  

Meredith Matics: Tammy. I liked how I totally do that, but never actually put that together in my brain.  

Tammy Schotzko: See, these are the little things though that we just, we were so busy. We don't have time to figure that out. So you need someone like me to come in and go, Oh, let's do this. Let's try that. You know, what about this? What about that? Because then we're just going to sit down and make it happen because that's the other piece of the accountability of working together is that not only are we going to talk about it, but we're going to make it happen so that when we're done with our session, they are set up to move forward. 

But when I figured that out for myself personally, it was like, why did I never do this before?  I want to type the response, schedule it to go out Monday morning and then I'll deal with it then. 

It was a game changer for me. You want to get it down while it's in your mind, so you brain dump it into a text or an email, and then you schedule it to go out during business hours and you're done. 

You can go on with whatever it is you've got scheduled or you're with your family or whatever that looks like.  

Meredith Matics: We talked a little bit about some tangible steps we can take. Do you have any last general tips that you want to throw out at our listeners before we start getting ready to head to a close.  

Tammy Schotzko: Yeah, I have two other ones I'd love to share. I have a gazillion, but I tried to, I tried to narrow it down to my top three. One was the email, on the text, but the other one is time chunking because I always try to talk to my clients about what is your optimal brain time? Some people are early birds, sometimes they're night owls, personally my prime brain function is between nine and 11:00 AM. 

I try to set aside those hours for any big projects I have to work on, any decision-making that needs to be done should be done during those hours. So I just like our clients or anybody in general to just give that a, a 32nd thought and like, don't try to make decisions when you're like fatigued or you're not functioning well. Don't schedule a 7:00 AM meeting.  It just doesn't work. Be respectful of where your body is and where your mind is and it'll flow better. It seems counterintuitive, but it actually does set the stage for better decision making overall.  

If COVID has given us anything positive, it's the ability to reassess what's really working for us like we can redefine our own expectations of our space, our time and how we function. That's a beautiful observation. Yeah.  

Meredith Matics: My husband initially was like, no, I don't work better at home, but he found that not having to do his commute, but him in a much better mood all around, so there were pluses and minuses. 

We did have to set up more of a dedicated space that felt more separated from the household in that sense, because he needed that brain space, but not having to drive for 45 minutes in stop and go traffic really put him in a nicer mood. That I'm pretty sure his fellow coworkers appreciated.. 

Tammy Schotzko: Oh yeah. Random take off on that is that dedicated space has been a huge issue for a lot of at-home workers right now. We actually turned a little used guest bathroom into an office because I know it sounds so weird, but it worked out so well. 

They never used it. The person needed a space with a door in a busy household that they could shut and lock. It just worked out so well. And it's kind of a funny story, but yet they can shut the door and they have their own space. 

Meredith Matics: Getting in that brain space of work because we do have to have that mental separation.  

Tammy Schotzko: We do. Sometimes our physical actions have to mirror that mental separation. So again, like at the end of the night or the end of the shift, whatever that is shutting the laptop, like literally shutting the lid. 

That is my final tip. Tidying up your workspace, wherever that is. Maybe it's your desk, your kitchen, the clothing in your bedroom chair, whatever that looks like to formally acknowledge that it's the end of your work session. And then that also sets the tone for the beginning of the next session. 

Whether it's your desk being straightened up, like you can just straighten the piles. You don't have to make it picture perfect. Make it a calm and peaceful space, that's what we wake up to in the morning and it sets the tone for the whole entire day. It's just being mindful of what does that look like for you? What can we do to make that happen? 

Meredith Matics: All right. So for closing out we always ask the same two questions and the first one is what is one piece of advice that you've received and would like to share with another business owner? 

Tammy Schotzko: One of my mentors said people first, profit second, and that really resonated with me. In fact, it's part of our mission statement to build lasting relationships with our clients and our team. 

I really believe that if we create a culture of caring for our team members that are going to take better care of our clients and vice versa. To me, seems like a win-win and personally, if I don't build a good rapport and relationship with my organizing clients, I can't give them 110% because we're not on the same page. 

Meredith Matics: For our listeners who want to learn more about why you love messes or, just learn more about you, where can they go on the internet? 

Tammy Schotzko: Okay. We're on Facebook, under We Love Messes, and then we're also on Instagram. On Instagram, you search for I'm the organizer and Tidy Tammy pops up. 

Meredith Matics: Tammy, thank you so much for coming on and talking about burnout today.  

Tammy Schotzko: Oh my gosh, Meredith, thank you so much for your excellent questions and your time. You've just been a wonderful person to chat with. 

Business Reflections Closing: Please note that these are thoughts and opinions alone. For tax advice, please see your CPA or tax advisor, tax professional for business advice and legal entities. Please see your local business, lawyer, or attorney for advice. And if you'd like to reach out to us for any topics or questions about. Any subject, any episode you can reach us podcast@maticsbilling.com. That's podcast@maticsbilling.com.    

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