Founders with Kids…Building A Paid Community with Sarah K. Peck

Maybe you’ve toyed with building a paid community as part of your business model. Or you gave it a shot and later shelved it because you just couldn’t make it work. Start-up Parent Founder Sarah K. Peck goes deep on how she built three paid communities:

How she chose the initial idea that morphed into her company and multiple highly engaged (paid) communities.

Why what looks like overnight success (260 applications for 25 spots) was actually years of experiments, trials and listening to a consistent audience.

How she looks at experimenting today—and why a one-year commitment keeps her focused on the best outcomes for her members and herself.

The role that lighthearted fun—joy even—can play in the success of your community and your own happiness.

The intersection of motherhood and business and finding your sweet spot between the two.

 

LINKS

Sarah K. Peck LinkedIn | Threads

Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram

BIO

Sarah K. Peck is the founder and CEO of Startup Parent and the host of The Startup Parent Podcast, an award-winning podcast featuring women in entrepreneurship, business, and parenting. She writes about work, culture, and parenting, and her work has been featured in Forbes, Inc, Fast Company, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and more.

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TRANSCRIPT 

Sarah K. Peck
00:00 – 00:25
I started interviewing folks who have big careers and are working at startups who have gone through pregnancy. That’s why it was Startup Pregnant. I wanted to learn from folks. And about three years into the project, I realized that I didn’t want to talk to only moms and only women. It was like, the shifts that happen when you’re pregnant are just the beginning. It’s just the tip of the iceberg. Like you’re a parent for the rest of your life.

Rochelle Moulton
00:31 – 01:11
Hello, hello. Welcome to the Soloist Life Podcast, where we’re all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I’m Rochelle Moulton, and today I am so excited to welcome Sarah K. Peck to the show. So Sarah is the founder and CEO of Startup Parent and the host of the Startup Parent podcast, an award-winning podcast featuring women in entrepreneurship, business, and parenting. She writes about work, culture, and parenting, and her work has been featured in Forbes, Inc., Fast Company, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and more. Sarah, welcome.

Sarah K. Peck
01:11 – 01:14
Oh, it’s so great to be here. I’m so excited to talk to you.

Rochelle Moulton
01:14 – 01:47
I was having so much fun in the green room that it was like I just had to stop and hit record so we could get some of this. So we talked a few years ago on my other podcast, but I’ve been watching you, and I’ve been fascinated by what I see as a very measured and successful approach to growth and how thoughtfully you’ve developed multiple professional communities, at least three that I’m aware of, that are at the intersection of motherhood and business. So I’m just thrilled that we can talk about this.

Sarah K. Peck
01:48 – 02:27
That’s really lovely to hear. It always feels, I think, on the inside, I’m sure other entrepreneurs can relate, that things are going so much slower than you want them to go. And it’s taking forever, and you’re trying some things, and then it doesn’t work, and you try some new things. But yes, community has always been really important to me. And I have, since I was in my mid-20s, joined a number of communities that have really been supportive and helpful to me. And it’s something that I really enjoy doing. It’s like matchmaking. I think if I were living in a different era, I might have been a matchmaker.

Sarah K. Peck
02:27 – 02:44
But I just really enjoy connecting people and bringing them together. And I recently took the StrengthsFinders, and it says that one of my skills is individualization. So it’s like seeing people as individuals and then really getting to know them. So I’m glad that I was doing something that I’m good at.

Rochelle Moulton
02:45 – 03:16
Well, yeah. And plus, you know, it’s nice to have somebody come in and look at like your last 10 years of work and just be able to see it all in one fell swoop. It’s a lot harder when you’re doing the actual work in the trenches. So before we dive into Founders with Kids, which is your newest community, and why those two key words are compatible, would you share a little bit about how you got here? I mean, I know that you had a lot of writing and communications experience in your early days, but it looks like you’ve been an entrepreneur for a big chunk of your career so far.

Sarah K. Peck
03:17 – 03:57
No, it’s so surprising to me. I never knew that that was a path you could take until you reach that point where you want to make something exist that doesn’t exist, or you’re tired of other people telling you what to do. And so you branch out. But my background is in psychology and then architectural design. I got a graduate degree in urban design and landscape architecture. And I worked for five or six years in that field. And one of the things that i noticed and started to observe was that these brilliant people who are dreaming up the future in visuals they’re able to do plans and design.

Sarah K. Peck
03:58 – 04:33
were speaking in jargon. You know, when they got up and to write about what they were doing or speak about what they were doing, so often no one could understand them because it was like, well, the precipitous back channel of the blank blank is something. So, and I was like, I don’t know what that means. Like, tell me in English, what is this? Speak to me like I’m a 10 year old so I can understand. And I ended up shifting and working in communications and through everything I was learning paired with some new startups at the time, like General Assembly and Udemy and other places to start teaching these skills.

Sarah K. Peck
04:33 – 05:19
And eventually my journey into entrepreneurship was through freelancing. And I started my own thing. I brought together a writing community. I taught folks how to write and I did a lot of ghost writing for CEOs. So taking the brilliance that people had, the deep expertise in helping them craft thought leadership essays before it was really known as thought leadership. And things evolved because I learned how to set better boundaries with clients. I learned contracting and marketing. And then I started to learn how to build a very small team. How do you have an assistant and how do you lean on consultants or other folks to help you really narrow in on what you are uniquely good at?

Sarah K. Peck
05:20 – 05:51
versus trying to do everything yourself. And learned a lot through that, by the way. One of the things I tried to hire out was I tried to hire writers and I did not realize how difficult it was to hire out for something that I’m uniquely good at. And I really should have hired out for other things. But in the early days, I just did not see that that was one of my strengths. I thought this was something anyone could do. And I had to do more CEO stuff and organization and operations, which is not my strength.

Rochelle Moulton
05:51 – 05:52
Classic.

Sarah K. Peck
05:52 – 05:57
So lots of learning that got me on the path of entrepreneurship.

Rochelle Moulton
05:57 – 06:12
So you did all those things. I almost feel like some of the communities you created followed where you were in your life stage, right? Because I’m thinking startup parent was startup pregnant first. Yes, that’s right. Yeah. How did that sort of unfold for you?

Sarah K. Peck
06:12 – 06:58
I was working and I built a number of online writing courses and communications courses and I was partnering with some folks and running my own business. I ended up actually joining a startup, a venture backed downtown Manhattan. It was a coding and skill building startup where you taught people how to build with Ruby on Rails and Python and, and more. It was there that I got pregnant with my first kid and nobody in the tech startup world was talking about how do you do this while pregnant? Like you would occasionally see a woman with a perfect belly on the cover of a magazine and being like, hell, this founder earned $50 million and didn’t skip a beat while pregnant.

Sarah K. Peck
06:58 – 07:31
And I was like, that seems very watered down. You think? Yeah. Excuse me, but how? I was too curious and also too dubious. Just say, that does not make sense to me. How does this work? Meanwhile, I’m making this map across Manhattan of all the places I’ve had to secretly puke because I’m so sick during my pregnancy. I was like, that trash can I puked in, that bush I puked in, that Whole Foods. You know, it was all I could do just to get to work as sick as I felt. And I was like, this is nothing like what people describe.

Sarah K. Peck
07:32 – 08:12
And so I started interviewing folks who have big careers and are working at startups who have gone through pregnancy. That’s why it was Startup Pregnant. I wanted to learn from folks. And about three years into the project, I realized that I didn’t want to talk to only moms and only women. And also that it was like the shifts that happen when you’re pregnant are just the beginning. It’s just the tip of the iceberg, like you’re a parent for the rest of your life. And at least the next 20 years are fraught with challenges of raising children and continuing to figure out how do you make all of this work together?

Sarah K. Peck
08:12 – 08:54
And, you know, what balls can you drop safely? And, you know, what do you do when you feel completely overwhelmed? And also I wanted dads in the conversation and all parents in the conversation. So we shifted and rebranded to startup parent. I still run a women’s leadership community because I think gendered spaces are useful and important. But when it comes to parenting, the thing that I’ve heard and talked to a lot of people about is you really don’t need gendered spaces after the first six or 12 months, right? You need some postpartum support groups. You probably need some birthing support groups, but everything out there is mommy and me branded and these dads don’t have any places to go and they need to be a part of the conversation.

Sarah K. Peck
08:54 – 09:19
So the more that we can make it about parenting in general, the better I think we can be. And we can have subgroups where it’s like, this one’s specifically for moms with trauma, or this is specifically for single dads. But it’s way too siloed. So that’s how I started StartUp Parent. I’ve been running that company for five years. and building it. And recently, this last summer, we launched the Community Founders with Kids.

Rochelle Moulton
09:20 – 09:39
Well, let me just say, as another woman, it’s about time that men get drawn into the parenting conversation because a lot of them want to be. Yes. Right? And a lot of these communities are kind of exclusionary, not in a bad way, but parenting isn’t a one gender thing. No,

Sarah K. Peck
09:39 – 09:57
it’s not at all. And also there’s, you know, folks that don’t even identify as being a woman or a man and, or a mom or a dad, they’re parents. And what about step parents and bonus parents? Like there’s so many. additional people that we need. And if we want to have any semblance of the village back, we can’t make it about one person.

Rochelle Moulton
09:57 – 10:28
Yes. I speak as a step-parent. I didn’t birth any babies, but I do have a lot of the other things that go along with, in this case, now grown-up children. But still, I think, yeah, it’s important to bring a lot of people into those conversations. Exactly. So before we go more there, because I do want to go, I do want to ask you this question I love to ask guests that have built their own businesses. Do you remember when you hit your first $100,000 when you started running your own business versus working for other people?

Rochelle Moulton
10:28 – 10:33
Yes. Was that like a milestone for you? Do you remember it? Yes.

Sarah K. Peck
10:33 – 11:13
There’s a couple parts of that. I remember both hitting it. I think we did like $40,000 the first year. It’s funny. it’s not up into the right. It’s not a single line because there have been different years where different things have happened. Like way back when, when I was leaving my architecture job and moving into being a freelancer, I had made $30,000 in side projects in selling writing courses. And I was like, certainly I can double this if I have full time to spend on this. Like if I don’t have a job and I was making about $50,000 a year at that job, And I look back and I’m like, how did I do it?

Sarah K. Peck
11:13 – 11:55
I was like, roommates and buses, you know? Yeah, in Manhattan. I mean, design does not pay very well. But I remember that. I remember benchmarking against the job and then saying, at least if I could make that much. And then realizing, oh, wait, that doesn’t account for half of what I need to make up for. But I also remember the milestone of, Realizing when $100,000 is not enough, like it’s actually completely, there’s so much out there. It’s like, oh, and then once you make six figures and I want people to think beyond that because there’s like, what are you reinvesting in your business for growth?

Sarah K. Peck
11:55 – 12:29
What are you reinvesting for? a rainy day for volatility? What about learning and an education? What about taxes? There’s so many places this goes. What about long-term savings and retirement? There’s so many more things to think about that when I talk to people, we can map out all of these different pieces, and then we start to map out What’s a luxury item for you? And the coolest thing is that people aren’t like, I want a private plane. They’re like, you know, I really want to like that fancy gym membership. That’s $300 a month. That would be so cool.

Sarah K. Peck
12:29 – 12:55
And you’re like, great. That’s $3,600 a year. So it’s very tangible what would make a difference for folks. And then they can find their number, whether that’s $140,000 or $180,000, but they can find the place or, you know, $500,000 because they want to be somewhere else or a million, wherever you are. But when you get to the specifics of it, you can find that life-changing number for you.

Rochelle Moulton
12:56 – 13:01
Oh, yeah. Well, we could have a whole conversation about that. I call it your enough number, which gets

Sarah K. Peck
13:01 – 13:01
you

Rochelle Moulton
13:01 – 13:36
everything that you want for the life that you’ve planned. But I think of the hundred thousand for these kinds of businesses, for a solo business, as once you hit that on some kind of a regular basis, you’ve got a sustainable business, right? If you can do that on a regular basis, you know, it’s sustainable. And then you can start to experiment even more with things that are going to push you through that plateau and get you to whatever your magic number is. And they’re all different. I mean, even when people have the same number, what’s in that number looks very different from person to person.

Rochelle Moulton
13:36 – 13:37
Yes.

Sarah K. Peck
13:38 – 14:09
Oh, I love that as the sustainable metric. I work with someone who teaches that there’s validation, there’s kind of the spaghetti, throw it on the wall phase where you’re trying to figure out what works first in product offerings and like what you can you actually sell. And then in terms of marketing, you know, is, do I go over here? Do I go over there? Like, where can I reliably find folks? And when you get to a place where you can reliably and predictably, she says within a 10% kind of gauge, say, I’m going to do a sale at this point.

Sarah K. Peck
14:09 – 14:15
This is how much I’m going to sell. And I can predict it, give or take plus or minus 10%. Then you’re onto something.

Rochelle Moulton
14:16 – 14:16
Yeah.

Sarah K. Peck
14:16 – 14:18
You’ve got to get to that point, because otherwise it’s like

Rochelle Moulton
14:18 – 14:51
a hobby. It’s not really a business. Yeah. OK, well, let’s go back to where we were a little bit ago, because I think that you have a lot that you can teach our audience about this idea of community. So you had the Startup Parent Community. You still have the Wise Woman Council Community. And now you’ve started this third one, Founders with Kids. So I have to tell you, I did a double take. I just want to make sure I read this correctly, that you did a soft launch and you had over 200 applications in three days.

Sarah K. Peck
14:52 – 15:11
Yeah, it was amazing. Yeah. About 50 of those applications had dripped in early and then we just, I announced it and then we just, boom, got another 150 and it jumped. It was like 260 by the end. Wow. That was really wild to me how quickly we had people throw their hat in the ring. I

Rochelle Moulton
15:11 – 15:47
can just see people listening to this going, I want to do that. So obviously you struck a nerve, but we all know that building a community is more than, you know, just having the right idea at the right time. I mean, you’ve been doing this a long time. And since many of our listeners here are fascinated with this idea of building a thriving community, will you talk through how you think about your communities, how you plan for them. I mean, you’ve got this new one and a little bit about how you run them. Let us pick your brain a little bit on communities as you see them.

Sarah K. Peck
15:47 – 16:25
I think it’s hard to see all the work that goes behind the scenes and also all the failures along the way and how so much of this is incremental, not magic. It’s you gain another 10 subscribers here, you gain a hundred over there, you gain 10 here. And it’s really just slow and steady pacing. I will say that I’m, I really identify with this idea of being a soloist rather than like a scale to exit kind of business. And. So some of the strongest advice that I’ve gotten is you can start with services and you can pivot towards group programs because those are kind of the most bang for the buck.

Sarah K. Peck
16:26 – 17:12
And also they let me scale myself and my time a little bit better. So when I started really taking this seriously, I created a group program that was a higher ticket item. It’s $6,000 a year now. I mean, I could easily be charging double that. I just really am committed to making things accessible, and I want to make it easy to have the conversation and the sale, but I also know the value I create. I love surprising and delighting people. So I’ve kept the price low, partly for integrity, but partly for accessibility. But $6,000, if I get 40 people into the program, that creates a nice, strong foundation for the kind of business that I want to run and gives me space to start to outsource things and free up my time.

Sarah K. Peck
17:13 – 17:51
And there’ve been some years where we had a smaller crew, like 18, 20, 26 people. So that was the first community that I built. And that one’s much more high touch, one-on-one, time, small groups, breakouts, and some audio chat rooms. I’ve had the idea for Founders with Kids and the URL for about four years now. And that’s percolation. Well, part of it was every time I tried to open up my calendar or figure something out and be like, I should start this. I was like, not yet. It’s not the right time, either because I didn’t have the bandwidth or I was dancing around burnout.

Sarah K. Peck
17:51 – 18:22
And I knew that if I added another program, it wouldn’t help. And also I just couldn’t figure out the pricing model without undercutting myself. It was like, well, if I’m going to charge a hundred dollars a month for something, now I’ve got a $1,200 offer, annual offer, that’s competing with a $6,000 annual offer. And I’m basically doubling my workload, but not doubling my revenue unless it works at scale. Right. And so it was like, it just, it kept being edited off my plate. I was like, I don’t have the stamina or the bandwidth to do this.

Sarah K. Peck
18:23 – 18:55
this last summer, I decided it felt right. It’s hard to describe other than like, I really trust my body. I listen to my body and try to do things both sensation based, but also pragmatically, like there’s strategy. And then there’s also internal gut checking. And I said, it’s the right time. Okay, I’m going to do this as an experiment for a year. That’s what I’m going to do because I don’t walk into things assuming that they’re going to work. I have no idea. Like, I don’t know if you can hear, by the way, there’s a dog in the background.

Sarah K. Peck
18:56 – 18:56
I can’t. I’m

Rochelle Moulton
18:57 – 18:58
so sorry. They

Sarah K. Peck
18:58 – 19:00
sound adorable. I’m so

Rochelle Moulton
19:00 – 19:01
sorry for the interruption, everyone.

Sarah K. Peck
19:02 – 19:43
Where was I? I don’t approach everything like it’s going to be a set win. I have no idea. The markets change, markets mature, economic conditions shift. Even my audience can grow tired of listening to me. We just don’t know. Also part of our life vision, my partner and I, we have been conscientious about looking for the smallest livable place, the most affordable livable place. A lot of people try to maximize their housing. It’s kind of the narrative that’s pushed on us. It’s very American. You know, get the biggest house. Yeah. And so we’re like, what’s the smallest place we can live in so that we have leverage to take more risk in our businesses and our creative lives.

Sarah K. Peck
19:44 – 19:45
So yeah, here I am from a small apartment.

Rochelle Moulton
19:46 – 20:03
I love that about you. We’re in the same, kind of the same boat, just on the other side of the country. And we do it very intentionally and consciously. And it feels really powerful when you do that. It gives you so many options and opportunities that you never thought of before.

Sarah K. Peck
20:03 – 20:38
It’s so fascinating for so many reasons, because also I love hosting back to the theme of community. I love hosting people over for dinner and we have a tiny apartment and people live in all sorts of different homes and houses. And there’s something really interesting. This goes way back to my psychology degree, I think, but about watching the social dynamics and the status games that people play and the assumptions they make and the things they share with you or don’t share with you. And then invariably, a lot of people leave and they’ll say, your house is so cozy and warm.

Sarah K. Peck
20:38 – 21:09
Like, I don’t feel like I have to posture or pretend. I feel like I could just lay on your couch in my pajamas. And I was like, excellent. That’s all I want. I don’t want us to be putting on airs. Yeah, exactly. Come over. Tell me all your problems. We’ll cry together and make popcorn and then maybe have a dance party. I’m calling you next time I’m in New York. Please. I mean, actually, the other thing I’m really proud of is there’s a lot of people who have napped on my bed because we have a really comfortable, we have like a king size bed.

Sarah K. Peck
21:09 – 21:32
I know the trick to getting a great bed. We get a firm mattress and then a super soft topper and a weighted blanket. And we’ve got like great white noise machines. And so I’ve had friends who are in this town and also visiting from out of town who they’ll just pop over and they’re like, you know, my kids are driving me absolutely crazy. I don’t know what to do. And I’m like, just come over and take a nap. And then they come in and they just take a nap in my bed. And they’re like, that’s the best nap I’ve ever had.

Rochelle Moulton
21:34 – 21:40
in the middle of the world’s most pulsating city. You gotta love that. You gotta

Sarah K. Peck
21:40 – 22:12
love that. I mean, this might be just indicative too of the community ethos that I have is like, treat people like people. right? Be a human. So yeah, so I, this founders with kids is an experiment and I’ve treated it very much with the kind of MVP style, which is there was no landing page. All it was is a Google form and the Google forum was like five things. So it could be easy for folks. That’s probably why we got 200 and something applications because it’s the only thing you could do was fill out this application.

Sarah K. Peck
22:12 – 22:13
There was nothing else.

Rochelle Moulton
22:14 – 22:23
Yeah, I was looking. I was waiting to see if it would say, were there other coaches or teachers inside? There was none of that. It was like, if you’re interested, here’s the form.

Sarah K. Peck
22:23 – 22:55
Yeah, let us know. And I’m relying on kind of an emergent strategy framework, which is instead of spending all this time designing what you think people will do, put them in a room together and see what they do. And the kind of analog version of this is there are some places, universities, small towns, what they will do is instead of putting sidewalks and paths in, they’ll put a big lawn in and then let people walk from place to place. And then they’ll put the paths in where they notice the footpaths being formed.

Rochelle Moulton
22:55 – 22:58
Yes. Yeah. Where the grass doesn’t exist anymore.

Sarah K. Peck
22:59 – 23:32
Exactly. Because we’ve all been in like a place where they put like a perfect square, but nobody, they want to get across. So they just cut right across the lawn. And then they put those bushes in to block people from cutting across the lawn. And you’re like, we’re really not getting this. So what that looks like in practice, however, is we welcomed our first 25 people. I put them, they joined in August. We had a once a month call, a hangout call. And it was a lot more crickets than I expected. Like people weren’t ready to go first in the community.

Sarah K. Peck
23:32 – 24:07
It was a little bit like, what do we talk about? How do we talk about this? And we had some churn. We had, you know, four or five people drop off right away. I mean, within the first three months. And the nice thing was that like, I didn’t take any of it personally. I was like, yep, that’s, I did this on purpose. Like I, this is what I would expect if you just said, here’s a room, I’ve done nothing. So that can be an uncomfortable strategy. But the other way to look at it is that I was generating $2,500 a month to experiment.

Sarah K. Peck
24:08 – 24:46
So it was pretty cool. And I learned a lot. And what I did is, at about three months in, when I was noticing, like, OK, people aren’t organically speaking up. These conversations aren’t happening the way that I would expect. So what’s going on here? So I started breaking out into small groups of three or four people. and getting to know them on a deeper level, talking to them, and having them brainstorm. Like, OK, what can we build? What can we design? So it wasn’t until December, which is three months ago at the time of this recording, that we started to lay out a plan and a design that was informed by the 12 most active people in this space.

Sarah K. Peck
24:47 – 25:19
And now, and then it was a month ago that I updated the landing page to reflect what it is. And it’s become something really cool. I had someone reach out and thank me. They’re like, this is just such a great place. Like the vulnerability, the bravery, the trust is really high. These people are wonderful. And I was like, Thanks for saying that, because it didn’t start there, right? It takes time. It takes iteration. It’s like walking into a party where everyone’s making uncomfortable small talk, but then by the end of the night, you’re laughing and having deep conversation with folks.

Sarah K. Peck
25:19 – 25:57
It takes a minute for people to feel comfortable. And I’m really proud of where we are now. So we have twice a month member mixers and we call them rapid fire masterminds, mini masterminds. So it’s really focused on come jam with folks. And for 30 minutes on this call, you’ll be put in a small group with three people and you’ll get 10 minutes of time to be like, here’s my puzzle, here’s what I’m working on. So it’s like really focused founder first. And then we’re kicking off a Monday morning coffee. So at 11 a.m. Eastern, We’re going to do every Monday, we’re going to hang out and just like have coffee and be like, what are you doing this week?

Sarah K. Peck
25:57 – 26:26
Did you survive the weekend? How’s parenting brain? How’s business brain? Which one needs attention right now? Right. So we’re going to do some Monday hangouts. And then we have pop up events with folks. And my husband actually joined. He built an anonymous bot so people can start asking questions anonymously and crowdsourcing help and support. So we’ve got some really cool stuff that’s starting to build and we’re about ready to go back to those applications and welcome the next batch of 25 people in.

Rochelle Moulton
26:27 – 27:08
One of the things I find so fascinating about that is that I think so many of us underestimate what it takes to build a community. It’s not you just, you design this perfect thing, even if you do a lot of research upfront, right? And you have your people tell you what they want and you go in, you can’t just drop it. in and then drop people in and expect it to survive. No. I mean, it doesn’t work. And what I love about what you’re saying is that even when you’re really good at this, when it’s part of your genius zone, when it’s right at the intersection of the work that you’ve been doing for the last 10 plus years in your career, it still takes experimentation and a lot more work than most people would expect.

Sarah K. Peck
27:09 – 27:47
Yes, a lot more work than people would expect. There’s the secret. And the commitment to keep tweaking, the commitment to keep experimenting and iterating and be like, huh, this part’s not working. Well, that’s my opinion. Let’s see what other people think. Oh, they like it. OK. OK, well, then nothing’s broken, right? Or why isn’t anyone using this room and talking to a bunch of folks? And one of the things I learned from a lot of folks when we were doing the feedback sessions was I’m a deep thinker. I go there. I talk about everything. But when it’s in written form, it feels heavy like homework.

Sarah K. Peck
27:47 – 28:17
Like if I show up and I just ask always big questions, and they’re like, I just need more like jokes and laughter and humor. I was like, oh, great. I’m good at funny. I get on Instagram at the end of the day, and I call this meme hunting, and I send ridiculous memes to a handful of friends. I love it. When the kids are down, I’m like, I’m going to go scroll Instagram. chaos raccoon for 20 minutes, goodbye. And I usually like eat cookies and scroll Instagram. And then I’m like, okay, I got my fix.

Sarah K. Peck
28:17 – 28:30
And so I was like, I could just screenshot those memes and start dropping them in the group. I was like, my nighttime quirk can now become useful for my community. And so we added memes and I dropped them every Saturday.

Rochelle Moulton
28:33 – 29:00
You know what I love about that? I mean, there’s a bunch of things. One is you asked and they told you, you acted on it and you found something that you have fun with that is natural to you. Because think about what’s the worst jokester in the world, right? The one who thinks they have to be funny, but they’re just not. I mean, it’s terrible. This is hysterical. I love it. It was really fun. And there’s only a million memes on this

Sarah K. Peck
29:00 – 29:41
topic, right? So many good memes. So we have this channel called Share a Laugh, so anyone could go in there. And we’ll drop other things in. So this is a story I dropped in. So sometimes we write stories, sometimes we drop memes. The other day, my husband is in the car, and we’ve got our six-year-old and our eight-year-old, and there’s this middle school show that’s happening, and it’s like these one acts and these stand-up, and they say, it’s not for younger kids. These are like more middle school to high school conversations. So he’s explaining, he’s like, I’m gonna take the eight-year-old, I’m gonna take him to this show, it’s just gonna be daddy and him, and six-year-old, you’re not allowed to go.

Sarah K. Peck
29:41 – 30:26
He goes, why? He goes, well, there’s a lot of swear words, and there’s some stuff about this show that’s grown up, and it’s not for little kids. You know what six-year-old says? He goes, fuck. Of course he did. I was like, okay, okay. Should’ve just said it’s past your bedtime. They learn it young. Oh my God. It was also like the comedic timing. I was like, kid, you got it. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up. No. So we tell stuff like that when our kids are being ridiculous. Like we don’t shame or embarrass them, but just it’s nice to capture those moments where you’re like, they crack me up.

Sarah K. Peck
30:26 – 30:39
Like they are ridiculous. Leo told me, my older kid told me, he’s like, I don’t understand why you don’t make more money so we can have a bigger house. Why don’t you just work while I’m asleep? I was like, but. Oh, Leo.

Rochelle Moulton
30:42 – 31:23
Sure, I’ll do that. I’ll just sacrifice all my sleep. Yeah, no problem, honey. Oh my gosh. You know, I want to, I want to segue into something else that I would just love to hear your viewpoint on. So most everything that you’ve done publicly is seems like it’s at the intersection of business and motherhood and like your revolution, which I talk about sort of like a big idea is around being able to be both a terrific founder and a terrific parent, you know, especially a mother. And I feel like we need to be talking about this and busting through some of the challenges, the myths, the outdated assumptions and practices.

Rochelle Moulton
31:24 – 32:08
And frankly, with all the crazy anti-woman, anti-LBGTQ, anti-BIPOC things happening right now in the US, I’m going to argue we’re going to need this a thousand times more. But it’s also such like a clear and compelling idea to build your business around. You put out the clarion call and you’ve transformed the lives of so many people, including the kids that you may never touch directly. And I mean, you’ve built this humane, successful business around it. So will you talk some more about how you see yourself at that intersection of business and motherhood? Like what are the principles that you fight for?

Sarah K. Peck
32:09 – 32:42
Oh, I love this. I mean, thank you. That’s a really kind thing to say. It’s true. My first response is actually, you said, be a terrific business owner and a terrific mother. And I just really want to lower the bar. Just be like a good enough parent and like a good enough business owner, right? Like we don’t need to be- I hear you. Like we’re not going to be good at everything. And I think that embracing that is okay. I think women in particular, but all of us in the school kind of education system in America, we’re really trained.

Sarah K. Peck
32:42 – 33:08
to get good grades and to get good grades in everything and to check off boxes and to complete things. And like, unless you have a 4.0, right? There’s just this like training of being good at everything. When I think the paradigm for life is more like pick two things to be really good at. Do you get an A or a B in? And then let yourself be a C or D student in other things. Like my kids come up to me and they’re like, I want to play video games. And I’m like, I’ve never played them.

Sarah K. Peck
33:08 – 33:42
I don’t want to. I’m not going to play them with you. Ask anyone else, right? you And does one of my children eat peanut butter sandwiches and that’s like the extent of his entire meal plan for the last year? Yeah. But Ezekiel bread has some fiber in it and peanut butter has some fat and protein, so it’s good enough. And I don’t share those allergies when I’m around other kids. I understand peanut butter is very dangerous to other folks. So that’s good enough. Should he eat more vegetables? Probably. Probably. But he’ll figure that out later.

Sarah K. Peck
33:42 – 34:24
And there’s only so much I can do. But with all of that said, to answer your question about what are some of these values that we hold dear, I think that each person is unique and wonderful and weird in their own special way. And things get really messy when we start to make broad, sweeping statements about everyone. And that’s true in business and in parenting. The business world online is full of so much noise that is absolutely irrelevant for your business. First of all, anyone that has a single success story from 2012 is probably no longer relevant to 2024, 2025, 2026.

Sarah K. Peck
34:28 – 34:59
because it might not be replicable. Anyone who’s working in e-commerce platform is different than a brick and mortar business, different than a services-based business. Like, it’s just different marketing strategies. Are you a traffic marketer? Are you like a spray and like send out? Are you doing conversions? Are you doing funnels? Or are you a relationship builder, right? There’s so many different things out there that we can get lost in the muck and the mud of all this internet noise. And if we read it all and take it all with equal weight, you’ll end up like, I should have a sub stack and an Instagram.

Sarah K. Peck
34:59 – 35:52
Why don’t I have reels? Why am I not also on TikTok? I should be on the stage. I should be speaking. Why don’t I have a book? And you will drive yourself absolutely nuts trying to do all of these things. I have to sit down. I need to sit down and take a nap. Yeah. And it’s like, just pick the one or two things that you are uniquely good at and focus on that in parenting and in business. And the thing that we miss, I think, in American culture especially, the reason that’s okay is because We need to be networked with communities of folks, with villages, where you’ve got 20 adults who have a relationship with your kid, and one of them will teach them music, and another one will teach them how to ride a bike or throw a baseball, and another one will teach them cooking, and another one will teach them manners, and another one will teach them about periods and high school sex education.

Sarah K. Peck
35:52 – 36:25
And it’s not all on you. And like your unique skills apparent will be your unique skills apparent and you don’t have to be everything to your kid because they should be networked that’s the same with business it’s like you don’t have to do everything for everyone because you can. Build referral networks and also just great networks and say oh go talk to rachel about you know getting your. your action plan together and starting up or longer term coaching and go talk to this person if you want to talk about imposter syndrome and go talk to that person if you want to do email funnels.

Rochelle Moulton
36:26 – 36:41
I totally hear that. So I just have to ask you about one more favorite topic, which is women’s leadership. Yeah. What’s your point of view on what we need to do individually and collectively to get more women into positions of power faster?

Sarah K. Peck
36:44 – 37:22
That is a provocative question. How to get more women into positions of power faster. It’s like dismantle the old systems. But I don’t actually know how to do that well. What I love thinking about when it comes to women’s leadership is how can we do leadership differently than it’s been done before? What’s missing from the canonical literature the good, the great, and all of the other things. What else is there? And so I do a lot of reading about gender and power. And I don’t even want to use these buzzwords because they’re so laden, but masculine energy and feminine energy, which people completely get wrong.

Sarah K. Peck
37:22 – 38:09
Those are the buzzwords of today. And I might write a piece about people are missing the point. But with women in leadership, I’ll point to two things. The first one, there’s this book, it’s absolutely amazing. It’s called Word, W-R-D, Slut, S-L-U-T. It’s by Amanda Montel, and it’s a history of women, language, and feminism, and it is brilliant. She traces the history of some of the English language and how we treat the way that men communicate and women communicate differently. And then reveals that, wait a second, Valley girls in the LA, the ones with the vocal fry and the likes and the lilts and the, oh my God, I don’t know.

Sarah K. Peck
38:10 – 38:51
Those and then urban centers and black America and hip hop, those two areas are the originators and the inventors of language. English is a constantly changing language. It’s evolving all the time. You can see it from Shakespearean times to today. And these originators of language, these two different groups that put new ideas out there, you can see, if you trace through history, is about 20 years later, white male broadcasters, so the people who are traditionally in positions of power, are saying the same things. that those folks said 20 years ago. And yet, we make fun of those people.

Sarah K. Peck
38:52 – 39:25
There’s also other analyses like, how many times does a woman say like in a sentence, and how many times does a man say like in a sentence? It’s actually the exact same, but women specifically are criticized for it. And then when you get inside boardrooms and things like that. Why does this not surprise me? Right. I’m also just stating facts right now. I’m not even getting to my opinions, right? And then you get into boardrooms and leadership trainings and traditional women’s leadership trainings are all about getting women to act more like men, to be more assertive, to be more dominant, to speak up.

Sarah K. Peck
39:26 – 40:03
And I think that training misses so much because one of the, essential parts of women’s style or the generally gendered women. And for everyone listening, like if you’re a man listening to this and you’re like, wait a second, this doesn’t apply to me. You’re probably right. Like you might have a more feminine style. And so actually the stuff that’s said about women applies more to you. Like if you have a softer approach or a more flexible approach, like this is not just specifically about whether you’re a man or a woman. Women’s style is more collaborative, more consensus building.

Sarah K. Peck
40:03 – 40:41
It’s softer. It’s when you say stuff like, well, I don’t know. What do you think? And, oh, does that sound right to you? And, oh, let’s listen to what so-and-so says. And you know what? Maybe I think that this was interesting and this was interesting, but I don’t know about this. Women are extremely powerful at building community, at building consensus, about rallying a team together. And that is a very powerful and useful skill. So my interpretation of this and what I think is really important is I want women and men and all humans to know that your style, wherever you’re starting from, is really powerful and useful.

Sarah K. Peck
40:42 – 40:55
And you don’t have to change the innate things about you and fix them or mold them, right? There’s something within you that already has a lot of power and what you are feeling is useful. So listen to yourself.

Rochelle Moulton
40:55 – 40:56
You’re not broken.

Sarah K. Peck
40:56 – 41:35
You’re not broken. The part two of this, part two is language is a style and it can be learned. And almost everyone has already learned. There’s nothing actually missing. You’ve already learned these various styles. You just, it hasn’t been taught or explained to you in a specific way. And I can give you some examples. If you have done something like taken a yoga class, or I went through yoga teacher training a long time ago, your yoga teacher doesn’t speak to you like, if you feel like it, you can maybe lift up your back leg, but if you don’t want to, you can just sit there.

Sarah K. Peck
41:35 – 42:22
I’m gonna leave that up to you, right? That’s a softer, more flexible approach. Your yoga teacher or any teacher is using a commanding, authoritative, firm approach and saying, pick up your left foot, raise it up behind your head, take that foot, bring it forward, plant it in between your hands, come up to a lunge. Those are directions, those are instructions, those are downward inflections at the end of the sentence. So you can adopt these styles. If you have ever trained a dog or a puppy, we talked about dogs, and you had to learn that skill of not saying, no, don’t do that, no, drop the ball, but you actually had to learn how to step up, open your chest and be like, no, so that your puppy would listen, you’ve learned that style.

Sarah K. Peck
42:23 – 42:54
And these are styles that we can move fluidly between. And the, I think, advanced skill is being able to pick, just like you pick out clothing for the right venue. You know, I’m going to wear my black tie for the thing that says black tie. I’m going to wear my business casual over here. I’m going to wear jeans over there. I’m going to wear sweatpants when I go to Sarah’s house to take You get to pick the style that you want going into a certain room based on your knowledge of the people and the dynamics happening and the leadership in the room.

Sarah K. Peck
42:54 – 43:24
And it can be a very powerful thing to take a softer approach. This applies to everyone. Like a man can go into a room and be the very supportive of other folks when they adopt that style of saying, oh, let me ask a few more questions here. Oh, can you explain this to me? Oh, I don’t know how this works. And these are more fluid, and that’s where some of our power comes from, realizing we’re not broken, and we have agency and choice and the ability to learn all of these styles.

Rochelle Moulton
43:25 – 43:59
Yes. I was really thinking as you were saying some of this, how this has really changed since I first started being in business. And I love it because there isn’t any one gender that has the lock on doing anything wonderful. can be great parents. Women can be great parents. Women can be great CEOs. Men can be great CEOs. So I just love this idea that there are behaviors that we can learn and use them as we want. And, you know, we all know different organizations have different cultures.

Sarah K. Peck
44:00 – 44:01
Yes. And if

Rochelle Moulton
44:01 – 44:24
anybody is like me, we have occasionally bent ourselves like a pretzel to fit into a particular culture until we realized it didn’t work anymore for us. Right. And then we moved on. Yeah. Excellent. Well, let me ask you this, Sarah, kind of getting close to wrap up, like what’s next for you? Obviously you’re spending this year on your new community, but what else is kind of percolating that you can talk about?

Sarah K. Peck
44:25 – 45:01
Oh, you know, I had one of those years last year and then through the pandemic and some early parenting stuff where a lot of balls got dropped. Last year I had spine surgery and I put a pause on my business for three to six months. And then I don’t want to say like, oh, that was so great because of blank, blank and blank. No, it was incredibly hard. That’s for another podcast episode. I really like went through those liminal spaces of like, who am I? What am I doing? But right now I’m at that place where it’s like, Oh, I’ve dropped a lot of things.

Sarah K. Peck
45:01 – 45:32
Do I want to pick this all back up? And I had a podcast for five years and I only just started to think, Oh, you know, I think I might like to do that again, but not in the same way. What would that look like? I write a lot on my sub stack. We’ve grown it to 11,000 people, which is mind blowing to me. And so I write weekly over there and I do community threads. where I asked people, the last conversation we had was, what don’t you do? Because I wanted to celebrate people who do less.

Sarah K. Peck
45:32 – 45:59
And people were hilarious. They’re like, I don’t iron. I don’t cook. I don’t do dishes. I don’t do this. Someone was like, my mom is retired, but she needs a little income. And she’s an amazing cook. So I pay my mom to cook all of her dinners. And it’s like a win-win-win. I was like, I love this so much. And then someone else was like, you get mom dinners. Yes. Yeah, she loves cooking, but she wants to be retired. So I was like, this is amazing. And someone else was like, I bathe my kids once a week, and they’re just a little smelly.

Sarah K. Peck
46:00 – 46:38
And I was like, bless you. I love it. So we have Substack, which has been a fun place to experiment, thinking about bringing the podcast back. I mean, I worked with a business coach friend of mine last fall, and she was talking about what to do in very volatile and uncertain times. And when things are changing a lot, that happens any time an administration shifts. Like my mom worked in national defense growing up. And so every time we shifted from Democratic to Republican leadership or Republican to Democrat, the size of the defense contracts would shift and she might be out of a job.

Sarah K. Peck
46:39 – 47:17
Like, it happens every time, and we knew going in that this would be even more kind of uncertain or unsteady, and those are euphemisms, but that’s what’s happening. Very, very chaotic right now. So last fall when I was doing some planning, I was like, number one, my body is doing a lot of physical therapy and recovery, so I don’t have as much time and bandwidth. I created the most simple business plan for myself, which was number one, run the Wise Women’s Council. Number two, run Founders with Kids. And that’s it. That’s my whole plan for the year, aside from I joined a band and I’m making music on the side because I want to and it’s fun.

Sarah K. Peck
47:19 – 47:20
That’s what’s up for me.

Rochelle Moulton
47:20 – 47:28
I love that. Well, you got to have fun. You have to have some fun in there. Yes. In addition to it, even when business is fun, there’s still some, you know, some of its

Sarah K. Peck
47:28 – 48:01
work. Well, some of its work and coming out of the chaos that we can do a deep dive in my life. If anyone’s ever interested, I’ll come back. You know, I don’t know where I’m going to share all these stories, but one of the things that was very clear to me in the summer last year was energy is not created equal, and it’s not just sleep, and it’s not just money. It’s also joy. And if I’m not playing, connecting, and having pleasurable experiences and joy in my life, then I’m kind of depressed and low energy.

Sarah K. Peck
48:01 – 48:19
And that’s a really vital thing that I need to have. to keep my energy reserves up. So I’ve been focusing a lot more on like, don’t forget to spend a lot of time with people. Like that’s the point of life. Like go hang out and have fun with people and you’ve wanted to learn the piano forever. So go play piano.

Rochelle Moulton
48:19 – 48:24
Joy. Yeah. We’ve got to have some joy. Yes. And memes, we need memes too.

Sarah K. Peck
48:24 – 48:43
And memes, dark humor. If you like this kind of dark, yeah, I don’t know how else to say it. It’s not dirty humor, although sometimes it is. It’s mostly just dark, twisted, and then also poignant. Follow me on Instagram. I don’t post on the feed, but I do on my stories. I just share ridiculous memes.

Rochelle Moulton
48:45 – 48:45
Well,

Sarah K. Peck
48:45 – 48:46
we will put the

Rochelle Moulton
48:46 – 48:47
link

Sarah K. Peck
48:47 – 48:47
in the show

Rochelle Moulton
48:47 – 48:58
notes, I promise. Great. Okay. So one final question, which is if you could go back to who you were when you first started your business, what’s the one thing you’d advise her to do?

Sarah K. Peck
48:58 – 49:36
Wow. I would say, I would like thank her and congratulate her and tell her that like your love of connecting with people has built your network and your community. So you did that really well, even though you had no idea why you were doing it. So that’s the first thing is like just taking really good care of people has always served you well. And then advice probably related to what we were just talking about, like make it more fun, like make sure you’re playing and having fun, even in the simplest of ways. This is like one of those woo woo mindset things, but I’m very introverted.

Sarah K. Peck
49:36 – 50:10
And so I used to be very limited on the number of calls I could take in a day. And I treated them like work. I have to research, and I have to get to know, and I have to do this, and I have to do that. And I would take notes, and then make sure I followed up. And that would drain me. And I recently flipped it to, what if this fills your connection bucket? What if you could just get to hang out with people? I swear, that sounds like the dumbest thing. But that mindset shift, for me, made all the difference in having so much more fun and pleasure in the day, and being less anxious and stressed about it.

Sarah K. Peck
50:10 – 50:19
And then it made all the difference. I think worry less, trust yourself more, and make sure it’s fun. Some of it’s fun. Make sure some of it’s fun.

Rochelle Moulton
50:19 – 50:43
The switch flipped when you said that about where you’re prepping to have this call and you’re looking at all their stuff and you’re ready. you’re totally attuned to the conversation and its work versus, oh, what could I discover about this person today? Maybe I could just be in the moment and see how it goes. There’s such a difference in how you carry yourself and how you feel about it when you do

Sarah K. Peck
50:43 – 50:58
that. I love it. Yeah, and the thing that changed was my mind. That’s the thing that is wild. Yes. Mindset is so powerful. Yes. And so wacky. It’s the hardest and the best and then sometimes the easiest thing. Exactly. Well, when it works, right? When you finally get there and you do

Rochelle Moulton
50:58 – 51:17
it, you’re like, oh, why didn’t I do this before? Yeah, exactly. Sarah, I just want to say thank you. I mean, so much. And not just for being here and sharing the stories that I think are really going to be helpful to people as they think about building community, but also for the essential work that you’re doing. Thank you.

Sarah K. Peck
51:18 – 51:30
Thank you. Back to you. I mean, thanks for having me here and for always being willing to go deep on these conversations. And just, it’s really lovely to chat with you. Thanks.

Rochelle Moulton
51:31 – 51:38
Oh, thank you so much. Okay, that’s it for this episode. Please join us next time for The Soloist Life. Bye-bye.