Consider the Wildflowers
Consider the Wildflowers
114. Scaling to 7 Figures While Raising a Family: Bonnie Christine’s Secrets to Work-Life Harmony
Welcome back to the show one of our favorite past guests, renowned surface pattern designer Bonnie Christine, for our second encore episode!
In today’s episode, Bonnie is sharing how she scaled her business to multi-seven figures, built a thriving community of 185k creators, and did it all—mostly from her spare bedroom. From time management hacks that’ll have you scribbling notes faster than your kids can ask for a snack, to productivity tips that actually stick, Bonnie’s giving us the real scoop on what’s worked (and what hasn’t) when it comes to balancing business growth, family life, and everything in between.
Tune in for a real conversation about how to keep it all afloat without losing your cool.
WILDFLOWER SHOWNOTES: shannaskidmore.com/encore-bonnie-christine
📌 RESOURCES MENTIONED:
Shanna on Bonnie’s podcast, The Professional Creative
Free Five Day Workshop— Your Pattern Design Playbook
You can do both. You can be an amazing mother and an incredible entrepreneur. You can use it as a way to teach your children. You can do hard things. It is like the current stage that you're in is so short, and this wasn't always apparent for me, like I remember feeling like, I'm not sure if I can do this forever, and then I realized it's not going to be this way forever. It's actually just a really short amount of time that you're feeling kind of like, you know, scattered, and so any any kind of like, season that you're in is short lived, and you can push through and it is so incredibly worth it, and you're not alone.
Shanna Skidmore:You are listening to consider the wild flowers the podcast episode 114, welcome back to the show. One of our favorite past guests, renowned surface pattern designer Bonnie Christine for our second encore episode, while our first conversation focused on building a business, this time around, we're getting real about how to build a life alongside that business. No fluff, just the good, the bad and the messy middle of juggling entrepreneurship and family. In today's episode, Bonnie is sharing how she scaled her business to multi seven figures built a thriving community of 185,000 creators, and did it all mostly from her spare bedroom, from time management hacks that'll have you scribbling notes faster than your kids can ask for a snack to productivity tips that actually stick Bonnie's giving us the real scoop on what's worked and what hasn't. When it comes to balancing business growth, family life and everything in between, tune in for a real conversation about how to keep it all afloat without losing your cool. Let's dive in. Hey, it's Shanna, and this is consider the wildflowers. The podcast. For the past 15 plus years, I've had the honor to hear 1000s of stories from entrepreneurs around the world. As a former fortune 100 financial advisor turned business consultant, I have a unique opportunity to see the reel. Behind the highlight reel. I'm talking profit and loss, statements, unpaid taxes, moments of burnout and those of utter victory. Or, as my husband says, the content everyone is wondering, but not many are talking about. And now I'm bringing these private conversations to you. Hear the untold stories of how industry leaders, founders and up and coming entrepreneurs got their start the experiences that shaped them and the journey to building the brands they have today, stories that will inspire and reignite, encourage to redefine success and build a life and business on your own terms. Welcome, Wildflower. I'm so glad you're here. You Hi Bonnie. Welcome back to the show. This is fun. Oh my
Bonnie Christine:goodness, Shanna, thank you for having me. I feel like part one
Shanna Skidmore:with Bonnie was how to build a business. Amazing. I love hearing entrepreneurial stories, but I'm really excited because you're the first person where I really want to dig into, like, how to build a life. I've just realized, and this was going to share with you right before we hit record, I've realized that so many of us are moms, moms in different season of our business journey. And I just feel like maybe this is just me, because I'm a newish mom running a business while also raising a family in whatever that looks like for people of whatever season they are. I know some people are like, just send their kids off to college, or comes with a whole different set of things. Just your mind is in a different place. You're wearing different hats, and so thanks for coming back on the show. Just to share more about building your business while raising a family.
Bonnie Christine:Yeah, I love it. It's a great and very important topic that's complicated. There's a lot of layers to it.
Shanna Skidmore:Okay? Bonnie, so let's just go back and kind of set the picture of Well, first, just kind of tell me about your family today, and then I would love to hear what your family looked like when you first started your business.
Bonnie Christine:Okay, so I have two children. I'm married to David. We met in high school, me and David did and we started dating like the week before he graduated. So I'm calling us high school sweethearts. Of course, we both went to school, so we dated a long time, but we got married in 2008 so we've been to we've been married for 16 years together for 20 and we have a this week, nine and 11 year old turning nine and 11 this week. So we have all of our birthdays within a window of about 10 days in our family and extended family. I'm not sure what that is, but it's birthday week over here.
Unknown:Um, birthday week. I love it.
Bonnie Christine:So, yeah, nine and 11 is an incredible age. Every Age has been incredible for completely different reasons. I. So I started my business, though in 2009 and so I had my first baby, my son, in 2013 so I had four years there, four years to really kind of just get going. I think, gosh, if we want to talk numbers, I think in 2009 I made about$11,000 in my business for the year that put David and I as a family making under 40,000 a year. It was like 35 maybe, and so it was very slow going and growing. So by 2013 I was probably making maybe around 50,000 without going to check something around 50,000 so, like things were happening. And then I had a baby. So my husband had a regular, kind of nine to five job, and I had this business that I was growing, and it continued to grow pretty, pretty well. And so I was kind of a stay at home mom, entrepreneur. The interesting thing was that my husband was a cycling coach. He was a professional cyclist, as well as at the same time as being a coach. So evenings, he had to train. So he had to kind of work from nine to five, and then he had to train for two to three hours. And then weekends were bike races, which we went on, but I just always had an infant or baby with us at these bike races. He doesn't do any he doesn't do any of that anymore, but it was very vivid when I think about those years for us. And so then I had my daughter two years later, in 2015 so by 2015 I had broke into the six figure mark. I was making 100 to 300,000 a year in in that time frame, that was a huge kind of like ceiling to break through for me at the time, and also meant that it was getting more and more difficult to to be like now. I have two small children at home with as and a nine to five. So it was the year that I made $350,000 that we decided to bring David home from work. We knew that that was enough to sustain us. I had no help in the business. Big mistake. I'm sure we'll talk about that, but it was still just me doing everything. And so it was an interesting decision, right? Like, we're traditional. We're very traditional in the way that we approach life and business and marriage and so to just kind of flip flop that role. You know, we talk about that a lot because it was, it was so sweet and also so confusing. It was kind of this awkward dance for I would say it took us a year to figure out, like, Okay, so now who's doing who does this? Like, who's doing this? If the kids have a doctor's appointment, who's doing it? Type of situation, just trying to figure it all out again, because my kids were still young enough to where they weren't at school, so they he was really a stay at home dad now, and that meant that I was, I don't know, just so many big shifts, right? The other big shift for me was that my income was no longer fun money. It wasn't like, oh my goodness, we can, like, pay off that debt or or, you know, do the trip that we want to do, or whatever it was like, this money has to come in. It's required to come in for us to live and pay our mortgage and pay our car bills. And that's a different shift for that was a different shift for me. For the first time as well. I remember feeling like I don't envy, I don't envy the main like, income provider, yeah, it's a lot. Yeah.
Shanna Skidmore:I feel this deeply in my soul. Okay? Bonnie, I have so many questions. Let's This is also good. I feel all of this very much. What were you offering in those first few years? What were you selling to make the 11,000 to 50,000 and then at what point did you change your offers to move into that six figure, multi six figure mark? Yeah,
Bonnie Christine:so I have this listed. It might be worth me pulling up. I was licensing my artwork. Still license my artwork today, do about six figures with licensing work. And so that was really what got me to six figures. Was licensing, okay, yep, that's really what my bread and butter like is, is, is surface pattern design and creating artwork for products. So licensing is beautiful because it's kind of do the work once get paid for it residually over and over and over again and so that slowly builds, but as it builds, it like kind of compounds. So it's a beautiful revenue stream. Then I also dabbled in handmade shop, so I had. Like an Etsy shop. I was selling handmade goods in I was also just beginning to dabble in education, so I had some classes on Skillshare, and I had a class on Creative Live, and I was selling things like digital assets. So the one thing that I learned in 2012 that stuck with me was the power of residual income. So how can we move from trading our time for money and move into doing it once and getting paid for it over and over and over again? So I just made that huge shift, and very rarely trade time for money anymore. And so, for instance, licensing residual income, selling a like a digital class, like on Skillshare, Creative Live residual income, selling things like digital assets. So I did, like video tutorials and ebooks and things like that residual income. And then the other thing that I did in 2012 was I started my membership. So I still have the have it today. It's a 12 year old membership. It's changed a lot over the years, but that is recurring revenue, so I think that's such a gift to creative entrepreneurs, because I would say that's the number one thing you don't have faith in. You don't know you're going to have a really great month and then you might have a dry season. And so what a membership does is create reliable recurring revenue that you know is coming month over month. And it just kind of like slowly, kind of levels out those hills and valleys. And so I launched this membership in 2012 with a blog post, and it was $5 a month. And that opening weekend, I had 200 people join, which was $1,000 a month in recurring revenue, which was the most I had ever been able to produce. And so that was growing in the background as well. Today that membership is for alumni of my surface design immersion. Course, it was all very design related, always, but it's changed over the years. And so today, that membership has over 4000 members at $47 it just grows and and it's such like a like, a like, it helps you sleep good at night, because you know that you have the basics covered with something that's predictable, which is such a gift. So all of those things, their multiple streams of revenue, were growing. It wasn't until 2018 that we really hit a much larger number, and that was when I started in education, truly, like, with a signature
Shanna Skidmore:course. Okay, so this is also good. So when your kids were little, not yet going to school, how are you running your business, and you have metals at home, like, how are you doing? Literally
Bonnie Christine:running to my computer during nap time. So I was my kids were great nappers, and I would, you know, just as early as is reasonable, I'm a reasonable person, but as soon as it made sense, I would stack their naps at the same time as as long as I could. And so with one, it's fairly easy. When he slept, I worked End of story. So I do remember, though, specifically that I was doing something a little bit different than the other moms that I knew, because the other moms would take their their child's nap time to nap themselves or do like, chores around the house. And I didn't do that. I did chores around the house with my baby, and so I would just take my baby with me, sit him in the floor playing while I did the laundry, or had him in the kitchen with me while I was cooking and shopping. So if he was asleep, I was working. And I remember literally every single day, running from the Nap Room to my computer. And for me, it was the first time that I learned time management. Because before that, no need had all day and had what did we do back then? I thought a lot, and turns out, I really figured out how to get all of the same important things done in a fraction of the time, which meant that I learned how to say no to the things that weren't really moving the needle in my business, and also learned how to focus, which I think is our biggest like kryptonite as a creative it's like we have all these ideas, but we have no ability to focus. So having a scrunch on your time is such, actually a gift, because it helps you focus. And you know what else it did? It made me do the most difficult thing first, because if you, if you keep it for later, you have no idea if you're working during nap time. You have no idea when your work is going to just get completely cut off. And so what I found is that I would put all. Off my more difficult projects, because I was afraid that my baby was going to wake up at any moment. So I learned to do those first game changer in the business, and then when I had a second child, as soon as it made sense, we napped at the same time. And so yeah, we just did things together. So we did chores together. We did all the errands together, and then if they were asleep, I was working, and that's how I did it, and it and it worked. So that was probably, oh, maybe three hours a day. I have my mom lived at the time. We live in the same town now, but at the time she was about two hours away, and she would come one day a week. We would call it Mimi Monday, and she would come help and just give me, like, more of, like, a good six, seven hour work day on those days, but yeah, the rest of it was done. How did
Shanna Skidmore:Bonnie, this is so good. How did you did you ever wrestle? Did you ever wrestle with working, or the type of mom you wanted to be or, and did you have to pull nights and weekends to, like, catch up, you know, if your baby didn't nap, or if you, you know, couldn't get them to sleep until 10pm so, like, my
Bonnie Christine:biggest effort or goal was to be available. And so I want to work with my children alongside of me. I want to work at home, and so that means, even if I'm working now, when I think about this, I'm thinking, my kids are a little older. They're like, three and five, so one of them is not even napping, and I'm still working David's at home now, and so naps are getting fewer and fewer than what are you doing, right? And so I would have work hours, and we would communicate that. But also that meant if there was a boo boo or a nap time, like I was there. And so the biggest thing I remember is feeling very scrambled at the end of the day. My mind would be fried, because I would zoom in to work and zoom out to mother, zoom in, zoom out, zoom in, zoom out, zoom in, zoom out. And so it was interrupted work. And, you know, I don't have any advice. It kind of just is the name of the game. It is the season, it is scrambled, it is zoom in, zoom out, and it is exactly your calling as a mother and entrepreneur to do both. And so you're just gonna have a couple of years where it feels like at the end of the day you're not sure what your name is, and also it's gonna be so worth it.
Shanna Skidmore:Word I'm just here in the middle. So it is so good to hear
Bonnie Christine:like, just wait till they're the kids the age that my kids are now mean that they i i pull them into my work. So like you, a lot of my work is on the computer, which is a bit of a drab to watch mom, but I never let them see me on my computer without letting inviting them to come see what I'm doing, because I want it. I want to be really clear that I'm not scrolling social media. I'll bring them in and show them the artwork I'm working on, or the email I'm responding to, or the email that I'm writing, or the book proposal that I'm working on, and I'll like give them a tutorial around what I'm doing, and then I'll talk about why it's important. And they love that aspect of my business. Now, I started doing that probably when they were maybe five, and around the age of 567, when they could start to grasp an importance attached to it.
Shanna Skidmore:Yeah, okay, I love this, Bonnie, when the shift happened and you became the main income earner, will you just talk about that mental shift. Did that add stress to your life? Did you embrace it? Well, how did your husband? Husband do with staying with the kids like share how you all navigated
Bonnie Christine:that shift. You know, this is just something I think more people should talk about. It is tricky, and we did it beautifully, and it was still tricky. And a lot of it was like, Well, are you taking them to school, or am I? And I'm like, Well, if I was a stay at home mom and you were at a nine to five, I would be doing both. And so now I think it's the opposite. And so lots and lots of conversations like that. What does this look like? But also wish my husband was here, because it's also an interesting thing, because I and he both, like, I want him to be the leader of our home. And so how do you detach leadership from financial provision? And those two things are completely separate. And oftentimes I think one implies the other, and it does not. And so financial provision does not imply leadership. David, 100% leads our family. He sacrifices his himself for us every single day. Pay. He also does all of the things that are like, no fun, like, you know, all the bill pays and all the doctor's appointments and all those things. And so there's just this really sweet and special leadership and respect for each other. I think that respect can also get attached to financial provision, and it is completely separate as well. So you must respect each other no matter what, or no matter who's doing what. And then for me, it wasn't my money, just like when he was the financial provider, it wasn't his money, it was our family's money. But for a time, the income I made was my money, because it was fun. It was fun money. It was like, oh my goodness, I made $10,000 like, we can knock out that debt, go on that trip and buy shop at Whole Foods or Lulu or whatever. And it did feel like we don't really need this money. It's fun money that flip flopped. And so for me, it was like, Well, this is no longer my money. This is our money, and because we respect each other, we've earned that respect. We're not asking permission from each other for purchases and things like that, like we we manage and steward it well together. So there is a lot, and I would just say, have communication is key, respect, absolute bottom line, key to a healthy marriage, anyways, but especially when you're shifting roles and just lot of conversations. But I would say it took us about 18 months to kind of get into that really smooth groove. Yeah,
Shanna Skidmore:was it hard for you to not go to the doctor's appointments and not take them to school, and was that hard for you?
Bonnie Christine:Well, I have a list of things that I do, and you know, it's not like I don't do any of those things. And so when I can, I'm always at the doctor's appointments. But if I'm not available, David is kind of the default, and so I'm, my goal is to always be at sports practices and games, and then to always be available for like, school activities, right? So, like, if it's a birthday party, I'm there in the classroom, or doing a craft with the classroom, or something like that. And so I have non negotiables, especially when it comes to after school activities, but the just kind of the generic running, running around. No, I never felt guilty about that.
Shanna Skidmore:Yeah, okay, I wrote down this question, which is probably the better way to ask it, but yeah, how and at what point did you feel the need, if ever, to define what does being a good mom mean to me, because that's it. I think what you're saying here, like you at some point have listed out I want to be at this school activities. Was there a certain point where you sat down and you're like, I have to define what being a good mom looks like, so that it's not because I find it's often we're trying to do it, all right? We're trying to do run this big business, be a great business owner, and be 100% present mom, like, be a stay at home mom and a working mom all at the same time. And I feel like that's the point where the tension really rises. And so do you remember a point where you're like, I'm gonna sit down and define what this looks like?
Bonnie Christine:Yeah, yeah. I think, when I think about that, the biggest one for me was being able to transition from work to life and motherhood. And so for me, that really came when my children started going to school, and that was a difficult transition, because I had had a good five years where there really was no transition. It was work in the fringes. It was that in and out all day, very scrambled, but making it work. And then all of the sudden they were in school, and I had this protected time, but I was used to, I was used to still going. And I I love what I do so much. Shanna, like, I love it. I would consume business material and think about it all the time, if that was, if I was just in my own world. And so I had a little bit of time where I was like, Oh, I'm multitasking. My kids have gone to school now, are home, and I'm still multitasking, and so I had to learn very intentionally to transition and kind of close the books for the day and say, No, that's my time. It's completely separate and dedicated and protected now and then I've got to 100% transition, because no one wants multitasking, mom, they want fully present. Mom. So for me, success as a mom is being fully present with my children when I'm with
Shanna Skidmore:them. Yeah, yeah. I love that. Okay, you kind of shared with me this before, but I would love to hear in different seasons of motherhood. So. Adults in school now they're a little bit bigger. Have you seen your business shift and change due to the seasons you're kind of coming in and out of? Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.
Bonnie Christine:So from 2013 to 2017 so that's four years. And when I had both my children, so I had a two and a four year old coming out of this. I just, I mean, it was a beautiful time. And also this, like black hole, this, like baby filled hole that I was in, and I remember feeling like the whole world was passing me by. I remember hearing this could be anything for you who are listening, but for me, it was email lists. I remember hearing about it and how important it was, how your business relied on it, and mine was cold and dead, literally. I remember I had 4000 people on the email list from who knows when, like, just by way of being in business for many years, and my open rate was 6% which is really bad if you if you don't know that
Shanna Skidmore:reference wise, yeah, like an open rate now is what 40 to 60% 40 to 60
Bonnie Christine:Yeah, yeah. Should be at minimum 40 hours is closer to 50 to 66% is really bad. So anyways, that was what I was sitting on. And I just remember feeling like I don't know if I can come out of this, like I don't have time, or the bandwidth, the mental bandwidth, to wrap my mind around it. And it was just it was actually a book for me, I read this book by Lisa Jacobs called Your Best Year, which is so fun, because Lisa is now my COO of the company. So, so full circle. But I read her book, and it just hit me at just the right time what I needed to do, and it lit a fire under me, and I came out of that whole blazon. And the next year, I doubled my list to 8000 people. I increased my open rate to 60% I launched a course to those 8000 people. My goal was to have 100 people. Had 352 people, and the course was$1,000 so I made $352,000 and it completely changed our lives forever,
Shanna Skidmore:okay? And that was the year your kids, both your kids, went to school.
Bonnie Christine:Well, they were, that was 2018 so, no, not quite, but it was the year that I brought David home. But I will say that course, by that time, I was having protected work time, so I had to record the lessons, edit the lessons I had still nobody in my business, and supply all the support for students. And I remember with, like, all the love in my heart for my family. I remember saying, like, this class opens on Tuesday. This was probably like a Friday. I was like, I have to leave. I have to leave, like, in order to make this come, like, birth this thing into the world, I have to literally walk away. So my sister had a little lake house, and I just, like, kissed everybody goodbye, and I went and for I think it was like, two nights I birthed the thing. Like, that's how much I needed to just be, like, completely protected. We didn't do that often, but I remember that one in particular was, like, epic, yeah,
Shanna Skidmore:because I know that. I mean, clearly, yeah, it's, I love what you said before. It's like, it's not just time, it's mental space, and when you're constantly I mean, with like, psychologically proven task switching decreases productivity. And as a mom with kiddos at home, like we are task switching all the time, yeah, yeah. So I totally get, like, going away. I
Bonnie Christine:think a month, three days. Better way to have done that would have been to built in, build in, like, I'm leaving the house for an hour often, you know, like I'm leaving the house having a dedicated workspace, whether it's someone's basement or a coffee shop, but like just kind of removing yourself, just for like, little bits of time, just so that you can get some of that deep work done. And when I look back, I think that's what was missing for me. We were all in the home together all the time, and so the deep work was just very rare. And I think even just a little bit of time probably would have kept me home right before we opened that and not, you know, I was like, 20 minutes away, but it was and, and it was, you know, David, like, David was like, go do the thing. I'm good. We got this, you know, it was a very supportive situation. But I was like, I think I. Have to literally walk away in order to get this thing done.
Shanna Skidmore:Did you ever struggle with mom guilt, protecting your work time?
Bonnie Christine:I very intention. I mean, there's not a mother that doesn't have mom guilt, okay, there's not a mother that doesn't have it. But I have also worked really hard on my mindset, because it is such a gift to let my children see what an entrepreneur's life looks like, how to be entrepreneurial, how to pull them into what I'm doing, how we hold conversations about it all the time. What does it look like to do something that you love, prioritize doing something that you love over making money, which is why I think we made money in the first place, was because we prioritized our passion over money, and so I've just been really careful with that mindset. I kind of don't let myself go there because I am doing good work and I'm also being a good mom and a great wife, and it is a lot to to juggle, but yeah, I think it's really important. I think it's important for them to see so we we keep it as positive open. In my mind, I think it's
Shanna Skidmore:hard, you know, yeah, to take any time, I mean, time to be like, I need to go for a walk, like, or, you know, take care of yourself. Like, I don't know why it's such a struggle. I think for most moms to make space for themselves, and when you run your own business, that feels like space for yourself. But I feel like what I'm hearing is in the little season it looks so different than as they get older. So I would love to hear Bonnie just kind of talk me through you launch the course, and then as your kids have gotten older, what has looked similar, what has looked different? Yeah, just kind of what your family looks like today in relation to how your work looks today. Does that make sense? Yeah. So
Bonnie Christine:I work outside of the home now I have a studio space in the downtown of our little town. That was a that was a game changer I didn't want, and I didn't want that at the beginning, and then when my kids started going to school, I was like, What am I doing at home now all the time, like, I'm alone. So it's been really nice to just separate home from work, because it's just one of those transition things, right? So, like, it makes transitioning easier. I also want to touch on this. I have tons of Help Now in my business and my home, and I think that business help is one thing. Highly suggest it. I think as soon as you possibly can get help in your business, start with a VA and go from there. I have a team of 11 now, and it's the best thing ever. But I think what I really want to talk about, specifically to moms, is help in the home. And this is something that I think has made all of this possible. And actually think you should start here, rather than in your business. And it took me so long to figure this out, but we started with a house cleaner, and we had help once a month, and that was amazing. I think it's such a gift to you as an entrepreneur and as a mom, and it's also a gift. I think if you're in a position to bring your husband home, your husband having all of the house to do's as well is, I mean, it's a lot. And so we went from once a month to twice a month to once a week. And once a week was when we were able to, like, have help with our laundry, like the laundry being taking over to finally, we moved into having a house manager. So we have a house manager today. It's the same woman. It's been the same woman the entire time, but she's in my home every single day, and so this is help with all cleaning, but also grocery shopping, meal prep, all of the management of the home, so like repairs and managing, like lawn care, you would not believe how much we are supposed to be doing. It's a good 30 to 40 hours a week, Shanna and like we are often putting that responsibility back on ourselves, on top of being the mother we want to be, the wife we want to be and the entrepreneur that we want to be, and it's not possible, and it shouldn't be normalized as possible. It's not possible to do all of that.
Shanna Skidmore:Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I feel, I feel, I think we all feel
Bonnie Christine:these things. I mean, it's an amazing I have a list of everything that Tani does for us, and oftentimes, when I talk about it in front of an entrepreneurial crowd, the women will just cry, and I will cry as well, because it's like all of these things, we really feel the weight of it. We really feel the weight of managing the home, taking care of the home, and when it isn't taken care of, we feel. Weight of that as well, and it just feels like stressful. So we don't, we don't have help with our children. My goal is to have help with the home, so that anytime that we have at the home can be, it can be like, Yeah, really good quality time with our kids. I don't know who's listening, who have like, a little bit of older kids, but as soon as, like, sports and school and homework starts, it's like, well, the two hours that I have, I want to be really, really quality, quality with my children. So it's been a absolute game changer. And it's also more affordable than than you would think, especially depending on where you might live. But I would say, like, the first time I heard of this concept, my mind was blown and expanded, and so I think we should talk about it more.
Shanna Skidmore:Yeah, what would you say to someone who's like, Bonnie, that sounds fantastic, but I don't have money for that. So
Bonnie Christine:we all have what I call a freedom number. And so a freedom number is how much your time is worth per hour. And so to do stupid simple math, right? If you make$100,000 a year and you work 40 hours a week, that's 2080 hours in a year, that's $48 an hour. So if you're making 100k a year, and you're working full time in your own business or in anybody's business, then if you could hire something out for less than $48 an hour, you should highly consider it. And if you look at the revenue graph for my business, there's like a an angle, like an elbow in it, and it is the moment that I made my first hire. Because what it does, we have so much fear around paying someone else, but what it does is it frees up your time to do more of the money making thing. And so if you are making less than $12 an hour with your freedom figure, you likely will continue to do be a one person show for a while. I was for way too long. So by the time I figured this out, my freedom figure was like $97 an hour. I had been a one woman show for a decade with no help, and it was not something you should aspire to do. It was the wrong move. And so as soon as I started getting help it, my freedom figure today is $2,700 an hour because I started hiring out when it was lower. And so I think it's just a numbers game, and you've got to understand that if you can hire anything out, then it's freeing that time up for you to do more of the income generating thing. Okay,
Shanna Skidmore:Bonnie, as we wrap up, tell me how much like, what do you love about owning a business today, in the season of motherhood that you're in? Oh, I didn't prep you for this question so
Bonnie Christine:well, you're asking me this at the end of our summer. So it's the end of our summer this year, and this summer has been, like the first summer I feel like I've had since I was a child. It's the first summer that we didn't put either of the kids in, like, a camp. Usually they have, like, karate kind of thing, or gymnastics, and we just were together as a family. We traveled a ton, so much so that I had to work while we were traveling, like I couldn't take that amount of time off. And so we got into this beautiful groove, whether we were in an RV or we went to Iceland, we went to Montana, we went to Canada this summer, and we just got into this groove where, like, I would take the time I needed, kind of in the first am the morning part of the day to do my work, and then we would just family the rest of the day. And we were shoulder to shoulder all summer. And it was so beautiful, like it was true, kind of balance, like, okay, obviously we've got to teach our children like working is how you how you live, you must, and so bring you in, show you what I'm doing. But also it's the location freedom, it's the time freedom. It's like I can do this work in the evening or in the morning, based on whether we're doing a morning hike or an evening like soak in the hot springs. And so it's that freedom for me, and then showing the kids work ethic and how important it is to work, but also the freedom that it gives you, that I think is my favorite part for me right now. Yeah,
Shanna Skidmore:I love that. What I'm taking away from this whole chat Bonnie is it's worth it, like it's worth it in the seasons where it feels like I just can't figure this out. And that's not a complaint, it's just we got to figure it out. What a blessing to have this thing that we have to figure out. You know, in the moments it feels clunky, it's worth it. Any thoughts as we wrap up? Up any thoughts would that you would like to share with other moms working to build a business while raising kids.
Bonnie Christine:It's beautiful. You can do both. You can be an amazing mother and an incredible entrepreneur. You can use it as a way to teach your children. You can do hard things. It is, like the current stage that you're in is so short, and this wasn't always apparent for me. Like, I remember feeling like, I'm not sure if I can do this forever. And then I realized it's not going to be this way forever. It's actually just a really short amount of time that you're feeling kind of like, you know, scattered, and so any, any kind of like season that you're in is short lived, and you can push through, and it is so incredibly worth it, and you're not alone. So many of us are doing the same thing. So get into a group, a community, a Facebook group, anywhere where they're working entrepreneurial moms, so that you can really be clear that you're not alone and that we're in this together. Yeah,
Shanna Skidmore:Bonnie, thank you so much for sharing your journey as a mom and building a thriving business. I feel very selfish for taking this time because I've needed every moment of it, but thank you just for encouraging us and your own who you are and so open.
Bonnie Christine:Thank you for letting me be here. Hey,
Shanna Skidmore:Wildflower, you just finished another episode of consider the wildflowers the podcast. Head over to consider the wildflowers podcast.com. For show notes, resource links and to learn how you can connect with Bonnie. One final thought for today, from Sophia, Bucha, you are allowed to be both a masterpiece and a work in progress simultaneously, as always. Thank you for listening. I'll see you next time. Consider the wildflowers. Podcast is produced and edited in partnership with the team at Palm Tree podco. Special thanks to our producers, Anthony Palmer, our audio mixologist of palm tree podco, and Lauren from Team Skidmore, without whom this podcast would never reach your earbuds each week.
