45:3 I know you’re busy but…

Lee:
Welcome to Trailblazer FM. This is Lee Matthew Jackson and today on the show we have Barbara Carneiro from Word Revolution. Barbara, how are you today?

Barbara:
I’m good, Lee. Thank you for having me.

Lee:
So, Barbara, I’m really excited to have you on the show, especially because we’re going to learn where your agency was and where it is today, which is a very different but interesting place. I’m also excited to hear what you have to share with us at the end. This is something that you and I spoke about before this show and I think it is phenomenal and super applicable to our audience. So, folks, be sure to stay tuned. So, Barbara, just a real quick 60 seconds. Could you let us know who you are, where you’re from and maybe something that people may not know about you?

Barbara:
Thank you. Well, my name is Barbara. I currently live in South Carolina in the US. And one thing that you may not know about me is that I lost count of the number of cities that I’ve lived in. So I’ve been in three continents at this point and normally I’m about, I would say probably like, ten years per continent. So I think it’s time to move out of the US now because it’s been over ten.

Lee:
Well, as you may be aware, we’ve invented time travel in our minds and I’d really love to jump into the TARDIS with you now and go back to that point when you were a stressed out agency owner working all hours. Could you describe to us what that was like? Maybe the team situation, the client situation, life situation, and give us a bit of an idea of what your world was like back then?

Barbara:
Absolutely. I’m not proud of it, but the reality is I started as web designer as contractor on my own back in 2005. And I’ll be honest with you, I never thought this would be a career for the future. I thought it was just a thing I was doing for a little while to get my feet back on the ground after having moved from another country. So we moved from Argentina to Brazil, arrived there with no job, no house, nothing, and that just seemed like a fun gig. It was something that I knew how to do, but I never realised that was going to be my career for the next decade or two. So the interesting thing about it is that it grew faster than I expected, which normally you’d say it’s a good thing, but that growth was at the expense of my time and my health and my time with family, because from one day to the next, I had too many clients. I couldn’t really take care of all of them. So every milestone of growth implied me letting go of something. So it was either time with the family or it was time to sleep or it was time to take care of my health.

Barbara:
Or was time to exercise and just be in a healthier place myself. Mind you, at this stage, I’m living in Rio, a block from the beach. Instead of going to the beach, I’m reading SEO books. So that should give you an idea of and even when I did go to the beach, I would bring these huge SEO books, because back then, we didn’t have that many resources. So I would bring these huge SEO books to the beach in Rio because I had to feel productive. I had to do something. I had to be always learning. I had to figure out a problem for a client or I think the worst part was I have to learn how to do X, Y and Z because I’ve already agreed to do it. So that was my life as an agency owner. It was not pretty, although I was making money and I was able to pay my bills, but a big chunk of my life was gone.

Lee:
And how many people did you have helping you in the end?

Barbara:
So we ended up growing all the way to 15 people. You think of an agency like all of the cliches type of growth that you know, we’re going to have an office, okay? We’re going to have an office, and it’s an office by the Chesapeake Bay with the view to the Naval Academy, and it’s going to be a two storey office. It’s like, I didn’t even need that lead. It was simply because everybody had set up this pattern of, you got to hire people, you got to have a bunch of people, you got to rent an office space. And nobody ever came to our office because our clients are all remote. But somehow I felt like that was the pattern of growth that I needed to follow. Mind you, I loved the office. It was awesome. Okay? It was really cool to have that space. And I think, in a way, it was a box that I wanted to cheque personally, and I’m glad that I checked it. But if I look back, it wasn’t a wise decision. It was simply out of what others have, the expectation that others have created for what an agency looks like.

Lee:
There’s a really old episode with Bob Gentle where he talks about building the agency that you want to build, and I think Brent Weaver also talks similarly about building something that cheques your boxes, something that you want to build rather than copying what other people do. And I’m afraid I am so guilty of copying what I thought everybody else was doing. We built our agency where we had a two story office in Bedford. We had another office down in London. We had a large distributed team, and we were trying to offer all sorts of services. You can just imagine the expenses that we had. It was ridiculous.

Barbara:
Yeah, it is a luxury. And a part of me was, I’m glad that we went through that stage. I think it was one of the things that I had to go through and actually live it out to now be able to assess it from a different angle.

Lee:
So we’re now at the point with the time machine where you have your amazing office with the incredible team that you’ve built up of 15 people, but what started to change to lead where you are today?

Barbara:
So I think the first well, two things happened. One was I had my youngest child and after we have a six year gap between our second and our third. So my third child was about to come to this world and I honestly spent the last month and a half in the hospital before she was born. And she was born ahead of time, so she was premature, but you have to count like a solid two or three months of what was supposed to be just pregnancy. I was in the hospital. And how can you manage such a large group of people when you’re the only person selling? That was basically, I guess, probably a mistake on my end, but it’s just how the company was set up, the way that our agency was set up, I was the one selling. So when that happened, immediately I had to let go of some people simultaneously. We had a piece of software that we used for almost all of our sites. We used to use Adobe Business Catalyst for web development and they had announced that they were going to discontinue the software. So at this point, not only I have clients that are in this platform as clients and their websites are done, but I also have sites that I’m developing and now I’m in the hospital.

Barbara:
So life hits. And that’s the reality. You never know when life is going to hit. And life hits in a moment where I really didn’t see a path moving forward with a premature newborn, two other kids and a group of 15 people that I somewhat felt responsible for. They are all over the world and I know that it’s a little irrational to think that they cannot find a better job or they can’t figure it out from them. I know it is, but we were such a tight knit together as a team that for me, it was hard to simply say, hey, go figure your life out, because now it’s time for me to figure my life out. But when things like that happen, right now I have a newborn in my home that needs my help and I can’t outsource that. So it was a need that led to having those conversations and we actually helped a lot of them find new jobs. Some of them are extremely happy today. We’re still in touch. Some of them have actually returned to work with us now. So it’s really nice to see this circle come around.

Barbara:
But my team was the best we had an amazing relationship. So overall, it was not a negative thing, as much as I probably thought it would be, but that was the beginning. So imagine you have to figure out a way to redo these websites that you’re currently building, because the platform is going to be gone. You have to figure out a way to migrate every site that you have on that platform. And we had quite a bunch there. And then you have to figure out how to go about life with another newborn in the house while you’re letting go of people. It’s just hard. So simultaneously, we used to have somebody that would help us in the house with cleaning and all that kind of stuff, like just a normal, hey, a person that we trusted that would come to our home. That person quit as well. She had a grandson, and it made no sense for her to pay somebody to take care of her grandson and for her to come to my house clean. So now I’m like, I’m losing people everywhere, even at home. I don’t have help anymore. And that forces you to make decisions and look at things clearly.

Barbara:
So the biggest challenge for me, Lee, was when things like that happen. I realised I have no time, no margin, nothing extra, nothing available for when life hits. I’m always at capacity. I’m always working at a level that nothing can go wrong. And we all know life is not like that. Now, mind you, this happened at around 2018 to 2019. So the irony of it all is that I actually prepared for what would hit us in 2020. So somehow what happened in 19,18 prepared me for what would have been a very hard time for us during the Pandemic. So by the time we got to that place, it was down to me and my two brothers.

Lee:
So how did you begin to scale down and get to the position where you are nowadays, where you work significantly less and yet you’re still profitable? What was the journey?

Barbara:
And that’s the interesting part, is that what I realised is that I became more profitable once I was able to make these adjustments. And I’m working less hours and I’m making the same amount of money, so I can look back and I can identify a few points that really made the difference. One was I was able to simply say, that has to be time for me. That has to be time for me, because if I’m not healthy, I cannot be a healthy leader in my company, period. If I’m not resting, I cannot have the same level of focus that I need. And if I need to have time in my life, that allows me to do certain things that are not business related. And so that journey started with simply saying, okay, I’m going to add all of Friday afternoon has to be for myself. And it started slow. I mean, sometimes you start with half an hour and that’s it. This week I can only give half an hour and that’s fine if that’s where you’re starting, but next week you may give an hour, the week after that you may be able to have 2 hours.

Barbara:
It really builds up on each other, so every week you’re able to recover a little bit more of your time. So that’s how I started. I started saying, okay, I have to have time and if I need to make it, I’m going to have to make it. And so if it involves telling a client, hey, I need another day, I need another week, so be it. Most of the time, that was never an issue. That’s number one. Number two, I realised I had a lot of overhead with my team simply because I wanted to offer more services than what I could naturally do on my own. And so this whole situation actually forced me to be a little bit more I don’t like to use the word exclusive because I don’t feel like that’s the right word, but selective maybe. So I was able to look at the projects that are coming our way and say, hey, I only have capacity for this, so these are the ones that I’m going to take and it’s okay to say no to other projects that are not necessarily either profitable. And again, I started measuring things not by the money that I would get, but by the time they would require from me.

Barbara:
And that was the shift. I was able to look at projects not from a financial perspective, oh, I’m going to make $1,000 on this, but more on how much time will I have to invest? Conservatively, just kind of like playing both scenarios conservatively, how much will I have to dedicate to this? And that has to be something that was worth it. So my measuring stick went from being the money to being my time.

Lee:
So let’s just recap real quick. You are in the worst situation possible. Everything was going wrong, everyone was disappearing. You were losing the platform that you had built all of these websites on and were building websites on right now. And you’re going to have to transfer all these as well as rebuild the ones you were working on. On top of that, you have got a young baby, you’ve got two other children, and you’re living in the right place, but you’re not getting to enjoy it. It does sound like a nightmare. And little did you know, just around the corner, COVID was coming. In response to this, you made time for yourself in order to be a better leader. Then you started to reduce your overhead. And I love what you said about time being the measuring stick rather than the money. I remember back in 2008 when we were struggling as an agency during the recession and we were accepting any project for the money. And at one point, I was doing three weeks worth of work just to be able to build £500. So you can definitely see that was a screwed up situation.

Lee:
And also, at some point, the math was not going to work. Now, as we come into Land, you learned something really special during that time. You’ve already alluded to it, and it’s the time snowball. So could you fill us in on what it is and what the benefits of it are to our businesses and to our personal lives?

Barbara:
Absolutely. So I know that when you’re busy, the last thing you want to hear is somebody adding one more thing to your to do list. And that is the interesting story nowadays is because people will normally start a conversation with me and say, I know you’re busy. And normally I have to say, Actually, I am not that busy. Which sounds so strange because we just have this great mindset that simply assumes everybody’s busy. I’m not saying I don’t have things to do. That’s a different story. And what’s interestingly is that right now, when we are recording this podcast, I’m actually a little bit busier than I’m normally, I’m simply because having all of that time available outside of my business, it just takes you back into, like, hobbies and things you love doing. So I just ventured into hosting conferences, and it’s something that I absolutely love. And so I happen to be a little bit busier now than I normally am, but I find that half of my time during a day or a certain week is spent doing things that I absolutely love. And my husband likes to go kayaking, and he likes to go often and take a weekend off and goes kayaking comes back.

Barbara:
And every now and then he sees me on my computer, like 09:00 p.m.. I was like, what are you doing? Put that down. Like, enough could work today. And I’m like, I’m actually not working for me. This is my kayaking. Like, this is me going kayak because I’m working on my conference. I’m talking with speakers, and it’s not project for a client. It’s just me doing something that I love. So anyway, so that’s my kayaking. I’m kayaking more these days, if you know what I mean. He’s super jealous because he’s like, well, I have to take a weekend off once a month to go kayaking, and you can just grab your computer at night. And I’m like, yeah, a little different. So anyway, the time snowball is simply this concept that you need to start with what you have available. And it is okay if it’s 15 minutes. It doesn’t have to be 5 hours, it doesn’t have to be a whole day, but allowing your mind to go to that place where you say, these 15 minutes are for myself, and I’m going to use it for X, Y and Z this week, you may be able to simply give 15 minutes away.

Barbara:
And I remember feeling like in order for me to give 15 minutes, I need to literally sleep less, 15 minutes less in order to do that, which feels kind of weird because you’re like, I’m taking away from my own sleep in order to have 15 minutes awake doing something else. But it was the mindset that changed. It was my ability to say, I’m intentionally stepping away and taking this time and next week I’m going to try to increase it. Maybe it’s 20, maybe it’s 30. And what I saw is that it grew exponentially. And here’s why you taking yourself outside of that hamster wheel is sometimes the only thing you need to assess the situation better and realise, I don’t actually need to spend that much time inside the hamster wheel. So by stepping out and simply allowing it and you know what? The world is not going to collapse. You’re not going to lose your clients, nobody’s going to lose sleep because you’re taking 30 minutes this week that you thought you didn’t have the ability to do. And I can point back to times where taking a bath was a luxury, okay? Like it was a quick 1 minute shower.

Barbara:
Get in, get out and go. So just this idea of taking a bath sounds like a luxury. And I’m like, this is not right. It cannot be right that I can’t take an hour to go have a lunch with a friend, that I can’t sit with my daughter and just do crafts together without having my mind completely anxious about what I should be doing right now. Those 15 minutes that you begin with is a time where you have full permission to do absolutely nothing related to your business. Whatever you want to do doesn’t really matter. And then next week you’re going to increase that, and then the next week you’re going to increase that. And before you know it, you’re going to have a full day available. And I’m not exaggerating. So this process, we took it all the way to going down to 10 hours a week of work where everything else is my own time. We’re still a six figure agency. We actually never went below six figures. We continue to have almost the same amount of revenue. We definitely increased in margin. And I can totally tell you the increase in margin has one reason.

Barbara:
It is because I now have the ability to focus. I am healthier. I can spend time doing things that will energise my body, like exercise. And just this morning, we start recording at 09:00 a.m. My time. And I dropped the kids off at school before eight. And I had a whole hour to have a whole nice quiet breakfast and the dance with my husband just staring outside. And we did absolutely nothing productive. And I can sit down here with you and know that we’re healthier. Our minds are sound, our bodies are stronger. And if that’s the case for you, your business will basically benefit from all of that.

Lee:
I can certainly echo this in our business, back during the recession, we were tired, we were all overweight, we were all having stressful relationships at home. It was a horrible time. But once we started to make that time for ourselves, once we changed how we approached our business, once we started dropping services, all of that good stuff, the stuff that you’ve described, we were able to make better decisions as leaders within our business. We were happier, we were healthier, and we were able to turn over as much as we were turning over with a hell of a lot less work. It totally is a journey. But, folks, we do have to start with that first 1 minute, five minutes, 15 minutes, whatever it can be with that time snowball, thank you so much Barbara, for your time sharing your story, being so vulnerable, being so open about where you were and where you are now, it’s been eye opening and I’m sure inspirational to everybody who’s listening. So, Barbara, how can we connect with you? And then we shall say goodbye.

Barbara:
Absolutely. Word revolution is my website. Don’t type world because you will end up somewhere else. So it’s W-O-R-D, wordrevolution.com. And you can email me at barbara@word revolution.com.

Lee:
Barbara, thank you so much. Have a wonderful day.

Barbara:
Thank you. You too. Bye.