210: 2MamaBees | Luxury Playsets, Partnerships & The Dream of Target

Julianna: 0:00

So surrounding yourself with people who are further along in their area of expertise, I think is going to benefit your life overall exponentially.

Camille: 0:22

So you want to make an impact. You're thinking about starting a business, sharing your voice. How do women do it that handle motherhood, family and still chase after those dreams? We'll listen each week as we dive into the stories of women who know this is Call Me CEO. Everyone, you are in for a treat for this episode. We have a special keyword at the very end of the episode to win a play set from two mama bees that is valued at over a thousand dollars. So make sure you listen to the episode all the way to the end so you have your opportunity to win a play set. You have your opportunity to win a playset.

Camille: 1:07

Welcome back, everyone to Call Me CEO. It is so good to be back with you guys today. I took a nice break. It's been about six weeks since I've interviewed and I've been to Paris and I saw Taylor Swift and I spent a celebration with my husband of 20 years of marriage and I'm coming back in feeling so fresh and excited to share more stories of incredible, amazing entrepreneurs, mamas doing their thing, and today is definitely not the exception to that rule. We are speaking with Juliana Van Lannen and Sam Alavi, who are co-founders of Two Mama Bees, and this is a luxury company of play equipment and turning play into a structure that is fun and work, not only just for the child but for the parent to be involved in the growth and the business of having fun. So thank you so much, ladies, for being on the show today.

Julianna: 2:02

Thank you, oh my God, and congratulations.

Camille: 2:05

Happy anniversary, oh my gosh, I know I must be a grandma. I'm like, how has it been 20 years? Like it is just blowing my mind.

Julianna: 2:15

You don't look like you're 20 years old. I got married at 12.

Camille: 2:20

Thank you, I appreciate that. So tell our audience where you live. First of all, a little bit more about you. We were doing some tallies of the amount of kids between us, and it's a lot. So let's hear a little bit more from both of you about where you're from and a little bit more about your families.

Julianna: 2:37

Perfect, so we are. We live in South Florida, so outside of Fort Lauderdale area, and I am a mom. Between the two of us, we have eight kids. I have three so wide age gaps. One is almost 18. And so I have one that's going to be going off to college next year and I have one starting kindergarten. So I have 18, 15 and five.

Sam: 2:59

And I have five children. I have a 12, a 10, a nine, five and a three-year-old.

Camille: 3:08

Wow, so like we said before, just the full spread, which is bananas, because my youngest now is eight, oldest is 16. And it feels like even between those that spread, it's like I have my older two and my younger two, even though they're split like evenly between them. I don't know how it feels, but the activities are so different but the energy that's needed for both are so different and so the same cause it takes a lot. So I applaud you both with all of that.

Julianna: 3:36

Yeah, I was telling somebody the other day. I'm like I feel like I am actively participating in one of their lives and financially funding the other two.

Camille: 3:46

right now it's a much different journey.

Julianna: 3:49

That we're all on.

Camille: 3:51

For sure. So you're living in Florida. How did you guys come together as a partnership? I'm assuming you are friends, if not very best friends, and I love that. When we first started talking I said, okay, so who wants to answer what? And immediately it was well, one of us really likes to talk and the other not so much. We'll let you figure out who but how did it come together that you guys decided to do this?

Julianna: 4:13

So, yeah, so we are. We're best friends since we were 15. And, um, I, our story really started. Sam's third child, her son, um, her only son, was born with autism and her husband kind of came to me and said, you know, sam, which Sam is, even though she doesn't love to talk on these, she loves to talk and she kind of, you know, withdrew a little bit, I would say, and was just having a hard time navigating it. So I think Phil was her husband, was trying to support her in that way and say, even if she makes like $100 a week, just something that's for her, that's just herself.

Julianna: 4:57

And just so happened that it was kind of like the late 2019 when, like all the Chip and Joanna, like everybody, was DIYing. So we were like we can DIY with the best of them. So we built some window boxes and threw them up on an Etsy shop, and that was really how organic the beginning of our journey was. Never in a million years would we have guessed that we would be where we're at today. Of course, but a lot of hard work along the way. I mean, fast forward to now we have our own brand of products and we're in over 110 retail locations, but it did start. It started just Sam's backyard and we were building window boxes and then we built a porch bed swing. It was really just products that we wanted for our own homes and then decided to see if anybody else wanted them as well, and gain traction that way.

Camille: 5:51

Wow, I think it's really interesting from doing interviews. A lot of the time it's born many times out of necessity because there's a hardship that comes, and I love that. For you, it was a part of identifying who you were again, sam, but also connecting to your child and your family and what could we do? That's different, but it's something we want and so it's twofold of that purpose. Can you talk to me a little bit about what that brought out of you at that time?

Sam: 6:24

I think it brought out like just a lot of joy we had a lot of fun. Yeah, we really, we had a lot of fun. We would, you know, just talk. We did the playhouse and we would just dream really big. Yeah, Like what if we were in target? I remember always being in the car being like, well, we're driving around buying all of our competitors, you know to do them.

Julianna: 6:51

I should probably touch on that. So Sam had one of our competitors playhouses in her backyard and had gutted her backyard. It was stunning and it was like this brown, like not very aesthetically beautiful playhouse.

Camille: 7:03

We know what they look like. Yes, we know what they look like, we all know.

Julianna: 7:09

And so we painted it and no idea how we would ship it, so we built crates around it Like we had no idea. I mean, it was to the point where when we did the first rounds of painting our competitors' playhouses which is how the Etsy shop kind of like branched out into now our own brand If it started raining we have the pieces like propped up against a tree. So one of us would be like we're doing you got to do pickup, go pick up all the pieces and get them out of the rain and like so it was. We did, we had a lot of fun.

Julianna: 7:39

And yeah, like she said, we would drive from like Target to Target, like especially when it got closer to Christmas season, and just buy every single playhouse they had available. We didn't care what it looked like, we're like we could probably sell it. And we would say like, imagine one day we come here in like a two mama bees playhouse this year. So yeah, we did. We really did dream a lot then.

Camille: 8:03

Yeah, and now we're in Target. Oh my gosh, so how long have you been in Target?

Julianna: 8:08

Almost a year, just about a year now.

Camille: 8:10

Yeah, that is insane. I mean, yes, you've been doing this for a while now, but from start to now, how many years? Like that's a pretty short runway to go from idea I want to be in Target and now you're in Target, like how, what was that timeline? So?

Julianna: 8:27

Etsy shop started late 2019. And we launched our own brand. So within the first year and built and painting that playhouse, we had almost 1000 sales. So it went quick. It was like rapid speed. So it was Sam's backyard, my backyard, one warehouse, two warehouses. We were literally in the warehouses. I quit my corporate America job and we were in hand painting playhouses for 14 to 16 hours a day, with no AC, repackaging them and shipping them out and then on the back end, like behind the scenes, developing our own brand.

Julianna: 9:03

And so we lean into that a lot as, like our market research years, and we pretend like we knew that's what we were doing now. But you know, etsy is such a different platform. It's so intimate the way you communicate with your buyers. So it was super beneficial to us because we got to have, like these, really like real and raw conversations about what their feedback was on the products. So then, when we went and developed our own brand, we were able to take all of that feedback and encompass exactly what a consumer would want.

Julianna: 9:38

You know, like, they want to be in the playhouse with their kids. They want room to be able to comfortably play. They want to be able to, you know like actually engage with their children for longer than five minutes. So all of our one-story playhouses are almost six feet tall inside. So, like just that framework, but launching our own brand of products, they they rolled out October of 2021. So, yes, it is, we're about to hit year three and it has been tremendous growth, tremendous traction in a short period of time and we just feel, so, I mean blessed, obviously, that that's the you know like what's happened for our brand.

Camille: 10:20

Wow, I'm literally blown away. You can see this video if you're watching on YouTube, but I'm just like what. This is incredible. I would love to hear what those growing pains were and how you were able to keep family. I mean, you have a lot of kids, so how did you keep your balance in check, or imbalance? What did you do? How were your partners involved? Like what, what was the story behind the scenes as you were in this quick ramp of getting into target and growing this brand and painting in the crazy Florida rain and the heat, I mean that's a lot.

Camille: 10:55

So the story of how, how did that unfold? I guess it's the right word.

Julianna: 11:00

Yeah so. So I would say where we're at now is the healthiest version of our company for ourselves and for our families and Sam is way better at this than I am, but Sam is really good at establishing boundaries right and prioritizing time with her families as I'm navigating that journey, I'm a work in progress, but so early on there were no boundaries none, oh my gosh.

Julianna: 11:31

It was 14 to 16 hours a day in a warehouse. Mind you, we were pregnant. We gave birth to little girls a day apart, and you ask how our partners helped. So we had Rain and Aviana a day apart and within 48 hours we were back in the warehouse and so Sam's husband ran the front end of the warehouse and we would have the girls up in the front end and he'd just be like Aviana's up for feeding and we'd go running to the front. So there were no boundaries. It was just a lot of like hard work and sweat. So making that transition into our own brand and finding the right fit with manufacturing team and having that support has really, overall, benefited our lives in such a dramatic way because now you know we can be more present as parents and you know, there for the day to day.

Julianna: 12:29

I know that one year with we were in the warehouse Christmas Eve until almost midnight and still had to go home and play Santa, you know. So it was yeah, it was. It was a lot of like sacrifice. We, I think I say that we say that to all our kids. I guess people don't recognize when you're an entrepreneur how deeply everybody around you is involved as well. So every win is all of our wins, right, because everybody in this family and both our families, are in the trenches with us and we know that time I travel quite a bit more than Sam does. Time away is hard too, you know like. So anything that any win is celebrated by the whole family, like we'll all go out to dinner and everybody is involved because it's everyone's sacrifice.

Camille: 13:19

Yeah, I love that. Is there a way that you have included your kids in those celebrations? Like, what does that look like when you are celebrating the wins?

Julianna: 13:28

Yeah, so all of our products are named after our kids and we kind of like do some branding within the brand where we have little bios about them. And if you order a product like, let's say you order, you can kind of see it in the background that's the Aviana Play Kitchen. That's my youngest daughter. If you order one, you get a little follow-up email with, like, her little cute headshot and her. What do I love about my mom and what's my favorite color? What do I want to be when I grow up? So again, yeah, they're extremely involved. They're our why, why, right, like for everything that we do, um, and the celebrations usually look like dinner and then home and bed.

Camille: 14:16

it's not that extravagant, but maybe one day it will honestly keeping them in the conversation and a part of that development and those conversations. I think that alone counts for everything that they know this is a family effort and we are going to go through these wins together. Can you tell me about a time that you went through a struggle, and maybe what that looked like, or something that you learned from something that went wrong?

Julianna: 14:43

Yeah. So the first run we ever did, we sourced our playhouses from overseas. And we happened to source them. We were quoted out like, at the time, five thousand to ship a 40 foot Haikyuu, which are those like really big shipping containers, but, who doesn't know, like the lingo. We ended up paying thirty eight000 per shipping container because COVID hit. Yeah. So when we originally were supposed to bring our first round of playhouses over, we sourced them from overseas and at the time it was briefly before COVID, and we were quoted $5,000 for a 40-foot high queue, which are the really large shipping containers you see on the boats. We ended up paying $38,000 per shipping container once COVID hit. So I mean it was a tremendous hit.

Julianna: 15:35

And even though we did everything I mean we did all the research, we did all the you know we had a boots on the ground overseas who visited the manufacturing facility directly. We paid for all the quality control and like the products were good but it wasn't consistent. And so year one we literally went right back to the drawing board and we were like this isn't the brand, this isn't the representation that we want, this doesn't have longevity. So we brought all our manufacturing to America. So financially we took a hard hit really early on and then we doubled down on it and decided that that wasn't enough of a financial hit. We would decide that we would move all our manufacturing to America, which meant retesting every product.

Julianna: 16:21

I mean, you have to redo everything all over again twofold. Redo everything all over again twofold. But with that being said, a lot of lessons were learned and it has probably one of the driving forces now behind our success. So worth it, right, would do it again, would ride that ride one more time. But yeah, now we are manufactured in America by Amish artisans and our craftsmanship. The quality of the products is heirloom quality products and not even just that like the customer experience, because we're consumers, we're moms, right, and we, you know, we're the ones who got stuck with assembling a lot of this stuff. It's not always the men out there doing it, and so you know. Yeah, so our rain two story playhouse, for instance, is our largest, and it takes roughly an hour and a half to two and a half hours to build. Our competitors take eight to 10.

Camille: 17:22

I was going to say that's short.

Julianna: 17:23

That's awesome, yeah yeah, almost the entire unit comes pre-assembled, but we would have never been able to do that. When sourcing overseas. You know you kind of you get what you get if you will and you don't have a ton of room for changing, especially their manufacturing capabilities when it comes to boxing items and what fits boxing items and what fits and it's just. There's so many different aspects that they have to look at where now we're able to be a little bit more nimble and movable so we can make changes in real time and we can make improvements and, like we can hear our customers and make adjustments according to what the market is telling us we should make adjustments to right. So it's paid off tenfold, but was still a hard lesson while navigating it.

Camille: 18:16

Yeah, oh, my word, that is so fascinating. I think again another thing with COVID. I've heard so many stories about having to pivot to American-made products and new manufacturing and new quality control, and it's fascinating to me. This brings something to mind where I was listening to the Olympics this week and the person who was narrating or telling the story of these Olympians. They said when you look at these Olympians, you may assume that they've always been the fastest, the best, the people who had the easiest way about it of getting here. And he said but any story I've ever heard is someone who has suffered the most, worked the hardest and fallen over and over again but kept getting up. And it was.

Camille: 19:00

I loved that message that it wasn't that sure there are some physical qualities that would lean more towards one or the other sport. That's just fact. But to assume that it's always the easy way or that it doesn't come with lesson and trial is just not. That just isn't the way it is, and so I love that. For you saying we would go through it again is those bumps and those trials were essential to the success that you have now and the lessons that you learned and that you have now from experiencing that. Would you agree?

Julianna: 19:33

Oh, absolutely. It's funny that you said that, because I read something today and I can't remember his name per se, but I know he was like in sprinting and he was a, he was an orphan, so he was until he was four and a half, and it same same storyline. He was just explaining how, like, his journey of perseverance was really there and, yeah, what a good, good, good way to like segment and it is, I mean, it's different, like we're, you know, like running for old metal, but we still, you know, we, I mean we've won gold medals eight of them. Yeah, but it is, you know, you have to have that perseverance.

Julianna: 20:14

I think that's one thing that Sam and I do really well is we have a really positive outlook. It is difficult to take us down, like when the hard hits come. We're always supportive of each other. We always show up for each other. So it's if one of us is like having an off day, the other one really picks up the, picks up the pieces and can like carry us through. So that's been great. Like the support of each other along the way has been extremely beneficial to the perseverance of our brand.

Camille: 20:47

Oh, I'd say I mean I, that would be. My next question is as a partnership, what is something that you've done to keep communication clear, because I think breakdown of any relationship is typically a communication issue in some way or another. What is a way that you two have stayed connected and communicated effectively?

Julianna: 21:06

You know, what's so ironic is we just started it last week. So it is true, I mean we're we're best friends, but do we talk about work for six hours a day and then maybe you're not really wanting to have a conversation about life after you just had to sit on the phone for six hours dealing with other things. But last week we went to Pilates and then we went to lunch and we didn't talk about work at a single time. We put our phones away and we reconnected as best friends. And I mean, if there was ever, like a day that, like one of the kids is doing something or the husband's doing something, like yes, she's the first person that I pick up to call and I'm like pause on two mabees because I got to tell you this part.

Julianna: 21:47

But yeah, I think staying reconnected is important. It is like a marriage. I mean we're in this for the long run until the wheels fall off together. And it's almost a little bit. I mean I don't want to say there's different levels of importance, but people's lives rely on us keeping our relationship together right, like people's entire livelihoods, like so that's pressure. It can be pressure. So you know, finding ways to like connect outside of work and still be best friends on top of it is not always easy, especially when every day is like you're sometimes in the trenches for months at a time together. But we I, just we always show up for each other. Like I know I can always count on her and yeah, she knows she can always count on me.

Sam: 22:40

Yes, I love that. I love that so much. I also think we have good boundaries. I think we're. I also think we do good boundaries. I think we're we've started really good. Yeah, yeah, it's good.

Camille: 22:52

What do? You mean by boundaries. Tell me what some of those are.

Sam: 22:56

Where we, when we started it was work. That's all we did every day in the weekends, cause we just that's, but now we don't work on. I mean she might work Like I didn't, it was a season.

Julianna: 23:11

It's different seasons.

Sam: 23:12

I think you know.

Julianna: 23:13

I think moms can. Nobody can relate better to seasons of life than a mother. Right Because you're in yes, you're in the infant stage. Same thing with the business. When it was in the infant stage, you couldn't. You couldn't look away for a second. You had to be on top of it every minute. We're in the. You know like they're walking.

Julianna: 23:32

Now it's walking you know, and it like feeds itself, and so you know we're, we're at that stage now. So it's been, you know it's growth and understanding and being understanding to that as well, that it's it's so important, you know, and we still have to show up for it. But as far as boundaries are concerned, like I think I said this early on, sam is very good at creating boundaries for herself and for her family. So, like travel isn't something that she does as much for two mama bees. I like the travel, so I'm fine with it. And so, you know, just hearing each other out and understanding where each other are coming from, being receptive to, like she doesn't have to love all the same things that I love, I know podcasts not exactly her thing, but here she is showing up for me, you know. And so vice versa, you know there's there's some, there's some give, some take, and then there's some hard lines that we respect each other enough to not cross. Yeah.

Sam: 24:29

We love each other. We're best friends, yeah.

Julianna: 24:31

We do really genuinely love each other too. So there's that. You can tell. We love each other's families. Yeah, yeah.

Camille: 24:38

No, you can tell it's really good energy and the way that you feed off of each other. I love that so much Now one of your missions is to empower families through purposeful play. So not only are your playgrounds gorgeous and beautiful. I wish when my kids were tiny, I had this. I want one for myself. But tell me a little bit more about your initiative for bringing families together and giving them the ability to play together, and also how that is incorporated with your development as well.

Julianna: 25:09

Yeah, I think so. That's something Sam and I really are working on ourselves as well, so we're meeting with industry experts.

Julianna: 25:18

So I mean, up until like two weeks ago, we didn't even know that there was such a thing as a play therapist. We were introduced to a play therapist. So think, speech pathologists, ot therapists, play therapists, learning and growing from them. It really comes back to what our initial mission was, which was, you know, helping Sam, supporting Sam, but also sensory development. We learned so much in the journey of Makai, and he's also my godson learned so much in the journey of Makai, and he's also my godson um, watching Makai's growth and what he's been able to endure and accomplish through different play therapies and so being able to then integrate that back into our products, like our play food. I mean, environmental consciousness is huge for us, so everything is pretty much made out of wood, even our play food, but it can be cut in half and Velcroed back together. There's sensory development there. There's motor skills that our kids are learning, and I think we've been kind of like powwowing back and forth about it and I had one of the speech therapists said you know, your child's only job is to play right. That's it. Like they just exist, and your child's only job is to play right, that's it, they just exist. And everything that they're learning and growing through is through play, and as a parent, as an adult, it's almost ingrained in you that your job is to work. I mean, even when you're a mom, you don't think of it as anything other than this is a job. This is what I need to show up and do this right. So, finding ways to help parents bridge that gap between I'm playing with my child but during this play, I am helping them develop these skills to better set their life up and to better help them accomplish goals that they should be accomplishing right, and being engaged in those moments.

Julianna: 27:05

So it's really we're on a journey right now of learning ourselves, like meeting with these industry experts and just saying tell us everything you know, tell us all your knowledge, tell us what else can we add to our play sets, to our products, to make them more sensory friendly, to develop them.

Julianna: 27:24

We're working on and we haven't talked about it yet, but I guess yeah, okay, so we're working on. I know I said that all our products are named after our own kids Makai, and so um, the Makai is going to be really close to our hearts. Obviously, um, and a percentage of the proceeds will go to Autism Speaks. But what we really want to focus on is making sure that that product speaks to sensory awareness and the fact that he is on the autism spectrum, being able to really encompass different items that are necessary for developmental growth with children around the spectrum. So you know, we care like deeply about what we're doing and the products that we're creating, and we're not specialists in these fields, but we have the ability to learn and listen and grow from them as well. So it's a focus point for us, right now.

Julianna: 28:19

And we're excited about it. Really, I'm like loving it, like it's incredible to hear other people's perspectives of what play is like as kids. And then go home and like I'm like Vivi, come do this with mommy and like I'm watching her accomplish these things that they just got done, telling me on like a two hour zoom call here's what your child could and I'm like, oh my gosh, like it's really working, it's really happening, you know, and yeah, it full circles back then to you know, as an adult, like I'm working but I'm playing, you know and they don't know the difference If you're just there and they love every second of it.

Julianna: 28:57

So, however, you need to compute that in your brain to make you engage for longer, like that's me. I'm a I'm a workaholic, so if I'm recognizing that while I'm playing with especially my youngest, that it's work and it's helping her grow, it makes me like be two feet in, like I'm all in and I'm engaged for such a long time.

Camille: 29:21

Oh, that's so cool, I remember. So I actually started my education doing Montessori learning. I'm not. Are you familiar with Montessori? I would imagine. Oh, yeah, we have Montessori products. Yes, perfect.

Camille: 29:32

And what was so interesting and I remember it? Because my brother, just older than me, was struggling with reading and underneath that was a lot of issues with learning in other classes because reading was not coming together and my mom decided to not coming together and my mom decided to take him out and at the time I was starting kindergarten and I remember the first time coming into this Montessori classroom and Montessori is all about real life engagement and education through play. It is very hands-on and I remember walking in and seeing a kitchen. I have a very clear five-year-old memory of seeing this kitchen and seeing a place where there were dolls and wood blocks and building centers, and what's so interesting to me is that going in as a child into that space, it felt so exciting to me. But I also, in the two short years that I was there, was learning exponentially what my cohorts were learning at public school, which is really interesting to me because it always felt like play to me. I always felt like it was so much fun and we got to play in the kitchen and play with the dolls and build the things, and I think that our public education system is missing the mark of the importance of play, and that was a benefit that I had from going to Montessori school because it was so enlightening and so such a beautiful way to learn, and so I really have a strong connection to learning and having work be your play.

Camille: 31:03

I think that is so cool and the fact that you have products that the parents can go and play with their kids because, listen, we all know the times, especially as busy moms, where we're like, okay, I can play with you for five minutes but then I gotta go to the dishes and then I have these emails, like we just have this really busy mind. But I love the way that you're restructuring this, of creating space for that play to be productive with your children and reshaping and reforming what production can look like. And, having recently gone to European countries and the way that they approach education and the way they even structure their day, it is so different from America, where they get up, they go to work, they take two to three hours off during the middle of the day and then they come back and I feel like if we can incorporate more of that like clay can be restful and productive and also educational too. What a gift that is for us as Americans, like we need right we need more of that.

Julianna: 32:04

Yeah, no, that is. I feel like I completely agree with you. There was my oldest daughter. She struggled a bit when she was younger. They put her on the spectrum and then they ended up taking her off.

Julianna: 32:15

But I used to always tell her that, dr Sussane, about like if a fish tried to climb a tree, you know how much of a failure would that fish think he was, because a fish can't climb a tree. And like you're so spot on as the box these kids in, and when you don't fit in this perfect box and I mean you have four kids right and I have three, not a single one of them or anything alike. They lived in the same household. I mean I guess they get a different version of us is what I'm hearing from outside therapists and everything but still I mean they are drastically different human beings all on their own. And so I think when you try to fit kids in a box, it's they're never, it's not everybody just fits that norm and the majority don't.

Julianna: 32:58

And um, finding ways to better support your children and support their development and support their growth and, like you said, I bet you learned more in those years too. I bet it resonated so much more profoundly than any lecture you've sat through in first, second and third. You know what I mean Like, and so you're right. It's like those moments they really do I same same thing. I went to a Montessori school when I was a kid as well, and I really, and then I went to Catholic school. Drastically different, drastically different retention, if you will.

Camille: 33:32

Yeah, well, that is so neat. So tell me, just looking forward to the future, you've been on this fantastic runway. What advice would you give to the people who are maybe in that first and I love how you compared it to infancy and toddler and little kid? What advice would you give to the people who are maybe in that first and I love how you compared it to infancy and toddler and little kid? What advice would you give to them that are in that spot of just feeling like, oh, we have no boundaries, I'm burning at both ends. What would you say to that person?

Julianna: 33:58

I mean I feel like it wouldn't be much different than what I say to like my mom, friends who are new moms, like and I hate to keep using it again, but it is just a season and I mean I'll stress all the buzzwords right, like you got to work on your business and not in your business and you got to you know like there's, there are those things and they are you, you know they, they, you know they are a buzzword because they're meaningful, because that is where your business is going to be able to shine, when you put people in the places that they are the best at right. Like Sam and I said it like we hired a marketing team best thing we ever did. We don't know anything about marketing. I, I literally told her I go burn the entire thing to the ground because we didn't know what we were doing. So surrounding yourself with people who are further along in their area of expertise, I think is going to benefit your life overall exponentially. I know it was and we were hesitant. Right, we were hesitant. How will we afford this? We weren't even really paying ourselves. We're going to go pay somebody else. It's made more money than what it's cost us. Let's put it that way, because that's what they do, that's what they're good at, right, like that's why we hired them.

Julianna: 35:14

So, just trusting the fact that, like finding ways to trust your business, trust that what you're doing, what you're developing, is going to continue, it's not I, I still feel this. Sometimes I'll be like we don't get a sale for like two days. I'm like it's all over, it sounds like so. I mean like yeah, it's, it's valid, like the fears are all valid. Are you kidding me? Of course, especially when, like I said, when people's livelihoods depend on it, like when they really, when they start to mean so much to you, the humans that you surround yourself with become your family, like our, our manufacturing team is like family to us and like watching their families grow and develop. And they sent us, like this past Christmas, they sent us the most meaningful letter about, like how we changed their whole life.

Julianna: 36:02

Then he can be home with his wife and kids more because now he gets to primarily focus on our brand. I mean, that's, that's a lie. It's, it's beautiful and it's really special. It's also a lot of pressure. So, you know, just putting different people in in the place where they need to be so that you can better step away and shine at what you shine at Right. So nobody else can tell our story the way Sam and I can, because nobody else lived it. You know, nobody else built it the way we did, but other people can do Instagram posts way better. Our CFO can read numbers way better than we can, you know. And so having those people in place, that's where I feel like that's when you can start setting those healthy boundaries, because then you, you have people that you can lean on and and fall back on and know that it's not all on you anymore. But again, it's a season, it's not going to be day one.

Camille: 36:59

Well, I love that you brought up the term season, because I'm actually opening a coaching called Call Me CEO University, which teaches how to become an entrepreneur from a solopreneur, and I feel like that's the biggest gap is when you're trying to wear all of the hats and you need to go from doing all of the things, like you said marketing and CFO and the actual production to hiring people around you and what are the steps to doing that.

Camille: 37:26

So this group coaching is opening up in October and this is a great time for me to plug it. So thank you for bringing that up. But I love that you said that because, honestly, it's the growth being willing to take that step of fear and the unknown of growth into trusting that you're going to keep showing up and doing the consistent thing, whatever that is, and then encircling yourself with people who are better at doing those things than you are. And I think that you nailed it on the head with that statement, because it is scary and you don't know exactly what that's going to look like, but it's taking that step into the unknown.

Julianna: 38:05

Yeah, it's like constant trust falls every day.

Camille: 38:10

Well, that's so great. Well, listen everyone. We have an amazing announcement and I'm going to do a little plug for this at the beginning of the episode, so if you didn't hear it, hopefully you'll hear it now. We are blessed, blessed by these women, because they are going to be doing a giveaway of their play kitchen. What's the name of the kitchen that you are doing for this one?

Julianna: 38:31

It's the Aviana Gourmet Play Kitchen and it's so cute. It's so cute but it does have some really cute features. So it has a little chalkboard that magnetizes so your child can draw like maybe a chicken, and then it magnetizes to the inside of the oven so it looks like that's what's cooking in the oven. So, yeah, so adorable, I want your kitchen this is so cute.

Sam: 38:59

I know I do too.

Julianna: 39:00

I'm in my kitchen and my little one's always that's hers. My little one, her name's after but it's a beautiful kitchen.

Camille: 39:07

Okay. So the keyword or the secret word we're going to be plugging this when we share this. So this is what the keyword is is CEO, and if you use the code CEO, you will get 15% off of any of the products. It also will enter you into winning the product. So the way that we're going to do this is that you need to be following both of us on Instagram and then you also need to DM us the keyword, which is CEO. That's the only two steps. Make sure you're following us on Instagram.

Camille: 39:42

I will put these directions in the notes below and then also send in the keywords so that we know that you listened to the episode. Now I'm going to pause right there just for a second, all right? Well, I just want to wrap this up by saying thank you so much for coming and sharing your story so authentically. I feel like this is one where, born from a need, a passion, a friendship and the guts of it all, like I feel like you guys really put it on the line and you still are, and that's so admirable, and thank you so much for coming and sharing your story with us today.

Julianna: 40:16

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Camille: 40:19

All right. Well, thank you all for tuning in. Please go ahead and give this episode a like and a rating. That helps other people to see it more. Also, if this inspired you, please send us an email or DM us on Instagram. Real conversations from women doing the things in the trenches that's what keeps us inspired. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode and I will see you next time. Bye, bye, hey CEOs, thank you so much for spending your time with me. If you found this episode inspiring or helpful, please let me know in a comment and a five-star review. You could have the chance of being a featured review on an upcoming episode. Continue the conversation on Instagram at callmeCEOPodcast, and remember you are the boss.