Yin and Yang: How do you balance work, family and friends?
Being completely honest, we’re still trying to work out that balance. It’s a juggling act, that’s for sure! When you want a business to work, you do need to spend hours behind the computer. But our family and our friendship is absolutely number one. So, we do have a few tricks up our sleeve to manage it all.
- We take turns a managing our social media so one of us can switch out.
- We have a “no emails, comments or client contact after 5 pm” rule. (When you have a large social media presence you need rules like this otherwise you would be on your phone all day!)
- Once a month we do something together that doesn’t involve a computer or a workout. We take turns at organising this and on these days we read out the testimonials or wins we have had for the month. Without doing something like this it’s easy to get bogged down in the “doing” and forget to take time out to realise and be proud of what we are achieving.
- We are also learning to embrace that we can’t do it all and have just recently taken on our first part-time staff member to help us with some behind the scenes stuff. A scary but necessary move when you want to grow.
The Drive: What challenges have you overcome?
Where do we start on the challenges…haha, there have been many!
Technology: Whilst we are good at workouts and motivating women to create healthy habits, we are not so good with technology. Needless to say this has been a big challenge starting an online business. Initially to keep our costs down we literally did EVERYTHING ourselves: website, design, copy, filming, photography, editing, marketing…the list could go on. You name it we have YouTubed it! Now are we in a position to be able to outsource some of our behind the scenes work to experts and it’s made life so much easier.
It takes a village and we are each other’s!
Becoming new mums: When we started this journey we didn’t have our gorgeous girls (Addison aged 1 and Sayer 9 months). Whilst we knew they were on the cards, we didn’t think we would basically have them at the same time. But as it’s turned out it’s been just perfect. It takes a village and we are each other’s! We both understand that some days we will be productive and some days we won’t. We often do afternoon baby swaps so each of us can get some focused work time; we work at night and we are very lucky to have great support around us – super dads and incredible grandparents who believe in us and our business.
For better or worse: What are the pros and cons of running your own business?
Pros: Flexibility. Not having to fit into the traditional 9-5 is awesome. It’s also great to have your own business with a young family…Yes it’s also hard but it means we get to keep learning and developing our skill sets. Of course getting to pour our energy and effort into something we love and feel so passionate about it also pretty damn cool.
Cons: It’s hard to switch off. Days often merge together and weeks sometimes don’t feel like weekends. You can’t just walk out the door and forget it.
Hopes and dreams: What next?
Our vision for the company is to reach as many women as possible and spread that ripple effect as far as we can. Because everyone deserves to be the happiest, healthiest and most confident version of themselves (especially mums!) and often through just a few lifestyle changes it can be achieved.
Renee & Jenna have recently just launched a FREE Online 7 Day Challenge to help encourage women to get active at home. As part of the challenge you get 7 home workouts that are all under 15 min and don’t require any equipment! You’ll also get daily motivation and tips to keep on track! You can get the FREE challenge here – https://bit.ly/2LW4OYa
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