Downsizing A 7-Person Agency To Go Solo with Laurel Scherer
Over nine years, Laurel Scherer built her digital marketing agency to a highly engaged and talented team of seven employees. In 2023, she decided to go solo—she shares her experiences with shedding employees for the freedom and flexibility of a solo business.
We dive into:
The day-to-day realities of running a firm with employees.
How having employees impacted revenue and profit growth plus the owner’s personal bottom line.
The emotional, cognitive and time commitment of being responsible for employees, their career growth and the underlying business.
The pleasant surprises from shifting daily responsibilities for an agency of employees to a solo model.
LINKS
Laurel Scherer | Website | LinkedIn
Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter| Instagram
GUEST BIO
Laurel started her professional life as an Air Force public affairs officer, working in internal communications and media relations, then managing the consolidation of several hundred base websites into a single news and information site for the AF. Ultimately, she decided to depart from her original career path, and moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains, where she began a far less predictable endeavor, starting a web development business.
Over the next several years, she grew her small operation into a 7-person digital marketing agency. Then, in 2022, she shifted gears again, and slowly scaled the agency back down. Now she’s a soloist, focusing on why she started this journey in the first place.
RESOURCES FOR SOLOISTS
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TRANSCRIPT
00:00 – 00:16
Rochelle Moulton: My new definition of wealth is money, revenue, money, time, and flexibility. So what you just picked up is a form of wealth that you didn’t have before, which is the flexibility to make decisions you might not have been able to make before.
00:17 – 00:33
Laurel Scherer: Right, and that’s the irony is you go into business to have that flexibility, and then you grow an agency and realize that you really don’t have nearly as much of it as you do if you’re working more independently and collaboratively without the responsibility of the employees.
00:38 – 01:03
Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to Soloist Women, where we’re all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I’m Rochelle Moulton, and today I’m here with Laurel Shearer who built a seven-person digital marketing agency but decided to convert to a soloist model, a process that she literally just finished a few days before we’re doing this recording. Laurel, welcome.
01:04 – 01:06
Laurel Scherer: Hi, thanks for shell. Thanks for having me.
01:06 – 01:39
Rochelle Moulton: Well, 1 of the many reasons I wanted to have you on the show, Laurel, is your experience of shedding employees to go solo. So, you know, I really appreciate your willing willingness to come talk about it as it’s kind of almost unfolding in front of us. And plus, I’d really love for our listeners to hear how you’ve gotten to this place. Because I suspect that you’re not alone amongst expertise business owners who built an employee model. I’ve heard this more than once, and I felt it myself when I did my first business with employees. So why
01:39 – 01:45
Rochelle Moulton: don’t we start with what made you decide to start your own business in the first place? And when was that?
01:45 – 02:26
Laurel Scherer: The business that I’ve had, the agency that I’ve had, I started actually in 2014. I had been working as a freelancer, web developer for several years before that. And at that point, I was also running a different type of company, a photography and action photography business. But I realized that I was a great developer, but I really sucked at design. And I needed some design help. And I started partnering with a designer and decided that it was time to ask him to join forces with me. And so it just kind of started out that way as
02:26 – 02:30
Laurel Scherer: a two-person agency, 1 designer and 1 developer, and it grew from there.
02:30 – 02:35
Rochelle Moulton: Wow. Were they typically employees versus contractors?
02:36 – 02:51
Laurel Scherer: Yes. I’ve done a lot of collaboration over the years, but I did grow this as a payroll employee business, which sometimes I second guess and is a good part of the reason why I am now downsizing.
02:53 – 03:03
Rochelle Moulton: Well before we talk about that, let’s talk about revenue. So how long did it take you to hit your first hundred thousand in your current business?
03:03 – 03:08
Laurel Scherer: We hit a hundred thousand in our second year with the 2 of us.
03:09 – 03:17
Rochelle Moulton: And from there did you plateau at all or was it more of a steady climb you know because you’re bringing in new employees of course?
03:18 – 03:44
Laurel Scherer: Yeah it was a fairly I mean in my mind it was a slower than I might have liked climb, but it was fairly steady. So I guess it would have been year 3 that we brought on a second developer. And that was mostly because I was the only developer and was becoming a bit of a bottleneck for projects. My designer could design faster than I could develop and run the business.
03:45 – 04:16
Rochelle Moulton: So when I think about having employees, I always think the revenue line is interesting, because there’s the revenue line and the profit line. And when we’re soloists, those 2 lines are usually pretty close together, but not so much when we have employees. So how did your profit change as you added employees? I mean, when you thought about your own income, were you kind of steady? Or did you have more of a personal up and down depending on, you know, revenue and your employee volume?
04:17 – 04:46
Laurel Scherer: Oh, it was definitely very up and down for me personally. I was able to maintain a fairly steady salary with small incremental increases, but there were certainly times when I had to not take a salary for a short period of time as we grew. But I always managed to make it up by the end of the year. But I would say as I added employees, revenue grew quite steadily, but profits did not.
04:47 – 04:49
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, that’s the rub, isn’t
04:50 – 05:15
Laurel Scherer: it? Yeah, definitely. We were profitable in most years, but we added a second designer in year 4, an SEO strategist in year 5, a junior developer and sales guy in year 6. And you know, it’s just every time you have more mouths to feed the profit margins certainly don’t tend to grow quickly, I guess, at least not in my case.
05:15 – 05:35
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah. So did you ever find yourself frustrated with your bottom line even when your top line’s looking pretty amazing? Like if you’re growing year over year, that feels good. But the bottom line, so when you paid yourself a salary, did you have profits left over most years or was it more just you know 0 sum?
05:35 – 05:49
Laurel Scherer: Honestly it was it was enough profit left over to over the years to build a rainy day fund but it wasn’t enough to really take a lot out of it as a business owner until the downsizing began.
05:50 – 05:53
Rochelle Moulton: And when did the downsizing begin actually?
05:54 – 06:27
Laurel Scherer: 2019 was an interesting year because my sixth hire really didn’t even last a full year. That just turned out to not be a great fit, the junior developer. And then of course in, yeah, so I guess I got down to 6 people in that year. And then in 2020, of course the pandemic hit and I had to let our sales guy go. So that put us down to 5. And at that point I determined that I was gonna stay at 5. I didn’t have a desire to try to grow the agency anymore. I was feeling very,
06:27 – 06:52
Laurel Scherer: as most agency owners are, I think very overworked and stressed out because that comes with the territory when you have employees to be responsible for. Part of that profit equation is that I really had a strong desire to try to increase salaries for my employees as much as I could year over year. And so some of our increased revenue went to that.
06:53 – 06:57
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah. Well, I mean, you share the wealth, right, on some level.
06:58 – 07:19
Laurel Scherer: Yeah, absolutely. And I just had such a 1 really rewarding thing for me is just what a wonderful team I had. The 5 of us really enjoyed working together and I always wanted to do my best to make sure that I was using the revenues as well as I could to increase their pay. And so that’s where I put my priority.
07:20 – 07:56
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah. And frankly, I’m really happy to hear that, right? Because, you know, we’re focusing on soloists here, but when we take on employees, I’ve always felt like we have a duty, you know, beyond the legal duties, but we have like a moral and ethical responsibility and duty when we take people on. And that’s the thing that nobody really talks about, but that can really weigh on you. Like during a pandemic, how do you take care of your people when something bad happens in 1 of their lives, how do you replace them at the office with and
07:56 – 08:18
Rochelle Moulton: still keep them part of the firm going forward. It’s, you know, I think this is the thing people just don’t really talk about. And was that part of your decision-making process? You just get to the point where you said, I don’t want to worry about this anymore? Or how did you decide to skinny down your business more once you got to the 5?
08:19 – 09:04
Laurel Scherer: To be perfectly honest, 1 key event really happened at the end of 2021. And I will say at that point, I was kind of been doing this long enough. I was tired, but really working hard to continue to increase that revenue. And at the end of 2021, my lead developer found another job doing something strictly in a technology that he had started to take our agency in the direction of using. And I was pretty devastated by that news having such a small tight-knit team at the time. But I very quickly came to the realization after that,
09:04 – 09:36
Laurel Scherer: kind of getting through the emotional part of that with the team and also thinking about the impact of him leaving. I pretty quickly got through that phase and It was a no-brainer for me to say I’m not hiring another. I’m not hiring replacement for him I’m going to use contract developer help from this point forward and I am a developer And I’ve always known how to get the right person for the right job so that’s the direction that I decided to go in at that point. And then the rest of it was pretty organic, fortunately for
09:36 – 10:14
Laurel Scherer: me, because I didn’t want to just close down the agency or try to sell it or anything at that point. But I talked to the team, the 4 of us that were left and we decided we would go through the rest of the year with having contract support and me not replacing this lead developer. And then everybody was okay with that, although it was a tight-knit team, like I said, so it was tough for them because they really enjoyed working together. Then a few months later, my creative director, who’s the first hire that I made, also
10:14 – 10:44
Laurel Scherer: departed. The rest of the team was pretty frustrated by that after he had, you know, kind of agreed to stay on for the year. But at the end of the day, that put us down to 3. And it was 3 women, which was fantastic. And we worked really great together. And there was just a lot of transparency and open conversation between us from that point forward. And I told them that I thought we should go through the rest of the year with the 3 of us and make a decision at the end of the year. I
10:44 – 11:19
Laurel Scherer: wasn’t gonna make that decision on my own. So I kind of let it go through the rest of the year. We agreed we’d meet in the fall of 2022, which we did. And I kind of knew what was going to happen. I knew that 1 of them was going to want to go and 1 of them was going to want to stay. And that’s exactly how it played out. So, we began 2023 with just 2 of us with me knowing, and with my last employee, pretty much having an understanding that, that we probably needed to part
11:19 – 11:38
Laurel Scherer: ways unless we could really make some sales that really fit her skill set and So we just continued the conversation and just as of last week she is now in a new position and I am happily down to a one-person team with some contract help.
11:38 – 12:11
Rochelle Moulton: Well, I feel like I should say congratulations. But what a ride though. This is the other part that when you don’t have employees you don’t necessarily appreciate is every time 1 person leaves or 1 person joins it changes the nature of the group. It can change it for the better, it can change it for the worse. It’s kind of a crap shoot. And the other thing that’s really interesting is it sounds like each of these people had what I would call an employee mindset. In other words, they were looking for another job. It’s not like they
12:11 – 12:24
Rochelle Moulton: were going out and looking for some contract assignments. They wanted what I call a job job, a salary, a place to go. Actually, did you have a physical office space or was this all virtual?
12:24 – 12:49
Laurel Scherer: We did. We had a physical office space, 2 different ones over the course of the years, all the way up until about a year and a half ago. It’s kind of during the pandemic, we decided to go all virtual. But and I will say that, you know, that’s another expense too, you know, you’re, you’ve got the, you’ve got this office space that you’re dealing with. And it’s just, you know, that’s, that’s always been a little bit of an added stressor in a way.
12:49 – 13:22
Rochelle Moulton: Oh, that’s where I was going next is, you know, having that it’s kind of like a noose around your neck because, you know, you usually have to sign a lease for some specified period of time. And the other thing you said earlier was that you wanted to bring in some assignments that suited 1 of your employees skill sets so as the owner you’ve got these responsibilities for the expense side that may not be changeable very much like the rent and then it’s not that you just go out and look for work that with the kinds of
13:22 – 13:46
Rochelle Moulton: clients that you’d love or the kinds of projects you’d love or the areas of expertise you’d love but you have to keep your people busy Which means yes, and I’m not saying you did this, but sometimes people take on assignments that they really didn’t want to in order to keep the lights on and keep their people busy or keep them engaged because employees are usually happier when they’re busy versus when they don’t have enough to do.
13:47 – 14:10
Laurel Scherer: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that there is a lot of freedom in not having to do that. And I’m at a point now where I’m really looking forward to being able to, like, I’ve learned how to say no to potential clients over the years that are not going to be a good fit. But now I have so much more freedom and flexibility in how often I can say no.
14:11 – 14:31
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, you just hit on, I don’t know if you’ve heard me say this, but my new definition of wealth is money, revenue, money, time, and flexibility. So what you just picked up is a form of wealth that you didn’t have before, which is the flexibility to make decisions you might not have been able to make before.
14:32 – 14:50
Laurel Scherer: Right, and that’s the irony is you go into business to have that flexibility, and then you grow an agency and realize that you really don’t have nearly as much of it as you do if you’re working more independently and collaboratively without the responsibility of the employees?
14:50 – 15:18
Rochelle Moulton: Oh yeah, I mean when I had my firm, I was looking at the, I had employees and contractors, and I was looking at them going, I want their life. They’re having fun, they’re going out, and we only had them do projects they were excited about. And we could do that because most of them were on contract. And they would have fun and we had a no fault, no policy. So if they didn’t want to do a project, they could just say no and we still love them. But I was there, right? I was there all the
15:18 – 15:49
Rochelle Moulton: time fixing the technology when it broke, making sure we had sales, if we had conflicts come up, you know, that was all in my lap. So yeah, there is a whole piece to that. And I think at least in America, we think that when we start businesses, other people judge us by, oh, how many employees do you have? How big are you? And I think a lot of us just kind of buy into that. Well, of course, we’re going to grow a firm. Why wouldn’t we? And, you know, we, a lot of us like to have
15:49 – 16:06
Rochelle Moulton: colleagues. We like to have people to bounce ideas off of. But yeah, this is why I just I’m loving hearing this because it’s allowing people who might be thinking about having employees to really think about whether this is a responsibility they’re prepared to take on.
16:07 – 16:48
Laurel Scherer: Yeah, definitely. I always wanted to make sure that they had opportunities for professional development, and each of them did have those opportunities, and they’ve all really benefited from them in going to their new positions, which I am thankful for. I’m glad that they have each been able to grow those different skills and areas of expertise. To some degree, I think I may have overdone that, not necessarily by like how many opportunities they had or anything like that, but just by the fact that I was letting things continually kind of evolve and go in new directions, which
16:48 – 17:20
Laurel Scherer: was great. We did all custom work. But during that time, I can’t think of really anything that I personally got to do that developed a skill set. I got further and further away from some of that stuff in fact, because it just wasn’t time. So now I actually am, I got all these things in my head like, what am I gonna do with free time now? It’s gonna be great, I can learn some new things and I can like catch up with things that I’ve had sitting in my review folder in my inbox for like the
17:20 – 17:21
Laurel Scherer: last year, you know?
17:21 – 17:54
Rochelle Moulton: I totally get it. But you know, the flip side though, is that you taught yourself a skill, which is leading people and building a firm. And that’s no small thing to have done that and especially if people are still speaking to you afterwards there’s there’s something to be said for that and that’s a skill set but it’s also okay to decide all right I developed that skill set I did this this was a good run I’m ready for something else because we don’t have to be martyrs to our business.
17:54 – 17:58
Laurel Scherer: Yes, absolutely. It’s an exciting time to be in that place, for sure.
17:58 – 18:15
Rochelle Moulton: Oh, I totally get that. Well, now, you said you did a lot of web work, so I’m imagining you had project work, but how did you roll this out with clients? Did you discuss it with them or was it just a non-issue because of who was working on their project?
18:17 – 18:54
Laurel Scherer: Being as small of an agency as we were, because it feels like big, but all of them have gone to bigger agencies or bigger organizations now from what ours was. But you wear a lot of hats, as any small agency owner knows. So all of them were, well, I should say all the 5 of us, the core 5 of us, everybody was capable of taking on project management responsibilities. And so I would have various clients. And 1 of my team members would typically be the project lead. So as each of them exited, we made sure to
18:54 – 19:20
Laurel Scherer: have personal communications with the clients that they had been managing accounts for. And they all really cared about a lot of our clients, you know, and so it was important to To give them a chance to kind of say goodbye and reassure them that they’re still in good hands with how we’re moving forward But we didn’t make big announcements of any sort on the exit of each of them.
19:21 – 19:54
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, I mean, the first time I looked at your website, Laurel, I had such a good feeling because you had pictures of your team and you were doing things. You weren’t just like standing around in a conference room saying, cheese, you know, you’re actively doing things. They look like they were having fun. I mean, I could kind of feel the bond through the photography. So that, that totally makes sense to me. Did you get any pushback either from employees or from clients when you, you know, this is kind of an evolutionary change the way that you
19:54 – 19:58
Rochelle Moulton: did it. But did you sense any of that? Any pushback?
20:00 – 20:37
Laurel Scherer: No, not really. I think I’ve always been sort of the face of the business and the main leader of it. Pretty much all of our clients had communication with me at some point. I don’t feel like that I ever got really any pushback, maybe a little bit of sadness about not working with my developer anymore or really enjoying the communication style that 1 of them had or something like that, but not really any pushback from clients, which was nice. I mean, you know, I still have, I still have a lot of those, most of those clients
20:37 – 20:47
Laurel Scherer: and they, I feel like I’ve built enough trust with them over the years that it hasn’t been a real negative factor for any of them.
20:47 – 21:12
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, I mean, I sort of feel like this is almost a textbook example of how to make a big change in a way that is respectful of all the parties, right Yourself, the employees that all had different needs at different times, and the clients. Yeah, I feel like you really did this well. It’s not an easy thing to do well.
21:13 – 21:44
Laurel Scherer: Yeah, I hope so. I mean, I still have relationships with all of my former employees that at least that core group that we ended with for the last few years of the 5 of us. So you know I wish they all know that I want the best for them and you know on the other hand they’ve left me with you know a great business that I can carry on in a different sort of way now. It’s been kind of a really nice mutual understanding. Like I said, it’s just been a very organic process. I don’t think
21:44 – 22:15
Laurel Scherer: any of us regret the way it happened. Maybe they’ll tell me differently when I have conversations with them in years to come. I’ll let you know if that happens. I feel like I still have friendships with them, which is great. I don’t get to see them on the day to day, but I’m interested to keep up with what they’re all doing. And, you know, I’m just, yeah, I’m thankful for the way that it’s all happened. There’s been, you know, a few little bumps in the road, but nothing major. And it’s worked out. And Now I’m kind
22:15 – 22:34
Laurel Scherer: of at an up, you know, I have opportunity to work with some of the other folks that I used to collaborate with or that I’ve kind of grown relationships with over the years through other leadership, you know, pursuits and networking pursuits. And so I’m kind of enjoying revisiting working with, with those people also.
22:35 – 23:13
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, it’s freedom. So if you think about, I won’t ask if you’ll ever do another firm with employees, because who knows. But if you think about this period of your life since 2014 and you look back at it, what do you think, like, what was the learning from having employees and building a firm, either about the business or about yourself? I mean, I’m sensing that this was a very much of a process, but that you’re you’re also learning about yourself in the course of this what you wanted next, how you wanted to work, how you wanted
23:13 – 23:15
Rochelle Moulton: to live, all those things. Those things.
23:16 – 23:55
Laurel Scherer: Yeah, I mean, I had led teams before in other sort of situations. I had that photography business and I spent a number of years in the Air Force as a leader. But this was definitely the most challenging thing that I decided to do, I think, was to grow a digital marketing agency just for a lot of reasons. I feel like once I started the downsizing, once my lead developer left and it was just so clear to me that I was not going to replace him. And I, I didn’t want to grow this anymore. It just, it
23:55 – 24:04
Laurel Scherer: became more and more clear the direction that I wanted to go. And I definitely don’t want to build another agency with employees ever.
24:05 – 24:33
Rochelle Moulton: Okay, she said it here folks. Well, I just have to throw this out because you said you know building a digital agency you know with employees was the most challenging thing that you ever did. What people probably don’t know about you is that you also graduated from the Air Force Academy. So you’ve just said doing this was harder than graduating from 1 of the toughest schools in the US.
24:34 – 24:35
Laurel Scherer: Well, it was harder
24:35 – 24:42
Rochelle Moulton: in a different kind of way, I guess. Yeah, it is a leadership challenge, isn’t it? It truly is a leadership challenge.
24:42 – 25:20
Laurel Scherer: Yeah, it totally is. And I have been in leadership positions my whole adult life, really, from, you know, the day that I stepped off the bus at the Air Force Academy. You’re put into a leadership program, and I’ve led people as an Air Force officer for almost a decade. And then I led a group of essentially young, I mean, I’ll call them kids because that’s what they were at the time with my action photography business. And so what possessed me to decide that I was going to take on the stress of leading a professional group of
25:20 – 25:59
Laurel Scherer: designers, developers, and strategists when I knew the difficulty and responsibility that came with it, I’m not quite sure. But I went down the road anyway. And it was definitely, in a lot of ways, 1 of the most challenging things that I’ve done, and in large part because these people were all very talented and they had opinions and I listened to them. And it’s difficult to sort of weigh out how to make decisions in that process, especially when you really have to make a lot of your decisions based on the healthy employment of those employees.
26:00 – 26:18
Rochelle Moulton: Yes. And that’s the rub, isn’t it? The healthy employment of those employees. So if you have someone who’s a real problem, like toxic, you want to get that person out quickly. And if you have conflict, you want to address conflict really quickly so it doesn’t fester.
26:19 – 26:54
Laurel Scherer: Yeah. And fortunately with my team, I didn’t have a whole lot of that. There was a very short period of time in 2019 when we had a team of 7 where there were some significant issues with my seventh employee and I had to make that difficult decision and go through actually firing that person. Not that I hadn’t fired anyone before I had, but as an agency owner you have to take into account how 1 person can be affecting the whole team. And with an agency as small as ours, that certainly was the case.
26:54 – 27:20
Rochelle Moulton: Oh, listen, and I’m not saying that person was toxic, but I’m just kind of using that as a label. But toxic behavior in any size firm is a problem. And sometimes the bigger firms just ignore it, especially if the person is really good at something like bringing in business or they’re running a practice that’s making a lot of money. It can be really easy. So I give you kudos for facing it head on. It’s not easy.
27:21 – 27:35
Laurel Scherer: Yeah, it’s not. But you know, on the other hand, there’s on the flip side of that, I’ve been in situations when I was an Air Force officer where you can’t fire someone in the federal government. So, you know, there’s both sides of that coin.
27:35 – 28:08
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, firing employees is definitely not fun. I actually had someone come back to me once and thank me. And I felt terrible because the guy was like a genius. He was just in the wrong place. It was not the right position or the right firm for him. And nobody would tell him that. And he wasted like 4 years of his career in a place that didn’t appreciate him. And I felt to me, he was didn’t report to me, but I wound up having to be the deliverer of the news. And he later, not in that moment,
28:08 – 28:27
Rochelle Moulton: believe me, but later thanked me for that. And he is doing amazing things now that he would never have gotten to do had he stayed there. So you know sometimes the best thing you can do not just you know for your own firm but for the person themselves is to let them go and go find something that’s a better fit.
28:28 – 28:29
Laurel Scherer: Yeah definitely.
28:29 – 29:07
Rochelle Moulton: But I say all of this really I mean I recognize that most most of our listeners are soloists, but I know from talking with soloists that a lot of soloists, especially when you’re in the earlier stages of the business, you start to wonder like, what’s the best way to leverage? Do I leverage with how I price myself? Do I leverage with courses and memberships? Do I leverage with maybe books and products? Or do I leverage with employees? Not contractors, that’s yet another thing, but there’s a clear differentiation which I hope the listener has heard here in
29:07 – 29:43
Rochelle Moulton: how you deal with employees who have a career that you’re helping them to to manage and to lead versus Contractors who are very clear what they want right? They know exactly what they want and They’re not looking to you to provide them a job and all the things that that entails so it’s definitely a different process and Laurel it’s it’s why I’m so glad you joined us. You can kind of talk through what that looks like from the inside, and especially after you’ve made the decision to go solo.
29:44 – 30:25
Laurel Scherer: Yeah, It’s definitely very different, as you said, working with contractors, which is what I’m doing more of now clearly than it is to have that responsibility with the employees. I will say, for anybody that’s thinking about hiring employees as a way to leverage, as you said, or scale. In my particular case, at least, with my type of business, that was a really slow process and it just requires an amount of time from you that you can’t even understand it until you get in the middle of it. Even with the best processes and systems in the world,
30:26 – 31:02
Laurel Scherer: doing that sort of growth thing for an agency is, you know, there’s some people that do it, no doubt. But for me, I found it to be a bit of a just a slow and somewhat tedious process, even though I loved the people that I was working with. And I loved having that team. There’s a lot of business and personal downsides to it in terms of how much of your time it takes and how much of your energy it takes and how much sleep you lose. Honestly, you know, things like that. So it’s, it’s a, I
31:02 – 31:08
Laurel Scherer: wouldn’t discourage somebody necessarily from doing it. It’s rewarding also, but it’s hard.
31:08 – 31:42
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah. I mean, there’s a cognitive load with it that is hard to understand until you’ve done it. It’s that the things that keep you up at night. So I always say, if you want to have employees, you have to really, really want them. Sort of like sometimes people will give advice to women deciding whether to have children or not. You have to really, really want them because there’s lots and lots of joys and there’s lots and lots of sacrifices and work involved. And so, yeah, I mean, I know when I created my first business, I wanted
31:42 – 32:18
Rochelle Moulton: to have employees, I was excited to have them. And, you know, just like you, I have some lifelong friendships from that group. So I do not regret it for a moment. But boy, if somebody said, Oh, you want to do this again? I’d be no. I do not. I’ve done it. I did it. I created something. I sold it and I moved on to the next thing. So thank you for that, Laurel. Just 1 last question is if you could go back to who you were when you first started this business, like What’s the 1 thing
32:19 – 32:20
Rochelle Moulton: you would advise her to do?
32:22 – 32:57
Laurel Scherer: Look at your personal priorities and try to project the pros and cons of adding payroll employees versus working with contractors. Would probably be really weigh those pros and cons like from on a real personal level I think is what I would would say. And that’s not to say that I would go back and not do this but like you said I wouldn’t do it again. So yeah, I think that’s the main thing that I would probably say about that. And you know, that’s just like from coming from starting this business. You know, I had that other
32:57 – 33:03
Laurel Scherer: business before and there were different challenges with it. But yeah, I think that would be the main thing.
33:03 – 33:08
Rochelle Moulton: Well, Laurel, before we sign off, where can listeners go to learn more about you and your work?
33:08 – 33:20
Laurel Scherer: Sure, yeah. My website is just statusforward.com, and I’m on LinkedIn with just Laurel Shearer. And that’s probably the best 2 places.
33:20 – 33:44
Rochelle Moulton: Awesome. And we will have those up on the show notes for people to access. Laurel, thank you so much for coming on and sharing like this of the moment shift from running an agency to going solo. I just really appreciate your candor about the joys and the pitfalls of building an agency with employees. So thank you so much.
33:44 – 33:46
Laurel Scherer: Yeah, Thanks for having me.
33:46 – 33:52
Rochelle Moulton: Awesome. So that’s it for this episode. I hope you’ll join us next time for Soloist Women. Bye-bye.
