EP 60: Blurring The Boundaries
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Welcome to The B Word, the podcast for women in real estate who want to unlock the clarity needed to put your big girl panties on and rock your career like the true boss you are. I'm Joanne Bolt, your host, and together we'll dive into the things your broker doesn't teach you in order to own your own path, disown the things getting in the way to finding your place, and stop apologizing for the obstacles you had to overcome along the way.

If you're ready to stop playing small and take action in your professional life, this is the place for you. Girlfriend, raise your hand if you entered the real estate career industry because you perceived it as totally flexible and the perfect stay-at-home mom career to bring in extra income for your family, only to discover that it's kind of like running a quickie mart that's expected to stay open at all times. Oh yeah. And toddlers are somewhat...

like that too, right? I mean, you're always on call and suddenly find yourself as both housekeeper, home chef, midnight diaper changer, and snack manager. The overwhelm that being a mom is compounded with running your own business as CEO. Well, it can be a showstopper. Can I get an amen here? Being a mom literally is the busiest job you'll ever hold without ever getting a paycheck.

So just how do you accomplish staying at home with your little ones and create a real business worth having? If you're feeling the desire to do both, then lean in and take some notes. It's okay to feel this way. It's totally okay to have a desire to both stay at home and mom hard while also having a business that provides you personal satisfaction and financial freedom. Understanding some of these realities is a good place to start though. So let's dig in.

The biggest thing to understand is that the boundaries are often blurred when you work from home. You'll find yourself both baking cookies and having a phone conversation with a co-agent on the intricacies of a contract. Or you may find yourself keeping the laptop up and running on the bed next to you as you fold a load of laundry because you're also reading through emails to see what you need to respond to.

And trust me, there is no harder worker than a mom during nap time for her toddler. Give me two good hours of a snooze fest and I'll give you some solidly written contracts, emails written, negotiations made, and a client appreciation event perfectly planned or as perfect as I could get it in that two hour time period.

When it comes to juggling career and being a present parent, you have to be willing to embrace the blurred lines and not beat yourself up that you cannot do it all perfectly.

I give you full permission to understand that done is better than perfect, especially when you're trying to raise tiny people and grow a business at the same time. I recently did an entire series on niching down. And if this episode is resonating with the season of life you are currently in, you may find yourself niching down into the stay at home mom arena or the mom of young toddlers because you yourself are in that phase of life. You

You can empathize and understand where those clients are, and they'll probably give you greater grace if you find that you have a toddler in tow during a showing.

Understand this concept as well, though. Your task will fill your time. If you have an eight hour day to work, you will. If you can only work during the preschool hours of 9am to 2pm, then I can safely say you can and will get the same amount of work done during those hours. It just looks a little different.

There were many days waiting in the preschool carpool line that I knocked out handwritten note cards to my clients because I knew that I had that time sitting there with nothing else to do, but listen to the radio. And I also knew that the minute the kids got in the car, my day would turn to chaos. I encourage you also to create a family schedule with your partner or spouse so that you can work out the logistics of when you need to work outside the home versus inside the home.

Set the expectations with your client or team of those times and do your best to abide by them. My husband, Jeff, and I had a rule when our kiddos were smaller that since he traveled a lot during the week, the weekends were mine. What we meant by that rule is if he wanted to go play tennis on a Saturday morning, that was a okay with me. However,

If it turned out that I was showing Holmes while he was going to be playing tennis, it was his responsibility to procure the babysitter, not mine. That was my work day.

It was, however, my responsibility to grab a babysitter if I needed to go out showing homes during the week when he was working or traveling. We had the same rules for cooking dinner or cleaning the house too. We kind of had our established, you work these days and I work these days. So if you want to quote unquote play on those other days, you had to grab the sitter, you had to arrange for dinner.

We blurred the lines on who did what based on the best rules of availability for our household. Yours may look different.

And of course that shifted as our kids grew up because quite frankly, they learned to do stuff on their own, but it was a good way for us to learn to work together as parents and not totally compartmentalize work separate from parenting. We tried our best to not treat the real estate career as the easiest one to shift around simply because it wasn't the W-2 paycheck in our home. Each person's career was equally important and we had to adjust our expectations of what that meant when it came to the responsibilities of running our home.

One thing I love you guys that COVID actually brought into our world is a renewed sense of what's right and wrong in the business. It's so refreshing as a stay at home entrepreneur to know that if I'm on a zoom call and one of my kids comes running into the office, totally ignoring my shut door, by the way, that most likely the person I'm speaking to won't be irritated. And yes, this happens on a weekly basis.

I really can't figure out how to keep them out of my office because they, it's like, they're drawn from a parallel universe into it. Every time I get on a zoom call, you guys probably have had the same experience too.

However, during COVID, everyone had to adjust expectations of what working from home looked like. And I'm personally really glad that hasn't gone away, even as the pandemic has loosened its stronghold on us. Once again, those lines between the image of a successful working mom and that of a successful stay-at-home mom has blurred, allowing you to really embrace both at the same time.

I've spoken with and mentored lots of stay-at-home moms turned realtors during my career, and I have found that they all have one thing in common. If they truly learn to be diligent with their time and create consistencies in their everyday activities, then as their little ones grew up, so did their business.

While they may have started in real estate with toddlers or infants, and they only had the capacity to close four to six deals a year, they were able to grow that into closing 20 to 30 per year as their families aged and the responsibilities shifted in the parenting aspect. Think of it this way.

If you can work a full day during the preschool hours of 9am to 2pm, then just what in the heck can you accomplish extra when they start riding a bus to and from school? Ladies, it's a game changer. What else can you accomplish when you find yourself during the summer and kids can make their own lunches, fold their own laundry, clean their own rooms, take a shower without you needing to be near them to ensure that they don't drown in the bathtub or the shower.

It's okay to give them extra responsibilities as they grow up so that you can take on more at work because it's actually teaching them how to ease into the adult world too. You are creating really good little human beings. So take heart. That's a bonus.

If you're struggling with creating this business while being a stay-at-home mom, because let's be honest, it can get a little lonely and you need to find your tribe, then I do encourage you to look into our upcoming Chick Click. It starts October 3rd, and you'll find lots of besties who are new in the industry looking to connect while also learning some solid foundational aspects of growing your real estate empire.

And don't be shy or afraid to slide into my DMs on Instagram. It's where I'm the most active and I love to chat and see where you are in your journey. But if you're listening to this episode when it drops, it's Thursday afternoon and I'm heading out for happy hour with my local besties. You know where to find me next week for all the entrepreneurial goodness. Same time, same place. Cheers for now.

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