045. Tiffany Sauder: Can you ~ REALLY~ have it all?

Can you really have it all? Today’s guest, Tiffany Sauder, believes you can. 

With four kids, three businesses, and two careers, Tiffany is a firm believer in living a life of “and”. She is a mom and entrepreneur, a wife and CEO, all building toward one abundant life. 

Since Tiffany founded Element Three marketing agency 17 years ago, she and her husband have been building their companies alongside their family. She’s here to not only share how she grew her marketing company to the Inc 5000 list (6 years in a row), but how she lives out a life of AND each day. 

WILDFLOWER SHOWNOTES : shannaskidmore.com/tiffany-sauder

Transcript

Tiffany Sauder (00:00):

Talked about this passionate pursuit of a life of, and that is really my makeup, my natural. I just want to see all the things and do all the things. And yeah, I don't want life to tell me that I can only have a big family or have a big career or have a good marriage or be on. I just don't want that. And so some of it is when you decide you want ands in your life, you start to figure out how to make that true instead of telling yourself it can't happen.

Shanna Skidmore (00:34):

You are listening to Consider the Wildflowers, the podcast, episode 45, living a life of and mom and entrepreneur, wife and c e o achiever and grilled cheese maker. Can you really have it all? Today's guest, Tiffany Souder, believes you can four kids, three businesses and two careers all simultaneously. She's here to not only share how she grew her marketing company to the Inc 5,000 list, six years in a row, but how she lives a life of and each day. If you dig professional bios, here it goes. Tiffany Souder is a wife, mom, entrepreneur, c e o, board member, speaker, investor, and mentor. 17 years ago she founded Element three, and ever since she and her husband have been building their companies and their families on the exact same timeline, that means four kids, three businesses and two careers, all building towards one abundant life. While Element three now has a growing stack of accolades and awards, this isn't the whole story.
(01:31)
An amazing team and a hefty dose of hard work, wrong decisions and scary nights are all a big piece of how she got here. Tiffany has learned it isn't our trophies that are transferrable, it's our scars and stories. Okay, y'all formal introductions over. Let's dive in. Hey, it's Shannon and this is Consider the Wildflowers, the podcast. For the past 15 plus years, I've had the honor to hear thousands of stories from entrepreneurs around the world. As a former Fortune 100 financial advisor, turn 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. Hey Tiffany, welcome to this show. I'm so excited to have you.

Tiffany Sauder (02:37):

Thanks. It's fun to be here.

Shanna Skidmore (02:39):

Okay, so we connected through a friend of yours, a student of mine who I think you went to college with.

Tiffany Sauder (02:46):

Well, that makes me much younger than I am. She and another girl lived with my husband and I their freshman year of college.

Shanna Skidmore (02:54):

Oh, that's awesome.

Tiffany Sauder (02:54):

So it is a college experience that connected us, but I am much older than she is.

Shanna Skidmore (03:00):

That is so funny. So I'm excited to get to know you just because I received this email that said you have to know Tiffany, you guys are kindred spirits and that's what started it all. So I'm just excited to hear more about you and your business journey. So let's just kind of take it back. Will you tell everybody first just actually who you are, what you do, and then we'll talk about life before being an entrepreneur?

Tiffany Sauder (03:26):

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Tiffany Souder. In my professional world, I'm a C e O of a marketing consultancy called Element Three. We're headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. And I also have a podcast that I'm sure we'll talk about as well called Scared Confident, which is really my personal journey with fear and running at life really hard and beginning to just better manage the internal narrative, which I'm excited to explore. Cause it sounds like that's much of what you do with clients as well. And I'm an active investor in a couple of other businesses and then serve as a board member in a few and for-profit capacities. So the professional column, I'm a mom to four girls, which is a different life adventure. I had one of them in my twenties, two in my thirties and one when I was 40. So I can definitely have a broad base of moms and ages that I can connect to because I'm from 14 year old to a two year old and I'm married to an amazing man and we have fought really hard to have a really excellent marriage. So it's kind of me,

Shanna Skidmore (04:27):

Tiffany, I'm so excited. I just had my daughter, she just turned two, but we have so much in common. I'm actually laughing, I can see you. You can't see me, but we are literally wearing pretty much the exact same outfit. So you'll see when we record for your podcast. But I love just, I'm excited to get to know you and I do think already I'm like, yes, we are absolutely going to be kindred spirits. How long have you been married?

Tiffany Sauder (04:52):

We are coming up on, it's 2005, so coming up on 18 marriage, 18 years.

Shanna Skidmore (04:56):

Oh wow. Okay. That's so exciting. All right, so take us back to life before the business you have now Element three and what were you doing? Where were you in the business world? Marketing world is I want to hear how this all got started.

Tiffany Sauder (05:11):

Yeah, so I promise, and this won't take a long time, but I'm going to kind of go back to where I came from because it's relevant to my story. Okay. I'm a small town kid. I'm the oldest of four. My dad farmed when I was little and then when I was in third grade, he became an entrepreneur. So I grew up in a very house that had a lot of risk in it. I didn't know that because it was just normal, but we kind of stood out. We're in the small rural environment where most of my friends' dads were farmers or pastors, something like that. And my dad was really making his way and figuring out how to become a businessman. So I lived that journey as a kid as he was learning about business. And he went back to school and took some classes and really I would say maturing in his financial literacy.
(05:58)
He brought us as kids along on that journey with him. So I had a very atypical childhood from that perspective. We worked a lot. We talked about money a lot, not what can we get with it, but understanding it as a tool for opportunity, as a tool to build community as a tool to create jobs and opportunities for others in as a tool to give back to your church and be able to pay for mission trips and that kind of thing. So yeah, it seemed normal because it was the only childhood I had. But as I've gotten older, I think my own risk tolerance and understanding of the business world really started at a very young age. At 10 and 12 years old, my dad had us start small businesses. So we had a mulch business as kids. That's awesome. Where we had to buy our raw materials, these semi loads of mulch.
(06:53)
My sister and I sat with a bobcat beside a hand painted sign, and we sold two scoops of mulch for $16 all summer long to farmers and pickup trucks. And they would say, honey, you know how to drive that thing, don't hit my truck. And we're like, well, we haven't yet. And we were 14 years old, so that's awesome. Rain or shine. There was nothing that would make my dad more mad than if it said we were open and we weren't there. So we just learned hard work. We learned being true to your word, we learned responsibility. He had us do our 10 40 easy file, our own taxes. The whole thing was a training ground for what I'm doing today. So it's not all accidental. Not everything is environmental either. So that's what I grew up around, a lot of decision making, a lot of risk, a lot of empowerment, a lot of, I didn't notice I was a girl.
(07:47)
All that kind of stuff was just not relevant to my childhood. So I went to college for business and finance. I had an experience in high school where a small team and I went to nationals on this financial analysis team, and that was where I was like, oh, my brain knows how to do this really well. Yeah, there was 70 people in my graduating class. So the question I've always asked the world is, I know I can swim in a little pond, but how about a big one? And so that was kind of my first moment where I had a opportunity to jump into a bigger pond and realize my brain really does do this well. And the combination of the technical analysis of finance and then the storytelling of needing to talk about why was that happening and what could happen next and extrapolating into the future.
(08:36)
I love that juxtaposition of certainty and wonder and creativity, which I think is again so interesting. I see this pattern in your own career too. Went to Purdue and then I started out at Eli Lilly, a great big pharmaceutical company. The Indianapolis was the biggest city I could think of as a kid. And so getting here was like, oh my word, oh my word. Can you even believe that what is happening to my life? I'm so happy. And I just realized big businesses are amazing and they do a lot of good, but it was not a good fit for me. And I think it's just such a different planet to what I had seen and the risk and the innovation and just proximity to outcomes of your decisions. And so I was there for about three years and then my dad and I bought what a very small agency. It was about $300,000 in revenue and I have built that. He was a early silent financial partner. He's no longer involved now, I've bought him out, but I with my team have grown that into the agency we have today.

Shanna Skidmore (09:41):

So why marketing?

Tiffany Sauder (09:43):

I feel like I wish I had a really good answer for that question. I really feel like I'll tell you the insane answer and then I'll tell you a slightly more linear one. I literally feel like God just took me by the ear lobe and pulled me into this business. Yeah, there's nothing that describes why I should know so much about marketing except that I think God knew my brain would figure it out. Well, yeah, a more linear answer is that a lot of the thinking patterns in the financial analysis world is what was happening in marketing when I was coming into it. So 2015, 17 years ago was when email marketing was still kind of new and the internet was definitely a thing, but websites were really brochures. They aren't the content machines they are today. You didn't have data analysts that were in marketing roles back then at all.
(10:37)
And so what was happening was there was all this data that was becoming available to marketers, but marketers didn't know how to do anything with it. And so my mind was already patterned to ask the questions, well, what happened in the past? Why did that happen? Well, what were your assumptions in the plan? You thought you were going to increase website traffic by 5,000 visitors a month, but you only got 3000. Which one of your assumptions was incorrect? And what's the new better one in this? Taking a plan actuals, interrogating variants was a very natural thinking pattern for me from my finance days, but it was very new in marketing, and so I think I just decoded it faster because I saw the patterns that were emerging and I had a whole four years of experience doing it, but I saw it fast and I've always been a really, again, sort of God-given ability to as a good communicator. And so I was able to make sense of all this change that was happening for leaders and senior marketers. I was able to kind of explain how do we now make sense of this new world and what can happen and what we can do with data. And technology was starting to become less fragmented and things were working off of centralized databases, which started to decrease variance in all the data so you could actually get better reads. And all of that was happening really fast early in my marketing career.

Shanna Skidmore (12:01):

So Tiffany was this early two thousands. When did you buy the company? And also why did you decide to buy a company instead of starting your own?

Tiffany Sauder (12:10):

I know all good questions that don't have amazing answers. So it was 2006 when we bought the agency. My dad had just had me read this book called the E-Myth, which are you familiar with that book?

Shanna Skidmore (12:23):

I have heard of it. I have not read it.

Tiffany Sauder (12:25):

A quick overview essentially, and I'm sure a lot of your clients can accidentally fall into this trap and likely call you because of it. The premise is there's a watchmaker who's amazing at making watches and he makes so many watches he has to hire an apprentice, and they're still so good and that quality is so great and that demand continues to increase that over time. What happens is this amazing watchmaker's not making watches at all. Yeah, he's making collections calls. He's selling because he's got all this capacity. He has to make sure and all this kind of stuff starts to happen. And we realize I'm so far away from my talent in the world. So I had met the people who previously owned the agency and I was like, oh my word, this is happening right here. I can see it. I'm a pattern identify.
(13:09)
I can see patterns. So you guys are living the very thing. They were about my age actually right now. They were in their mid forties. Their kids were teenagers, they were kind of over it. The agency was not as easy as they thought it was going to be. And they were about seven, eight years into the journey. And I was like, you guys are doing the thing. You need a business person to come in and help you. I know business. I don't really know marketing, why don't I help you? That would be amazing. And my dad had said, don't be partners with people you don't know. At some point in my past I was like, so I don't know you guys, so I'm going to need to own the whole thing to get involved.

Shanna Skidmore (13:42):

Yeah. Wow. This

Tiffany Sauder (13:44):

Is really how it happened. It was just sort of young hubris and a lot of naivety. That was how hard can it be? And it was a great season of my life to take risk. And my husband was very supportive at the time. We were literally six months married. And so yeah, that's how I got to here.

Shanna Skidmore (14:00):

Okay. So tell me about the early days of business. Did you keep the same packages and pricing? Did you overhaul everything? And then I want to hear just how about the growth, so early days and then when you saw it really growing and taking off?

Tiffany Sauder (14:16):

So in the early days, I would say yes, the first 18 to 24 months, I didn't make a lot of changes because I didn't know much about the business, about the industry, about what people wanted to buy. And then I started to get my own sea legs under me and my own perspective. And I would say if one of the things I will do differently if I ever make an acquisition again is I went into it a bit naive and was like, oh, I mean, I don't know. I guess we'll work together till the end of time. What else could be the outcome? And if I ever do another one, I will set a timeline with the previous principles and say, the goal is to transition in 18 months or 24 months. And if we get to that timeline and say, wow, this is working so great, we can change our mind.
(15:00)
But I didn't go into that with that much clarity. And so what started to happen was this odd tension of at the beginning I was the student, even though I owned it and had maybe an important sounding title, I really didn't know anything. And so I was like, yeah, what should we do and what do you think? And they got used to that still being in control. And then as I started to come around the corner and be like, Hey, I've got my own perspective, I feel like what we're creating right now is really a commodity. We're struggling to compete on anything other than price. I was starting to see some of these financial patterns come into the work, and I was like, I think we can sell some different stuff. And that was where honestly, things just got weird and it became clear they needed to move on and I needed to take the agency in a different direction.
(15:41)
So that would be a hot take I would pay attention to. And I've learned on my past. And then we really were a creative and brand shop only before I purchased the agency, and I really was able to add more of a marketing business strategy function. And that was really how we got to element three. The three elements are Dory strategy and creative. So we've got to find out the story. We've got to make sure that we're using the time and money available for marketing well, and then we actually partner with or empower our clients, internal teams to execute the creative and the scorecard and implementation of whatever it is that we've done together. So yeah, I added that for sure. And then I knew marketing technology was coming hot and heavy, and so we selected some very specific technology partners to become experts in because I knew that was going to power the future of everything. If we didn't know how to push the buttons, well, we were never going to be able to execute really sophisticated strategies for our clients.

Shanna Skidmore (16:43):

Okay, so this was early two thousands. You're growing the business, you start doing more of a marketing approach. Tell me how, I'm assuming social media was a big transition in your company, content marketing. How did you see the landscape of branding, storytelling, brand marketing change in that kind of mid 2010 to 2020 era?

Tiffany Sauder (17:10):

Yeah, I mean, it was very unsettling for businesses that suddenly the consumer had a lot more control over their brand narrative than they did because it was like suddenly the review economy was starting to come to bear, and the salespeople had a lot less control in the sales process than they had had three, five years before. And I had this lunch probably a hundred times. I wish I would've counted them where I would meet with a C E O and I'd say, tell me what you already know about me. We've been sitting here for maybe three minutes and we have our water. What do you already know about me? They knew where I went to college. They knew who our mutual connections were. They knew what agency I ran. They knew whether or not I was married. They knew whether or not I had kids. They knew who my clients were. They, I'm like, so why are you meeting with me? You already know all of this about me. You can curate all of this about me on the internet. Why are you meeting with me? And they're meeting with me because they want to see is the thing I read actually the thing you are.
(18:02)
And I said, that's exactly how your buyers are buying. So the fact that you've got eight people on your website that no longer work there, and again, this doesn't happen anymore, but it happened then, right? It's not up to date your product. Your product overview is 18 months older than it needs to be. I'm like, whoever is out there educating the consumer on what there is to buy, they're going to be the first one in because they're already establishing trust. And at the point of sale, a salesperson is just there to say, are you validating what I think I know about you and your brand and your promise and your customer service and your core values and the reason your company exists in your company history and the leadership? I'm just looking for validation that what I experience in real life is what you present on the internet.
(18:45)
And if there's a gap, then they start asking a totally different set of questions. And I had that conversation over and over and over again, beginning to try to create an experience for these leaders to say, the marketplace is shifting under your feet. You're kind of mad about it right now, but let's talk about how you're going to be left behind if you don't figure it out. And so that was really how the growth of the agency started where we started to get some traction as role leaders in our space and not just using the buzzwords of inbound marketing, content marketing. Those were definitely hot and sexy, but business owners didn't know what to do with that, those words.

Shanna Skidmore (19:21):

Right

Tiffany Sauder (19:23):

At all.

Shanna Skidmore (19:23):

What kind of companies did you specialize in a certain industry? Tell me about the companies you were working with.

Tiffany Sauder (19:30):

We've never come to market that way, but really the bulk of our work is in B2B or b2, b2c. So dealer distribution models where think Airstream is a big client of ours. Many people have seen the silver bullet travel trailer going down the road. So we work with Airstream, but we also work with all their programs where they have all these independent dealerships that they ship product to. They have to be in lockstep with one another. And so we create program marketing programs for the dealerships to participate in. And so we are doing a lot of in consumer marketing, but we distribute it through the dealer channel. So that's really where we thrive. Some of it is even location for us. There's not a lot of B2C brands in Indianapolis, and as a result, there's not a lot of B2C marketers here. And so some of it's a function of that. It's like the talent is here, the education in this area around marketing tends to be more B2B heavy, and the tech scene is a lot of B2B marketing tech.

Shanna Skidmore (20:29):

Yeah. Okay. Tell me how your offers started to change, or you built out your offers. I just want to hear about the growth of the company. How did your team change? How did your role change? When did you see the company really start to take off and what was the growth trajectory from there?

Tiffany Sauder (20:46):

Yeah. I'm maybe going to answer the question a little differently than you're asking it because I think there's maybe more lessons in it, but if not, we'll loop back exactly to your question if that's okay. So we spent about eight to 10 years on a total hockey stick up into the right. We were growing revenue like crazy, and we really were packaging it around this narrative of like, Hey, you've got to build a content team. You've got to build, you've got to have sophisticated digital marketing because the Internet's changing all the time. And your B2B salespeople who you have a Rolodex of people go to trade shows all day long and are really well paid, that is not the future. And so that we were reselling that over and over and over again, and we built the company like crazy. We had almost 80 people working here.
(21:33)
We were Inc 5,006 times in a row. There was a season there where wasn't a stage with an little award on it where I wasn't on it or somebody from our team. And one of the mistakes that I made in that season was that it was growth at all cost. And so we were taking on clients that maybe weren't profitable under the hopes that we'll get them profitable or onboarding is expensive. Once we get 'em up and going, then we'll make money off of them. And we rode that train until 2018 and suddenly we lost our largest client. We started to have some client churn issues because our training wasn't in place strong enough for our employees to really be delivering on the promises that I was making in the marketplace through our sales and marketing efforts. And there started to be this poll that we couldn't escape.
(22:23)
We couldn't outsell what was happening. And so 2018 was really a moment of reckoning for me as a leader to say what I'm saying we're doing. Maybe only 60% of the team really knows how to do that well, and the rest are trying to figure it out along the way, but we're not really experts at this anymore. And so in 2018, we made the decision. Some of it was we lost a huge client, and some of it was saying, look, anybody who's below this profitability threshold, we just have to very gracefully retire them as clients and fix this financial problem. And we were still making money, but not nearly what we needed to be making fix this problem, get our team sized accordingly, and then really start over in building the infrastructure for training, for onboarding, for making sure that we were delivering every single time.
(23:12)
And so it really became profit first over growth, first business, and paying so much more attention to our client churn rate, client satisfaction, because we know we can sell what we need, we can do that, but I had not invested well in some of the other muscles that we needed to be able to keep with the growth that was happening. And I've sensed did a lot of internal reflection and talking to a lot of CEOs and my sales trainer, it's like too many companies go out of business after their record year of growth or sales because they just don't have the infrastructure to be able to deliver on the demand. And my younger self was like, oh geez, you know, what a terrible problem. But now, Dan, you have to have the courage to say no when the business is not built to deliver it. And so yeah, it's been a really a different journey in the last five years, I would say. We spent two years really internally entrenched, growing five to 8% a year. And now we're really back to a growth rate that we're, I would say, our achiever, high competitive selves and excited about, but we knew we hadn't earned the right to grow again.

Shanna Skidmore (24:25):

And so was that just training your team to deliver on the promises that you're giving these clients? I mean, in the marketing world, I'm assuming that's where we can see growth of website traffic or brand awareness growth. And was it those promises that you felt like you weren't seeing and your clients weren't seeing?

Tiffany Sauder (24:47):

Yeah, the marketing is what was breaking, but what I've under come to understand is I grew up in business and learned marketing in the context of business. We educate marketers about marketing mostly in the context of marketing. And so I was talking to our prospects about, okay, so I could imagine what their p and l looked like. I knew by just knowing what industry they were in, where their highest costs probably were. Like I knew I just knew because I just been around stuff for a really long time. And what I was finding is while I had really good digital marketers, they didn't know how to ask questions to understand. I know our client is asking us to increase their website traffic. Is that actually what they need to be solving? What are they really trying to solve? Because most people don't actually care about their website traffic.
(25:40)
And so having the context, the experience to be able to ask questions to say, tell me more about that. So what are you hoping the website traffic gets for you? Okay, tell me more about that. Okay, so your salespeople don't have enough leads. Tell me more about that. Where have they come from in the past? Why isn't that working anymore? What have you tried? It seems obvious, but it wasn't. Digital marketers were wanting to do digital marketing things as fast as they possibly digital marketing could. And so we were just having these, it wasn't because the website traffic wasn't growing, it was because what that person really wanted was not even leads. What they wanted was they needed $2 million and more sales for this specific product by February 14th, or they were going to have to make the inventory obsolete. Well, that's a very different problem than make my website traffic go up.
(26:32)
And we didn't have the sophistication and we didn't have the I when it was just 18 of us, me and a couple of other, my unicorn, just business thinkers would be close enough to sort of sort through like, oh, you don't really want website traffic. You want to spend $200,000 on this instead? And they're like, oh, yeah, that sounds great. But as it started to get bigger and people were wanting to stay busy with the thing that they've been trained to do, we did not have the muscle in place to teach people honestly, business strategy frameworks and how do we onboard clients in a way where the first thing we do is align on what the business challenge is and let's quantify it together. What is the value of fixing that problem for you? And we do all that now. But that was all intuitive to me in the early days. And then when we grew it wild, that was still intuitive to me, but I didn't know that we needed to teach people that. I didn't realize that that was part of our magic sauce though.

Shanna Skidmore (27:27):

Yeah, I love this. Tim is so good. I can't help but sit over here and think you are a mom of four. You grew a company to the ink 5,006 times. I have no idea how big your team, 80, I think you said on your team, how in the world did you handle all of this? How did you handle all these things?

Tiffany Sauder (27:51):

Well, in some seasons better than others. On my podcast, I've talked about this passionate pursuit of a life of, and that is really my makeup, my natural. I just want to see all the things and do all the things. And yeah, I don't want life to tell me that I can only have a big family or have a big career or have a good marriage or be on. I just don't want that. And so some of it is when you decide you want ands in your life, you start to figure out how to make that true instead of telling yourself it can't happen. So I think I'm a really good problem solver, and I have been really good at finding and asking for help. So I don't know, do you want me to go into detail about

Shanna Skidmore (28:40):

I do. I kind of just want to hear all the thanks, Tiffany, and we'll definitely link your podcast because a passionate pursuit of and is such a beautiful way to say these things. But I know it comes with a lot of intentionality.

Tiffany Sauder (28:55):

It does. You have to be very intentional and you have to decide what you want and you have to be okay saying no to things that don't align with that. So I'll talk a little bit about, and then ask me really specific questions because it helps prompt my brain about helpful place to go. What I have found is that I set up systems and they serve me and they serve the environment that I want to create. So when my kids were younger, we had in-home care, I had a nanny that was at home, and it was definitely financially a bigger commitment, but for me, it was important to have the flexibility in what I was busying building to be able to leave the house when I wanted to or needed to when my calendar needed me to, and to be able to get home when my calendar needed me to.
(29:39)
And that extra hour of packing them up, dropping them off at daycare, and then the reverse version of that, I'm like, I did the math of that's five hours a week, this many hours a month, this many hours a year. I don't know off the top of my head. I'm like, that's extra weeks. Yeah, time for me. And that's how I think about those things is how do I make myself maximum efficient? And the other thing, when we had in-home care, which we did for 13 years, they did a lot of other things for me that was part of the requirement of that person being in our home. When the kids were really little, they take a lot of naps. So they did laundry for me. They would prep food for me. They helped I, I mean, I grew up with a stay-at-home mom, and my kids do not have the same environment that I did, but I wanted home cooked meals.
(30:24)
I wanted my kids in their own beds. I wanted home to feel and smell like home and it not be this place that we were just dropping and leaving, dropping and leaving, dropping and leaving. So I worked to create that, but I needed capacity because on Saturdays I needed to be with them in the evenings. I kept my kids up really late when they were little because if I got home between five and six, they could go to bed at 10 and they could sleep in till 10 in the morning. You know what I mean? And I got time with them, and those were choices that we made as a couple so that we could really still experience our kids and have a family time structure that worked for us. So those were early day things. I think as women, as working as career women, we don't think about our time in the sense of opportunity, crossed opportunity cost for investing in your relationship with your husband, opportunity cost of you being able to keep yourself healthy and fit, opportunity, cost of doing the things that you love and bring you joy, which for me is cooking.
(31:25)
I love to cook for my family. It just brings me a lot of joy and brings us together. And so we pretend that we can be both do the complete list of things that we would do if we were a stay-at-home mom, and we put the responsibility of our jobs and our careers and the responsibility of the people that report to us, and we run ourselves crazy. And I just wasn't willing to do that. And so there are certainly times when we bet on my earning potential, and I've paid for people to clean my house and do my laundry and those kinds of things for a really long time because I was like, if it costs me $150 a week to get my house clean, but that takes me five hours to do my hourly right here and my earning potential is way bigger, and I'm so much better when I have Saturday to play, to go outside to have friends over to color a picture.
(32:25)
So yes, is my time very busy. Yes, there are other people who look at my life and say, wow, that's incredibly imbalanced. But it works really well for me. Yeah, I get up early, I have an hour and a half of quiet time, and I exercise and I take a shower every day and I have makeup on, and those things are important to me, and I'm not going to let those things go in service to all of these roles that I play. Taking ownership and keeping those things as part of who I am make me better at all these roles that I play. My kids are partners in it. I mean, I think kids are so capable. And I tell my daughters, my older ones especially, there is a cost that they pay to allow me for me to have a career, but there's also an incredible amount of beautiful things in their life as a result of it. And I tell 'em, it is not a zero sum game. There are times I know it's hard when I'm gone, and that's okay for them to be uncomfortable. That's part of life. I'll do my best to make sure that there's a as frictionless as possible, but I don't want to protect them from everything. And I'm there if they need me, for sure, but they'll also be fine. So yeah.

Shanna Skidmore (33:36):

I love how you said Tiffany, and I'm going to ask you, and you don't have to answer this, so only if you feel comfortable, but when you said the idea of sometimes you had to had to bet on your earning potential, which I totally understand, sometimes you have to, if you want something, if you have a dream, if you want help, whatever it is, hiring people, you have to increase the amount of revenue you're bringing in or the amount of salary you're bringing in. Was there ever a time when that got scary?

Tiffany Sauder (34:05):

Oh, for sure. Yeah. I mean, when you start signing personal guarantees for loans in the business, when I bought my dad out, my husband and I took on a gigantic loan to be able to do that. We did that personally and our house was collateral for it. So I mean, those are moments where it's like, I can't decide. I don't want to do this. Once I sign this paper, I don't get to say, you know what? And my husband makes, I think the thing that's always surprising to people about my story is my husband is very successful. I have never had to work. It's always been a choice of mine. I think it's a calling on my life. And that doesn't mean that every season has been simple or that has always been clear. There have been seasons where I've had to recommit and just ask myself, is this the right thing for myself, for my family, for my husband, where life is taking our individual opportunities, but in those moments, I can't decide I don't want to. And I think as a mom, sometimes there are days you're like, man, this is really hard. This is really hard. And if I have a million dollar loan, I have to pay back. I mean, I can't decide. I don't want to tomorrow. And so there were times for sure where we had to decide together where I had to realize I got to put my big girl pants on because this is not a pretend environment.

Shanna Skidmore (35:22):

Yeah, I think thank you for sharing that because I think in everything you do, no matter how much you love your work or like you said, you feel like this is a calling on your life. I don't know if you've felt like this, but I know I have. Maybe it's surprising that it doesn't always feel good and it's not always fun. And like you said, you have to recommit no matter how much you love your work and different seasons of life. So I just appreciate you saying that so much. And I have absolutely felt that, okay, no turning back now if I'm signing this thing or we're making this choice or we're pursuing this dream, I can't just decide to quit. Well,

Tiffany Sauder (35:59):

I'm sure for you, when your husband joined you, it was like, okay, this is now a hundred percent of our earning as a family.

Shanna Skidmore (36:06):

And he joined me right after we had our baby, or I think I was pregnant with her. So yeah, we're like, we're in this. And sometimes I always joke with people, I never thought I would want to be a stay-at-home mom. I am always been so career focused and oriented, and I totally would. But I love being a mom even more than I ever thought that I would. And so I think waking up and remembering writing notes to yourself, whatever it takes of, I love what I do. I love my work and I love being a mom, and I love, and I just appreciate so much about this pursuit of and knowing there's weighing those pros and cons. And then I don't even saying it that way, the intentionality of how you're living your life. And I don't know Tian if you've ever felt this way, but I don't even spend a lot of time on social media. But this idea of you can do everything and means all encompassing of everything. And I always think there have to be trade-offs, and those trade-offs don't have to be bad, but to work means I'm not with my daughter all the time. To be a mom means I'm not working all the time. There is always a trade-off. And I think accepting that and choosing your trade-offs is so important.

Tiffany Sauder (37:24):

Well, I also think we look at it too unilaterally. So when I talk to young women, I say, okay, you or even you, you're like, I could be a stay at home mom. It's like, what part of that do you yearn to be a part of? What part of being a stay-at-home mom, do you say, I just want this piece in my life. Is it I want no distractions? Okay, fine. But for me it was like I want to be able to, I want the house to smell. A mom is there and for me, because my mom cooked and baked all the time that was cooking, I wanted to smell a mom is there, I want there to be garlic and sizzling and homemade soup, and I don't want there to be takeout in our trash all the time. I don't want that. To me, that is a garbage existence for me and my kids.
(38:06)
For somebody else, it's a totally different definition. And so I have worked really hard to keep cooking part of my job description. I do not have an emotional attachment to bathing my kids. Just saying, some people are like, I love that time with them. That's amazing. Then you should do that. And if you want to do that at 10:00 AM because that's when they love it, right before they go down for their nap, then that's a part of the day that you should work really hard to figure out how to be a part of. That wasn't it for me, but I think look at it so unilaterally and now today in this stage of my life, I'll be 43 this year. I have two kids in middle school. When I started this journey, I said, I am going to outsource more of the caretaking of these babies because I want to work really hard.
(38:52)
I want to be able to take my kids to Europe and not think about it. I want to be able to go see my sister in Arizona with all of my kids and it not be a financial thing. I can do it whenever I want to. That's what I was working towards. I want to be able to say yes to stuff that I can't have and do if we didn't figure out how to make an atypical financial outcome for my husband and I. So it's like, what do you want to say yes to later? And I said no to a lot of laundry. I said no to a lot of baths. I said no to. A lot of times when my kids were sleeping at home, that's what I said no to. But today I told myself when they're in middle school, I want to be home every day when they get off the bus.
(39:31)
And I am. The last two and a half years, I have worked really hard where every single day I leave the office at two 30, my kids get off the bus between three 15 and four 15, I drive 'em to practice. We have their friends over, we make oatmeal cookies, we do whatever they want to do. And I'm pretty much, I might take a call or two, but it's just if I want to, and this is part of the mommying that I won, this is a season I know I'm good at, good at leadership, I'm good at teaching problem solving. I'm good at building confidence in them. I'm good at helping them discern friends. Good at that. And this is the stage of being a mom where I was like, I'm going to be there for that. I'm not going to miss it. Yeah, I'm also going to figure out how to build a business that can make me money while I'm not working in it all the time. And now I've got all these cool things happening in my life. But it wasn't without first 15 years of really specific decision making.

Shanna Skidmore (40:22):

This is so good, Tiffany. This is the reframe of this idea that it truly is defining what your values are, like you said, with wanting to be a mom. That aspect of you want it to smell like garlic and is, I can picture that. I can smell that. I can sense that. And for you, that is what you held onto of what being a mom and having your mom around felt like. So that's so beautiful. We haven't talked much about numbers, but we are talking about a concept that I know for me, I am. So for entrepreneurship, I mean, I am a champion of entrepreneurship, so I have to be all for risk. I mean, it's risky, but I'm also very risk averse. And so this idea of when I worked in finance, I was kind of taught that, you know, take on staff, take on an office, take on these expenses will make you work harder.
(41:20)
And I found for me personally, that was actually really stressful and demotivating. I like to have a lot of margin in my life. So the idea of taking on expenses is really hard for me actually, but it's worth it for what I'm getting. My time I'm getting back are those type of things. But I would love to hear just you talk about your money mindset. How would you define your relationship with money? And that could be seasonally. I'm just so interested for those listening I know, just how do you think about money and has it ever been scary for you to take on these big risks?

Tiffany Sauder (42:02):

Well, I think that environment I grew up in is very relevant. So I see money as a tool and I see it as an abundant resource sometimes to a fault. I'm just convinced I can figure out a way to monetize an idea, sell another client, something to pay for what it is that we need to do. Because money is abundant. If you figure out how to sell something, you can figure out how to sell another thing. You just have to have a good idea or find one person that knows a little less about it than you do and sell it to them. And so I'm willing to take some swings. I'm willing to take some bets. I would say personally, my husband and I live very light on personal debt so that we can take big risks in our businesses and some of our investments so that we don't like, oh my word we're going to have to do without something.
(42:55)
We have a mortgage and that's like it. And it's not even that big. We've put a lot down on it. So I think in that way we're very aligned. We don't have a lot of stuff. We have an, we're in an expensive season of life because I, we'd have got a kid in travel sports and all that kind of stuff, but we can turn our expenses off pretty fast. And really our standard of living changes very little. That would be a, I think hot take for me is we're leveraged in some of our income producing assets, but we're very unleveraged in our personal lives so that we can take risk there.

Shanna Skidmore (43:33):

Yeah. Okay. Well, Tiffany, I'm so glad you said that because I tell my clients all the time that personally your personal finances have so much to do with the longevity of your business was if you have this huge financial need personally, it can put a lot of strain on the business. And that is one of the very first things that Colin and I did 12 years ago before I ever launched my business, is we worked really hard to get rid of all of our debt because I was just like, we need to live as lean as possible to give the business the opportunity to grow. So many more questions I could ask you, but we're going to go into kind of a quick fire round. But before we do, Tiffany, I would just love if anybody, you said you have this abundance mindset. If you have a product, you can sell it, you can find somebody else to sell it to you. What would you say to anyone who's like, Tiffany, I am struggling to sell my product. I cannot get it sold. Do you have any just, I know that's a big, you're like, oh, so many things I could say here. Is there anything you would say to someone struggling to sell?

Tiffany Sauder (44:44):

I would say it's almost a hundred percent their own mindset and that it's not a product problem. It's not a pricing problem. I think it's their own mindset. And I would ask them, do you really believe in what you're selling? And the problem solves because my guess is somewhere in there they don't, or they're so aware of themselves participating in what they have gooey relationship with this idea of being a salesperson. And so I think I would encourage them to be like, you're not a sales. You're just help. You're figuring out who you can help. And when you're an excellent salesperson, because I get so excited I cannot talk or sell something. I don't actually believe or haven't participated in it changing my life, but I have a very abundant mindset. And so I'm like, if I love this, other people will too, and this is going to help them and it's going to be amazing. And then think about what they can do with their time and their money and what's going to happen. Like, oh, wait, wait. And if we all do this, this is going to be incredible. Yeah. And when you think about it that way, instead of I have got to get money or figure out a way to get the money you need in something that you already naturally know how to do. Yeah, I think people force it sometimes though. I don't

Shanna Skidmore (45:55):

Know, Tiffany, that was so good because people do not guess this about me, but I actually, I have this folder. I know people have heard me talk about billion times on this podcast. I call it the Sunshine folder. And anytime I get a good review or testimonial, just something like that, I put it in this folder because I actually have to do a lot of mindset work myself. And I think that you nailed it because if you believe in something, if you love something, if you're like, these are the best pan hugs I've ever bought, or whatever it is, it's like, you are your own. We want to believe in our own product. That way you will be your own hype person. It's not about being a great salesperson, it's just about genuinely believing that what you offer solves a need, a want, a hope or a dream. And if you're struggling to sell, it's probably a mindset. That's so good. That spoke to me because I have to talk to hype myself up and I know my work is good. Yeah. Okay. Oh my goodness. Okay. Tiffany, let's come into a quick fire round and I'm going to put you in the hot seat. You ready? Okay. Okay. I don't know if you read these before. So

Tiffany Sauder (46:59):

I did. We'll see 'em, read 'em to me over the, I was driving, so I didn't read him myself. I was like, give them to me real quick. But I don't

Shanna Skidmore (47:05):

Remember that. I know. Cause it's so funny, some people are like, I need to know and prep. And other people are like, let's go off the cuff. Okay. So first one, what is one thing you would be embarrassed if people knew?

Tiffany Sauder (47:15):

Oh my word. I'm such an open book. There's so little, I have a very low embarrassment reflex. I don't have any weird collections or anything. I, that's where my brain is going. I don't have moldy food in my car. I don't know.

Shanna Skidmore (47:29):

This is, okay. Quick story. I dislocated my shoulder in high school playing volleyball. And so my mom got me this backpack that rolls on wheels. And so after my shoulder healed, I kept the same backpack and you could wear it or you could roll it. And so I remember there was this one day I put this backpack on and I would walk around the halls and people would play jokes at me. They would pull the handle up cause they're like a suitcase on my back. And it's so funny cause I'm like, that should have embarrassed me. But instead I'm just walking around the halls with my backpack, got the thing on, so I totally understand that's what a gift, I'm like

Tiffany Sauder (48:03):

Generally a little awkward and clumsy. So I think I've had to just learn and be like, I mean, it's just who I am.

Shanna Skidmore (48:08):

Just do it. No, no about it. That's how it's like if you laugh about it, it's way less embarrassing. Okay. That's so fun. Number two, any regrets or wish you could do over moments?

Tiffany Sauder (48:18):

Yes. If in the early stages of the business, I would have found an operational partner, I am a sales and marketing leader and I struggle with seeing an operational infrastructure as clearly. I think we would be twice the size as a business we are today, if I would've known

Shanna Skidmore (48:35):

That. Yeah, I love that you focus on, you don't have to do all the things higher to other people's strengths. Okay. Big win or pinch me moment.

Tiffany Sauder (48:45):

When we were transitioning the agency from a, we do everything to more specifically helping with content and inbound marketing. We won HubSpot's Agency of the year in 2012 and it put us on the map and gave me an enormous amount of confidence as a young leader.

Shanna Skidmore (49:02):

Oh, I love that. That's so good. Okay. Best advice or just really good advice that you have received?

Tiffany Sauder (49:09):

Hard is not the end. It's just hard. People wrongly interpret difficulty as a sign that you should quit.

Shanna Skidmore (49:16):

So true. Hard is not end. It's just hard. Yeah. Okay. Last quick fire question. What are you working on now or one resource that you would like to share?

Tiffany Sauder (49:27):

I launched a newsletter about six months ago, so I'd love if your listeners want more tips about a life of and mindset about how to think abundantly, they can sign up for my newsletter. It's, I'm really excited about it. It's getting great response. And it's a real quick read. You can get all through the whole thing in three to five minutes.Shanna Skidmore (49:44):

Okay. I'm excited. I will link the URL and the show notes, but is it a easy to remember url?

Tiffany Sauder (49:51):

Tiffany souder.com? Yep.

Shanna Skidmore (49:53):

Okay. All right. Let's send it off, Tiffany, with what would you tell yourself, looking back now, what would you tell yourself on day one of your business?Tiffany Sauder (50:02):

Don't emotionally go to the highs or the lows. They are both false reads on reality.

Shanna Skidmore (50:09):

I'm going to need you to expand that just a little bit.

Tiffany Sauder (50:12):

Well, I think my early self, when we would win an award or win a big deal or s, something would happen where we were in the newspaper, I would be like, oh my word. This is incredible. I would just be like, wow, we have really made it. This is amazing. And then when we would lose a client or something bad would happen, I would sort of be like, it's over. And it's like they're both false reads. When amazing things are happening, you're probably not that good actually. And when a, there's a string of bad things that happen, you pr, you're probably not that bad either. And so I think I just lead much more evenly now of the good things that happen are signs that we're moving in the right direction, but it is not a moment of arrival. And the bad things that are happening are signs that maybe we have something wrong or the process stinks, or we've got a wrong fit marketplace. But it doesn't mean that we're terrible. Yeah. It just means that there's something wrong. And I think I'm much more even now, and I think I could have saved myself just some sleepless nights on both sides, honestly.

Shanna Skidmore (51:16):

Yeah.

Tiffany Sauder (51:17):

If I would've just been more even.

Shanna Skidmore (51:19):

Yeah. Ooh, Tiffany, that's so good. This is our 10th year in business, and I can absolutely relate to this idea of bad things aren't the end. It's just a learning opportunity and good things. Unfortunately, in business, I don't think there's a point of arrival. It's just no, there's always going to be pivots, adjustments, market changes, and seeing that with excitement instead of like, huh, another hill to climb is good zone. It's so

Tiffany Sauder (51:48):

True. Can we tell you a quick story and then we can beS

hanna Skidmore (51:50):

Done? Yes. Okay. Tony,

Tiffany Sauder (51:51):

I had a business coach and I was totally grumbling to him. Can I just have a day where there's just no problems? And he looked at me like, you're an idiot. I was like, what? And he's like, if there aren't problems, you're not doing your job. And I was like, oh my word. What a reframe. And so now I'm like, my job is to find problems. That's my whole job, is to find problems and to sort through those and get to the root cause. That's my whole job, and I emotionally process it so much differently now. Yeah. It's like, it's just my job.

Shanna Skidmore (52:23):

That's so good. I think about that too, with a to-do list. I've al and remember in the, I mean, I still wish for this some days, so my to-do list to be done, it's like there's always things that can be improved and bettered and worked on and optimized, and the more I embrace that, the more I can rest that tomorrow's another day and I can go watch a movie and it's fine. Tiffany, this has been such a joy. Thank you for coming and sharing your story today.

Tiffany Sauder (52:54):

Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

Shanna Skidmore (52:57):

Hey, 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 Tiffany. One final thought for today from Andy Stanley. As leaders, we are not responsible for filling someone else's cup. Our responsibility is to empty ours. As always, thank you for listening. I'll see you next time.