621 Sarah K Peck:

No one ever said owning a business was easy. Our work as entrepreneurs is never done … … and it never seems like there are enough hours in the day to check off that growing ‘to do’ list. It’s easy to fall into the trap of being a “human doing” instead of a human being, getting burned out and frustrated with the very business meant to manifest our dreams

Sound familiar?

MELINDA

I’m Melinda Wittstock and today on Wings of Inspired Business we meet an inspiring entrepreneur who is showing business owners how to do less in their business and stop trying to do it all.

Sarah K Peck is the founder and CEO of Startup Parent and the host of The Startup Parent Podcast, an award-winning podcast featuring women in entrepreneurship, business, and parenting. She writes about work, culture, and parenting, and her work has been featured in Forbes, Inc, Fast Company, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and more.

I can’t wait to introduce you to Sarah! First

Sarah K Peck started out in environmental psychology and the design of environments, and with her Master’s Degree in Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning, Sarah focused on international design projects before charting out a path as an entrepreneur in media and communications. Her goal was to change the way we talk about the world around us and how it influences our behavior and wellbeing.

In 2011, Sarah began consulting with Y-Combinator backed startups, and launched her own consultancy in 2013. Today, she’s the CEO and founder of Startup Parent, a company focused on the narratives we share (and the ones we don’t share) about work, parenting, and motherhood. Her writing and work has been featured on Forbes, Inc, Fast Company, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and more. She lives in New York City with her family.

Sarah is also a 20-time NCAA All-American swimmer and has successfully swum the Escape from Alcatraz nine separate times, once doing the swim totally naked as a way to raise $33k for charity: water.

Today we talk about the negative impact “Hustle Culture” has on female entrepreneurs, and how slowing down can lead to greater productivity.

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Sarah K Peck.

Melinda Wittstock:

Sarah, welcome to Wings.

Sarah K Peck:

Thank you so much for having me. It’s so great to be here.

Melinda Wittstock:

You say that you’re an accidental entrepreneur. How did you become an entrepreneur?

Sarah K Peck:

This is such a great question because at age seven, at age nine, at age 12, I was always doing things that were entrepreneurial, but I did not know what that word meant. I would go to my neighbors’ houses and say, “Hey. I’ll pick your weeds for a penny a weed.” I would sell cookies and do lemonade stands. As I got older, I got more creative, but I got a graduate degree. I got an enormous amount of student loan debt. I tried to work in the corporate world for a long time. I did some freelancing on the side, and then I ended up in the startup world. That’s when I finally knew. “Oh, I see what’s going on here. People are starting companies. People are building companies. Maybe I could build a company.”

That was in my late 20s, early 30s, and while I was at a company working on building a startup, there were 10 people. I was the sixth person hired. We had a million dollars in venture funding. I got pregnant on purpose and talked to the CEO about it and was helping them build their maternity leave plans. I was helping them create their parental leave policies. We’re building all the documentation and the systems at a 10-person company really from scratch. Then I just had this moment where it’s like, “Wow. Being at a startup and being pregnant, that’s a pretty particular space, and I haven’t seen that many people doing it before me. What if I followed this intrigue, startup pregnant. I want to go there, but I didn’t know that I was starting a company. I thought I was writing a book, so this is the accidental part. I pitched a book proposal to one of the agencies in New York City. I wrote five drafts of a book proposal, one when my kiddo, six weeks after he was born. He was six weeks old. I’m not sure that was the greatest draft I’ve ever done.

Then in the process of doing the writing, I realized I really should talk to other women. I should interview other women, so I started doing all these interviews, but I never put them anywhere aside from just I thought I was taking notes for my book. Wait a second. This could be a podcast. I turned it into a podcast, but I look over at my husband and I say, “I don’t know if I can take on more unpaid work as the parent to a six-week-old working at a startup,” so I looked for sponsors. We got about $30,000 in sponsors for the podcast. I realized that I might have to start paying taxes on it and also that this might be a path to follow. I’m four years into it now. We have made a bit of money building the startup. It’s now Startup Parent. I am the CEO of a company that I’m trying to scale and build. Now it’s not a book at all.

Melinda Wittstock:

How wonderful. I love entrepreneurial journeys because it’s so interesting to follow the breadcrumbs, and there’s so many things that you and I have in common, just even how this podcast started. It was originally a book.

Sarah K Peck:

Oh, interesting.

Melinda Wittstock:

I was also launching a company way, way back. I’m a serial entrepreneur, so company one as an adult because I did all the kid stuff, too. Company one as an adult, we got our funding when I was nine months pregnant, so we had to launch. It was all accidental, and I don’t know how I did it. I really don’t. I wish you’d been around when.

Sarah K Peck:

I would have asked you so many questions had I known you then. You are one of the people I would have wanted to interview, so we’ll have to get that on the book.

Melinda Wittstock:

But it’s so interesting, though. I think a lot of women who are naturally entrepreneurial just don’t really know what that is, and we have a tendency to go and get credentialed and follow the path that we should follow. Then we get either into a corporate job or just the experience you were describing of your own and think, “Wait a minute.” You start innovating within something else, and it takes a little while to just get the confidence to say, “You know what? Actually, no. I’m going to build this company myself.” There are more and more female examples of it, but I know when I was coming up there really weren’t any. There weren’t very many female founders.

Sarah K Peck:

Yes. First of all, I have a two-year-old right now, and I can just hear him saying, “No. I want to do it myself.” Just, I want to do it myself is something that comes to mind when I think about female entrepreneurs, but let me connect the dots with what you’re saying and what I’m seeing. I run a community of women who are entrepreneurs, who are entrepreneurial and who are curious about it, so what I see a lot is women in their career paths have gone 10, 15, 20 years. They’re at the top. They’re at the top of product. They’re at the top of marketing. They’re at the top of finance. They have become high-level leaders and they’ve reached their capacity and they look around. They’re like, “Where is my next move? Am I going to take over this company? No, that’s not the path. How do I grow?” Then they realize, “Well, I have product ideas or I can do this at another company, or I can do this myself,” which is why I was reminded of my two-year-old. “I can do this myself,” phrase.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, it’s interesting because I see a lot of women going into entrepreneurship a little later in life, more into their 30s, 40s, even 50s, which is not really the path for men. When you think of the VC world, the pattern recognition that they follow is dudes in their 20s, in their garage eating Ramen noodles with some tech innovation but no business expertise, and the VC puts the business expertise around them. Women’s pathway is so much different because we tend to come to it with deep domain expertise, creating businesses that solve problems that we know, for markets that we know with all the expertise to do it. It’s a very different pathway. I wonder if that’s part of the disconnect of why women struggle to get funded.

Sarah K Peck:

That’s so interesting, and I would agree. I also think that inflection point where a lot of people, they’re becoming parents, and they realize that the risk is too great to stay in a job. They can’t keep doing things the way they’ve always been done, or the company doesn’t support them, or they’re actively pushed out of a company. They finally say, “You know what? F this. I’m going to go try to do something else. Why not now?” I talk to a lot of women that are like, “I did not plan on starting a company right now, but also, I had to, and it worked-

Melinda Wittstock:

I had to, exactly.

Sarah K Peck:

… and actually, I like it.” Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, because with kids it allows you the flexibility to create your own schedule, in a way. You have this flexibility. It’s interesting, just having gone through this whole pandemic and lockdown where everybody is suddenly at home, having to balance all these things, it was a lesson that was foisted on a lot of people who weren’t necessarily prepared for it. For me, it was just like, “Oh, yeah. This is how I’ve always done it,” but entrepreneurship in my case, as my kids are older now. I have an 18-year-old and 15-year-old, but they’ve been along the entrepreneur journey every step of the way. I had to learn really early on how to balance all these things, right? Like building a company is a constant, it’s always on your mind, right?

Sarah K Peck:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Melinda Wittstock:

So how to be present for your kids and have really quality time with your kids, how to be present for the business, how to navigate all this thing, especially when we as women have this gene somewhere where we think we have to do it all.

Sarah K Peck:

Oh, let’s talk about that.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. Well, a big part of what you do is helping women, right? Like parents, entrepreneurial parents navigate all of that. How can we enjoy the journey along the way and be present for our kids and also build businesses? I think this is the thing that puts a lot of women off. This is the thing that I think puts some women off entrepreneurship because they just wonder, “How can I possibly do it all?”

Sarah K Peck:

Right. Right because we’re given this model of the 20-something college dropout, Ramen-noodle eating. This is what VCs want to invest in, so they say. I think it’s a labor play [inaudible 00:09:12]. It’s because younger guys can work all hours. They can work around the clock, and they have more energy, so you’re basically placing a bet on the fact that these able-bodied, often White younger men are going to be able to push harder. That’s the strategy, I think, behind that. I think maybe that’s an effective strategy for some industries, for some businesses. Maybe it has worked, but it also misses so many different markets, so many different industries, so much diverse thinking, so much creative thinking. So, the danger here is that women who are leaving corporate worlds that are really based on hustle or women that are competing against these entrepreneurial younger men think that to go into entrepreneurship you’re going to have to hustle at all costs. That can be off-putting is what I’m hearing you say, and I think I would totally agree with.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s not only off-putting, but it also leads so many women to burn out, unnecessarily, trying to fit into that paradigm which doesn’t really work for us. I don’t think we’re wired that way.

Sarah K Peck:

No, so one of our core values at Startup Parent is hustle is a dial, not a way of being. Hustle is a dial. It’s a tool that you can use, and there are going to be sprints. There are going to be really solid sprints. When I work with people, even back when I was in corporate, I had an assistant. She was always like, “Oh, I’m sick, but I can come in and I can push through.” I was like, “Do not do that. Go home. Sleep. Take the day off. There will be a day when I ask you to push through when you’re sick. We are going to have those days, but I’m not going to use them unnecessarily. We’re not going to push just for the sake of pushing.”

I think people get really addicted to hustle and pushing, and we forget that there are so many different ways of being. I use pregnancy all the time as an analogy. If you’re exhausted for three months, you can’t hustle. The first trimester is exhausting. Why? Well, you’re growing a baby. That’s pretty hard work. Maybe you already are hustling, but in labor, you’re pushing with such extreme bodily physicality energy, and no one expects women to be in labor for their entire lifespan.

Melinda Wittstock:

What a great way of putting it, right? We think of our companies like babies in a way, right?

Sarah K Peck:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Melinda Wittstock:

But yes, exactly. It’s the sprint, so I’ve found that, just even growing a team. We’ve gone from basically two people to 22 now.

Sarah K Peck:

Wow.

Melinda Wittstock:

In six months.

Sarah K Peck:

Whoa, okay.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right, so all that I’ve learned along the way about productivity and about sprints, about looking after myself, about the fact that I have my best ideas when I’m not working, all these sorts of things that gosh, have been transformational really in my life. It’s how can I impart all of that to the team as a whole so they learn these things? Our team is comprised of people of all ages. We do have a lot of young people. We do have a lot because it’s a tech company in the podcasting space, but we do have a lot of young guys. I find myself telling them sometimes, “Look. Get rest. Take a break.”

Sarah K Peck:

Yeah, go home. That’s right. That’s right.

Melinda Wittstock:

I feel a bit like mom. It’s funny.

Sarah K Peck:

I know, but I think that’s actually really good management and really good leadership. A lot of hustle culture is a flaw in managers who are putting too much on their employees’ plates. They’re not giving good direction. They’re not being as strategic as they could be. Sorry to … I know leadership is really hard. I know management is really hard. I don’t mean to dump on all of you out there that are managing and leading, but decisions are hard. Making decisions is hard, and that’s one of the most important jobs of a leader is making the hard decisions because you actually have to protect your resources, and your resources are your people.

If you burn them out, you lose them, and that’s very expensive, so I’m so into not trying to do it all and taking plenty of rest, in not having those, “Oh, any vacation you want,” policies but getting them into your culture and your workplace and saying, “Hey. Quarters are 13 weeks long. We work for 12 weeks. We rest for one.” What a revolution that would be if you took a week off every quarter for your team and you said, “Hey. We’re not working this week.” There’s not too many projects that are going to be in crunch mode all the time.

Now there will be some sprints. I’m not saying they’re aren’t. I work with entrepreneurs sometimes who come to me and they’re like, “Hey. We’re in the middle of scaling a massive business. Just got two million in the bank. Working on this project. I’m about to have a baby. This is going to be a hard season.” I don’t sugarcoat it for them. I look at them and I’m like, “Yeah, different businesses have different needs, and some seasons are harder than others. Just like you can have an easy baby that comes out and sleeps. You can also have a hard baby that doesn’t sleep at all and is colicky, right? It’s tough. It’s tough. It’s different. You do need to hustle sometimes, but I just don’t want you to hustle all the time. You’re just going to burn out.”

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, gosh. It’s so true. I see the impact of that on a lot of women, particularly in the tech space, that it shows up in their health in their 40s and 50s with adrenal problems or thyroid or just health crises. It’s the health crisis that makes them rethink. “No, maybe this masculine energy hustle grind thing actually doesn’t work for me.” In the end, it doesn’t really work for men either, so I think women as entrepreneurs have a unique opportunity to really remake corporate culture in a way that is kind, in a way that is creative that really maximizes peoples’ full potential. I guess it’s easy to come to that conclusion when you finally realize that success is not a destination. It’s actually enjoying the journey. Right?

Sarah K Peck:

Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

Because when people are loving what they’re doing and they’re enjoying the journey, they’re being validated, they’re loving the work, they’re loving the people that they’re working with, they have the space to look after themselves and have fun, they are actually more productive. We get so much more done with that kind of culture. We almost go slower to go faster. You know what I mean?

Sarah K Peck:

100%. I started my company when I was about four months post-partum with my first kid in 2016. Since then, I have had another kiddo, so I got pregnant and gave birth again. Then when my second kid was one and a half, we entered into a pandemic and we lost child care for seven months.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, my God.

Sarah K Peck:

Didn’t have a backyard because we live in New York City. Then we moved in the middle of the pandemic. The entire season of my parenting journey … My older kid is now five … has been just constant need for adjusting the pattern and the rhythm. I used to have a weekly podcast. Right around the start of the pandemic, I moved it to every two weeks because it was absurd. I don’t want to say I was going crazy because I wasn’t actually. It was more like I was just so frustrated and so overwhelmed. Then I said, “Wait a second. You’re the boss. You literally made this up. You created this. Whose schedule?”

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah because when you’re an entrepreneur, you’re the one that sets the pace.

Sarah K Peck:

That’s right. I mean, there are sponsors and there’s agreements and there’s other things, but I can negotiate that as well, so we dropped down to every two weeks. The other thing that’s been really helpful, so my husband and I have the same schedule. We both work 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM, full stop. We stop at 4:00, one of the best things that I think has ever happened to my work life. What a delight it is to not be so intensely trying to pick up a child and then take them screaming through dinner but actually to enjoy the evening. There is not a lot of good stuff that happens when I try to push from 4:00 to 6:00, so we work a limited schedule. We take summer Fridays off in the summer. We don’t work on Fridays.

Sarah K Peck:

Periodically, I take three-month breaks from things, so I don’t stop the business in full, but I took a three-month break from the podcast when I was having my first baby. I was like, “Y’all. I’m not going to do this to myself. I’m not going to try to podcast with a screaming infant next to me. Like why would I do that? I’m not going to try to double my workload just to make these episodes be continuous. You can wait three months, and I can wait three months. You can catch up on back episodes. We’ll be great.” I took another three-month break in the middle of the pandemic, and I took a three-month break when I wanted to focus on writing books and I couldn’t find enough time. I said, “You know what? Why don’t I stop podcasting for three months?” Then I wrote three mini-books in those three months, and I thought that was just the best decision because I finally got to publish the things I wanted to work on.

Melinda Wittstock:

This is fantastic, so you’re being kind to yourself. I think that’s the way to say it. I think so often we confuse value with hard work. We think that our own value is only justified if we’re killing ourselves to get there, and it’s actually a big mindset shift. Yeah, it’s a big mindset shift to really step into understanding your own value because without you as the founder of the company and the leader of the company being in good spirits, in good health, your decisions aren’t going to be as good. You’re not going to be as effective, all of those things. What do you think, in all the women that you work with, on this question of valuing ourselves, what’s the block there?

Sarah K Peck:

I’m going to rely on a lot of amazing feminist writers that I know. I’m a book nerd, so I read a lot of books. I got to interview on my podcast, so it’s been a nerdy, high school book, note-taking girl’s dream to have this job, but I’m going to lean on some folks like Eve Rodsky and Tiffany Dufu. Eve Rodsky in her book Fair Play talks about how society looks at men’s time as finite and women’s time as infinite. Because we don’t value women’s time because so much of women contribute to the free labor in our world because laundry is done by women, because child care is done by women, because all of these things are just done by women. In the 50s, the sandwiches that men brought to work were made by their wives. They got mornings to write. Women did not. They did work. Women were always working, so I think that part of it is not individual.

There’s nothing wrong with your brain. You live in a world that doesn’t value your time, and you’re not crazy if you feel that way. That’s what I would say first. It’s like what do we do differently to value ourselves? I think we tell the truth, and I think we look at history, and I think we look back at the astonishingly terrible history of women’s careers and women’s lives. Women weren’t allowed to have a credit card. They weren’t allowed to leave the house. There weren’t public bathrooms for women, only men. There’s just so much constraining women. Now if we don’t really look at the feminist history of what’s happened before we were born, we can delude ourselves a little bit and be like, “Well, the world is fair, so why do I feel like I’m having a hard time valuing my time?” That’s where I would start.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. I think that’s really, really important, valuing your time. I had a mentor. I guess it was business number three, who took me aside and said, “Okay, so Melinda, what would be your hourly rate if you were landing a major client or a major sponsor or a funding round or a strategic partner or whatever and that was worth a million dollars to the business? What would be your hourly rate?” I’m like, “Wow, gosh. If I brought a million dollars in the business and say 10% of that was mine, my hourly rate would be pretty high.” Okay, and then he said, and it was a guy. He said, “Well, what’s your hourly rate if you’re fixing a broken link or if you’re scheduling your own calls or if you’re doing the laundry?” Okay, pretty low, right? So why would you be doing that? Why don’t you hire somebody because to not hire that person is basically to rob from your business.” It just sank in with me. It’s like, “Oh, okay,” because it was just clear numbers. It was clear calculus, which I think men are very conscious of and women aren’t so much.

Sarah K Peck:

Yes. I want to take that even one step further because I think there’s in the work sphere and there’s the home, the domestic sphere. So often women will be doing tons of things that they aren’t paid for, but if they hired someone they would pay for it. I actually think that that’s a radical act. When you pay not the lowest possible wage but an actual living wage. Instead of $15 an hour, pay $25 an hour for your babysitters or your house cleaners or whatever it is. You are actually putting that into the economy. It was invisible before and now you’re making it visible.

I think that’s super cool because you’re actually elevating the value. When you increase the amount of money that your business makes so that you can pay more people to do more jobs that were previously invisible, I find that so cool. I know that capitalism has flaws and there’s other conversations to have in terms of how we think about our economy and our work world, but I just think it’s so cool to be able to pay people for things that you’re like, “Oh, I could just do it. It’s not that hard for me. I’ll just do it quickly,” is the place where maybe you should start your hiring.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s absolutely the place. There was a study not so long ago that said that businesses that hire people quickly within the first six months are just more likely to succeed. The ones that don’t struggle because the founder burns out. It never can really get to any kind of scale. It just becomes impossible, and there are so many women who are stuck at the low six-figures. They can do it up to all of it, as solopreneurs up to maybe $300,000 annual revenue, maybe, but it gets really hard at that point. Only 3% of women get to a million dollars or more. It’s that that stops them because I think when we think of hiring people as an expense rather than as an asset, because if you hire people, you’re free then to go and do the important stuff like bring revenue into the company, create the IP, do all the things that are going to be of tremendous value, so it’s not just valuing our time. It’s being strategic about what we choose to put our time into.

Sarah K Peck:

Oh, I love, love that example. I’ll be honest and candid. I’m a little over four. I’m almost five years into building this business, and that is the learning curve I’m inside of, right? I spent a little longer being a solopreneur, about two years, and then I hired a couple of coaches to help me because I couldn’t take on all of the coaching load as we grew our program. I hired an admin and an assistant who’s an amazing online business support for me. I’m now looking to make what will effectively be my fifth hire in year five, so I’m going slowly, but what you’re speaking to feels like my current learning it again. I feel like you learn this once, and then you learn it a second time, and you learn it again. Each time you’re like, “Oh, yeah.”

Melinda Wittstock:

You keep learning it in different ways, like I’ve found with Podopolo. The first real group of hires were obviously around product, really getting it, and I was very much involved in product until I had the team really, really firing on that and the tech team, and then my attention could turn to okay, now I’ve got to build the marketing team, so I’m really in the marketing right now, working in the business in the marketing, on the business on the product. As the marketing team, then sales team and all the operations scale, then that starts to take care of itself. You know what I mean?

Sarah K Peck:

That’s totally true. On the value thing, too, I talked about the feminist approach before, but one other thing came to mind for women in particular valuing ourselves. I think sometimes we get stuck. I’ll say I get stuck, and then I’ve seen some people get stuck here where we’re trying to find some sort of hourly value, and we conflate it with personal value. “Oh, what am I worth?” That’s where people can run into whatever their ceiling is, whatever they think their value is, it might be an unconscious number, but it’s like, “Oh, I could never earn more than 150K, or I could never earn more than 75K.” Whatever your number is, you will live and breathe that out because you equate it to your own personal value instead of looking at it as the value you create for someone else.

I have a specific example. I’m working with a woman right now. She’s a phenomenal coach. She was approached by somebody to become a coach for one of their C-level folks, not the CEO but right next to the CEO. She was putting together a package, and she was like, “How do I price this?” I said, “Well, let’s think about the value. What’s the value of better decision-making? What’s the value of better C-level thinking for this person? Who would they hire? What’s the value of an employee? Would they hire an employee at 100, 150K?”

We were able to put together $100,000 coaching package for the year, even though she wasn’t “an employee.” She was like, “Wow. This would be just one of my clients at 100K,” but by focusing on the value created for that C-level person and figuring out, Melissa, what would it be like to have somebody to help you make really good decisions and help you take your business from … I’m making numbers up but … one to two million or two to four million? If they could double your revenue, the value there is actually in that two million dollar increase in business revenue. That’s the value you’re contributing. It’s not an hourly rate. It’s not a personal rate. It’s not a salary rate. It’s what you’re doing for that business.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, values-based pricing is so important because when you can make your customer see. “Okay, so assuming that we succeed providing this value for you, what will it mean to your business?” I find in the sales process very few people ask that question. Understanding from your clients, especially if you do high ticket stuff, what would it actually mean for them to go from where they are now to where they’re going to be as a result of working with you and that is quite clear, that then should be dictating your price. I think that’s a really, really important point.

I want to make sure that we talk about community with you, as well Sarah, because you’ve built a really cool community, the Wise Women’s Council. You started out with six members and you’ve got 40 members now. They all pay $5,000. That’s awesome, so how did you come to create that community, and what was the secret of building it and keeping it going? As women, we really need to be in great communities, I think, to succeed.

Sarah K Peck:

Yeah, it’s one of my favorite places. I get a lot of testimonials throughout the programs. I get people just messaging me privately and saying, “This is one of the best places I’ve ever been. I love what you’ve built. I’m coming back another year.” It just tickles me because I love it so much, and I think it’s really good, but I’m always nervous that other people won’t think it’s as good as I think it is, which is very problematic if I built something that’s, “Yeah, I think it’s great, but other people don’t,” but it’s working, and I love it. I want people to be able to leave the Wise Women’s Council and say to themselves, “That was the best 5K I’ve ever spent. That’s the best business 5K I’ve ever spent. I made more friends than I did in college. I have lifelong connections. Sarah opened me up to her network. I got fundamental business training, and I also learned how to have conversations differently. I know how to ask big open questions. I know how to have hard conversations. I know who to look for for support and my life is transformed.”

That’s my goal. It’s a big goal, but just what I noticed is for new mothers in particular, and the Wise Women’s Council is for working women, career women and entrepreneurs who are navigating a big business project while also navigating early parenting at the same time. For me, the power of being in a room of 40 people where you can look around and you’re not the only parent. You’re not the only one breastfeeding. You’re not the only one figuring out a diaper. You’re not the only one leading a company. It’s just transformational to be in a room where everyone says, “Oh, yeah. I understand. This is a hard day for you. Cool, cool. You’re still bleeding into your postpartum pants and Calavision wants you to be on national radio, and we’ve forgotten how to put rollers in our hair. Let’s figure it out. We got your back.” To your question, you said how did I scale it and what do you think the magic sauce is?

Melinda Wittstock:

Yes, absolutely.

Sarah K Peck:

Yes. We started with six, and the reason we started with six was because I was six months pregnant with my second kid. I wanted to offer a community mastermind program. I was really exploring and vetting the idea, and I was going to give birth in about three months, so I really had to marinate on the question, “How might I do this? How could I do this a little differently? How can I take leave and run a program like this?” I stitched together three of my friends so they would teach during the first three months postpartum. They would take over the program, and I wrote the sales page telling everyone I was pregnant and that I would be taking a break, but that we could still run this program. I had a vision. I said, “I believe that we can do things like this, and we can do them while being kind to our bodies and to the fact that we’re pregnant, and I don’t think that you need to avoid entrepreneurship during these times, but I don’t think you need to do it the way it’s always been done either. I think we can find a different way.”

I think if I show up as a leader and I say, “Hey, I’m going to be gone for three months because I’m going to be doing 90 days of overnights with a tiny new human trying to get them to latch,” people will be generous and understand, and they could still find value in something. I think we had 100 or 200 people on the email list because we had just started the podcast. We had maybe 18 or 20 applications, and I picked six people. I said, “Let’s try this and it worked.” That was validation number one. Six people paid me $1,800. Did it pay all of my bills? No. We could do the math on these numbers, but did it work? Yes.

Validation is so, so important. Validate early and charge is one of my things that I tell people all the time. Make it cost money. See if people will pay you. If they will, you’re on to something. Then we did it again. I launched it again, so I had my baby in October. I launched the next cycle in January, so I did a little overlap. I had guest teachers teaching for me, and then I was launching another cycle. We got 18 people into that second cycle, and that really opened my eyes. I said, “Oh, people really want this kind of a space.” Then I set it up to be on an annual curriculum, so we open in January for applications, and we go March to November.

The reason we do March to November is because again, you’ll see the rhythm of a nine months-three months in a lot of my business planning. I want those three months to dedicate to sales. I see so many people who are in programs that are 12 months long, and then they have to do double work. Instead, I wanted to do the nine months. I also wanted to respect the fact that working parents have kids at home usually during winter break, and everybody gets a cold during winter break, so people drop out of programs in December and January. Sometimes they start programs in January, and I wanted to just clean the slate. Let that be open. Then we would start in March, after the new year chaos had wrapped.

Then we had 28 people in 2020. My sales cycle starts in January, like I said, so I closed everything by around February 15th, and I was very fortunate in the pandemic that I sold everything that was a baseline for my business by February 15th. Then of course the pandemic hit, and people said, “I’m so glad I joined the Wise Women’s Council even more because of this crazy year.” I did not know what would happen in 2021. Actually, my intention was, let’s just repeat the year and get better at systems. We had 60 or so applications. We made 50 offers, and we had 40 people sign up for this year.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s fantastic. What you talk about in terms of validation is really critical, and you have a curated process. You’re bringing the right. Like in a mastermind or a community, it’s bringing in the right people that are going to work well together, so there’s a real art to that, as well. I’ve had a very similar experience with one of the other things that I do which is the Wings Retreats, where we had two of these in 2019. The whole idea is bringing high performing female entrepreneurs together to really connect and collaborate deeply, business learnings and things, but just combined with a lot of radical self-care, pampering, a lot of fun in a beautiful location.

I’d never run a retreat before, tried it out. They were both very successful. We had to obviously cancel the one for last year, but then it’s ramping up. We’re all getting together in Costa Rica at this beautiful resort later in October. The most amazing thing that came from that because the whole concept of it was abundance, women really stepping up to help each other, whether it’s mentoring each other, promoting each other on each others’ products, buying each others’ products. Some 30 women who came to both retreats, we did $500,000 worth of business with each other.

Sarah K Peck:

That’s great.

Melinda Wittstock:

The relationships that manifested as a result, just these hotlines if anyone needs help with anything that they’re working on. This was interesting, too, because it was curated like women from all different industries, different entrepreneurial experiences, different places in their business, different challenges but everybody had something of tremendous value to give to the community and everyone had something to receive, so getting that balance right has been really interesting. I’m excited. October can’t come fast enough. I’ve got a little bit of cabin fever.

Sarah K Peck:

I want to go. That sounds amazing.

Melinda Wittstock:

It is really amazing. Yeah, check it out. We have an application process, just wingsexperiences.com/apply. If you’re on this podcast, Sarah, you automatically qualify because really the women who attend, they’re into the six figures, some of them seven figures, eight figures. Some of them have exited their businesses, starting up new ones. It’s just a real mix, but it’s a lovely community, so I would love to have you. You’ve got to come.

Sarah K Peck:

I think retreats, communities, I am pretty discerning about the people who run them because I run them myself. I look to make sure that the person at the helm is someone that I think can attract really good people, but once you find that, these events are so important. I didn’t know this when I was 23, 24, 25. It’s been 20 years now, but going to an event like that, whether it’s $1,000 or $5,000 or wherever the price points are, if you’re introduced to 30 people, the value comes later when you get to email a couple of them and say, “I’m looking for a PR hire. Who do you recommend?”

Melinda Wittstock:

Exactly.

Sarah K Peck:

Boom, your hiring gets easier, or they talk to you about the processes that they use. You get these insights. They’re just one of my favorite things to do, and I have done entrepreneurial retreats for 12 people on different weekends. One of my dreams is to get a house north of New York City, like a five or six-bedroom house so that I can run four or five retreats a year and bring entrepreneurs together. I just think they’re so incredible. People listening, try them. Try them and see, and be open. Be open, be generous, be kind. Share and you’ll get back so much.

Melinda Wittstock:

You do get back so much, and I think as women we really need them. I think one of the worst things for any woman and especially any woman entrepreneur is to be isolated. We advance so much quicker in that environment. One of the things we do at the Wings retreats that I think is really unique is giving people a lot of white space as well to really collaborate. The way that we facilitate them, too, just gets to deep connections right away with a lot of fun and also just teach this. Where we began the conversation really about the difference between getting out of the hustle mode and getting more into flow, all of that just happens in the way that we do it, but yeah, we all need community. It’s so, so important. Sarah, I want to make sure that people know how to find you, work with you, how to apply for Wise Women’s, check out your podcast, all the things. What’s the best way?

Sarah K Peck:

Oh, yeah. The Startup Parent is my company, and the Startup Parent Podcast is our podcast. We go every two weeks now. We’re going to take summer vacation, by the way, so we’ll be off for eight weeks. You can catch up on back episodes, and then we’ll be back in September. Go to startupparent.com/newsletter. I send out a Friday newsletter that people, they tell me it’s pretty great. I love hearing that. You can check it out and see what you think and if it helps you. I’m never offended if people unsubscribe. People are busy, right? Do what you’ve got to do. Then if you want to learn more about me personally, Sarah with an H, kpeck.com is my personal website. I used to write there for 10 years and do freelancing over there, so there’s a whole lot of blog posts from 10 years ago on that site. Now if people want to get the book that I wrote, I do have a giveaway copy of one of my mini-books for free, so you can go to startupparent.com/half, and I’ll send you the book.

Melinda Wittstock:

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us. I loved our conversation.

Sarah K Peck:

Well, thanks for having me. This was so great.

Sarah K Peck
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Listen to learn the secrets, strategies, practical tips and epiphanies of women entrepreneurs who’ve “been there, built that” so you too can manifest the confidence, capital and connections to soar to success!
Instantly get Melinda’s Wings Success Formula
Review on iTunes and win the chance for a VIP Day with Melinda