Harnessing the Power of Boundaries and Support in Running Your Business with Tanya Alvarez

Tim Melanson: Hello and welcome to today’s episode of the work at home rock star podcast.

Excited for today’s guest. We have the founder of owners up. And what they do is they empower six to seven figure B2B service based entrepreneurs to build profitable businesses, reduce workload, and enhance life balance through a unique facilitated accountability spirit approach. Super excited to be rocking out today with Tanya Alvarez.

Hey, Tanya, ready to rock. Yeah,

Tanya Alvarez: absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Tim Melanson: Awesome. So we always start off on a good note. How many stories of success in your business that we can be inspired by?

Tanya Alvarez: So immediately when I started my fifth business, which is owners up, um, here it was training for, I’ve been a collegiate athlete, a distance runner, and I’m training for the Boston Marathon.

And even though I know exactly what to do because I’ve been running for years. I still joined a team, right? And most people are like, well, why wouldn’t you just do it on your own? And I go, well, a team allows me to coach, allows me to like, understand my, um, my [00:01:00] tracking log, all my blind spots, course correct me.

And then honestly, when you run a marathon, like at first it’s really excited, exciting. And then at the end, it gets really kind of like, Ooh, this is a bit tough and you need more willpower. You need more consistency. And then you also have to like say no to a bunch of things like, Oh no, I can’t go to this event.

I got to get up to go run, you know, 10 miles. And this is exactly like an entrepreneur, right? So you want to join a group of people. Then I’m hearing I’m running and I was like, Hmm, I wish I had this for my own business. And that’s when owners up came along. So what I realized is there wasn’t anything that actually helped me kind of like train in a group of people, have a coach course, correct me.

And this is what I needed for my first business, which I grew to over 1 million within the first year. But Oh boy, that was challenging.

Tim Melanson: Wow. Wow. So you’ve, you’ve been around the block there with the businesses. Yeah. [00:02:00] Oh, and, and with your running, wow. What a good analogy.

Tanya Alvarez: Absolutely.

Tim Melanson: Absolutely. Around several blocks.

That’s awesome. Yeah, you’re right. There’s a lot of similarities there. You have to really do a lot of sacrificing, right? Mm hmm. Tons. That’s

Tanya Alvarez: cool. You have to have your boundaries to have everything. You know, if you want to really have an integrated life, you definitely have to have boundaries. As you probably know, as

Tim Melanson: a musician.

Yeah, well, a musician and, and as a business owner. Yeah, like, I think that one of the, I’ve talked about this before, about working from home especially, because a lot of people don’t quite understand, not only do they not understand business, but they also don’t understand working from home. And, you know, people are, like, thinking that you’re just doing nothing.

So, you know, yeah, you can help me move on a whatever morning, but you really do have to have some really strong boundaries. It’s easy for you to say, Well, no, I have to go to work or I’m going to get fired. Right? Mm hmm. But when you’re working for yourself, you’re not going to get fired, so people will try to guilt you into stuff.

Do you find that that’s the thing, or?

Tanya Alvarez: Early on, so I come [00:03:00] from a Colombian household and they like to text and call at all times. So here I was in my first business. I started at 25 and my family’s like, you’re your own boss. I can call you whenever. And I’m like, no, no, no, no. That’s not how it works. So I said, unless it’s an emergency, you cannot call me this, this, this.

You can, if you want to send me something, you could send me text messages. And so at first they didn’t understand. So I would. I would pick up the call. Are you all right? Are you okay? And they’re like, yeah. And I go, okay, well, you just called me and I thought something happened to you. And then they got the picture.

Then I stopped answering. I’m like, I will contact you right after this, this time. And that’s how it worked out. So then they know only to call me. If it’s an emergency,

Tim Melanson: well done. Um, sometimes that’s hard to do.

Tanya Alvarez: You have to be consistent. That’s what it is. Holding your boundaries. Right. And now with, oh, do you like, this is, I started my business a while ago in the early 2000s and, but [00:04:00] now you can just put like, um, your phone into like notifications, like I’m working.

Right.

Tim Melanson: Yeah, there’s a lot of, it’s a plus and minus, like there’s a lot more phones, right, and a lot more people like accessibility, but there’s also a lot more tools that you can like put yourself on silent, you can send automatic messages. So yeah, that’s a really good tip, actually, to do the automatic send thing.

Hey, I’m working if this is an emergency text back, but otherwise, you know,

Tanya Alvarez: or you could say I’m on a video call. I’m on nonstop video call. Right?

Tim Melanson: Yeah. Right on. Okay. Well, I mean, you’ve been in business for a long time, so tell me something that didn’t work out. Cause you know, there’s some bad notes that get hit from time to time, right?

Yeah. So is there something that we can learn from?

Tanya Alvarez: So it’s interesting. Um, one in my first business, a client owed me a hundred thousand dollars. And it was a reliable client. They’ve been paying for years. And then all of a sudden there’s little signs, like all the, they were like on net 15 terms [00:05:00] and they were asking for net 30 terms.

And then it was a little later and I was like, I don’t understand. I get it. Like things happen. Then they’re like, sorry, we can’t pay. And I was like, what the heck, this is my first business. So I go and ask, you know, of course, family and friends. And you know what they say? You should sue them. And got to tell you, that’s not the right answer.

I did actually end up suing them. It costs me money. I barely got any of it back. Right. And the most important part is I lost so much time and effort and energy focusing on that I could have generated. So what that made me realize is that a lot of entrepreneurs, we do have, like some of us are really, um, fortunate to have people who are cheerleaders, right?

And then you have other people who you might be surrounded with. That actually are kind of like, no, you shouldn’t do that. They’re a little bit more risk averse. And then it’s not that they don’t support you is that they’re, they’re scared. Right. They, they want the best for you. So they’re trying to help [00:06:00] you kind of like not get hurt.

So those are two scenarios. And what I realized with that is, oh man, I need to like have more experienced entrepreneurs near me to tell me, yeah, that’s a hundred thousand dollars. It’s going to hurt, but it’s not worth your time. So now when I tell people. If there’s an agreement, and agreements are great as long as you can enforce them.

Yeah.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. Well, and that’s the thing. Like if you, if someone stiffs you out of a hundred thousand dollars cause they can’t pay, how are you going to squeeze something out of a rock? Right. Yeah. It’s. Like, I don’t even understand how that works logistically. Like you’re going to go spend all this money, try to figure out how to get that money back, but they don’t have it.

So now it seems like a lost cause. Right.

Tanya Alvarez: Well, that was some good advice. I could have said, I was like, Oh, I see it all the time on TV and, and like informs you sue. That’s why you have contracts now. Yeah.

Tim Melanson: Well, you sue the people that, uh, don’t want to pay you [00:07:00] but can pay you. That, that would make sense. But if someone just, you know, just doesn’t have the money, I mean, it’s just…

You know, it sucks, obviously. And you know, I imagine that probably the, you know, that there’s a couple of lessons out of that. But the other one is probably the, have you modified your, the way that you, that that’s works that you don’t end up getting clients in the hole so much, like how did that work?

Tanya Alvarez: Well, no, this claim still was making money. They could pay. It’s just that their bills were tight, so they wanted it into a certain monthly payment. And so. Uh, that model we were in the 1st company I started was a performance based marketing agency. So we generated leads and sales and got paid based off of that.

Right. And so you should have people paying net 15 terms. And so now if I was going to do that business again, moving forward, I would still, I only had that problem once. Cause it’s really good about having that relationship and I would have should have seen the signs and cut them off. And [00:08:00] instead years and years of business with them, I just assumed, Oh, I’m going to get it back, but for them, they’d rather pay everybody else.

Then me, because they thought I can hold on to and, you know, because our company was doing well. Hey, you can like wait 4 or 5 months. No, we can’t. So that was a situation, but with owners of my business, um, we pay, we have stripe and in order to even work with us, you have to pay upfront.

Tim Melanson: Yeah, I will say though that.

It is very, very difficult to cut someone off though, that has been a client for a while. Like, yeah, it really is tough,

Tanya Alvarez: especially like, you know, I’m so well, and you want to feel at the same time you have a team to pay too. And you have your own household, like payments that you have to make too.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. So how does that conversation go?

Like, what do you say to them? When, if that happens again, what would you say?

Tanya Alvarez: Cause I was like, I didn’t have that conversation. The lawyers ended up having it. [00:09:00] Um, be, well, I wouldn’t, like you said, I wouldn’t know when the signs are happening, right. And I’d be aware of it. And then I would ask them, you know, what is your situation?

And is this going to last? What do you think it is? And then I would think about, is this worth my business to invest in it and continue on. Or is it to kind of pull back? So we’ve had, um, we’ve had our own members where they’ve been through a financial spot, but we know since we’re in a coaching business that we’re able to get them out of it very quickly.

So we’re like, okay, 15 days, we can get you out of this very quickly. And then we kind of move forward and then we have a monthly, that’s why our clients, we have a long lifetime value with them, but in a marketing business and say, like, I don’t know, you’re doing AdWords and all of that, you still have to spend money.

So in this case, you’re spending money for the client and then managing it. It’s a little different. Wow.

Tim Melanson: Yes. Very different. Yeah. If you’re spending money, then you’re actually losing money. If it’s [00:10:00] just time, that’s something different, right? You know, it’s, it’s similar to like, I’ve got this policy where I don’t lend money to friends and family.

Uh, you know, because it just creates weirdness, right? Yeah. It gets complicated. Yeah. And sometimes some of your clients end up being friends, right? And I think it’s a, it’s a similar thing where like, if you can think of like, okay. Well, this is a really good client, or this is a really good friend, or this is a really good family member.

I’ll give it as a gift, not expecting anything in return. And then what ends up happening is that if they do happen to pay you back, fantastic. But you tell them right up front, listen, I don’t lend money to friends and family. I know you need it. You’re, you know, consider this a gift. And maybe that might work in the same situation with a long term client, you can say, Hey, you know, I, I know things are a little bit rough right now, you know, consider this, this a gift, uh, you know, but then the cool part about it is that you can cut them off there.

Because there’s no, like, [00:11:00] it’s just weird for them to come back to you and say, can I have another gift? Oh, that’s true. It ends up stopping there because they’re like, they feel weird about it now. Like, they don’t feel weird that they have to pay you back. You’ve done this before. You’ve done it many

Tanya Alvarez: times.

And you’ve never had anybody say, can I have another gift?

Tim Melanson: No, no, once you give that gift, that’s it. Now they might give it back to you and then ask for another gift. To me, that’s okay. You know, if, if I lend them a few bucks and then they give it back to me and then they need some more money later on, well then I can give them a gift again, but you never have to give them multiple gifts.

But I have found that when you lend them money, they’ll keep coming back and asking you for more money. It’s weird how that works. I’d like. Oh, you know, I can’t pay you back, but I need a little bit more. Right?

Tanya Alvarez: Great one. I’m definitely going to use that one. That is amazing. I’m going to try that one gift and then see, they come back for me for another gift.

I’m going after you, Tim.

Tim Melanson: Oh, Hey, [00:12:00] if they come after you for another gift, I think it’s a different conversation. Well, I just gave you a gift. I can’t afford to give you another gift, right? Cause it’s the thing they, they, they flip that around. Whereas, Oh no, no, I’m going to pay you back. Don’t worry about it.

No, I don’t want the money back. It’s a gift. I like it. But we don’t give gifts every day of the year. We give gifts on Christmas or, you know, birthdays and stuff like that. And if this is just a one off gift, I don’t know, it hasn’t happened yet. And I have done this multiple times where, you know, someone will ask me for money and I’ll just say, I don’t lend money to friends and family.

However, you know, you know, I could have spare it right now as a gift. So consider it a gift. And how do you

Tanya Alvarez: let go of that? Like, Oh, you only give a gift if you have the money that’s

Tim Melanson: electable. I only give it if I can afford it. Yeah. Okay. And I mean, there have been times where I’ve not been able to afford it.

Like, let’s face it. We, you know, we have good, we have good months. We have good, bad, bad months. We have good years. We have bad [00:13:00] years and stuff. I mean, I’ve been self employed for 15 years now. So there are times when things are great and there are times when things are not. And in that case, it’s a, if I can’t give the gift, then it’s a similar conversation.

It’s a, Hey, listen, I don’t lend money to friends and family. You know, things get weird real fast. Um, however, and I’m not really in the position right now to actually give it to you. So I’m sorry. And people tend to be okay with that. They move on to someone else and that’s them. But yeah,

Tanya Alvarez: but anyway, this is a knowledge bomb.

This is a very powerful knowledge bomb because as you know, being an entrepreneur, people assume like, Oh yeah, it’s consistent. Things are going great. Right. And they don’t realize that. Yeah. Sometimes it’s amazing or sometimes I can owe you a hundred K.

Tim Melanson: Oh yeah. Sometimes you could be in a pretty big.

Pretty big hole. Like it’s just, you know, it’s not comfortable for sure. But I mean, [00:14:00] that’s, you know, maybe this is a big warning to people who want to be an entrepreneur. Hey, if you, you know, are risk averse, you know, if you’re okay with this kind of stuff, then it’s great because things do do this. Like it will come around if you work hard enough.

Uh, but you know, sometimes you can be in a situation where, Oh, you know, maybe I’m going to have to put a little bit extra on my credit card this month. Um, you know, next month, as long as you have a plan, I mean, I’m not saying just keep rolling it on the credit card for months and months and months, but, um, you know, a few weeks here and there it’s, you know, it’ll come back.

Right. Absolutely. So let’s talk a little bit about the people that you have around you. I mean, what do you do when you’re setting up your team, when you’re delegating, like who do you look for first and what kinds of people do you delegate to?

Tanya Alvarez: So the first thing I always tell any entrepreneur when they first start.

Is buy back your time and buy back your time at 4 dollars. And now I think everyone can afford 4 dollars an hour. If not, then you should figure out a [00:15:00] service that you can provide that pays you 8 dollars an hour minimum. Right? And. Then go to Upwork or there’s onlinejobs. ph and find somebody in the Philippines.

This is actually a great pay, like you’re probably like, Oh, 4 an hour. That’s awful. No, that’s actually really, that’s pretty decent for them, you know? And why I say that when you first start off, there’s so many things you have to get done. Right? To like business development, to research, to eat, all these things.

And even your finances, like getting it all together and there’s things that drain you. And so the task might be equal in the sense of time, like it may take you 20 minutes, but that energy it takes drains you and you won’t be able to do the next task as easily. And so if you actually take the time and pay somebody, uh, let’s say the monthly, I don’t know, a part time is like 325, 350 or whatever it is a month.[00:16:00]

You can do that because you’ll be able to actually get more done and move your business faster. So that to me is essential. And if you think that you have to do everything exactly how it is, and you’re already holding yourself back.

Tim Melanson: So how do you find like, cause I’ve heard some pretty bad stories about going to Fiverr and all that stuff about finding people that weren’t really able to do what needs to get done. Do you have sort of like some guidelines that you follow to make sure that you get somebody that’s going to be good?

Tanya Alvarez: So, yeah, first you got to figure out what are the tasks that you want to get done.

So I think a lot of people have the issue where they’re doing like one offs, which are great, but one officer, you have to kind of train them to be who, how you want them to be, to think how you are. Right. Um, so I like to think about having a mix of 50 percent some admin and 50 percent some lead generation or biz def.

So you always have the return on investment. Right? Because like, let’s say they’re searching, I don’t know, [00:17:00] they’re going on LinkedIn and they’re searching for your prospects that would take you hours and hours, right? Kind of figuring out which ones are your best ones and thinking about how you’re going to reach out to them.

So here you’re having them come up with a list. And you can either a have a template and, and have them have options to kind of personalize it, or you actually take the list and then you get, and then you actually follow up with your own personalized message, depends how you want it to go about it, but those are the things.

So a lot of people are either micromanagers or totally hands off. And what I mean by that is micromanaging. You forgot this comma. Yeah, they’re not going to be a hundred percent. No one’s gonna be a hundred percent like you. Right. Even with the best piece, but 80 percent done is better than you a hundred percent doing it.

And even if you have to add 20 percent

Tim Melanson: Hey rockstar, I hope you’re enjoying this episode of the work at home rockstar podcast. If you didn’t know already, my business is creative crew agency. We build websites. [00:18:00] Now let’s talk about your website for a minute. Most people realize that at this point. day and age, we need a website, but we don’t really know what the website is supposed to do.

And sometimes you’ll just go and build a website for the sake of building a website. What I do is I make sure that your website actually accomplishes a goal. Now, there are three main goals. To most websites, number 1 is to provide information and build credibility. Number 2 is to schedule some sort of appointment and get them onto a sales call.

Number 3 is to sell something like an e commerce site. Now, when you’re setting your website, you have to be very mindful that. The visitor doesn’t know what to do, and so you have to provide them with a roadmap that leads them down a path to wherever you want them to go on my website. I want them to be on a free consultation.

So that’s why when you go to creative crew agency dot com, you’ll see information about scheduling a free consultation. Now, for you, though, I’m going to provide you with an extra link so that you can get your free website audit. Go to creative crew agency dot com forward [00:19:00] slash free website audit. And schedule an audit with me and I’ll go through your website live and determine what we can do to improve your conversions and make sure that you’re getting the business from your website.

Go to creative crew agency. com and we’ll see you there. Love it. I love it. That’s great. Yeah. And I like your idea of splitting it up between work. That’s going to get you an ROI right away too. Right. Uh huh. That is, then it’s not all the way out.

Tanya Alvarez: Yeah. Or people are just like, well, I don’t know. It’s not paying off.

It’s like, well. Your energy is better, right? You’re not doing those tasks and now you have actually leads that are predictable because what ends up happening with people, um, when they’re starting a business is they don’t have predictable lead gen and because they’re not consistent doing the outreach or whatever that activity is, the only way you can get consistent is if you’re doing paid ads and most of the time when you’re an entrepreneur.

Paid ads isn’t going to happen for you.

Tim Melanson: Yeah, well, especially in the very beginning, you don’t have your systems figured out yet. You haven’t [00:20:00] figured out the conversion of your tools, right? Like there’s so much stuff that you’re sort of working through. So if you’re going to throw a bunch of money at it, like, and that people do make that mistake.

I’ve heard that mistake many times in this podcast, where you throw a bunch of money at something that just doesn’t work, right? Just because you spent the money in the ad doesn’t mean it’s going to make you money, right?

Tanya Alvarez: Those are tons. People are always like, Oh, well, I paid the ads. It was like, Oh, your landing page wasn’t optimized.

The conversion, the follow through. It’s a whole thing.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s true. And, uh, and so when, when you first start the, what, what kinds of tasks did you find were the best to offload to someone like on Fiverr or whatever?

Tanya Alvarez: So, the 1st task I had is, like, literally looking for people within my ideal audience, right?

And then having it where it’s filtered. So mine are very specific right now. Um, I’m looking at 6 or 7, uh, figure businesses and I can tell based on their size or [00:21:00] location. Some of like, um. They’re with their family, their mindset. So I have them researching a lot of little things that necessarily it’s not like a quick, like, Ooh, let me go on LinkedIn.

Let me just do a search. Now I have a very specific, and that would take me hours to do. So that’s

Tim Melanson: really cool. Yeah. This is really cool. Because when, when I think about. Uh, delegating some of those tasks. The first things that I think people think about it are like tasks tasks. They’re not research tasks.

They’re like, Oh, I would need you to do some accounting for me. Or I need you to do some banish my emails or something like that. You’re actually getting them to go out there and get you leads, which is, I agree a hundred percent. It’s one of those things where you, uh, you’ve got work to do. And then you’ve got sales to do and it’s like you do the sale, you get the job.

Now you do the work, you’re not doing the sales anymore. So then the work’s done and now you have no work to do. You have to go back to do the sales again, right? So this right here would really kind of like make it so that you can do the work that you’re good [00:22:00] at. That’s the reason why you’re probably doing the business in the first place.

The sales is not what you necessarily. Thought when you started a business that that’s what I was gonna do. I’m just gonna be a salesman. Right? You thought I was gonna do this work. And the sales part was like, all I have to do this too now. Right?

Tanya Alvarez: And then what ends up happening is maybe you start, okay, I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna do it.

Then you know, a week goes by and you’re like, uh, you’re not consistent. You’re kind of like, maybe like reaching out to people once a week and then it comes out to like every two weeks, and then you’re servicing your clients and then you’re like, wait, my pipeline’s dry. What am I gonna do?

Tim Melanson: And you don’t, you know, what’s interesting, I’m thinking about this now is that there’s been a few, uh, guests on this podcast that have grown these giant businesses.

However, they’re the salesperson, right? And they ended up hiring all the people who do the work work, right? They’re not even the people that do the work. But I think that that’s super like rare. I think that a lot of people, when they start their business, [00:23:00] especially solopreneurs, that’s not what they’re doing.

They don’t want to. be a salesperson. They want to be a worker, right? It’s, it’s, you know, that’s what their passion is. So this is

Tanya Alvarez: really good advice things is find somebody who closes similar to you. So maybe what they’re doing is they’re letting everyone do the work, but they’re the closer.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. Well, maybe, maybe they’re letting everybody else do the prospecting as well.

But it kind of sounds like they don’t know how to do any, like, I know it’s one technical guy who hired an entire technical team to do all the technical work and he’s just a salesperson and I’m like, okay, but he’s doing very, very well because like you just said, I think that. Like, uh, sales is really difficult to let go of in your business.

Cause you, like you said, nobody’s going to really have the same type of passion for that business and be able to close those sales as well as you can, because it’s, you know, what you’re doing, right. Yeah. [00:24:00] And. And so it’s super powerful if you could find someone else to do the work, work the way that you do the work, work, but it’s, you know what I mean?

They wear all these hats at the same time. So how do you choose?

Tanya Alvarez: And that’s why I’m like, that’s the first thing. And the best part about is it helps you start thinking about your own process, your own criteria. Who do you want to go after? Because then if you’re just like. Go find all these business owners and then they come back with like crappy leads while shooting, like actually filter it.

So it helps you really focus in like what’s super important to your business. And one thing that really frustrates me, but it only takes two minutes. I think it’s like David Allen. Um, I forgot what the book is. It’s like, if it takes you two minutes, just do it. No, don’t do it. So if you’re gonna do it, record yourself, go get wound for free and do it and record it.

Loom actually transcribes, it tells you the summary, and then you can pass it off.

Tim Melanson: I love it. I love that. So that leads us right into the next topic, which is talking about tools and [00:25:00] instruments. Like that’s a tool, you know, is there any other tools that you use to get success?

Tanya Alvarez: Yeah. So another one, which is like for business and just like one password or password manager.

So yeah, password I manager I use is one password, right? It’s not, I use one password for everything. It’s a password manager. And in order to get my husband on board, he was so resistant, but now it’s like he can’t live without it. And so what it is, is you want, you can have your business one. So when you hire people, you can always change your password, not having to remember the same password or thinking like, Oh no, what are the passwords I actually gave them access to?

Right. And then for your family, it’s small little things that you don’t actually have to be like, Oh, what’s the Netflix password or what’s this? It’s all on his web password manager. And it is game changer. And then when you think like you’ve lost your credit card, cause it stores all your credit cards, you have all the information there too.

So it’s, I would say it takes a little bit longer to set up, but once you have it [00:26:00] set up, you can’t imagine living without it.

Tim Melanson: I use last pass.

Tanya Alvarez: Oh, that’s a great

Tim Melanson: one too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’m next check out one password though. Cause I like, I like checking out other tools. That’s great. That’s a really good advice.

Tanya Alvarez: Yeah, and another tool I can’t live without, uh, without is loom, uh, anytime I’m doing a task, I’m always recording myself and the, and I’m always, um, talking the task out. So that really helps me kind of say, like, I’m going here. Oh, the reason why I’m filtering this is because of this. So those are 2 and then another 1 that I can’t live without is, um.

Why am I blanking out? Oh, audio pen. So I am an external thinker. So external thinkers, I just found what external thinker means by the way, is I like to talk my problems out. Right. And so sometimes I’m like, my husband’s like, wait, you seem like you know what you’re doing, but I have to talk it out, kind [00:27:00] of bounce it out.

I’m one of those external people. So now audio pen, what it allows you to do is record yourself. And sometimes, as you know, when you’re thinking things out, like it could be like, Tangents are kind of everywhere. What they do, they summarize it and put it into like a thought. So you can actually have you actually think something out and then say, Oh, yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking and repurpose it or use it.

Tim Melanson: Okay. I’m going to check that one out. I’m an external thinker as well. My wife hates it. It’s like, would you, would you figure out what you’re going to say before you say it? All of me, all of the tangents. Oh, so I’m working it out right now. Come on. Let me know. That’s really cool. So what’d you call that audio pen?

Tanya Alvarez: Audio pen, I believe it’s dot IO, but it’s, um, it’s a really good one. I’m so for me, AI has been like helpful for helping me be more efficient and just how my brain thinks.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. I’m the same way. I find that AI has [00:28:00] really helped me quite a bit as well. And, and loom, I use, I’ve been using loom for quite a while as well.

And I’ve introduced some of my clients to it now. And, uh, I get such a game changer. Oh, yeah. I didn’t want to get into that because it’s so much, but you know, definitely download loom or go to the loom website and check that out. Cause yeah, for creating playbooks and for, um, you know, we use it in our onboarding processes as well.

You know, make sure you record your, your, your onboarding, uh, Interviews and tutorials off so many things, right? Yeah, I love it. And then

Tanya Alvarez: Fathom is a great tool too.

Tim Melanson: Fathom is the one that I’m using. Yeah. Yeah. And Fathom, actually the, uh, the founder, the, the creator of Fathom was on this podcast. That’s how I found out about it.

And so I went, it took me a while to actually, you know, I was like, Oh, it was just a little company. I wonder if they’re going to be any good, but I’ve tried so many other AI, uh, note takers and still the best one only disadvantage I [00:29:00] have on this one is that it only attaches to zoom. So, you know, some of the other ones will attach to Google meet and all that stuff, but, you know, Fathom is fantastic for, for what we need it for, especially being able to.

Like do the highlights and just flip those highlights and send it to someone else. So they don’t have to listen to the whole interview. Right. Ooh.

Tanya Alvarez: Here’s another one for podcast and, um, for Kochi cast magic. That’s magic. Okay. Have you heard of this one? So let’s you get your podcast recording or a coaching call or any of your clients calls.

Then you put it in this, um, just upload the link of your, your video or your audio file. And then it basically transcribes it and then puts all the summaries, all the, like, here’s a great one. Here are the quotes and puts it in LinkedIn emails. And you can actually ask the AI to like, say, um, Create a course about this.

So let’s say you ask this based on this conversation. They probably would do a course on a [00:30:00] VA or AI tools. It’s amazing. I

Tim Melanson: do all that manually with a bunch of different AI tools. That’s so cool. I use the script to, uh, to transcribe the whole thing. I take the transcription, put it somewhere else. Oh, wow.

Okay. That’s cool. I’m going to check that one out too. Awesome. So now let’s talk a little bit about cashflow and keeping the hat full. So how do you, like, what do you decide? How do you decide what to spend money on actually is a good, good start.

Tanya Alvarez: Um, so I definitely think about what buys back my time. Um, right now I have two little ones, uh, one and a half year old and a three and a half year old.

So the best thing you can ever do is have constraints, right? Time constraints. Because now I look at my calendar and I’m like, Hmm, is this worth my time? Cause like when I first started my business at 25, uh, by the way, this is my fifth business. Right. So my first business, I was like, I can do it all. All were crazy hours.

It doesn’t [00:31:00] matter. Yeah. Burnout city. If you don’t have that and you, you’re thinking you’re getting all this done, but in reality, it’s like not the same caliber of things you have to be starting really good at saying no to. Cause nowadays it’s like back then, and even now there’s so many things you could do.

And you’re just all of a sudden you get FOMO. You’re like, maybe I should be doing this. Maybe I should be doing that. And you’re scattered. So the best thing to do is really kind of like challenge yourself. Oh, sorry. Let me go back. So my first business I wanted, this is before it was trendy, you know, Instagram, all that, um, to start traveling.

So I did something just. Being 25, I wanted to travel. So I wanted to go to like Peru, uh, Vietnam. So I went to all these places, but at this time they didn’t have internet connection. So that’s what that forced me to do. It forced me to trust my team and delegate, right? And that was perfect for me because [00:32:00] that allowed me to be like, um, have you ever heard of Parkinson’s law?

No. So Parkinson’s law says, basically it’s like, if you give a task like four hours, it’ll take you four hours. Oh

Tim Melanson: yeah. It expands to the amount of time.

Tanya Alvarez: Yeah. Yes. And so notice how like right before vacation, you get so much done. So here’s a little tip I always tell entrepreneurs go away for two weeks, even if it’s some, if you can’t afford to go to like, I don’t know, staycation somewhere else, but it’ll force you to get really productive with your time.

Right. My

Tim Melanson: wife’s going to love that one.

Tanya Alvarez: Yeah. And so that works out. So then it allows you to actually kind of look at, okay, I have two weeks before I go. I’m not going to like, you know, I’m going to be off the phone. What can I actually get done? And these constraints get you more productive, allows you to outsource things and delegate faster.

Tim Melanson: Really good. Awesome. Yeah. And I, I think that’s, I think that’s a really good, uh, piece of advice, [00:33:00] uh, So what do you think holds people back from, from doing that delegating? Like what, why, why was that scary?

Tanya Alvarez: Well, there’s a number of things that they they’re scared that they’re not going to do it. Right.

They’re going to look bad. Um, if the person messes up, um, what else, what do you think? I’m sure there’s a task that you haven’t wanted to delegate. Of course, there’s, if it’s your own, like, if it’s something that only you can do, you’re going to hold onto that. That’s what makes it special.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. Well, that’s what makes it exactly that.

That’s the special part of it. Right. But I think you’re right. I think that you’re scared that something’s going to happen and you’re going to have to be in there to come and fix it. Right. Um, but maybe there’s ways that you can, like you said, maybe take a staycation that’s close by so that if something does fall apart, you can come back and check on it.

Right. But, but I would think that probably problem is that you haven’t really defined the [00:34:00] tasks properly to be able to be taken over. Right.

Tanya Alvarez: Or it’s all in your head, but here’s the sad kind of truth that if you got, it’s kind of like morbid, but something happens to you, health wise, you’re going to have to trust your team or it’s going to be scary that if you’re in the hospital, who’s going to take over.

There’s only so much where your clients are going to be patient, like, Oh yeah, I’m going to keep paying you for the hospital. If you’re three, four months in, it’s called the bus factor. If you got hit by a bus, does your business still run without you?

Yeah. All right. And you have to think like that. Right. And you, you have kids. So it’s kind of like, how do you prepare them for the future? Same thing with making a sense of your team. How do you, you can’t just like be on top of them, right? They have to make their own decisions. So how do you empower your team to make those decisions so that when you’re not there, you can enjoy going to conferences, speaking events, doing all these things.

Yeah.

Tim Melanson: It’s totally true. [00:35:00] And that’s exactly, like you said, with parenting as well, the more you do for them, it’s a tough mind game, right? Because the more you do for them, the less prepared they are really, but you feel bad like watching them do something on their own when you could be doing it for them.

Right. Isn’t that? Yeah.

Tanya Alvarez: It’s difficult. Seeing my one year old, like trying to put her shoe on and I’m like, no, no, she has to learn how to do it on her own. This is her process.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. Wow. Okay. So it’s time for your guest solo. So tell me what’s exciting in your business right now.

Tanya Alvarez: So right now, what it’s funny that we went on this topic, it’s, I realized there’s so many freaking courses out there.

There’s so much knowledge. I bought a course and it’s in my digital bookcase. How I see that. I mean, I never got it done. And one thing entrepreneurs are dealing with is consistency, right? No one’s holding you accountable. There’s nothing that’s kind of like rooting you on. No one’s telling you, Hey, the reason why you haven’t [00:36:00] got this done is you’re dealing with either perfectionist over analysis, or you feel like you’re, there’s a knowledge gap.

You don’t know how to do it. So how do you solve this? Of course, isn’t going to help you solve it. Right. Can help you. And we already have the knowledge. Everything out there is somehow on YouTube, but you can find it on the web or even as chat GPT. But there’s something about. Thank you. The insights about doing something right.

And the knowledge you have based on it. So I, before I had kids, I read tons of books. And then when the kid happened, I was like, Oh, shoot, there’s nothing like the book told me. Yeah. So it’s one of those scenarios. So what we have is we have it called power up where we help entrepreneurs really get the success habits that actually move you forward.

So what that means by that is. The 1st week of the month that we have it where you review your past month, and then you plan out your goals for that month. Now, plan out the goals sounds great, right? There’s so many times where I planned out goals, and then I did not break it [00:37:00] down. So, for example, in that marathon, I’m going to run a marathon.

But did we actually schedule the workouts, the stretches, the intervals, the distance in my calendar? So it moves you around and I could, and I’m not jumping from, Oh yeah, here’s a meeting and I got to go run right now. No, you have to put it in your calendar. So we help them take that time to break it down.

And if they don’t know something, we help them break down the knowledge gap that they have. And then the most important thing is having it where it’s consistent. Right so what are the metrics that hold you accountable to that consistency and so that you deliver and usually you have to have a peers to help you with that.

And so we set people up with peers and then we have these things and it’s called. Um, it’s what we call it is a power hour. So you learn a tactic for 15 minutes and then you actually implement it for 30 minutes on the call and then you share with others and learn the insights from it. So you walk away, not [00:38:00] like another, like online course and you’re like, okay, I’ll, I’m gonna put it someday, you know, get it implemented.

No, you’re actually doing it on the call. So that is owners up power up.

Tim Melanson: Wow. So what kind of person would get the most out of a program like this?

Tanya Alvarez: I would say somebody who is a. Who’s just like, in a sense, knows what they want to start their business. And then, or they’re in the six figures are trying to get to 10, 000 a month.

Tim Melanson: Okay. Awesome. And so how do we find out more?

Tanya Alvarez: Yeah, just go to ownersup. com and you can follow me on LinkedIn and just DM me.

Tim Melanson: Helenia, this has been a really good interview. Thank you so much. Thank you to the listeners. Make sure you subscribe, rate, and comment, and we’ll see you next time on the work at home rockstar podcast.

Tanya Alvarez: Thanks for listening to learn how you can become a work at home rockstar or become a better one. Head on over to work at home rockstar. com today.