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Episode #052: Empowering Entrepreneurs With Susie Bulloch

In episode 052, we chat with Susie Bulloch about how as an entrepreneur you can be empowered and encouraged in this journey.

We cover how one part of your business is a building block towards a much bigger picture when you step back and look.

Listen on the player below or on iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast player. Or scroll down to read a full transcript

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Guest Details

Connect with Hey Grill, Hey
Website | Instagram | Facebook

Bio Susie has bee blogging 10+ years and on social media and recipe creation. 4+ years ago, she started running her own site and business, Hey Grill, Hey. She was able to bring her husband on to her team full time along with 2 full time salaried employees and expand her business into new areas. Susie and Todd are parents to 3 amazing kids.

Transcript

  • Reassigning of roles for a spouse joining the team is a big transition. Spend time finding a role for your spouse by trying different roles.

  • A lot of spouses come into food blogging with pre-existing skill set from their previous businesses.

  • Don’t make big decisions in a dark moment because being an entrepreneur is a journey and it is fun but it’s not all joy. But it’s not supposed to be all stress and sorrow either. 

  • Burnout can create a desire to quit so instead focus on your why you decided to do this.

  • The highs, the big, bright gleaming moments are fleeting. But so are the dark times. You won’t have 100% bliss.

  • Get used to failing and the ups and downs. Acknowledge the highs and lows and realize that mostly you’ll be in the middle. 

  • Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Build your business out.

  • As you diversify, build multiple traffic streams first so you don’t rely on anyone thing. Find revenue steams in both the digital space and physical products/traditional revenue.

  • Talk to your audience to find out what people want from you, what they want to see, how much they’re willing to pay.

  • Focus on establishing one source of revenue, get it consistent. Then go out. See what viables sources of revenue are there. Then when you see one rising, figure how to build that out more.

  • You can always take a step back if you branch out and it doesn’t fit. 

Continue Learning

Learn how you can keep your own eyes on. your work will help you grow as a blogger with Danielle Esposti in episode 019.


Transcript

Click for full text.

Intro:

Welcome to Eat Blog Talk, where food bloggers come to get their fill of the latest tips, tricks, and insights into the world of food blogging. If you feel that hunger for information, we’ll provide you with the tools you need to add value to your blog. We’ll also ensure you’re taking care of yourself, because food blogging is a demanding job. Now, please welcome your host, Megan Porta.

Megan Porta:

Food bloggers. Don’t forget to check out the food blogging forum style community that we started over forum.eat blogtalk.com. Finally, there is one place that we can all convene and talk and that isn’t scattered all over Facebook. Here are the things that I am loving about it. It is free. It also allows for categorized discussions on all food blogging topics, and there’s a category for sharing successes, AKA self promotion. So no more holding back about discussing your big wins and things that you’re promoting. Also, everything is in one single spot. So no hopping around from group to group, and there’s an amazing opportunity to network and really get to know your fellow food bloggers in a single place. So come join the discussions that are going on over at forum.eatblogtalk.com. I hope you enjoy this as much as I do. Don’t forget, forum.eatblogtalk.com.

Hello food bloggers. Welcome to the Eat Blog Talk podcast made for you. Food bloggers who are seeking value for your blogs and for your lives. In today’s episode, I will be talking to Susie Bulloch from heygrillhey.com, and we will be discussing empowering people on the entrepreneurial path. Susie has been in the blogging, social media and recipe creation world for over 10 years. For four years, she has been running her own site in business, Hey Grill, Hey. Susie’s husband is a part of her full-time team along with two full-time salaried employees, and she’s a mom to three amazing kids. I have to mention quickly that I cannot say your website without saying, Hey Grill, Hey!

Susie Bulloch:

If it doesn’t make you smile a little at the end, then you’re saying it wrong I think.

Megan:

Absolutely. So I’m super excited to have a chat with you today, Susie, and thank you for being here.

Susie:

Same, thanks so much for having me.

Megan:

But before we dive into it, I would love to hear a fun fact about you.

Susie:

A fun fact about me. I once said the national Anthem as part of an acapella group for the Chicago White Sox, a major league baseball team.

Megan:

Acapella too. Super impressive. So you are a singer. I did not know that about you.

Susie:

I don’t sing publicly or solo.

Megan:

That’s amazing and a great fun fact. Something that not everybody can say for sure. I’m excited to talk about empowering entrepreneurs. Also we’ll get a little bit into income diversification because I know that you have managed to just nail this part of being an entrepreneur. But I have to tell you first that I’m super honored to have this conversation with you today. I listened to you speak at Tastemaker 2018 and there were so many things you said that I related to during that little speech of yours. One of the things you talked about that got me all pumped up was when you talked about reading, Think And Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. How that book kinda just gave you permission to strive for more in your life and also in your business. At that time I had literally just gotten done reading that book.

Susie:

Awesome.

Megan:

So when you said it, I looked around and nobody else was raising their hand, maybe one other person did. I raised my hand from the back and you were like, woo. But there’s a few of us here, but I just wanted to scream. I just read that book. So I kinda secretly bonded with you at that moment.

Susie:

Oh, that’s amazing.

Megan:

But I also share that entrepreneurial spirit with you. I know that many of the people listening to this podcast do as well. So I would love it if we could just start this chat by hearing a bit about your backstory. I know that your parents were entrepreneurs as well. So tell us about that. Also how that has carried over into your own life.

Susie:

My dad owned several hotels and that was what he did essentially for employment when I was a kid and one of the hotels had a restaurant and that became our family’s go-to place. So all the kids grew up working in the hotel, working in the restaurant, carrying bags, doing the front desk, busing tables, waiting tables. That was how we spent our summers. Even before that happened, my mom and her sisters and her mom opened a mail order catalog for crafts. It was essentially a magazine version of Etsy. They would source local artisans and crafters to market their product in their magazines. They were doing all of the fulfillment and the shipping. So I kind of had it on both sides of the parenting aisle. My mom and my dad were both entrepreneurs. By the time I was a little bit older, my mom was like, okay, entrepreneurship is fun and exhausting. I have to get a job now.

Megan:

Next. Yes.

Susie:

So she started working retail, working her way all the way up. I mean, in the nineties, she was shattering glass ceilings as regional manager and moving up in this company. That was really inspiring to me also to see a female in the workspace dominating a really male heavy field, especially in the sales area at that time. Anyway. I grew up with really great inspirations as parents, for sure.

Megan:

I would say inspiration all around too. I love that you got all worlds of that. You got into the mail order thing, how forward thinking was that. That’s amazing. Then going into the corporate world as well and seeing her just kill it because especially back decades ago, that was not the norm for women to step in and just get to the top like that. So that’s really cool that you were able to see that.

Susie:

I actually asked her about that as an adult. I was like, how did you do that? Because at the time I didn’t know any different. She was just my mom. She said, I actually had a female mentor that she could call and consult with and have conversations with when things were hard or difficult. That just made it all the better to me that there were women supporting other women and helping them in their career aspirations at that time. That was great.

Megan:

It’s proof that we should be doing that today. I think the food bloggers have totally tapped into that cause we’re primarily women obviously. But I think all of these amazing conferences that are popping up are just, they give us more reason to do that and more ability to tap into each other. It is so important once you start doing that, things take off and there’s such immense value in it. So I love that your mom found that. I mean, back then, I don’t know how old your mom was or is, but back then, I just think, that is so cool that she knew to do that. That’s awesome. So inspiring for you too. That had to have an effect and an impact on you being an entrepreneur. What is your journey with working and how did you decide to step out into this world?

Susie:

Well, I wanted to follow the trajectory because it’s interesting. I think my form of rebellion having grown up in a family of entrepreneurs was that I wanted a husband with a stable nine to five. I thought that was the way, you know what I mean? I was like, oh, this is going to be so nice because we worked so hard as a family of entrepreneurs. We worked hard and I was like, oh, it’s nine to five. He could be home on the weekends and not have to think about work and take a break. So I met my husband in college. He graduated and went on to get his CPA and worked as an auditor for years. I graduated and I was like, okay, we’re going to have kids. I’m going to be a stay at home mom. We had our first baby.

I think within that first months of me being a stay-at-home parent, I started to get a little bit stir crazy and realizing, okay, this is amazing. This is fantastic, but I need something for myself. I need something creative. I need some kind of outlet and I have always worked my whole life. I think I really just wanted a reason to not have to do the dishes as often. Oh hey, I had to work today. I couldn’t do the dishes. We were dirt poor by the way. So, so broke. First kid, young couple, one income. Just trying to make ends meet. We had a mortgage, we bought our first house. I had my first kid. I thought, what’s something that I can do to kind of stretch myself and challenge myself, but also help supplement the family income.

I had been using coupons like crazy because like I said, we were dirt poor. I’d been following this blogger and she was sharing all these amazing coupon deals. They were really helping my family save money on our groceries every month. She posted on her site that she was looking to hire somebody to help her do different things on the website. I thought, well, I have no qualifications for this whatsoever, but I read her website a lot. I could probably figure it out. So I sent in an email and applied for this position and got a job with her writing her grocery store coupon match-ups every week. So I would take my coupons that I got in the mail and take them to four different grocery stores and take pictures of the products on the shelves and match them up with the coupons and write posts on how people could do grocery store coupon shopping for her website.

I legitimately knew nothing about blogging. She was on a WordPress site. It all looked like gibberish to me on the backend. I have a psychology degree. I could uncode the human mind better than I can figure out the backside of a WordPress webpage. I had to learn on the job. My husband taught me that if I hit shift and enter, it would put in just a single space instead of two. I’m not kidding. He taught me how to hyperlink. I knew nothing. I knew absolutely nothing. So it was really nice of this blogger to give me a shot. So I learned a lot working for her. I learned the backside of a WordPress website. I knew how to format posts. I watched a lot on how she shared on social media. She was big on affiliate links. So I learned about affiliate linking and sponsored posts.

I learned essentially that a blog can generate revenue. There is a way for this to be run as a business. That was a very big deal to me. So I did that for years and it was just my little side hustle that I got to do while my kids were napping and we kept having babies and supporting our income. After a couple of years, that transitioned into a job where I was helping a grill company. Well, they reached out to one of my friends and she said, you know what? I have somebody that would be perfect for this. She’s been working in the blogging space forever. She’s a huge foodie. They needed somebody to help get their recipe blog up and running for their barbecue that they manufactured. So that when people bought the grill, they could come back to the website and have a reason to be there for free content and recipes. Blogs were a big deal seven years ago.

It was very buzzy seven years ago. So, I started writing content for them and helped them get their website, their blog up and running because of what I had learned working for this other blogger, which was really cool. Then that job transitioned into another part-time job where I was helping manage social media for a startup company. So I kind of hit all of the bases of recipe development for the barbecue blog, earning money blogging from the coupon and deal blog. Then the social stuff side of things from this little startup that I had been working for. When all of those jobs kind of ended as a lot of contractor part-time work eventually transitioned, or I had to decide what I wanted to do and did I want to keep working for other people?

My youngest was one and I was like, okay, this might be a chance for me to give it a little bit more of my time and a little bit more of my attention. Especially in the barbecue space, this was the real catalyst for me to jump into my own thing, as I’d been writing recipes with the byline of S. Bulloch. Nobody even knew that I was a female writing all of these recipes. Also I’m self-taught in the barbecue space. I knew the blogging stuff, but I didn’t know anything about barbecue. So when they dropped off the smoker on my porch and said, okay, great, we want five recipes a week starting Monday. I had to learn everything immediately on my own. The resources online at that time were very limited. Truly what was out there was written, I would say 98%, even just in the last decade, if you can believe it, by males in the barbeque space. I mean, I wouldn’t call it exclusive.

There just weren’t a lot of women publicly in the space and there were some women on the competition circuit and there were some female cookbook authors and restaurant owners. But in the content space online, there just was not much. Every cookbook I went to buy, most of them were written by males. Some of the verbiage created a lot of barriers of entry to get into the barbecue world. So when it came time to start my site, I knew there was a gap in the marketplace for somebody writing recipes that were approachable barbecue. Because I was a mom with three kids and we loved cooking on our smoker. Like we loved everything about it. We loved the community. We loved how it brought our family and our friends together. We loved that it was something we could dedicate time to and really see some positive results from it in our family and in our friends.

I knew I had to keep writing about barbecue. I knew that I had to not just build a blog, but a personal brand as a female in the BBQ space, so that more women could feel comfortable kind of stepping into that world and into that zone. It was incredibly terrifying. I really didn’t realize how much I appreciated not having my first name beyond all of the recipes. When I was posting on social media, having it be the name of the startup company that I was working for instead of my own name. There was a lot of doubt, a lot of, I don’t know, I’m not qualified for this. I’m going to show up in the barbecue space specifically and get laughed out of here. There’s no way anybody’s going to listen to me. So it took a little bit of mental coaxing to get myself to do it, but I just had that feeling in my gut that it had to happen and that I had to be the one to do it. So that’s what’s kind of forced me into starting my website after so many years in the blogging and social media and digital marketing space.

Megan:

Here we are. I just love hearing your story and I love how you can look back over all of the different moving parts that have led you to where you’re at today and see those as opportunities to put your whole puzzle in place. Because that first WordPress job that obviously gave you valuable skills. Then the next thing built: getting you information on barbecuing and getting you to fall in love with that. Then everything builds up to where you’re at and then even the fear, because I think that’s such a huge part of it for so many food bloggers is that we get scared and it’s that imposter syndrome that tackles us. I think it’s mostly women that deal with that, but we feel like, who am I? Like you were saying about being a woman in the barbecue space, who am I? People are going to laugh at me, but really I think that’s what makes you amazing. It makes you stand out from the 98% male barbecuers out there because you are a woman and you have community in mind and your kids and your family, and you have a different perspective. So it makes you very unique and awesome. I just love that you found that as a niche and I love your products by the way. They’re amazing.

Susie:

Thank you. I like them too, which I feel is a pretty good thing. If I’m going to be trying to sell them to people, I should probably like them.

Megan:

That’s a good sign. So I’m super interested to hear more about how your husband was able to join you in your business. I’m still working on my husband. So I’m needing some tips from you, Susie. So tell us how things went with getting him on board, because you mentioned he’s a CPA. Probably very used to a very strict nine to five ish schedule. So how did that go?

Susie:

Well, when I first was looking into starting my own website, when I had made up my mind, like, okay, I’m going to start blogging. I think I’m going to do this. Now, the first thing I did was I went to Google and I said, can food bloggers make money? I’m not kidding because I knew that deal bloggers could make money. I knew that businesses could make money from food blogs, but I wasn’t sure of the actual revenue streams for food blogging. I had no idea. So that was the first thing that I Googled because I could do this creatively as a pursuit. I think that’s great. I think it’s super important that we’re creatively invested in the work that we’re doing. But I also knew that if I was going to be able to sustain this with the time that it was going to require, I had to be able to at least make some money from it.

It had to be profitable enough to justify the time I was putting into it, because that was going to be time away from my kids’ mental time that I’m spending on this. Plus there are some financial investments with starting up a food blog, even if they’re minimal. Hosting and domains and everything. So I had to be able to justify our limited one income family, what could I make and what type of revenue could I generate as a food blogger? I’m sure most people who started a food blog at one point did the same thing. How do I actually do this? How do I generate revenue doing this? There were a series of income reports that multiple bloggers had been publishing. I stumbled upon income reports from bloggers that were sharing their financial statements of what they were able to make.

I remember reading one and they shared that they made $30,000 in a month. This is the first night that I had ever Googled anything about making money as a food blogger. My husband’s sitting in bed behind me and I turn around and I’m like, dude, $30,000 a month. This is a life-changing type of business money. This is insane. I did not know that was possible. Truly. I had no concept of what was possible in the food blogging space. He just laughed. He’s all, yeah. Okay. I was like, but listen. Most of the people that are making this kind of money as food bloggers have a team and a lot of them, their husbands are working with them. He was like, all right, here’s the deal. When you make $30,000 in a month, then we can talk about me joining you as a food blogger.

Megan:

He gave you a goal and there you go.

Susie:

That really was. So that number stuck in my mind for a very, very long time. I have made it if I make this much money and this is what will happen. This is how things will look. So it did give me a benchmark in my head of like, this is possible for them. It’s possible for me. That was all I needed. Was somebody just saying, Hey, this is possible. Then I’m like, oh great. I just had to know it was possible. Now I can go and do it. I mean, it wasn’t instantaneous for anyone ever by any stretch of the imagination. But it was just enough to have somebody say, there’s revenue available in this business and it’s possible for us to earn it. Here’s who we are and how we did it.

We’re normal people. We worked really hard. So that was the kick in the pants that I needed to get started. Then it really took him seeing, cause he’s been running my books since the beginning of my food blogging journey. We took losses the first two years on our taxes, by the way. So by the end of year two, when we were starting to see an upward trend, he was like, oh, look at you. This is great. We’re generating revenue. At the end of year two, it was New Year’s Eve. I told him, I said, you’re quitting your job this year. This is our year, you’re quitting your job. He said, that’s hilarious, no. I’m not kidding. Then I want to say the next month I had my first viral recipe. Then a couple months after that I had another viral recipe. Then I figured out what worked really well on social media for people that they would respond to and the types of recipes that I created. So I started catering my content and making these little tweaks and adjustments. He quit his job in December of that year. So it took him two weeks before the end of the year, he quit his job, which is crazy.

Megan:

So you’re right. You were right all along.

Susie:

It was a self fulfilling prophecy, but he really had to see the financials and he had to see how much we’ve grown year over year. He had to see the money coming in the bank.

Megan:

That’s smart. That’s very smart.

Susie:

Now I say we’re real risk takers, but I mean, it was really calculated. By the time he was willing to leave his job, we had over six months of living expenses saved up in the bank. So that, were something to happen, were Google to explode and the internet and delete all of our content that we’d ever made or like in the worst case scenario. If we stopped generating any revenue at all, for whatever reason, we have six months that we can bank that we can like get through.

Megan:

Yeah, no, that’s smart. That’s very smart.

Susie:

So it’s always a risk when you transition jobs in any way, whether you’re moving from one job to another. One company to another. It’s also a risk to stay in a job that you’ve been in for a long time, because you never know if their company is going to be stable or not.

But we calculated the risks. He felt comfortable and confident. He actually gave it to his boss. He’s like, I need you to know I’m probably going to leave this year. He was in a smaller firm at that time. He was working for a private company. So he gave them plenty of time to hire and train his replacement and it worked out beautifully, but it was still scary.

Megan:

Of course.

Susie:

The biggest transition point was just seeing what was possible for his own eyes and not just reading something that he saw on the internet. For him, that wasn’t enough permission. He needed to actually see the dollars in the bank and the ability for us to support our family. We calculated everything. How much is it going to cost for us to buy our own insurance? How much is it going to cost for us to run everything for the website so that we have our website expenses every month.

So it was a pretty calculated decision, even though it feels now like it was still so risky. It was not a smooth transition either. When he quit his job, we really didn’t know what he was going to do with the blog. So we brought him on with the idea that he would take over lead parenting of our children, which would free me up for several more hours a day to work on the website. So that was the initial transition. That he was going to help with a couple of things on the website during his fringe hours when he could. In between running kids to school and all of those things. He didn’t really like anything in the blogging space. He tried SEO. He didn’t love SEO. He edited our videos for a while. We found that he needed his own ownership of what we were doing and not just coming in and me giving him random tasks and assignments to do.

That wasn’t super great. It was a pretty difficult transition to go from main breadwinner to supplementary employee slash dishwasher. Yeah, it was a big adjustment for us and the money was scary and I was on a work conference trip in April. So he’d been home for almost four months and I came back and he was like, uh, it was, I was looking for jobs this week. He had a small moment of panic. It’s not an easy transition. There is a lot of adjustment that goes on. Our marriage was always great. Our marriage has always been great. We’re super lucky that way that we work really well together in our marriage. We work really well together in business, but just the reassigning of roles was a really big adjustment for us after a decade of a very traditional marriage. Does that make sense?

Megan:

It does. I am super curious about this. I loved hearing your talk because first of all, I know that a lot of husbands go into it, just really having something specific in mind that they would help out with. So back end computer help or I don’t know, just something really specific. My husband does not either. I know that we’re close to getting him to come and we could start working toward it, but I just don’t know where he would fit in or what he would start out doing. So this is really intriguing to me because I’m afraid he would get in and just say, okay, now what? He joked one day, when I start working with you, I’m going to be golfing all the time. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That is not funny. I work hard. I work really hard. So when you come on, you are going to be working. So I trained him to start thinking and he asked, oh, what am I going to be doing? So I’m curious, what are the first things that your husband started to really find passion in? What did he start enjoying?

Susie:

What we found was the best fit was he actually really took over when we went to launch our product line. He has majority ownership of our product company because he has taken that from nothing into what it is. He built everything. It was essentially my recipes and my creative input. He had ownership over everything else. Which was a really great, I think transition point for us because after trying to fit him into all of these food blogger boxes for so long, and he already had a business skill set and I think a lot of men come when they do. I don’t know if you know about this, but there’s a food blogger dudes group.

Megan:

No.

Susie:

That Todd’s an admin of. So if anybody is listening and they have a husband too, is food blogging as a dude, what do we do? I think their catch phrase is, I guess I’m a food blogger now.

Megan:

I love it. What a great idea.

Susie:

So if you have a husband that is interested, you need to make sure to find Todd on Facebook and he will get you into the food blogging dudes group. But that’s helped a lot. What we’ve found is husbands typically come with a preexisting skillset from their previous businesses. So we really were able to utilize that. Todd does all of our bookkeeping, like I said. He is fantastic at inventory and he’s fantastic at tracking all of these points of data. He just runs with that, which is really nice. What I thought would happen in my mind was like, oh, he’s going to come. It’s going to be so much easier for me because I can offload all of these tasks I don’t want to do. But turns out he didn’t want them either. You know what I mean? So he said, so I just get all the crap that you don’t want.

I’m like, essentially. He’s like, this is terrible. That didn’t work for very long, but we communicated about that. We were able to talk about that and make some changes. Now I think we’re both in a really great space where I’m mostly doing things that I love. Like you mentioned at the beginning, we have two full-time employees now that we’ve hired and brought on with us and they both enjoy their jobs so much. They’re both things that I never wanted to do. I was like, nobody’s going to want these jobs cause I don’t want them. But there are people that legitimately enjoy things.

Megan:

And are better at them.

Susie:

So Todd and I are in a place right now where we get to do work that we really like to do, which is very fun and very exciting. He has a lot of ownership over our product company called Patio Provisions. We have some really exciting things in the works over there. We launched with the Hey Grill, Hey rubs and sauces. Because that was kind of the easiest point of entry for us into the physical product space that made the most sense. But now we’re working on engineering and inventing new products for the barbecue and grilling space. He’s heading that up and that allows him to be really creative. So it’s been really fun. But I would say it has been a process. It has been nearly two years since he quit his job.

Megan:

Wow, that’s so cool.

Susie:

I know I can’t even believe it. But I would say the first four to six months were constant adjustment of, okay, let’s try this. Okay, let’s try this. Okay. Let’s try this. We just had to keep communicating the whole time.

Megan:

The great thing about food blogging space is that there’s so much opportunity. Doing the rubs and the new venture that you guys are on now, who would have ever thought that in the beginning. When you first brought him on, did you have any idea that that would be in your scope? Probably not. I just love that and I want to point that out for myself and for any food blogger who might have those doubts about bringing a husband on, that there is like so much that this job can turn into, don’t limit yourself to you’re doing the dishes and taking out my garbage because new things pop up all the time. So there’s opportunity everywhere.

Susie:

Yep. I think that’s fun for us to think about food bloggers too. Because if you would’ve told me10 years ago, when I was writing coupon match-ups, what I learned in the back of a WordPress site would be helping me today. You can’t see how all the puzzle pieces fit together when you’re just in one of the pieces. You know what I mean? Sometimes it takes a lot of time to be able to step and look back and see what has led you to that point. I think our husbands or our partners or our employees need to have that same opportunity to grow and to be a piece in the puzzle and then take a big picture look. Then be another piece in the puzzle and take a big picture look and find their own place.

Well for me and I’m not going to speak for all food bloggers, but for me, I was, Hey Grill, Hey. Like I am Hey Grill, Hey. This is my name. My name is literally in the logo of the website. My pictures on the homepage, my profile picture is on all of the social media accounts. So there’s this weird sense of ownership and this weird sense of control over all of the little details and all of us start out as solopreneurs. All of us start out as just one person with an idea and a goal and a lot of really hard work. So when it comes time to bring on an employee or a spouse or a partner, it can be hard to know what to relinquish. So that’s what I was doing. I was just relinquishing all the little things that I thought he could help with, but maybe weren’t that important and weren’t that valuable. If something went wrong, it wouldn’t cause a big deal. But what that did was strip him of any ownership in the company and any personal investment.

Megan:

Absolutely. But then I totally related to what you said earlier about, this is you. This is your face, this is your brand. This is what you have worked so hard to start. I relate to that. Sometimes I’ll be working on something and I think, if my husband were in this project with me and telling me how to do it, I would be mad. I’d be like, no. Because we do what we work so hard. I would just have such a hard time with him coming in and saying, we need to change this. So I worry about that. But having new opportunities. I love that your husband just found something and ran with it and was really passionate about it. So I think it’s a matter of just doing that and please let me do my own thing. Let me keep being creative and producing my content. Don’t tell me what to do.

Susie:

It’s hard because in marriage, we’re partners and in business we’re partners, but how equal is the division? We laugh because we literally had to sit down with a legal team and define the percentages for business ownership. Because that’s what you do when you own a business. We were building a new business. We have three companies now. We have our product company, we have Hey Grill, Hey and we have the IP company that owns all of the trademarks and the licensing agreements and all of that. The recipes for our products. So we had to go in and define, we literally had to put a number value on how much of this do you own?

Megan:

Yeah. I think that’s really smart. I mean, it’s hard to have to think like that. But honestly I think just being smart like that upfront is good practice for your marriage.

Susie:

You have to have good humor. We went into it laughing and we knew it was going to be the worst and also the best. It’s been fantastic because for us having those clearly defined roles has been very, very important. We both know what we’re responsible for and what we’re in charge of. We both have ownership over the things that we want to have ownership over. So that kind of gives us that, I don’t know. There’s a lot of accountability that comes with owning something instead of just being given tasks and feeling like you’re a little bit on the sidelines. So that was very crucial for us. Sure he jumped ship on a corporate career and technically he was an entrepreneur and we were doing this together, but I don’t think it was really until he had ownership over something, over a piece. It doesn’t have to be a completely new business, but ownership over a piece of the business that you have that we really both felt more satisfied and more fulfilled and more happy and more motivated because we were both owners.

Megan:

Over something. So I think the bottom line is just going into it, knowing that it takes time, it’s going to take time and it’s going to take some struggle. It’s not going to be super smooth. Just a matter of figuring it out and figuring out your roles. I like what you said, taking ownership over a project. I know for my husband that would really help cause he does, he likes to feel like he’s important. I think a lot of people do, especially men. I am adding value.

Susie:

We all do. I think that’s just such a human condition is you want to feel valued and you want to feel important and you want to have some sense of control and ownership over your life.

Megan:

Yeah, absolutely. Not being told to do the dishes. I know I’ve joked with him. Someday you’re going to be doing my dishes and he’s like, no, I’m not. He just likes to fight back on that. Then I have to stop and think, well yeah, I wouldn’t want someone to tell me you’re going to be doing my dishes. I have to kind of look at it from his perspective too.

Susie:

To be fair, Todd does all of my dishes.

Megan:

That’s a dream.

Susie:

Really. I’m not kidding. I think I started working so that I could do the dishes less. They are my nemesis and they have been since my whole life. I don’t know. I’m terrible at dishes.

Megan:

I hate dishes. They are. It is actually on my goal board, that is right next to me. One of my goals for the next three months, my due date is 12/31 is to quote, figure out the dish situation.

Susie:

No, it’s a real thing.

Megan:

It’s like a constant struggle for me. Why can’t I figure this out?

Susie:

No, it’s a real situation.

Megan:

So you have a dream situation.

Susie:

I do. I do have a dream situation with the dish doer of a husband.

Megan:

I love it. Okay. So let’s move on just a little bit. Let’s chat about ways that we can encourage entrepreneurs who have that fiery burning passion to just kill it with their businesses. As you know, Susie, this journey is not always easy. It’s super fun, but sometimes it’s really hard too. So give us your best advice to encourage us to keep killing it with our entrepreneurial dreams.

Susie:

I think my best advice would be don’t make big decisions in a dark moment because entrepreneurship is like you said, it’s a journey and it is fun, but it’s not all joy. The flip side, it shouldn’t be all stress and sorrow either. So I think a lot of times we hit those dips. We hit those down moments. You know, Todd went and looked for a job when he was feeling down and I was out of town. I have threatened to quit and burned down the website nine times. I think I quit blogging like seven times in year two. I’m not kidding, for like a month. I’m all burnout. Done. Quit. It’s over. I’m not putting anything new up because there’s no inspiration and there’s no joy in it. Luckily I didn’t delete it. I didn’t make any big decisions in those dark moments, you know?

So I think that’s important to remember is the highs that we experience as entrepreneurs, those beautiful, bright gleaming moments where we feel like the heavens have opened and we are on our path and we have found our purpose and this is the right place for us, are fleeting. That’s okay. So were the dark times. No one’s ever going to be operating in a state of their business where a hundred percent of the time it’s bliss. Even if you hire stuff out that you don’t like. Even if your husband comes and works for you. Even if you hit that next milestone and figure out the dish situation. You know? You’re going to have a great while where you’re like, oh, this is the best and you’re riding that high and then something’s going to happen and you’re going to dip again. I think entrepreneurship is just surviving those failures, surviving those dark moments.

But there’s a quote that I just live by and it says, “True success is just going from failure to failure, without any loss of enthusiasm.” If you can just hold on through the dark times and get used to failing, get used to some of the ups and downs and acknowledge that there’s going to be lows and there’s going to be highs and there’s going to be a lot of middle time. But that’s totally fine. That’s part of the process. What you see on social media is people killing it. What you hear online is people, oh my gosh, I just did this, this, this. Let’s celebrate together. That’s great and we celebrate with those people and we share those moments. But not everyone, especially in the business coaching or people who are trying to sell you advice on blogging, which there are a ton out there. A lot of them are super useful, but they’re selling you on those high moments, right? The blissful beautiful moments when this entrepreneurship journey is great and you’re living a fulfilled creative life and they don’t talk about the dark times they almost quit too. Or they sold their own businesses or they shut it down for a month because they just can’t that day. But it’s okay to have those times. I just say, don’t make any big decisions in the dark times.

Megan:

I like that. That’s very important. Just take a step back and you use the visual too, of being a puzzle. I use that visual all the time because every single piece, even the dark moments, even the tough moments, the moments that you want to burn your website down, they’re all a part of the puzzle. And when you step back and look at it, it’s going to be beautiful. But that puzzle piece needs to be there. It’s really hard. I know. But embracing that somehow, I think you can get more comfortable with it just by doing it over and over, but just like embracing. I don’t do this all the time, but sometimes when I’m in a dark period, I’ll be like, okay, this is where I’m supposed to be right now. I don’t know why. I have no idea why, but I just need to sit with it and embrace it. It helps. It gives you peace somehow. So I think that’s really a great thing to say, thank you for pointing that out, Susie.

Susie:

We’re here. It’s terrible. It’ll be fine later. It always turns around. Right? This is something I tell my kids all the time, that nothing is permanent. No emotion is permanent. The happiest you’ll ever be will someday change into you not being that happy. The saddest you’ll ever be will someday change into you not being that sad. Our emotions as human beings are just not that permanent. There’s a lot of shifting and that’s true in the entrepreneur space too. So just be okay with it, be okay with it. There’s going to be crappy times and live for the moments that are great and acknowledge that, guess what? It’s the same in any other business. Like whether you’re an entrepreneur or whether you’re employed, you’re not happy every day and you’re not sad every day. There’s highs and lows in every business and in every type of job that you have. Especially as entrepreneurs, I think we just feel it really deeply as entrepreneurs because we’re very present and we’re very aware and when we’re feeling dark and we don’t want to post, it’s our business that kind of sees that. So I think we’re just hyper aware of it in this space.

Megan:

So true. So I want to talk a little bit about diversifying income because you and your husband have done that so well. You’ve talked a little bit about him kind of taking ownership over those projects. How did you decide to go into the rubs? Can you talk us through that a little bit?

Susie:

Sure. We have this history when things go really well and we see a big jump up in one space. Our next goal is to go out a little bit. So instead of just focusing on one vertical and going straight up, we tend to build out because I think that’s his very conservative CPA side, which is having multiple streams of income. So that not all of our eggs are in one basket. One thing that I saw early on in my food blogging career, especially as I’m a part of Facebook groups or go to conferences or have meetups with people and chat with them is I would hear it over and over, oh, the Pinterest algorithm changed. I lost 80% of my traffic in four months. That frightened me. Or, oh! Facebook changed the way that they show certain content. I lost so much of my traffic or whatever the thing was.

So my first goal is to build multiple traffic streams. If something took a dump and was nose diving into the ground, I could have other sources of traffic that I could use to keep us afloat. So that was when I first really thought about diversifying how we made money. Yes, the money was still coming from the ad revenue on the website, but it was coming from multiple sources. People were getting to the site from multiple sources. So that’s when I first started thinking about diversifying revenue streams. Then as we built up the website traffic, we realized, great, we have multiple traffic sources, but that’s our only revenue stream. If CPMs take a nose dive back to where they were or any number of myriads of things that could change in the advertising market, what does that leave us looking like? What other revenue streams are there?

So we started looking into affiliate marketing. We started looking into doing sponsored work, then that kind of triggered our brains. We’re thinking creatively about other ways that we could look at generating revenue outside of the website itself. That’s kind of how the thought process started, it started just small. How do we diversify our traffic streams? Okay. Now how do we diversify our revenue stream so that it’s not all coming from ad revenue? So, our main revenue streams right now are the ad revenue on, Hey Grill, Hey, affiliate income sponsored income. Then we launched last year, a membership portion of our website, which we’re currently revamping. We launched it as a subscription platform where people would pay and it would renew every year. We were adding new content that was exclusive to the members that paid for the bonus content.

We’re revamping that now into more of a course based model instead of subscription-based model. So that’s paused right now, but we still have our core group of people there. So that was really fun. That’s called the Grill Squad. So we’ll be relaunching that at the beginning of next year, as we build it out into more of a course-based format. So that was the digital space. Then we thought, okay, so we feel like we’ve touched points on most of the revenue streams in the digital space that we can with our sphere of influence. So how do we get into a more traditional business model as another source of income so that if you know online, I know it sounds like fear-mongering. If the world falls apart, how will we pay for our children’s food? Now we’ve established this, how can we go out a little bit further?

So that’s what kind of encouraged us to launch the rub and sauce line. It’s been something that I’ve been talking about for a long time, but when we were like, okay, physical products, traditional business. What on earth are we going to do? We have a friend who said, well, what do people ask you for? What do people want from you? You know what I mean? Our readers over and over again, we’ve had recipes on our website. One specifically was our sweet rub. This traditional barbecue seasoning. It’s really delicious. It was probably my most popular recipe early on. We would get comments from people all the time. Hi, do you sell this anywhere? I don’t want to buy the eight ingredients or the 10 ingredients or whatever it takes to make it. I’d love to just have a bottle ready to go.

So that was our first real foray into what to make, was what people were asking for. What did people want from us? So we did some research and we asked our people, especially in our Grill Squad, they’ve been super helpful. We have this core little group of super fans. So we asked them, what would you want to see? What flavors would you like? What sizes do you want? How much should it cost? They are a little test to market and really helped us flesh out what we were going to be making and what that would look like. We were lucky enough to find people here locally in Utah that can manufacture for us. Then the first run we did all of the fulfillment and shipping ourselves. It was the middle of December, right before Christmas. It was insane.

So in the next round, we got really smart and we hired somebody to do all of our fulfillment for us. It’s been a whole learning process, but now we say, okay. So we have revenue that we’re generating from the rubs and the sauces. How do we expand our physical product? Our history and our pattern is to establish one source of revenue, get that to a point where it’s fairly consistent and then go out and then see what the viable sources of revenue are there. Then when we see one rising, how do we build that out a little bit more? That’s just been our pattern over time. So that’s been the process that led us to the physical product space, just looking at how we can generate multiple streams of revenue in multiple different facets of business.

Megan:

So really you guys just started with what you knew about your website and you just took one step at a time. I think a lot of people think of diversifying income, we need to think so far ahead and do this massive project. But it doesn’t have to be like that. We can just start where we’re at and look at that. If you’re getting a lot of your traffic from Pinterest, okay, start there. Let’s look at going into SEO. Then once you feel like you’ve nailed a few different aspects of traffic, then look at maybe digital marketing. I love that perspective. I think that’s a really refreshing one for food bloggers because we hear such big scale things that are going on that we get overwhelmed. I could never do that. I’ll just focus on Pinterest.

Susie:

That’s the thing that we discovered too, is that it’s just one thing at a time. Our path led us to where we are because of what our audience asks for and what we like to do. Todd loved the process of figuring out how to source bottles and find somebody to print labels. That was a really exciting work and project for him to take on. So it was a natural fit, but that might not be the case. For other bloggers who are looking to expand, when I said, I think we should do affiliate marketing. I signed up for one affiliate program to learn the ropes. Do you know what I mean? Oh, we should do sponsored work. I don’t know what it looks like. One thing we say, this is our life motto right now is we just take one step further into the dark. Then we feel around with our eyes closed. Did we stab our toes on anything? Okay, okay. Your eyes adjust a little bit. Then you take one step further into the dark and you don’t know what it’s going to be, but you can always take a step back at any point. You know what I mean? Very few things are so high risk in this space that you risk losing everything. Especially if you already have a good base and you’re just looking to expand out.

Megan:

Yeah, for sure. I love that analogy that you just said. There’s always room to turn around. You can always turn around if it’s too much or too scary. You can step back, breathe a little bit. Then also just pointing out what you said about listening to what, not only what you’re good at, but what your audience is wanting. I love that a friend said to you, well, what are people asking you for? That made you think, well there’s this rub that people always ask me for. Maybe there’s something simple like that waiting for all of us. I’m sure there is, just as you were talking, I was like, oh, a lot of people ask me for that.

Susie:

Yeah. What is your thing? What do people want from you? What can you provide for them, truly, that will make their lives better. We apply this to every facet of our businesses. We want to reduce those barriers of entry into the barbecue space. We want to help people make better barbecue. The reason we want to help them make better barbecue, so that they can feed the people that they love and bring people closer together. If having those rubs and sauces premade for them made it easier for them to cook better barbecue and feed the people they love, then fantastic. So that’s the metric. Is this going to help our people ultimately accomplish that end goal of spending time with their family around the table? Because that’s our biggest motivator. So we filter all of our attempts at things through that lens.

Megan:

That’s so smart. I love that. Before we say goodbye, Susie, this has been so fun. Since I secretly bonded with you during your speech at Tastemaker over having read, Thinking Grow Rich. I have to tell you a few of my favorite quotes from the book. Is that okay? Because nobody else will listen to me on this topic. So I’m sure all food bloggers are like really, but I love it. I know you dig it.

Susie:

All of the food bloggers, just go read it. It is old and it is weird. It is also really great.

Megan:

Yeah. There are parts of it that are just really odd. But overall, I was like, I dig it. I read it a few times.

Susie:

I think you need the weird parts. I don’t know.

Megan:

Okay. So a few of my favorites are, “the starting point of all achievement is desire. Keep this constantly in mind, weak desire brings weak results. Just a small fire makes a small amount of heat.” Love that one. Another one, “whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”

Susie:

Like I literally made my husband quit his job because I just thought that he could.

Megan:

You declared a timeframe even. And it happened!

Susie:

Yeah. Yeah! That’s real actual life voodoo right there.

Megan:

I am with you. Okay. I have a couple more. “Our only limitations are those we set up in our minds.” It goes along with the last one I just read. So true. If you limit yourself, you are going to happen. You’re going to be limited.” Do not wait. The time will never be just right. Start where you stand and work with whatever tools you may have at your command and better tools will be found as you go along.” Kind of like your thing with being in the dark and taking a step and feeling around. There are better tools there. So keep going.

Susie:

Listen. I’m going to tell you a real life story about how that’s true. So when we first decided to launch this subscription program, the tools out there that existed to integrate that into a WordPress page were almost non-existent and they were not great tools. So we set it up and we were like, all right, this is what we have for now. We’re going to make it work because we’re not going to just wait on this. We know it’s a good idea. We know it’s going to work. So we used, you know, the software and the resources that were available and it was fine. We hobbled through. Now we’re a couple of years down the road and we’re ready to revamp and redesign and rework our subscription model into a course platform. Do you know how many resources are available now? The tools have literally become available and opened the doors for what we want to do for this next core space. I don’t think we would have found them had we not started when we did, building out this program, truly, 18 months ago.

Megan:

So start where you are. Just start with what you have. What’s in front of you? Don’t think too big. Sometimes just try to yeah look at what’s right around you.

Susie:

As you continue to grow, the tools that you need to expand and grow, they truly will become available to you. It’s crazy.

Megan:

It is crazy but so true. Okay. My last quote is probably my favorite. “Fear, the worst of all enemies, can be effectively cured by forced repetition of acts of courage.” Love that one.

Susie:

Yeah, but that one’s hard.

Megan:

It is the hardest one, but it’s the best one. It is so hard. Before we say goodbye, Susie, I have to say that we have some friends here in Minneapolis that love your products and he talks about your stuff all the time. So I have to give Kurt a shout out. I know he’s part of your community.

Susie:

Hey Kurt! We’re incredibly lucky to have found people that are awesome. I think your vibe attracts your tribe. We try intentionally to be awesome so that the people that will be around us will be awesome.

Megan:

Yes, seriously. Sometimes I look around me and I’m like, I am so grateful. I have just the best husband and kids and friends. I feel like I have that because I’m so grateful for it. You know those people who just complain all the time, I hate my friends or why is everyone so negative? What you put out really does matter.

Susie:

That works in your business and in your personal life too. What you’re putting out will attract a certain type of person. Are you bringing the right people to you?

Megan:

For sure. That goes with just followers you get from Pinterest or Google too. That goes for everything, everybody. Oh, I love it. I could talk all day, but I suppose I should let you go. So thank you Susie, for taking this time out today and chatting with me. I’m super grateful for this conversation. Do you have any extra quotes or words of inspiration? I’m going to just squeeze as much out of you as I can.

Susie:

Hold on. I have to find it. My friend Richie is insane and I think he just got nominated as one of the top 100 business coaches. Todd was lucky enough to go with him to China earlier this year, while we were looking at building out our product line. We’re working on inventing some new products in the manufacturing process. We just didn’t know. We didn’t know what that was going to look like. So he went to China with Richie who owns a product company and I’m trying to find the quote that he just dropped this week, but it blew my mind. He’s on Instagram. If you guys want to follow him, he’s awesome.

Megan:

What’s his account?

Susie:

Richie_Norton. Okay. So here’s his quote. Are you guys ready? “There is nothing sweeter than not caring at all what other people think of you.” I just feel like that’s so true because we spend a lot of time, especially in our younger years, in our more formative years, being very invested in what other people think of us. Those thoughts creep with us throughout our lives. There’s just a lot of joy and a lot of freedom when you can just ditch that fear of being concerned of what other people are going to think and really be courageous and do what you want to do and what feels true to you and what feels right to you. There are a lot of people in the food blogging space or when we take paths that aren’t traditional. I can’t say that my food blogging path is traditional or that it looks like anybody else’s path in the food blogging space, right? My goals are not the same as any food blogger next to me.

Especially in food blogging, because it’s so new, we tend to look at what other people are doing as gospel or what one SEO expert says or what one Pinterest teacher says in one class one time. We take it as gospel because we’re so desperate to grow and to build out our business. It’s important to be on top of trends that become more important than just what we like and what we want to do and being true to who we are. It’s just really sweet when you stop caring what other people think and do what feels best for you in your business and with the decisions that you’re making personally. It’s just really great.

Megan:

Love it, Susie. That was amazing. Well, thanks again. Susie has a list of resources relating to things that we’ve talked about today, in today’s episode. These can be found on her show notes page at eatblogtalk.com/heygrillhey. Susie, tell my listeners the best place to find you online.

Susie:

You can find this on our blog heygrillhey.com. If you would like to learn about barbecue and grilling things on social media on Instagram, it’s at @heygrillhey.

Megan:

Awesome. Well, thanks again, Susie. Thank you for listening today, food bloggers. I will see you next time.

Outro:

We’re glad you could join us on this episode of Eat Blog Talk. For more resources based on today’s discussion, as well as show notes and an opportunity to be on a future episode of the show, be sure to head to eatblogtalk.com. If you feel that hunger for information, we’ll be here to feed you on Eat Blog Talk.


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Megan
Megan

Megan started her food blog Pip and Ebby in 2010 and food blogging has been her full-time career since 2013. Her passion for blogging has grown into an intense desire to help fellow food bloggers find the information, insight, and community they need in order to find success.

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