Episode 723: Solopreneur to CEO – Build a Strategic, Sustainable Food Blog with a Powerful Team With Jessie Johnson

EBT723 – Jessie Johnson

[00:00:00]  Megan Porta 

If you are feeling stuck between that solopreneur hustle and being a full fledged CEO of your business, this episode is your roadmap forward. Jessie Johnson of Life as a Strawberry joins us to unpack what it really takes to scale from blogger to business owner. She reveals the systems her six figure team uses to stay on track, how to tame Shiny Object Syndrome, and what the Month of Little Things or Day of Little Things Things can do for your long term growth. Plus where to stash those wild ideas until you’re actually ready for them. Let’s dig in. 

[00:00:43]  

Hi food bloggers. I’m Megan Porta and this is EBlog Talk. Your space for support, inspiration and strategies to grow your blog and your freedom. Whether that’s personal, professional or financial, you are not alone on this journey.

[00:01:00]   

Maybe you are eager to join one of the Eat Blog Talk Mastermind groups, but not quite ready to make the full investment.The Eay Blog Talk Accountability Group could be the perfect solution for you. For just $34 a month, you’ll be part of a supportive community that offers weekly accountability check ins, a private Slack channel, live productivity sessions, and monthly zoom calls. With fellow bloggers and me, Megan Porta. We are here to help you stay on track, stay motivated and connected as you build your brand and work towards your big blogging.If you are ready to move forward without the pressure of a huge commitment, visit eatblogtalk.com/focus and claim your spot today. 

[00:01:38]  Megan Porta

Jessie, welcome. I’m so happy to have you on the podcast. How are you today?

[00:01:42]  Jessie Johnson 

I’m so good. Thank you for having me. I’m excited to chat. Yay.

[00:01:46]  Megan Porta 

Me too. Your beautiful website is just amazing. I know I’ve peeked at it before but I brought it up today and was just like oh my gosh. So beautiful. The photos, everything just comes together. So great. So nice job. I do want to ask you about your site a little bit, but before we get to that, do you have a fun fact to share with us?

[00:02:07]  Jessie Johnson 

Yeah. Not very many people know this, but I’m actually a pretty classically trained singer so I have been. My dad is a classical pianist and so I was in music lessons very early and I ended up doing a lot of classical voice training as an alto and ended up in choirs through my 20s and I actually got to travel quite a bit doing concerts in.I think I’ve been to eight different countries for music stuff. That’s so cool. That’s my kind of secret before life.

[00:02:35]  Megan Porta 

That’s like just one of those things. I am not a singer at all. So every time I hear someone sing well, it’s just like, oh my gosh, it’s so. Just amazing and miraculous to me that people can do that. Do you sing a lot still?

[00:02:48]  Jessie Johnson 

A little, Yeah. I mostly I like to describe my piano skills as like aggressively. Okay. So I still have a piano and I play and I sing a little bit, but not anywhere near the level I was at before. I did a lot of Renaissance stuff. So it’s a lot of like very old classical, Italian and Latin and kind of the all those language beautiful, very Renaissance haunting pieces.

[00:03:11]  Megan Porta 

But yeah, that’s incredible. Wow. Yeah. So cool to know that about you. And I guess to frame our conversation today because we’re going to talk about your journey and just how to do strategic planning and build a team for success once you’re a full time food blogger. Just to outline that, would you mind telling us a little bit about your blog Life as a Strawberry.

[00:03:35]  Jessie Johnson 

I started Life as a Strawberry when I graduated from college in 2012. And before that I had grown up in kitchens. My grandma baked wedding cakes and my mom was a caterer for a long time. And then through high school and college, I also volunteered a lot in community kitchens. So kitchens that would make fresh food at like a food bank or a food pantry.

[00:03:56]   

And so I kind of grew up in kitchens doing cooking and food outreach work. And then in undergrad, my academic work was all focused on sustainable food systems and food security specifically. And by the time I finished undergrad, I knew I wanted to go to grad school for more food systems work. But I took a year off to work and save money.

[00:04:16]   

And I had heard of these new things called food blogs and thought they were really fun. And I had bought a camera on a random Black Friday sale the year before that I had really not used very much. And so I was like, I’m going to start a food blog that’s going to give me a chance to keep my feet kind of in the food world while I was doing a lot of nonprofit work in the interim.

[00:04:36]   

And it’ll give me a good excuse to use my camera and I’ll get to talk about food and that’ll make me more competitive for grad schools. And so it was really just a fun hobby that gave me an excuse to keep talking about food. And so I started it, I kind of just posted recipes as I thought of them, Ended up moving to New York for grad school, kept the blog going through grad school, and then by the time I finished my master’s the blog was making almost as much as I would have expected to make at an entry level nonprofit job.

[00:05:05]   

And I had done my master’s work in public administration, focusing again on food systems and specifically snap, which is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly food stamps. And so I at that point was like, maybe I just do this for a minute and see where that goes. And so I went full time with Life as a Strawberry in 2015, and now it’s a decade later, and here we are.

[00:05:32]   

So it started. Yeah, it really had no focus. It was just me posting recipes mostly for, like, my mom and my then boyfriend, now husband, and, you know, the two people I worked with who were reading them. And, uh, it snowballed in a way I absolutely did not anticipate. But very, very grateful for this amazing wild 10 years.

[00:05:55]  Megan Porta 

Yeah. And that. That is a long time to sustain a food blog. Yes. Just kind of a side question, have you ever gotten to the. I don’t know. I’ve. So many times along my journey, especially in these last few years, I’ve gotten to the point where it’s kind of like burnout, like, blogger burnout. Like, this is so much for so long. Do you know what I mean? Like, can I keep sustaining this? Yeah.

[00:06:18]  Jessie Johnson 

Yes, 100%. I think anything that you do for this long of a stretch is gonna get old in some ways eventually. And I think that’s one of the challenges, is one to keep it feeling exciting and new and fresh, but also figuring out what the pieces are that you really do love and doubling down on those and kind of handing off or letting go of the stuff that is not making you wake up filled with joy to do your job.

[00:06:46]  Megan Porta 

Yeah. And that’s a big piece of the puzzle right there for keeping a sustainable business afloat, I think is just exactly what you just said. And thankfully, food blogging lends to a lot of different options. I mean, there’s so much involved in it, photography and writing and. And creating recipes. And so, yeah, usually it’s not too hard to find something that can still bring you joy.I imagine you’ve grown a team over the years. Can you talk about your team?

[00:07:15]  Jessie Johnson 

So I. In 2017, I think, is when I made my very first hire. And like a lot of people, I started with a virtual assistant, a VA. I had been doing everything all by myself for five years at that point, but two years full time, and it was a lot, and I was definitely hitting kind of a burnout wall.And so I decided to bring somebody on to help me with kind of the administrative stuff and a little bit of social media. And so I hired a VA and she was great and we worked together for about two years. And then in 2019, I started building out a full time team. And then today at our biggest, our team has been about 12 people.

[00:07:54]   

And today we’re actually the smallest team that we’ve had in a really long time because we had a couple of people move on like within three months of each other in the last few months. And so we are kind of at this strange point again of really just being a couple people and getting to decide, you know, have a lot of conversations about what, what do we want our team to look like over the next five years and do we want to just fill positions that have recently been opened or do we want to, you know, kind of start shifting ourselves in new directions?

[00:08:24]   

Yeah. 2019, I hired my first two full time people and so right now it’s me full time and I have a full time director of operations. And then we also typically have a part time customer happiness specialist who does a lot of answering emails and comments. And she also was doing a lot of our email marketing stuff.

[00:08:43]   

And then we work with a video editor. We’ve worked with extra photographers in the past. And then we also have a professional support team. So a CPA, an attorney. I work with a business coach. So yeah, we have quite a few people in our little life as a strawberry bubble now, which is very interesting.

[00:08:58]  Megan Porta 

I love your customer happiness title. That’s the best thing ever. Oh my gosh. Right? Like, there’s so many opportunities to keep customers happy in this business. Yeah. What do you recommend for people listening who are like, I’m on the verge of needing a team or a VA, but I don’t want to invest?It’s scary. How and when do you decide to hire a team?

[00:09:24]  Jessie Johnson 

I think the first thing for us that has really informed our hiring process is where are you feeling really strained? And so I think a lot of people come to hiring, they know something has to give and they know they need help, but they don’t necessarily know what that help looks like or what is going to make the biggest difference for them.

[00:09:43]   

So a lot of people talk about, start by making a list of everything that you do in a day or in a week or a month, and all of the tasks that are associated with your business. And think about when you’re looking at that list of tasks, what do you like to do and what do you not like to do?

[00:09:56]   

And I think that’s a really good starting point. But I also would really encourage folks to do a really detailed time tracking document over the course of a week or two. Write down what you’re actually doing, because what I found is what you think you’re doing every day and what you’re actually spending time on can be very different.

[00:10:14]   

So you might think, oh my gosh, photos take me so long. I need so much help doing photos. But really, if you are tracking your day minute by minute, you’re going to maybe find that you’re spending a lot of time on Pinterest instead of picking up a camera, or you’re spending a lot of time going down a keyword research rabbit hole.

[00:10:31]   

And maybe taking some of those more tedious tasks off your plate is going to free yourself up to do the thing that you initially maybe thought is the thing that you needed help with. So that’s a really simple process. I open a Google Doc and I just make a bulleted list every single day for about two weeks of everything I do.

[00:10:48]   

And some people that I know get really granular with this. So they’ll be like 7am, wake up, brush teeth. I tend to start a little bit more just work day focused. So that might look like, you know, 8:30, answer email for 20 minutes and then at 8:50 maybe I open TikTok and then it’s an hour later and then what have I done?

[00:11:04]   

And so getting really clear about where you are spending your time and then you can kind of go through that list and group everything together and say, oh my gosh, like I spent two hours collectively on social media today. Let’s maybe put some systems in place so that I can make that time a little bit more productive.

[00:11:23]   

Or for me a big one was when I was taking my lunch break, I tended to lose momentum in the afternoon. I was trying to take a lunch break, like at a regular person lunchtime, you know, I’d be like, okay, noon, I’m going to pause. And really what I noticed when I did this kind of time tracking exercise is actually that’s like a time that I have really high energy and I need to keep going.

[00:11:43]   

So I need to change kind of where my natural breaks fall in my workday to take advantage of where I’m most productive. And so writing down seriously every single thing you do, do it for a week, at least, maybe two weeks, and then go through and kind of look for pattern. And that’ll give you a really good idea of where maybe you can make your own time a little bit more efficient, but also where it would make a lot of sense to hire somebody out and specifically looking for the pieces of your day that give you energy versus the things that drain your energy.

[00:12:14]   

So if you really don’t like keyword research, you might tend to complete that task a little bit more slowly than something you really love. And if you really like, don’t enjoy taking your own photos, you might be dragging your feet through a lot of the photography and really you want to be doing something else.So kind of getting really clear on not just what you are doing, but what you like doing and what makes you really excited. That’s a really good place to start when it’s time to hire.

[00:12:40]  Megan Porta 

Yeah. So you take some of those tasks that maybe drain you and pass them off to somebody else who’s more qualified. And also just maybe it fills them up and they do it much more efficiently than you would.

[00:12:53]  Jessie Johnson 

Yeah. So, like, for me, I do not love talking to people. I know some people who they’re like, I get so excited when I get an email from a person or when I see a comment from somebody who made our recipe that stresses me out so much. That is not the thing. That is not the piece that I love.

[00:13:07]   

Our community happiness specialist loves people and she is like so happy to talk to people and she is so like supportive and incredible and wonderful. And it makes so much more sense to have her as the front facing voice when people have a question or leave a comment because not only is she just really wonderful at that and so good at communicating when people have a question, but also like, that’s a thing that she enjoys.

[00:13:31]   

And so you can really find people who are incredible at their little pockets of work and who enjoy it. You don’t have to force yourself to enjoy something that you don’t like to do. And I think we do wear a lot of hats. And it’s really easy to get sucked into like, oh, I just need to figure out how to be really good at this or I need to figure out how to enjoy doing this.And you don’t. You can. Somebody is perfect for that role and you can find that person and it’ll make you better at your job when you get to focus on the stuff that you’re great at.

[00:14:01]  Megan Porta 

Yeah. So where do you go to find these people?

[00:14:04]  Jessie Johnson 

All over the place. My director of operations I had known for a very long time and we have worked together in the past and so she was somebody who I recruited. And then we have also hired from every different avenue that you could imagine. We’ve hired VA’s from Facebook groups. So if you’re in a blogger Facebook group and just post a job and say, hey, I’m looking for somebody to do this.

[00:14:24]   

We’ve gotten great staff members from there. Word of mouth is really great, especially for professional support folks. That’s how we found our CPA, our HR person, all of kind of our professional support team. And then we’ve also used a website called goodfoodjobs. Goodfoodjobs.com which is a job search engine specifically for folks in the food industry.

[00:14:46]   

And that site does tend to lean a bit towards culinary experience like chefs or a lot of farms post jobs there. So you are going to get people with more kitchen experience and specific food industry experience as opposed to tech and blogging typically. But that is often exactly what we’re looking for in a new hire.

[00:15:05]   

But I do always tell people the best place to find a new team member is in your existing community. And a lot of folks get a little bit scared if you’re hiring to post it on your own Instagram or to send it to your own email list. But always, always, always our best hires have come from the people who already know Life is a Strawberry, who already are familiar with our brand, who already kind of get our ethos a little bit.

[00:15:28]   

And so I always encourage people get really, really clear on your job description first of all, because that’s going to help immensely. So know exactly what you’re looking for, exactly what you’re asking somebody to do and then share it with your own community first. And then importantly ask them job description with somebody that they think would be great for it.

[00:15:47]   

Our best hires consistently have come from either within our existing community or somebody who follows us on Instagram or whatever. It’s like, oh, I have a friend who would be awesome at this and they share our job posting with that person. And you’re. It’s scary and it’s a little bit uncomfortable to put put yourself out there like that.

[00:16:06]   

But your community likes you and they want to help and let them. They’re going to find really awesome.

[00:16:12]  Megan Porta 

That’s such a great recommendation. Yeah, that’s where your loyal people are coming. Going to come in. The people who already know and love you. So lean on them. How do you figure out how to pay or like set the pay? Because I think that is a huge hang up for people and it causes people to not even get started with the process.

[00:16:32]  Jessie Johnson 

Yeah, I think the first thing that I would encourage is to get really clear on the classification of the job that you’re hiring For I see a lot of people post a job as a contract position when really it doesn’t meet the criteria to be a contractor. And it should be a W2 employee, which means that you have them on payroll, you pay taxes on their behalf, things like that.

[00:16:53]   

So number one, I would get really clear on the requirements for a 1099 contractor versus a W2 employee because those classifications are really important. A lot of people get it wrong and you can end up having a lot of penalties to pay if you misclassify somebody especially that’s a state by state thing.

[00:17:10]   

So definitely do your research on that. That’s the first thing I would say. And then think about, you know, getting a really, really dialed in job description. Like I said, that’s going to help you so, so much and it’s going to make the whole process a little bit better. And then I totally lost my train of thought.I’m so sorry.

[00:17:25]  Megan Porta 

I was like, oh, no pay, maybe pay rate or yeah, yeah, how to pay them?

[00:17:34]  Jessie Johnson 

Oh my gosh. I was like so wrapped up in the 1099 thing. I was like, wait, what was I going to say? I don’t even remember what I was talking about. But yeah, I think the other thing that I would say is, and this is a hard truth, but if you pay really competitively, you’re going to attract and recruit better talent.

[00:17:50]   

So I know that it is really scary to pay somebody, especially if you’re looking at, you know, this total cost of a paycheck. You’re like, that’s, that can be a lot of money, especially if you’re making a full time hire, you’re looking at payroll, you’re looking at taxes. But I would really encourage people to.

[00:18:06]   

So it’s really important, I think, to make sure that you’re paying your staff a living wage, to make sure that you’re paying people a competitive rate that values the work that they do. And so keep that in mind as you’re setting all of your hourly or salary numbers. But my recommendation is to kind of figure out your job description, decide on what would be a fair number as far as pay goes.

[00:18:31]   

If you’re looking at a part time employee, typically you’ll set an hourly rate. If you’re looking at a full time employee, that’ll be a salaried position. So it’ll be a number amount, a dollar amount for the full year that you then divide into, you know, weekly or bi weekly pay periods. But figure out what that number is early and then save for six months as if you were already paying that person and see how it feels.

[00:18:51]   

Because what you don’t want to do is hire somebody and then be like, oh, actually I can’t do this. And then you have to let somebody go. That’s not fair to you. That’s not fair to the person that you’ve hired. So I try, before we even post a job description, to have six months of somebody’s predicted salary in the bank.

[00:19:06]   

So that not only gives me a chance to save the salary as if I am paying the wages to make sure that that is a thing that I can sustain, but also that gives me a little bit of runway when that person starts to make sure that they are going to get paid for six full months, regardless of how their onboarding or training goes.

[00:19:22]   

So it takes a long time to train somebody and to get them really up to speed and really comfortable in a new role. Give yourself time to help that person really get their feet under them. And that’s going to also make the whole process a lot easier. If you’re not stressed about, wait, how am I going to pay this person?

[00:19:37]   

So, and again, you know, look at other job descriptions, other job postings that’ll give you a pretty good idea of what, you know, kind of a going rate is for somebody. Look at VA postings, especially if you’re thinking about hiring a VA and that, you know, every company and every role is going to be priced a little bit differently.

[00:19:55]   

So be prepared to be a little bit flexible as you’re starting to put your job description together. Ask other people in the industry if they’re comfortable sharing those numbers. But yeah, and I think just, you know, being really realistic about the length of the onboarding time. So six months to me is typically the number that I’m comfortable with with, you know, putting that money in an account as if you’re paying it for six months. And then you have six months of runway when you do that.

[00:20:17]  Megan Porta 

That’s really smart.

[00:20:18]  Jessie Johnson 

There’s also what I would encourage people to think of is when people come to us and ask about hiring, they’re typically focused on wages as the primary number. And that obviously is the biggest expense when you hire. But there are other expenses when you bring on a team member that I would encourage f to factor into their payroll math.

[00:20:36]   

So one of those that can get up there is extra subscription costs. So when you add somebody to your email service provider, even if you want to add a separate staff login like to any of the programs in your tech stack, that typically is going to have a cost associated with it paying for a payroll provider, we use Gusto to pay all of our staff that has a cost associated with it.

[00:20:57]   

And then if you’re offering benefits to your staff, typically running those benefits will also have a cost insurance. So workers comp. Disability, stuff like that. Taxes. The employer, if you have a W2 employee is responsible for paying a portion of taxes on top of the wages that you’ve set. So all of those costs need to get factored in as you start thinking about hiring.

[00:21:20]   

And then also, you know, state licensing compliance training. It takes time and money to train somebody. So also be thinking about kind of those ancillary costs a little bit as you hire and just know that that needs to be added to, you know, the wage that you set.

[00:21:35]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, those all add up. Everything you said, I was like, whoa, yeah, huh? Yeah, it gets.

[00:21:40]  Jessie Johnson 

And it gets expensive. And I will say like it is. This makes it sound very big and stressful and scary. There are people who will help you with this. So Gusto is our payroll provider. They take care of a lot of the compliance stuff for us. When you hire people in other states, you typically have to register with that state to say, hey, I exist and I’m going to hire somebody.

[00:22:00]   

Tell me how to pay taxes in the state that they’re working in. Gusto helps with a ton of that stuff. Your CPA often is very helpful with employment stuff if you work with a bookkeeper or a CPA. Other bloggers. If you have questions about hiring, shoot me an email. I’m happy to answer questions.

[00:22:15]   

It is a headache a little bit to deal with a lot of the paperwork and to figure out the pricing of hiring. And also, my team is consistently like, the greatest thing about running this company. So it is so worth it to get people on board who are incredible at what they do and really all in on your mission and who are really a part of your team.

[00:22:39]   

So don’t let the, you know, be prepared for all of the little nitpicky things that go with it, but don’t let them scare you away. Just know that it’s a thing that you have to deal with and you will get through it and it’s okay. So.

[00:22:52]  Megan Porta 

Well, you said it earlier, there are people to help you, and you don’t have to do all of this alone. And you’re not expected to know everything. So lean on the people who have expertise in the CPA world or whatever and go from there. Build from there. Yeah. So once you find the people, they’re awesome and you’re.

[00:23:10]   

You’ve saved enough money and you can pay them adequately. How do you get them on board logistically? How do you train them to do what they need to do? Does that make sense?

[00:23:22]  Jessie Johnson 

Yeah. Yeah. We have a really thorough onboarding process. It starts with any of our new team members. Get an actual physical box in the mail with a printed copy of our company handbook and some swag and some treats just to say hey and welcome and we’re happy you’re here. So we send them an actual like box of goodies to start with.

[00:23:42]  Megan Porta 

Setting the standard high.

[00:23:44]  Jessie Johnson 

Oh, yeah, we try. I also, I’m a snail mail person, so I like sending mail. It’s really fun.

[00:23:49]  Megan Porta 

I do too. My team is going to be like, Megan, come on. Falling short. Oh, that’s so great.

[00:23:57]  Jessie Johnson 

I love it. I do not. I am not good at sending mail. After the first one, I should probably step up my. Yeah, the first mail is like the peak for sure. But I’ll get on it. But yeah. So they get a welcome box with our employee handbook and that includes kind of just the standard HR stuff.

[00:24:13]   

So like, here’s how your vacation time works, here’s how to log into our payroll system. Kind of the just nuts and bolts of everything. We also have a brand voice guide that’s like a 20 page PDF and basically that just walks folks through. Here’s kind of how we write and how we talk so that all of our brand writing sounds really similar, even if it’s different people writing different pieces.

[00:24:34]   

And we give a lot of examples in that document. So we’ll say things like, hey, here’s a comment that we received, here’s how we answered it so that you have a sample. And you know, a lot of kind of our like internal slang that we use is in that just to kind of orient people to how we write and how we talk as a brand.

[00:24:51]   

And then we also have a recipe style guide, which is very important. So we have a PDF that they get and we give them a printed copy in the handbook. And they also have access to all of this stuff in our teen Google Drives. But it talks about how we structure our recipes and just kind of like the little formatting things, like we bold our ingredients the first time that they’re listed or we write things as teaspoons and tablespoons as opposed to TSP or tbsp.

[00:25:16]   

So kind of all those little formatting things and they get all of that. And then when they start, they kick off with meetings with me and our director of operations just to kind of say, hey, welcome. Do you have questions? Let’s walk through how we organize our Google Drives and kind of what we expect of you in the first one or three or six months.

[00:25:33]   

And then we have a staff onboarding online course essentially that they go through where we have recorded video of a lot of our day to day tasks. So every new staff member goes through this online course that we have built specifically for our internal folks that walks them through like, hey, here’s a video of our SOP for structuring a blog post or here is how we access XYZ Tech stack or here’s how we’re using Airtable or whatever it is.

[00:26:00]   

And so they get a lot of the kind of introductory SOPs, standard operating procedures delivered via video. So we don’t have to do that 40 times in a row when we’re hiring people. But they still all get the same kind of entry into our software and our systems and things like that. And that has been hugely helpful because everybody then gets a very identical onboarding experience.

[00:26:25]   

And so everybody is kind of starting from the same place. And then obviously we have check in meetings and we can answer questions. But as a remote team, because we are fully remote, it really has helped us a lot to systematize a lot of the onboarding and to make it really easy to navigate so that folks can jump right in and importantly find things as they need them.

[00:26:46]   

So learning how we organize all of our Google Drives, for example, because we have specific internal naming conventions that we use to make it easy to navigate and find files as you need them, things like that just kind of all the quirks of how we organize things is a big part of it.

[00:27:02]  Megan Porta 

So organize. Jessie. Oh my gosh, I’m just, my mind’s blown. That’s amazing that you’ve taking the time to put all of that together. I think that pays off right when you take the time up front to create the course and create the SOPs so that everything is just streamlined and seamless once people are onboarded.

[00:27:19]  Jessie Johnson 

Yeah, and I will say credit for all of the SOPs goes 100% to my director of operations. She is like SOP queen all over the SOP everything. So she has made us really efficient at that, which is incredible. And we have talked a lot too about because it does take a lot of time to get all that stuff set up.

[00:27:38]   

And I don’t think if you are just getting started and thinking of hiring your first VA, you do not need to go like 0 to 100 and make 10 handbooks and do all this stuff. But I do think it’s worth taking the time now to get your files really organized. So think, hey, if somebody was just airdropped into the middle of my business right now, what’s going to trip them up?

[00:27:57]   

What’s going to be hard to navigate? And start organizing those files now and start kind of figuring out how you might integrate another person into your workflow. Now. We talk a lot about spending the time building the foundation so that when you’re ready to like hit the gas pedal, you can just go.

[00:28:16]   

And I think getting all of those systems set up and all of the handbooks written and all of all of those little kind of admin things, when we then started hiring much more quickly in the last four years, everything else was so much easier because we had put all that time in up there.

[00:28:32]  Megan Porta 

So I’m curious about recipe testing because I know you guys create a lot of content still. How do you do that as a team?

[00:28:41]  Jessie Johnson 

We our motto at Life as a Strawberry is recipes that work. We’re particularly known for our really thorough recipe testing process with our audience. And so that’s one of our. Our top priorities is making sure that we’re using a really in depth recipe testing process. And so what that looks like right now is typically we have an editorial calendar meeting with me and my director of operations and we pull other people in kind of as needed and that’s once a quarter and we lay out a plan for the next few months.

[00:29:11]   

And I will say that plan changes often as we go, but it is good to have a starting point at least. And it’s just our jumping off point. And our editorial plan is typically a mix of brand new recipes and then updates. Like a lot of people, we have been really aggressively updating old content and bringing it up to our current standards.

[00:29:32]   

So it’s a mix of all of that stuff. And then once a recipe has been assigned to the editorial calendar, so we’ve gone through kind of our in progress list and said this thing is going to get published this quarter. Let’s slot it into a spot on our calendar. If it’s a new recipe, it’s assigned to an initial recipe tester.

[00:29:52]   

Typically that’s me or Rhonda, our operations director and that is kind of tester A. So they do the primary development, they do all of the initial testing and then they write the recipe up in a Google Doc. And when the initial tester is like, this recipe is ready, it’s good. I would publish it today.

[00:30:09]   

Then they send that Google Doc to a Secondary recipe tester. So a lot of the times that’s me and Rhonda, just like switching was, the primary gets flipped to the secondary. So sometimes I’m making, you know, if I’m the primary tester, I might make a coffee cake like six or eight times and then I’ll send it to Rhonda, she’ll test it once or maybe twice just to kind of cross test it.

[00:30:29]   

So the secondary tester takes the Google Doc from the first person. They follow the recipe exactly as written. They take notes if anything doesn’t work, if anything is confusing. They also pay special attention to timing. So when we’re writing a recipe and we say, you know, simmer this for six minutes, they’re timing that step to make sure it is actually six minutes.

[00:30:49]   

And that is kind of a cross test just to check. And the idea is that that test will go perfectly and then we will publish the recipe and take the pictures and we’re all done realistically. That’s usually where we identify some snags or some problems and then we bring that recipe back to our staff meeting and talk about maybe some of the hiccups it had.

[00:31:12]   

Very occasionally that gets kicked back to the original recipe tester to do some more tweaks. And then sometimes also we will pull in a third or fourth recipe tester to try the recipe as written and give us their thoughts. And typically if we are working with a third or fourth tester, that test has some really specific questions attached to it.

[00:31:31]   

So if we’re making a coffee cake, we might say, hey, is this too much crumble or is there not enough cinnamon in this filling? Or do you feel like the texture was too dense? So it’s often a tie break between the first two testers who might not agree on which direction to go.

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[00:33:05]  Jessie Johnson 

And then once everybody who has tested the recipe has approved it, then it gets put into our photography videography schedule. So the photos and the video also serve as final recipe cross tests. I am doing still the bulk of our photos and video, although we are trying to get me away from that more.

[00:33:26]   

It kind of ebbs and flows depending on the season. And then once all that’s done, it gets posted. And our video schedule does operate independently of our editorial calendar. So the video might not be shot by the time the recipe goes live. And that might be a different piece. We tend to prioritize video for high performing posts that don’t already have it.

[00:33:48]   

So. And that’s just because we have limited time and that’s one way that we have kind of streamlined our process and we do have multiple sites. So this is the process that we use everywhere and the video is its own kind of separate silo that happens once every month.

[00:34:03]  Megan Porta 

Yeah. Okay.

[00:34:04]  Jessie Johnson 

Wow.

[00:34:04]  Megan Porta 

I love hearing about your recipe testing process. So thorough. I love how just very thorough you guys are and just making sure you deliver that quality end product to the people who are loyally coming back to you. Right. I think that’s so important.

[00:34:20]  Jessie Johnson 

Yeah. Yeah. It’s really nice too, to get a chance to test with different equipment.

[00:34:24]  Megan Porta 

That’s a good point too because so.

[00:34:26]  Jessie Johnson 

Much of it is I could make the same recipe in my kitchen a hundred times and never have an issue. But you know, my director of operations, her oven might be a little bit different or her gas burner might not be as intense or somebody might have an electric stove. So testing with all kinds of different things, all kinds of different ovens and pans and measuring cups and things like that is a really important piece of it because there are only so many variables that you can really control when you’re in a kitchen.

[00:34:54]   

And so the more that we can do so that we can tell somebody who’s on our site, like, hey, we tried this with a slow cooker and we will tell you not to try it with a slow cooker or Whatever. But our kind of internal phrase is like, we will make the million mistakes so that you don’t have to, and that, you know, we want people to be as successful as possible on the first try.

[00:35:15]  Megan Porta 

Okay, let’s talk about planning, because I imagine there has to be a lot of planning that goes into your work life. How do you manage planning? Just kind of big picture planning, but then also getting down to maybe weekly planning and daily planning.

[00:35:31]  Jessie Johnson 

I will say it has been a very slow process to get to what I feel like is a pretty solid strategy and planning system. And I will say too, like, it’s very easy for me to come on a podcast and be like, this is how I plan. And it sounds like I maybe know what I’m doing.

[00:35:46]   

But we, like, we’re making this up as we go. We don’t know what’s going on. So this is what’s working today right now. And it will change, and it has changed, but it sounds really good sometimes. And then also, I just, you know, want folks to keep in mind in the midst of it, it still feels very chaotic sometimes.

[00:36:02]  Megan Porta 

So I think we can all understand that. Yeah.

[00:36:05]  Jessie Johnson 

Yeah, it’s.

[00:36:06]  Megan Porta 

Yeah.

[00:36:06]  Jessie Johnson 

I’m like, oh, this sounds like I have it all together. I do not. Not even a little bit. One thing that we use to guide a lot of our planning, and actually I’ll back up and say that the most effective thing that I have found that you can do for effective use of your planning time is to set some parameters so that you’re working within some criteria.

[00:36:27]   

For a lot of people, that’s like, the niche that they’re in. So that is a hugely helpful thing if you are niched down or niched down. Life as a Strawberry is very bad at that because I started it just kind of off the cuff for fun. And so Life as a Strawberry is a very broad site.

[00:36:43]   

And if I was starting it again, I probably would have dialed it in a little bit more. But Life as a Strawberry is typically like, that is our comfort food focus, with a special focus on bread and baking. But we also have a site specifically dedicated to appetizers and entertaining. It’s much easier to do a lot of planning for that site because it’s very narrow focus.

[00:37:02]   

We have a site that’s specifically about meal planning and dinner prep for, like, very fast dinners. That also makes the planning a lot easier. So if you can dial in your focus as much as possible, that’s very helpful. But building as many systems and parameters as you can to make the decisions for you is hugely helpful because we have so much willpower and decision making power in our brains at any given time.

[00:37:28]   

And so the more of that, that you can focus on the creative work instead of having to be like, oh, how many posts should I make this week? Or, you know, should I try a baking recipe on this website? Like, make a lot of those decisions in advance and then stay within the boundaries that you set for yourself.

[00:37:43]   

And that’ll help things go much more quickly, in my experience. But one of the things that we talk about a lot is there’s a famous quote attributed to Henry Ford, although it sounds like he probably didn’t say it, which is if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

[00:37:58]   

And he, of course, famously like, brought the Model T to the masses and started this automobile revolution. But so we talk a lot about our Model T content at Life is a Strawberry. And we like most people and kind of going back to the burnout idea that we talked about, we are very much guided by keyword research, by things our audience is asking for, by blogging trends or food trends.

[00:38:23]   

And all of those pieces help us slot content into our editorial calendar. So, oh, a lot of people are searching for this. We’ll make one of those. We’ll put it on the calendar. A lot of people are asking us for this. We’ll put it on the calendar. But we also want to leave room for recipes and content pieces that we make just because we like them and we think that they should exist.

[00:38:43]   

And we call those things our Model T content. And so the vast majority of what we produce is still what we call a faster horse piece of content. So it’s the stuff that people are asking for, the things doubling down on things that are already working. These are the recipes that our audience wants.

[00:39:01]   

These are the recipes that make us money. That’s a very important thing to consider. These are essential pieces of our business, but also creatively, it’s really important to have some of the Model T’s in the mix and to get to spend some time making content that just really does scratch that creative itch.

[00:39:19]   

And that is the stuff that we think is really fun and really exciting, but that nobody is necessarily searching for. So when we set our editorial calendar, we try to stick to a 70% mix of 70% faster horse content and 30% Model T content. And I actually, we run our editorial calendar in Airtable and we add emoji on the calendar to designate things so that I can skim it really quickly.And so if it’s a faster horse recipe. It has a little horse in front of it.

[00:39:49]  Megan Porta 

Oh, nice. That’s awesome.

[00:39:51]  Jessie Johnson 

And if it’s a Model T recipe, there’s a little race car at the front. So we have all of these little emoji symbols throughout all of our internal documentation so that we can skim it really fast. And I can look for our Model T mix and make sure that we are doing the stuff that’s going to move the needle and that’s going to bring in the page views and the revenue, but also that we’re making time for the fun stuff, because you will burn out if you’re not doing anything in that kind of fun column.

[00:40:16]   

So that’s one way that I have been much better about navigating burnout is kind of keeping protecting those content slots for the stuff that is really fun, but not necessarily the big draws for page views. And I will say, sometimes the Model T stuff is a huge hit and we have no idea why. So definitely worth it to do the creative stuff like that.

[00:40:39]  Megan Porta 

And it’s always so exciting when those things that you. That light you up when you’re making it and you’re like, this isn’t going to go anywhere, but it’s fun, actually takes off. It’s like, oh, the most. It’s. I know. It’s like coming together in the universe, conspiring for you finally. How do you manage planning just more from a business perspective on a weekly basis?

[00:41:02]  Jessie Johnson 

It varies kind of week to week. As far as our team, like collective working goes, we are a remote team. So Slack is our primary communication tool. But we do have one all team meeting every week where we all just kind of touch base and say, I’m doing this, I’m doing this. Here’s how it’s going.

[00:41:19]   

What do you need help on? What do you need help on? And we kind of just all do a quick check in so that we’re all on the same page about all the projects we’re doing. And then we are very good about asking people to hop on a call as needed during the week.

[00:41:31]   

So if I’m working on something and I realize, like, hey, I really need Rhonda’s eyes on this. I can slack her and be like, can we. Can you come look at this with me so that I know that I’m thinking about it the right way? So a lot of our work happens very independently and that’s a function of the team that we’ve built.

[00:41:47]   

And just everybody has a lot of ownership over the pieces that they own. In our workflow, but we kind of shift depending on the season. So the summer, we take advantage of the summer slump and do a lot of kind of the admin stuff when our traffic is a little bit lower. And that way we have all of our kind of foundational pieces in place when it’s time to really sprint on content for Q3, Q4.

[00:42:12]   

So one thing that we do is every April we have what we call the month of little things. And that is where all of the nitpicky stuff that we have been putting off gets done. So April, we typically do not do a lot of new content. We really dial down the recipe testing.

[00:42:26]   

But we are all in our file management. So Rhonda might take that month to clean up all of our Google Drive files. We use Google Drive to manage all of our internal files and our team stuff. And so she might go through and make sure everything is cleaned up and easy to navigate.

[00:42:42]   

I might watch the 10 webinars I’ve had in open tabs for six months that I’ve been avoiding. But all of the things that you’ve been procrastinating on, that happens in our month of little things. And that’s a thing that we tend to look forward to often because we can tell each other during the year, like, we’re gonna save that for our month of little things.

[00:43:01]   

And that is a way that we deal with shiny object syndrome too, because it’s really easy to get distracted and be like, oh, this might be really cool, or this might be really fun. And then you’re off down a rabbit hole not doing the thing that you should actually be doing. And so we have tried to build in a lot of places for us to put our shiny objects so that we can come back to them later.

[00:43:23]   

So we have Slack channels for like, hey, here’s a really good idea. We’re going to dump it in this Slack channel. And then when it’s the day to think about really good ideas, we can come back to it. And in the meantime, we can keep moving forward. And then kind of from like a day to day standpoint, we, like I said, are very independent.

[00:43:41]   

But typically we put up two posts a week on Life as a Strawberry. And so if we’re using like a blog post as an example, I will typically do the final version of the blog post. I’ll publish it, and then I will send it to our team to review. And then everybody can take a few minutes and read through it.

[00:43:57]   

Rhonda will go through and fix any typos or if she catches anything that’s broken, like if a piece of our recipe card isn’t loading or something, then we all get that addressed immediately and then it goes out to all of the different social media platforms and we have again systems and checklists for kind of those big tasks that tell us who’s responsible for which piece so that it all kind of goes on a…It becomes kind of a self fulfilling prophecy once you have those systems really dialed in. Because it just kind of rolls itself along down the hill.

[00:44:30]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, it requires so much organization, doesn’t it? But like you said, once you have like one piece in place, it kind of forces the other pieces to fall into place. So you just like creates momentum somehow. Yeah. Do you, do you have recommendations for just being more efficient? Because I feel like there are so many opportunities for us to get like sucked into social media or spending too much time in our inbox, things like that that we might not see. Do you have any tips that have really helped you just maybe see those things and then just maybe systematize or strategize some way?

[00:45:10]  Jessie Johnson 

Yeah, so the time tracking exercise is hugely helpful for me. I do it like twice a year and just to see where I am wasting time or getting kind of sucked into shiny object syndrome. So I definitely recommend folks do that. But also I use an app called Jomo J O M O to like physically lock myself out of social media platforms and certain websites.

[00:45:33]   

And I have the paid version of Jomo and it works on my iPhone and on my Mac computer, but I have Instagram and TikTok and Facebook blocked and I have. You have to go through like all these hoops if you want to access it. So it, you know, I have to like enter a password and then I have to wait 50 seconds and it makes it very hard to actually get into those apps.

[00:45:52]   

So that is a very easy way if you feel like you’re getting sucked into TikTok or Instagram or something to just like remove the temptation and set that rule and let the app make the decision for you. Like, nope, you’re done. Go do something else. I also have email blocked with that app for most of the day.

[00:46:08]   

So I only have like a one to two hour window every day where I’m even able to get into my email inbox without jumping through a bunch of hoops to actually access the app. So that’s a good one. Especially if you tend to doom scroll or if you tend to like use social media to like turn off your brain or something.

[00:46:24]   

That’s a good one. To kind of force you to get out and touch grass and put that stuff down. I am also a really, like I said, I’m a big fan of finding places to put your shiny objects to save them for later. So just like go squirrel mode and go bury it somewhere and come back to it at another time.

[00:46:40]   

But I can actually tell you some of our Slack channels. So we have a training channel in Slack, which is where we drop any kind of new industry news. So if there’s a new SEO webinar or somebody puts out an article about like whatever the newest Google algorithm dumpster fire is or whatever, all of that stuff goes in the training channel.

[00:47:01]   

And then when one of us is like, oh, I’m going to catch up on some training stuff today. That’s where it all lives. But it’s not clogging up kind of our regular talking to each other. In the meantime, it has its own kind of place to live. We also have, I have a CEO channel in Slack, which is private to me, which is where I just dropped things as I see them.

[00:47:21]   

So if I see a great idea or if there’s a course I want to take or a webinar I want to take, it goes in that channel. And then once a month I go back to that channel and I go through that list of things and 90% of them get deleted because it turns out I didn’t actually need it that much.

[00:47:37]   

So it gives you a little bit of perspective. But I think it also like having a designated place to put shiny objects really helps kind of scratch the itch of like, ooh, it’s shiny and it’s new. And even just putting it somewhere, even if you won’t come back to it kind of. I don’t know if that’s like a dopamine hit that it’s giving you or what, but it kind of satisfies that urge a little bit so that you can move on.

[00:48:01]   

So finding a place to put your shiny objects, hugely, hugely helpful. And then I also block off a couple of different themed days in my calendar, which is very helpful. One is a CEO day, which is kind of a strategy planning big picture day just for me. So that is a recurring calendar event.

[00:48:20]   

It’s a full day. I take that day off. I start by journaling. I might go through some pages of. We have an internal strategy workbook that kind of walks me through our planning process. I might do a couple of pages of that or dig into analytics or look at our one or five year plans.

[00:48:36]   

I tend to get out of the house. On my CEO days, kind of change your atmosphere and get a little change of scenery. Take a walk, work from a coffee shop, something like that. Just remove distractions. And the CEO days for me are less about coming up with new ideas. So it’s not a brainstorming day, but it’s more an execution day of, okay, here’s the thing.

[00:48:56]   

Here’s our goal. Here’s the thing that we want to get to. Let me put the framework in place for us to get there in an efficient way. So as far as my staff is concerned, on days like this, I’m out of office. I turn off slack. I don’t get slack notifications, I don’t book meetings, I don’t post content.

[00:49:12]   

It is a day to really be focused on this particular task. I also do like a what if day a lot. So I’ll take a morning, usually Monday mornings, and I’ll just kind of start very slow and go through maybe some of the shiny objects that I’ve squirreled away and think a little bit about what are the new things that I want to try building or what are some of the brainstorming pieces that I would like to investigate. You could also do a day of little things. My staff does, like I said, a full month of little things, but you can block off a day just to do all the nitpicky stuff that’s on your to do list. That’s hugely helpful. And that because the little things especially, I feel like they don’t just live.

[00:49:55]   

Like, if you have an email that you’ve been ignoring for a month, it doesn’t just disappear from your brain when you close your inbox. It’s like it’s. You’re breathing in. Like you’re breathing in the smoke of this thing that’s lingering in the back of your brain. And so being able to, again, have a place to put that and say, I’m going to do my day of little things and I’ll deal with that email is really helpful. And so I have a lot of days like that on my calendar, which have a theme. They are blocked off. I protect that time. It’s not, you know, treat it like a dentist appointment or a flight or something that you have to show up for. But those are hugely helpful again, to kind of compartmentalize and systematize as much as you can.

[00:50:35]  Megan Porta 

Wow, that is. The day of little things is such a good idea. I wrote it down. And because they do add up, not just like, you know, on your computer, on your phone, or wherever they live. But in your head, that’s where it matters because they just put like this clutter just piles up and you need to release it.

[00:50:54]  Jessie Johnson 

Yeah. And I always encourage people start making a list, like keep a running little thing things list and add stuff to it and look for the things that feel lurky and look for the things that feel like they’re just bugging you. And also you haven’t dealt with them yet, put them on that list.

[00:51:10]   

And then we also, we have a Slack channel for website updates too. So whenever I see something that I want to maybe try to implement on our site or something like a cool feature or if I have a thought about, you know, how I want to structure post that all goes in a website Slack channel. And again, that’s just a place to put those shiny objects. One other tool that I will say is very, very helpful, especially if you are a small team or still a solopreneur, is having a no list. And for me, this is a list of things that I absolutely do not do.

[00:51:43]   

Like, I am not allowed to do these things. One of those for me is like getting better at food photography because there are so many incredible food photographers working and teaching right now and they have incredible courses that are so helpful. And also my professional goal is not to be like the sole food photographer of my company.

[00:52:04]   

That’s something that I want to, down the line, have fully outsourced. And so me taking a photography class, as good as it is, is not helping me get closer to my ultimate goal. And I will tell you, I have almost bought like three or four different photography workshops or courses or whatever just because they’re so.

[00:52:24]   

I’m like, oh, but it’s so good and they’re so talented or whatever. And that no list has stopped me multiple times from trying to pursue something that is actually not in service of my bigger goals. So website updates. Another thing on our no list, we are still on a feast plugin theme for our very large food blog because we just have had bigger priorities than a website update.

[00:52:49]   

And so I used to get sucked into maybe we need to do a new website and I would go down the rabbit hole of designers and whatever. And no, that’s on the no list. That is not a thing that we do right now. So getting really clear about the things that you do not do and then keeping yourself away from those things at any cost is also very helpful.

[00:53:07]  Megan Porta 

The no list. I have the no list too, and it has saved me so many times over the years. One of them is TikTok. I am. I just like, I know I should be on TikTok and I know it would probably serve me in some way, but I also know how I am and I just cannot bring myself to do it.And I know that I shouldn’t do it because I know me too well. And it has saved me so much time, I believe, and so much energy and whatever else. And also there have been years when, like, you in photography, I’ve just known that I shouldn’t focus on video or whatever else. And I get so tempted and I’m like, no, wait, hold on. I think this is on my no list. So I go look and like, nope, you can’t do it. And I think that has saved me so much distress over the years.

[00:53:53]  Jessie Johnson 

Yeah. Oh yeah, so much. Same. Big same. I work with a business coach named Natalie Miller, who’s incredible, but one of the things that she has made me very attuned to is anytime the word should comes up for me. So it’s like, why should? Because I’ll be like, well, I should be doing this or I should be doing this. And her thing is always like, but why should. Why are you shoulding yourself? Like, it’s. Why, why is it should. Are you set? Like, is there a rule somewhere? Like, and so I. And I. It is wild to me. Like, after working with her for so long and hearing her point, point it out to me so many times.Like, I use the word should all the time and it is never. Yeah, real. Like, that is always. It’s always.

[00:54:34]  Megan Porta 

And who is this coming from anyway?

[00:54:36]  Jessie Johnson 

Why should I be doing this?

[00:54:37]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, like, is there a team of people that. Yeah. Like these mystery people that are telling us we should do something? I don’t know. That’s funny. Okay, you’ve shared so much. This is all so good. I have so many notes here that I want to imp. The last thing I want to ask you about, Jesse, is the transition from part time blogging to full time blogging.Because I know a lot of my listeners are in that stage where they’re considering this. Do you have any, I guess, words of wisdom for them, tidbits that might help them? Anything at all to help the process?

[00:55:12]  Jessie Johnson 

I think it is a very weird transition from. It’s like every phase of building a business, especially a blog, is so different. Like, you’re going from 0 to 10,000 page views is like its own totally separate journey. And then trying to get from 10,000 page views onto an ad network is like a completely different.

[00:55:34]   

And it’s just you, you need different tools at every stage. And I think that there are a lot of resources for beginning bloggers now, which is so amazing. And like the podcasts like this, like that did not exist when I was getting started. And it’s so incredible that there are so many amazing resources now when you’re kind of, especially in that beginning phase of how do I build traffic or how do I make a website or how do I format my photos for the website.

[00:56:02]   

And then once you get to a certain point, you realize that a lot of the very beginner resources really aren’t for you anymore because you maybe already know how to format your photos. You already do feel comfortable in your Pinterest strategy or your, you know, your blog post template or whatever. Once you kind of have the bones dialed in, it gets a little bit lonely.

[00:56:24]   

And I think for a lot of people that I know, and certainly for me, really where that happened was as I was crossing into the six figure mark, that was where I felt like a real strange shift. And I will say I’m kind of a weird example because I went full time at a very like, low stakes time in my life, right?

[00:56:43]   

I was 25, I didn’t have a job with a corporate salary to replace. I didn’t have a car payment, I didn’t have kids. Like I, I have, I had all of these, all of this freedom and all of this flexibility that was very unique to that time in my life. And so for me, making that full time leap was very different than somebody who today maybe is trying to go full time but needs to replace a corporate salary and needs to make sure that they have really good health insurance for their family.

[00:57:10]   

And so there are all of these different moving pieces where that trajectory is going to look different for everybody. But I do think that as far as just the work itself, like the tasks that needed to get done, that shift really was around six figures for me. That was when I realized that I knew very few people who were kind of in the same spot as me and who were looking for the same types of resources.

[00:57:37]   

So how do I hire? What do you mean? I have to register with a state when I want to bring on a staff member. Like all of that kind of CEO level stuff is very new once you kind of reach that point. And I also want to say I think there’s a lot of pressure on scaling and growing and, you know, bigger, bigger and more.

[00:57:56]   

And you don’t. That’s not for everyone. And that’s okay. I have always kind of kind of my mission with this company has always been to create really incredible jobs for creative people in food. And so. So everything that I do is to serve that mission. But that might not be your mission and that’s okay.

[00:58:17]   

And if you are just wanting a really flexible job that lets you be home and that is not going to be really stressful and you don’t have to think about growing all the time, that’s okay too. And so there are all kinds of different ways to do this, right? And the right way is different for everybody and will totally depend on your goals and what you want out of your business and out of your life.

[00:58:38]   

And I think that’s the really beautiful thing about food blogging in particular is it is. So there are so many right ways to do it and they’re different for everybody. But I do think if you are really interested in growing and hiring and scaling, it gets lonely because you just. It’s. Very few of us have full time teams.

[00:58:59]   

That’s still a very unusual thing. A lot of us work with contractors and VAs and things like that. But I know very few people who have W2 employees. I know not a ton of people who are running multiple sites full time. So I think that’s a really hard thing to navigate. And step one is just acknowledging that it’s hard and that it is kind of the old phrase of what got you here won’t get you there, knowing that you will have to shift and grow.

[00:59:27]   

And one of the hardest things I think for me as we’ve grown our team has been when you start hiring, you let go of the things you don’t like to do. And so for me, that was like, I need an accountant, like, I hate bookkeeping, I don’t want to ever look at this.

[00:59:40]   

And then you hire somebody and you’re like, oh, sweet, I don’t have to do this anymore. Or you know, answering emails and answering reader comments. That is not a thing that I’m passionate about. That fills me with anxiety. So that is not for me, bringing somebody in who is incredible at that and enjoys it.

[00:59:55]   

Amazing. And then I think also once you kind of grow and are in this team building phase, you hit a point where you have to start letting go of some of the things that you do like. And that for me was a lot harder than handing off stuff that I didn’t like to do because I like photography and I like doing video and I like editing video.

[01:00:16]   

And also me doing all of those tasks does not necessarily help us get to the level that I want to be at. And that is not. That’s not helping me create more jobs. That’s not helping our sites grow in the way that I want them to. And so also being able to recognize that there are things that you do that you might like and those might also have to be handed off to somebody at some point.

[01:00:41]   

And that was hard. That was a hard one. But ultimately, I think handing off our video editing was a huge boon. Like that made a huge difference. And so just knowing that that is coming if you haven’t gotten to that point yet. And it’s okay to grieve those pieces a little bit. It’s okay to be sad when you hand off something that you like.And there are also times where that is the next right move. So just being prepared for stuff like.

[01:01:08]  Megan Porta 

That and trusting yourself and find friends who you can. The community piece is huge.

[01:01:14]  Jessie Johnson 

Yeah. Find your work friends.

[01:01:16]  Megan Porta 

And that’s a big part of it.

[01:01:18]  Jessie Johnson 

And call them when you need to be sad about something or whatever.

[01:01:22]  Megan Porta 

Thank you for all of this. This was so valuable. I think that new bloggers and more experienced bloggers alike are going to find so much value in this. So we really appreciate you. Jesse, thank you for everything today.

[01:01:33]  Jessie Johnson 

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This was fun.

[01:01:36]  Megan Porta 

Yeah. To end. Do you have a favorite quote or words of inspiration to share? You’ve already inspired us. But something additionally.

[01:01:45]  Jessie Johnson 

I think we touched.On it a little bit. Definitely. But I think for me the big thing is you do not have to do what everybody else is doing. For me in particular, I have no interest in being an influencer. And we do not post. We’re terrible at Instagram. I am never on Instagram. I don’t think we’ve posted for three years and I still have a six figure business with a full time team.

[01:02:09]   

So if there is a part of blogging that you should be doing in quotation marks, you make the rules. This is your business and you are in charge and you get to do it your way. Find your superpowers. We talk a lot about superpowers on my team. What is the thing that you do that only you can do and that fills you up and that you love and lean into that and don’t get sidetracked by what everybody else is doing or what they.

[01:02:39]   

What you should be doing or. You know, there are a thousand, ten thousand different paths to a successful food blogging career and they look different for everybody. I am really fortunate to know a lot of people now who are very successful with their sites. And I don’t know any two people who have done it the same way.

[01:02:56]   

You know, for us we do. We’re bad at Instagram, we do very little social media. We’re on Pinterest and things like that. But. But I’m not on Insta. I kind of gave up on that because I just didn’t like it and I decided it wasn’t for me. So I was like, we’ll do other things. We don’t do sponsored work, but we have done a lot of white labeled work. So creating work for other brands, but everyone’s path is different and you do not have to do it the way that you see other people doing it and that’s okay and that’s great. So do it your way.

[01:03:26]  Megan Porta 

Beautiful and perfect way to end. Thank you for that. I think we all need to hear that and be reminded of that from time to time. We’ll put together a show notes page for you, Jesse. You can find those at eatblogtalk.com/lifeasastrawberry and remind everyone where they can find you online.

[01:03:42]  Jessie Johnson 

Our main site is lifeasastrawberry.com and then if you want to get I do a intermittent newsletter for other professional food bloggers and you can find that at lifeasastrawberry.com/bloggers if you want to hear my ramblings on work things.

[01:03:57]  Megan Porta 

So amazing, go check it out everyone. Thank you again so much for being here Jesse and thank you for listening. I will see you next time. 

[01:04:16] Outro  

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Eat Blog Talk. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d be so grateful if you posted it to your social media feed and stories. I will see you next time.