Consulting with Amy Rasdal of Billable with Baby. Ep 81

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vanderkam. I'm a mother of four, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hart Hunger. I'm a mother of three, practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode eighty one. We're going to be talking with our guest Amy Rasdall about setting up an independent consulting practice. I know a lot of women and men decide to do this at some point in their career, moving in and out of the corporate world, or deciding that self employment is the way to go for more flexibility also potentially higher earning as well. So we're going to learn all sorts of stuff from her about that. Well, this is aggression that we didn't plan. But I wonder how many men are listening. Oh, well, that's an interesting question. If if you are a male listener of Best of both worlds. We would love to hear from you, so please just email us secret Laura at Laura vandercam dot com or the shoe Box blog. I think, right is Sarah Yees seeing that on Instagram on Instagram. Yeah, we'd love to hear you, know, we because best of both worlds. Could could definitely deal with Maile issues too, but that would be fun to find out. But yeah, no, independent consulting is I mean, I guess sort of what I've been doing, although I don't really think of it as that, but I've done various projects over the years related to that. So it's interesting to hear Amy talk about that. So Sarah has life going for you right now? Yeah, well, we're sort of settling in. I feel like these listeners are getting the play by play of what it's like to uproot your family and move to another town. You know, our move was not that traumatic. We moved a whopping like forty five minutes away. But we are gradually putting together the pieces. We just had a nice week well pretty nice weekend. My husband's on call, so that always makes it a little bit more of a challenge. We spent one day here and one day back in Miami Beach definitely still. You know, all of our close friends and family are mostly there, so we're still apt to go there when we can, and the kids still have piano over there randomly, so I kind of stuck in that pattern. I have not really made that much of an effort to hang out with people here yet, but I'm hoping that Naturally, we do have a bunch of birthday party invites coming up, and most of them are not drop off, so that's automatically going to be me hanging out with a bunch of parents. Ye make some friends that way. So you've been making friends but not reading, apparently, I'm looking at my notes here. We were both talking about how we were in a bit of a reading rut. I was such in the habit when I was pumping, and somehow, I don't know, I just sort of lost my groove a little bit. I don't want to blame your a comedy because I love him very much, and his book Killing Commendatore is actually very beautiful and lyrical and nice, but it kind of was putting me to sleep every night, and it was not compelling me to pick it up like in those random spare moments, So I did randomly pick up yesterday. It was terrible weather, and Genevieve took a great afternoon nap and Bell and Cameron were taking turns playing Minecraft and reading, which was my way of making it feel like it wasn't the worst thing ever. And I was picked up Educated by Tara Westover and let me tell you, that one much more of a page turner. So it's a memoir, but it's fascinating. Yeah, I don't think there's anything wrong with playing Minecraft. I think it's one of the better ones. So even if they were both playing Minecraft simultaneously, that would be fun way too much. And we only have one like real setup right now. It's on this special kids computer that we have, So anyway, yeah, they they'd have to be on different devices and it's a long story, but that wasn't happening. So yeah, my husband and my boys wound up playing the Xbox together for a long time. So maybe you need to dive in fun. You need to dive in there with them, Sarah, and play Minecraft with them. Yeah. Now, I've been at a reading rut too. I was in October. I was reading a ton of business books because I had agreed to do this round up for the Wall Street Journal of the best business books of the year, and I found, you know, a couple that I really could recommend, but I had to read a lot that I wasn't really going to recommend in the in the course of getting there. And that's actually why I stopped posting roundups that on my blog too, of like what books I'd read, because I didn't want people to know the books I'd read. It really didn't want to recommend. It was just, you know, anyway, long story, what a way to make reading feel like I feel like a story. Which I love reviewing books for them, but that particular one was just a kind of got me into this moment of, oh, well, there's a lot of stuff I'm not choosing, and then I just kind of got out of the habit. I don't know what happened. So I haven't been reading that much for the past few months. But you know, did you read it one? Did you read on the plane to San Diego? I love you? I did so I read Actually on the way there, I read cal Newport's forthcoming book Digital Minimalism. Of course I want to read that. Yeah, so I'll be talking more about that in my blog and stuff, probably by the time this has aired. I also, on the way home, I read some novellas from an independent publishing house. My friend Melanie, who writes the blog A Wandering Scientist If anyone reads that, she also as a sideline where she does. She has an independent publishing house that does novellas of various authors, and she had a couple of really good ones. I read one that was called The Inconvenient God, and it only took forty five minutes to read, like a very short novella, but the author has created this whole world within this forty five minutes, and I was like, I could see this world, like this makes sense. I feel like there should be more in this world. But there's only forty five minutes in this world. So maybe I'll find something else from that author in the future. But yeah, that was great. So I've read some stuff, but you know, I need to get back on the way. I'm reading Station eleven. Have you read that? No, But that's been on my list forever and I've heard it's amazing. I think it's really well written. I'm having a little trouble with it. It's a bit more of in places, that sort of dark page turner I don't always do well with. I had to stop bits, you know, and then come back to it and be like, Okay, well I'm gonna read for half an hour and then do something else. It is dystopian, right, That's I don't always do well with that. Either. I cannot watch actually dystopian TV or movies. Books are a little better, Yeah, like even Ready Player one, Like I loved it, but I it haunted me. Yeah, I'm sure I'll get through it. I'll get through it. It's fine, but and I know it's a really great book, so I think I'll be glad I've read it. It's just not quite what I'm in the mood for right now. And I know, maybe I feel like January February bleak enough. I don't need dystopia as well. So anyway, we're getting ready to talk with Amy Rasdal and we'll be back with that interview segment. Well, Sarah and I are excited to welcome Amy Rasdell to the podcast today. Amy is the owner of Billable with Baby, which helps women set of independent consulting practices. So, Amy, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself to our listeners. Hi, I am so excited to talk to you guys today. I've been looking forward to it. I listen to your podcast and I can't believe that I get to have a conversation with you two this morning. So thanks for having me. I am Amy Rasdall and I like to say that I liberate corporate working mothers. I left my corporate job for consulting fifteen years ago, and I love it. I have been able to still have a meaningful career and not sacrifice pay or career trajectory, while still having the flexibility to raise my kids the way I want. And so I think for there. I know a lot of corporate moms who do great in the corporate world and it works fine, but for some of us it's hard to juggle all the things when you don't have any flexibility. So I help working mothers have the freedom and flexibility to do that excellent. And I assume that you had a corporate career prior to this that led you to believe that this was the direction to go in. I did, and I really didn't set out to be a consultant when I started my corporate career. I think like other working people. I thought I wanted to rule the world. Right. I was on my career path and I had high hopes of ruling the world. And my original career goal was to be a startup CEO. I grew up in Silicon Valley, so I'm a Silicon kid. I didn't actually realize there was business outside technology in the early days of my career. So I started as a software engineer and then went to business school and worked my way up and did all my cross functional areas and all that stuff, and it was all going great. And at one point we did a startup company that didn't work, so I found myself out of work. A consulting project fell into my lap. It was twenty hours a week for three months, and I thought, wow, this is great. I'll bring in some money while I'm looking from an next job. I got a few weeks into that and I said, cancel the job search. This is the life. I'm now a consultant, and I think that I love, loved completely working for myself. And the other thing that I found career wise is that as a consultant, I could actually have more impact on my clients because there's a phenomenon when they're paying you consulting pay. They really listen to what you tell them, even more than they do when you're an employee. And then I also could choose when I work where I want, who I work with. I had a lot more control over how much I got paid, and I loved all of a sudden the work was so much more interesting. Let's step back a little bit, because I'm totally curious about the whole consulting phenomenon, being in a completely different industry, and I'm definitely sure there are listeners who don't have no idea how people get started as a consultant, what a consultant actually does. So take us a little bit through. Did you ever do any consulting for like a consulting firm or you just went out on your own? And how did you find that job and how did you find the expertise to do it? Did it just no volunteer lab So that there's a few parts of that question. If I don't catch them all, then feel free to ask them back. But I didn't, and so I'm sure that it was probably good and bad that I hadn't worked for a professional company. The bad part is that I made a lot of mistakes. And so I'm fifteen years in now to being a consultant, and I've made all the mistakes, and sometimes my billable with baby. People now that in addition to being consultant, I also help people start their own consulting businesses. People will say, well, what can I learn from you that I couldn't figure out on my own, And I'll say, absolutely nothing. You could figure it all out, but it's taken me fifteen years. How long do you want to wait? Right, I can tell you all of these mistakes that you can skip. So I made a lot of the mistakes. On the other hand, I didn't have any of the constraints. I figured I could just do anything. So occasionally not having experience can be kind of a benefit it. And then in terms of how you get started, what's interesting is that I got started and I hear a lot of other people get started a little bit accidentally. I wasn't looking for a consulting job, but people heard that I was between jobs and they thought, oh my gosh, Amy could help us with this, Amy could help us with that. So I got started accidentally, and I do a lot of speaking now on how to start your own consulting business, and one place that I speak every month is an outplacement services firm. So when you get laid off from a big corporate job, sometimes you get outplacement services that helps you find your next job. And I get a lot of people in those sessions who are already doing a little tiny bit of consulting work because it has fallen into their lap. So what's funny about it is that it's actually shockingly easy to get started, sometimes accidental. But there are pitfalls to doing that because and all of the mistakes that I talk about today are ones that I've made. One of the things that happens that's so common and I made this mistake is because I didn't think I was going to do it. I just kind of came up with a rate and I thought, well, I didn't do any homework or research. I thought, well, I'm just going to do this a few months. It doesn't really matter. And most people start out pricing too low because they think, oh, it's just a thing I'm going to do for a little while. So that's one of the pitfalls in terms of the expertise you are going to be consulting in the field that you already have experience in so I'm really helping people and helping position people who already have some years of corporate experience. It's not a great option to go as an independent consultant when you're fresh out of college, so people are going to be doing what they've been doing all these years. People hire me because I've been doing what I do for many years and they know that I'm good at it. So it feels a little bit strange when you first get started, and it's slightly scary, but as soon as you jump in with the client, you realize, oh, this is what I do. So the new part is setting your rate and the proposals and all that stuff. But when you once you actually dive in and start doing the work, it's it is your expertise, it's what you've already been doing. So Amy, maybe you could explain for some of our listeners, who again aren't in this world sure why a company might bring in a consultant, you know, whether they're bringing in like a big firm like you know, McKenzie or Accenture, or whether they're bringing in independent people to do stuff. I mean, what are they looking to solve that they can't with their own employees. Yeah, so when they hire somebody like me, I'll start there. I come in to be really a superhero. So they're hiring me because they don't have either the internal bandwidth or specific skills to get something done, and that's when they bring me in. So I come in I can hit the ground running immediately because I have all of this experience. There's typically a very small learning curve. I can jump in and start contributing immediately in an area when for me personally, I most typically come in when things are really messed up, so a little bit of maybe not a crisis, so to speak, but when, gosh, this is something that's really important. We need someone to come in here and get it on the road, either from the beginning or we tried to get it started ourselves and it didn't go very well. Now let's get an expert in here to really make it happen. And you're still in the technology part of this, right, So we're talking like a technology problem that didn't work and you need to bring in somebody to help solve it. So more typically now, so I moved out of technology, I went to business school. I got general management, so I do some technology but I do other problems too, So for myself, I have a broad range of skills from technical to marketing and a lot of steps in between, so I can do a little bit of everything. I can come in and be somewhat of a utility player and solve a broad range of problems. But any expertise is relevant. So you may have technical people, you may have really crackerjack finance people, you might have marketing people. You might have people who are really good at manufacturing. I do a lot of work in medical devices. A lot of my corporate experiences medical devices, but I don't only do that, all right, So Amy, let's say that somebody has decided either because they've they're between jobs, or you know, they've decided that they want to just go out on their own and try this. What. Well, first we should explain, I mean, the reason you would the upsides of consulting versus sort of traditional job. I assume mostly it's that your billable rate can be higher than what you'd be earning per hour because you're coming in for a short term big thing. But then the upside for you is that you're not an employee, so yes, you're working hard while you're on the project, but you can often dictate when to a degree you'll work, and that you can say I'm going to take it or not take it right exactly. Yeah. And then I also I think most consultants can organize it so that you can do a fair amount of your work remotely, which for anybody, I think that not for anybody. For many people that's appealing, and especially when you have kids, it's appealing. So for myself, what I really want to emphasize is that it's choice. So I often work half my work hours during the day and half my work hours at night because I prefer to work that way. But you don't have to. And I never first say that I work from home. I always say that I work remotely because professionalism is really important. But I do work from home. I do have a dedicated office space. I can close all the doors, I can open or close them as I choose, and you can choose. Some people find it hard to work from home, so they can go get an office or go to a co working space. So the important thing I think is that it's choice. And so yes, billable rate can be higher, and you can dictate how you want to work. So there are so many upsides I think to doing it well. One thing that we wanted to make sure our listeners that we made clear is you're not saying, oh, you can just put your baby to bed and not have any child care and do all your work during nap and bedtime. Let's clear the air on that one. Yes, I mean I will put out there that when I first saw your company name, Amy, I was like, I don't know that we're going to do this, because this is Laura's particular bugaboo of people that assume that if you are independent or freelancing or you know, consulting whatever that you know, and you have kids, you can just like have them right with you and not worry about You can have the best of both worlds, right but you know, no need for childcare, which is not true at all. Yeah. So I am a little cheeky about it on my website saying, you know, and I make flip little statements about I'll teach you how to do a full proof conference call from Disneyland, and I have done conference calls from Disneyland. But at the same time, I really teach how important it is to be professional, and like I said, I never say that I work from home. I say that I work remotely, right, because I don't want anyone to have the vision that I'm home with babies crawling around in pink fuzzy slippers. So, yes, I did have childcare, but I didn't need to have for me. I didn't choose to have full time childcare. Some of my colleagues do. I liked the idea. And I was just listening to one of your episodes. I know you were talking to Laurie Mindful Return. I was just listening to that episode. So you're talking about breastfeeding. So thank goodness, I never had to pump because I was I had access to my babies, right, but I had the nanny taking care, and she would trot the baby into my office, you know, and then I could nurse the baby and give the baby back to the nanny. So I had some flexibility. I didn't need full time childcare. And now that my kids are in school, either my husband and I go on all the school field trips, right, one of us goes in those elementary school years when I think we don't quite trust the other parents to supervise. So I can organize my schedule to do all of that stuff, but no crying babies, barking dogs in the background of a conference calls not accepted. Yeah, and you may have to show up places at times too. I mean there are going to be like hours and meetings and things like that. So it's not yeah, you know. So we just wanted to get that out on the table here. So and so just one more point on that. Now that your business card no longer says Microsoft or Google or Facebook, it's more important than ever before to be professional. This is not the time to show up in shorts and flip flops. I do sometimes meet with clients face to face. I usually close the business face to face, and then as time goes on in the project, I do more and more remotely. But I do still meet with clients. And what I do when I do, I dress in full business dress. I'm careful. Now, there are some startup technology companies where full business dress is jeans and boots, but I would never show up in shorts and flip flopsy. You know, we're your hoodie for Facebook's Yeah, dealing with that all right. So let's say one of our listeners is saying that she wants to set up an independent consulting practice. I mean, the key thing she needs to figure out what people are willing to pay her for. How do you go about that process? And clearly part of that strategy might be checking out buildable with baby I'm getting feel free to add that in there, Okay. So the thing that I like to talk about first is if the idea of starting a business is exciting to you and you're really gung ho, that's great. If you're like most of us and the idea of starting a business is overwhelming, especially if you've just had a baby or you have small kids and there's already a lot new in your world, you don't really need to think about starting a business. You just need to think about landing a project. So I really like to tell people to focus on generating revenue first, land a project and get a check in the bank. And when I was sitting in the shoes of where at least some of your listeners may be, which is a corporate job, I thought, I've never been self employed. What's all this stuff that you have to do to be self employed? So I had no idea of all that administrative and set up stuff was a giant mountain or a little hill. And so I'd like to clear the air first and say there's no giant mountain. There is a checklist of administrative stuff that you need to do, but it can be done step by step as you move through the path. There's very little. You don't have to set up a corporation and a website and have a logo and professional photos. You don't have to do all of that stuff from day one. In California, the only administrative thing you have to do is get a business license, and I suspect that it's similar in other states. You don't have to do all that other stuff right from the start. So I really teach land a project, get a check in the bank. And what's interesting is that it's surprisingly easy to get started. And the first thing I already mentioned this a little bit. You're going to start out working in the field where you already have all of your work experience, all the things that you may have gone to school for, all the years that you worked with So the good thing about this starting is that in terms of your earning potential, you're not leaving any of this value on the table. If you were to go and start a completely different business, all of that education, the years of experience, the work that you may really love would be left behind, so you don't need to do that. And so what I tell people to get started is you reach out to the people that you've already worked with and you already know in the past. So the first thing you do need to do is figure out what is it that you're going to sell. So in the corporate business world, it would be called your value proposition, and it really simply is just the goods and services that you're going to sell. As consultants, we sell services, So what piece of your background is really going to sell on the market. And then you do need to do a little bit of homework and find out your rate. But I will tell you, as people are sitting out there thinking, gosh, I have no idea, for reasons that I don't fully understand, eighty percent of the independent consultants out there, and I'm talking about business people with corporate experience, which may not be all of your listeners, but certainly is some of them. For reasons that aren't completely clear to me, eighty percent of those people charge one hundred and fifty dollars an hour. It's just the number, and it's a weird thing. But I've been doing this for a long time, so I see. I think it's really important to throw that out there because if some of our listeners are out there thinking, oh wow, that's maybe I'll get this a shot, and you have no idea where to start, let's try that we start at one hundred and fifty dollars an hour. Now, I do want to also throw out the mistake that I see most often is people not charging enough. So if someone is sitting out there right now thinking, gosh, I think I'm worth three hundred dollars an hour, go for it. I'm not saying don't charge more. I'm saying just so if one of my billable with Baby people is coming back to me and saying, I don't know, I don't know if I can charge one fifty, I think one fifteen, I'm gonna really I'm going to make them really prove it to me to allow them to charge less than that. Well, well, someone currently selling a house, I feel like the market's going to decide for you, right, I mean, you put yourself at it, like hopefully a slightly higher value than you think, and if it works, great, that's what you're worth. And if it doesn't then you have to. Yeah, And i'd also you know, it's it's better to aim a little high a because people will negotiate, which you should be prepared for. But b also because once you do one project at a rate, like if those people refer you to other people, they're gonna tell what they paid, yes, and so you know it's gonna be hard to you can go up, of course, because you can always just say no, I'm not willing to do it for that, but that's gonna be the sort of anchor point, and so you want to be that. So you know, I think one other thing you might you probably have people do is like look around you. If you've worked for company, like you've worked for a big company. Your big company has hired consultants in the past, So what did they do, like, what functions did they serve? And could you do any of those things or something related to those things. I think that would probably be another way to figure out what the market will take. Absolutely and so and a lot of times in your corporate career you have either hired or worked with consultants yourself. So often you have a good idea. And what's funny is when I talked to my job transition people. A lot of times, the company that just laid them off realizes that they actually do need a certain amount of their expertise and hires in the back as a consultant. Yeah, they laid off too many people, and they're like, wait, we need people. Where do we get the I mean, I me twice as much for consultants. That sounds smart. I've done it because sometimes when you're sitting in a mid management management job, it comes down that you have to get rid of a certain number of people and you say okay, And I've been in the position and I've had people and I've said good for them come back and say, yeah, but guess what. I did a little homework and now I'm worth more. I know that I'm worth more than what you were paying me, and I say, well, good for you, right, and now we need you and now we're going to pay you that. So it's really common. And what happens is that we're all good at what we do. We're really good at our jobs, and when people find out that we're available on the open market, they want to jump in and grab us. And that's why it's so easy to get started at the beginning. Now I'm fifteen years in and oddly enough, I have to work harder for my business at this point than I did at the very beginning. And what I realize is I've worked off what I now call the pent up demand. And at the beginning I had never been available on the open market, right, I'd always been in a job. Now you're available, and people surprisingly will snap you up. So let's talk. So it's easy to get started. Yeah, let's talk through a day in the life, because I know Sarah is very, very interested that she's like the self employed? Do we do all that? So? Amy, what does your date? What does a day look like for you when you're not up at six A? I'm talking to us. Sorry about that time zone issue. Yes, yes, that was so funny. So the most important thing is that I spend part of every single day doing networking, marketing and business development to keep my business and my pipeline and my customers coming in. So for most of us, I don't think that's the favorite part. There are a few people that just love getting out there and selling, but the selling part is the hardest part. I started life as an engineer, and so there's part of me that just loves to hibernate in my office and shut the door in front of my computer. But I make a point every single day. I never let a day go by without doing something for networking, marketing, and business development. So that takes at least an hour a day and the rest of the day, and now I often spend more than that. So a day in the life would be getting up And of course I have kids, so getting all of that stuff taken care of. How are your kids right now? My kids are five and fifteen at this point. So I jump in and first I'll log into my email and just make sure that there aren't any client emergencies, because I really do positions myself as a superhero who solves crises, whatever that crisis might be, And so I'll jump in and just kind of take the temperature and see if there's anything urgent, maybe send out a couple of emails. I might even jump on a really quick call, shut my door while the morning craziness is going on, and get all that happening, and then I'll get everyone off, and then I'll dig back down and I'll always have I know that you guys are big on planning priorities, and I think you guys resonate with me a lot, because I'm very much that way too. So I do time blocking of my day and then I'll jump in, I'll have some live calls or meetings, and then I'll work all of my other kind of hourly work where I'm doing more independent work around the pieces of calls and meetings that I need to attend to and what time. And then you said you yeah, I was gonna say, give us a like, and then do you pick your kids up from school? And then you say I to work at night? Yes, yeah, So for me in one of my lives, I'm a dancer, and one of the huge advantages to being on my own and being able to set my own schedule is that professional level dance classes dancers work at night, so professional level dance classes happen at nine thirty or ten o'clock in the morning. So now that I work for myself, I can do that. So my day really is most typically getting everybody going, checking in, doing a little bit of work on days that I possibly can, So three or four days a week, I take it a hard dance class at nine thirty or ten. Then I come back dive back into some of my work. I most typically when I can schedule my calls and client meetings in the early afternoon so that I can do my dance class, I'll work for the afternoon, and then we actually kind of divide and conquer my husband and I. I do the driving around for the little guy, and my husband does the driving around for our teenager who's a girl. So then I'm usually clear to work until about four thirty when I pick him up, and then I do all the family and dinner stuff, and then I usually sit down again to work from about eight to ten or eleven. What's interesting is that I have positioned all of these, really what are my lifestyle preferences as a client advantage. So a lot of my clients are executives, and they're really busy during the day, and because I like to work in the evening times do conference calls in the evening. So I don't think it's always good for my client's lifestyle and their families, but I'm available to do conference calls in the evening, which can be sometimes a benefit for a busy executive who's running around all jay chasing their teams to sit down and have a quiet one on one session with me, and I can imagine if they're in the kind of crisis mode where they've hired you to fix something, they may not mind leaning in a little bit for those nighttime That's right. So that's so makes sense. So your I have been able to position my lifestyle preferences really as a client advantage. Always good when you can do that. Yeah, always thinking about you know, because what you are in, you know, sales and services, You're always thinking about how it meets the client's needs and anything you can do to position that way is great. So Amy, as you know, as a podcast listener, we always do our Love of the week, so we can go first in case you want to think about it. Sure, okay, So Sarah, what do you have for us this week? You know, I have a not terribly exciting one, but I wanted to give a shout out to my laptop because I typically buy them every five years and maybe to make things easy. I think I did like two thousand and five, twenty fifteen, so it's twenty nineteen, and you know, this one's really like lasting and it's a MacBook Pro. And yeah, I'm just impressed as longevity because it still feels pretty new and feisty to me. That's awesome. Yeah, laptops are key, and especially if you are an independent worker. Oh my goodness, the setup of good technology. I've had to go other places when my internet goes down. So yes, well that's not my love of the week story. But we have high hopes that this one thing will go out great, So my love of the week is different. I was on a plane the other day and I watched the Mister Rogers documentary, which I don't know either of you guys have seen, but won't you be my Neighbor whatever it was called. And it was funny because I forgot how strong my memories are of watching mister Rogers neighborhood. But they showed some of the you know, him walking in and putting on his sweater, taking off his shoes, and I'm like, those curtains, Oh my gosh, I remembered those curtains. I was staring at this curtains every day, the sort of greenish, bluish yellow flooralish curtains that he has in his house. But it was a good movie, so I'm glad I saw that. All right, Amy, how about you? So my new love is my new protein powder shake that I drink in the morning. Oh, you're so a silicon valley there, I know, isn't that funny. But I made an effort a few years ago to really eat real food as much as I can and not use bars and stuff. But I recently added a purch just a simple It's a really simple powder that you just flo thrown a shaker with ice and water, and I add that in the morning and so I can grab it whether I'm taking kids to school or running off to dance class. And that protein boost in the morning has made a really big difference in my keeping my energy level steady throughout the days I'm running around through all of my different incarnations and lives. So that's my new current love. Yes, eating protein is good. We're fan. We're fans of proteins. Well, Amy, thank you so much for joining us. This has been great. Thank you for sharank you so much for having me. It's been really fun to have a conversation with you guys. So we have a fun question today that is actually from a mutual acquaintance of Sarah and mine that she said her kids ages six to eight ish will be with grandparents for two weeks this summer. That's part of their childcare the summer is sending the kids off to grandparents for week long two week long chunks. She says, she and her husband will still be working, but they won't have kids at home, So what should we do to make the most of this time and feel recharged. Well, first of all, thank you, I'm his friend for this question, because it's a super fun question. I just enjoyed fantasized and fantasizing about your children being shipped. That's a nice little chunk man two weeks. And I think they actually do both sets of grandparents. I think it might be more than ten. Yes, thought, and yeah, how great for the kids. They can really immerse like you have that time with the other family, and so I feel like this is a win win. Okay, So my ideas were, even though you're working a weekdays, I definitely think you need to build in a mini getaway because that will just make it feel more special. It doesn't have to be somewhere far, but you can. You could fly somewhere two three hours away, maybe like up to Canada, maybe because I know where you live. Maybe a Montreal trip perhaps anyway, you could leave like Friday right after work and then get back Sunday night. And I do feel like even a mini trip would kind of make the time feel more special compared with staying home the whole time. So I highly recommend adding in that maybe around a concert or a show that you want to see. I definitely would make a list, because you know I love making and actually take a list. We do too, and you'll probably blog about that list, so you should make one and I'll enjoy reading it. I do think it might be a good time, Like if there's one really annoying work project that's just like like it is your brain invery time you think about it, you know what I mean. I would maybe just think about like a week like an power hour every night to do that perhaps, and then it will just be off of your plate. And then finally, I think if I had this, I would so I'd have to resist my urge to come home and just like stack out on the couch every night, because would probably be my initial instinct. And maybe I could do that the first couple of nights, but maybe I would put in after I've recovered a little bit, like an evening massage or an evening pedicure or like a workout that I wouldn't normally do on some of the nights, just so you can, because otherwise I'm sure that time is normally fairly high energy. You have to come home to make the interne if you do bad time, So do something that takes a little bit energy, but that's purely for yourself, how decadent, or with your husband of course, not just alone. Yeah, no, I think it's good to make a list of like a short list of the things you guys want to do during that time. But also the part of the fun though, of you know, not having the kids around, is you can do things spontaneously as well, which true, yeah, I mean, And so that's kind of leave some room for that for being like, oh, well, let's just go meet somewhere for dinner, like in a nice neighborhood, and we can walk around and find a restaurant. And if the restaurant you want to go to has a thirty minute wait, you don't care. You'll just go sit at the bar and like, you know, because you're not paying a spitter and counting the hours, or you know, I need to get home before bedtime and all that stuff, so definitely plan on doing that a few evenings, just you know, enjoying the extra stuff. So I have actually experienced this in the past. So in the summer of twenty fourteen, I was crashing on a book deadline for I know how she does it, and my husband took the three kids we had at the time, well the three extra uterine kids we had a time because I was pregnant, but I was stuck with the baby. Obviously it's so easy when there's so the three older kids went with him to a family extended family get together at the beach and I had no kids other than being pregnant for the week. And I know what I did was basically I just worked and that's but you know, if my husband had been around for the week, I probably would have done stuff with him, so we I it had a mini version of this yesterday, which I wasn't planning on that. My husband had been like, oh, well, I'm going to take the kids skiing, but then it had gotten moved around in the day. I thought he was gonna do it in the morning, then he didn't, so I took the kids to church in the morning. We came home, he loaded them in the car, and then all of a sudden, I realized, wait, it's like an hour and a half up there. They'll ski for at least two hours. Then it's an hour and a half back. I have five hours' free, like day five hours. So again I just worked. But you know, sometimes it's good to catch up on these these things. So we'll see what she does. Yeah, that's uh. And it can also be fun to kind of adopt more of your natural schedule, Like this is the thing that I figured out that week. Is what I do is I get up in the morning and work it kind of relaxed in the afternoon, even nap or you know, just sort of be very low key, and then work more at night, but starting more like seven and go through till midnight. And that's just a schedule that doesn't really work in my life now, but does if I have no one else around? So interesting to know. Well, we'll have to report back because since we know this person, we can actually let you all know what she does. Yeah, so you've not had that, You've never had all of the kids gone, Sarah, and not for any I want, I'm on call. But then I'm like, I mean that's not very exciting. No, not for any length of time. I mean, the closest thing to this kind of freedom for me is like when I've gone on conferences, and I did go away for a girl's weekend, like by myself. So mostly I've been the one traveling. If I'm going to get solitude, I don't. My husband hasn't, like ever, like left with all three of them for some extended You haven't had this solitude at home? No, I haven't had the magical solitude at home. No, sounds nice. Someday, someday a day. Well, this has been Best of Both Worlds Episode eighty one. We've been talking with Amy Razdel about setting up an independent consulting practice, so we'll be more back next week with more on making work and life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the Best of Both Worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.