Investing in Yourself with Sara Alter

 

Sara Alter is a veteran entrepreneur, business coach, certified life coach, and the founder of The Moment Group. Sara has consulted for businesses of all sizes, from multi-national corporations to early stage start-ups.

Sara founded her first global business, Pretty Please Nail Polish, in 2010. Pretty Please was a first to market, customized nail polish business.

Sara founded Moment Consulting (MOM-ENT-repreneur) in 2019, offering business strategy and consulting services to mom entrepreneurs. She built a team and expanded her business into an agency, rebranding as “The Moment Group” in 2023. She now offers a wide range of in-house services to support moms taking their businesses to the next level. 

Sara has been featured for her entrepreneurial achievements in Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, CEO MOM Magazine and in Conde Nast Fingerprints where she was selected as their “creative innovator”.

Sara holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Apparel Design from the University of Delaware, a certificate in “Entrepreneurship Essentials” from Harvard Business School and a certificate in “Women in Entrepreneurship” from Cornell University.

She sits on the advisory boards of Intentionally Unplugged, a digital well-being organization and Plannr Consulting, a youth-led mental health support nonprofit. CPSM Graduate

 

 

Links: CPSM Graduate

Website: The Moment Group

Instagram: @heysaraalter

If you would like to learn more about the Becoming a Sleep Consultant, please join our free Facebook Group or check out our CPSM Website.

Book a free discovery call to learn how you can become a Certified Sleep Consultant here.

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Transcript:

Intro: Welcome to Becoming a Sleep Consultant! I’m your host Jayne Havens, a certified sleep consultant and founder of both Snooze Fest by Jayne Havens and Center for Pediatric Sleep Management.

On this podcast, I’ll be discussing the business side of sleep consulting. You’ll have an insider’s view on launching, growing, and even scaling a sleep consulting business. This is not a podcast about sleep training. This is a podcast about business building and entrepreneurship.

Sara Alter is a veteran entrepreneur, business coach, certified life coach, and the founder of The Moment Group. Sara has consulted for businesses of all sizes, from multi-national corporations to early-stage startups.

Sara founded her first global business, Pretty Please Nail Polish, in 2010. Pretty Please was a first to market, customized nail polish business. Sara founded Moment Consulting in 2019, offering business strategy and consulting services to mom entrepreneurs. She built a team and expanded her business into an agency, rebranding as “The Moment Group” in 2023. She now offers a wide range of in-house services to support moms taking their businesses to the next level.

Sara has been featured for her entrepreneurial achievements in Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, CEO MOM Magazine and in Conde Nast Fingerprints where she was selected as their “creative innovator”. Sara holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Apparel Design from the University of Delaware, a certificate in “Entrepreneurship Essentials” from Harvard Business School and a certificate in “Women in Entrepreneurship” from Cornell University.

She sits on the advisory boards of Intentionally Unplugged, a digital well-being organization, and Plannr Consulting, a youth-led mental health support nonprofit.

Jayne Havens: Sara, welcome to the Becoming a Sleep Consultant Podcast. I’m very excited to be having this conversation with you today.

Sara Alter: I’m very excited to be here. Thanks.

Jayne Havens: Of course. So the topic of today’s podcast is investing in yourself, which is funny. Because, Sarah, you and I had this exact conversation inside of the Becoming a Sleep Consultant Facebook group several years ago. I actually looked back, and it was January of 2021.

Sara Alter: Wow.

Jayne Havens: So almost exactly three years ago, we had this conversation. And more recently, I was scrolling Instagram and came across one of your posts that you had made on this topic, and I texted you. I was like, we need to discuss this. I think you were like, “We already did.”

But I wanted to have it again, because I think you and I are in different places in our lives and in our careers and in our entrepreneurial journeys. And I thought we could sort of unpack it on a deeper level and just rehash. So I guess, my first question is, why do you think it’s so hard for people, women in particular, to invest in themselves?

Sara Alter: You know, I think it’s a handful of different things. I think one of the reasons is because most women that are in a situation where they’re thinking about starting a business. Because let’s be clear. Women do not have a problem in investing in themselves when it comes to a ton of things in their lives — when it comes to self-care, exercise, shopping, travel, just anything recreational, going out to eat, drinks. There’s a ton of things that women are perfectly comfortable purchasing. I think when it comes to their education and the growth of a business, it’s a different situation.

Because they almost have to go to their husband and kind of switch this role where they’re almost — it feels like they’re asking for money for something that isn’t necessary in a lot of ways. It’s kind of like, I don’t know. I’m going to try this thing. I don’t know if it’s going to work. There’s no guarantee that it will work. I know that you’re bringing in the money. And it feels very risky in a lot of ways, where I think a lot of the other things that women, myself included, purchase, it’s tangible. Or, we already know what the result is going to be. Even if it is something like Botox, for example, you know—

Jayne Havens: That’s a good example.

Sara Alter: It’s like really expensive and absolutely not necessary. But everyone is like, I’m not missing that six month—

Jayne Havens: It’s going to make you look better.

Sara Alter: To make me look good, that seems like a really good investment. So I think it’s risky. I think it’s just also like when your husband or partner goes to work in their job. They’re making money. They don’t need to spend money to make money in a lot of situations, unless they’re also entrepreneurial.

Whereas for women, because they’re in these positions where oftentimes they can’t go back to work because of their family structure, or they don’t want to go back to work full time because of their family structure, it’s like you have to put money in to see money come back out. And I think that’s overwhelming.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, I don’t know. I see for those who I speak to on a day-to-day basis — I speak to a really wide range and variety of people. Some women. And it’s not just women. I actually spoke to a guy yesterday who’s interested in becoming a sleep consultant, and it happens. But for the sake of this conversation, I think we’ll talk about women because that’s the majority.

Some of them are stay-at-home moms. Some of them are professionals. But if they’re professionals, they’re generally in careers like teaching or nursing where they’re used to sort of just showing up and getting a paycheck. Maybe they have a higher level of education, whether it’s a master’s or whatever they have. But they’ve been using it their entire adult career. That’s what’s comfortable, and that’s what they know. I think you spoke to this a little bit, that like when you are investing in yourself in an entrepreneurial environment, there is perceived risk, right?

Like what if I spend this money and nothing comes back? I think that that’s worth unpacking. Because the way that I look at it is, the only way for it to not come back is if you quit and give up on yourself, which is, really, I think what women don’t want to admit. It’s that, like, they have to just work at it and keep working at it until something comes of it.

Especially in entrepreneurship, it’s usually not an overnight success situation. It’s not like — we’re not winning at the slot machines. We’re putting in work and time and energy to develop this new skill and craft and business. That takes time to nurture it and to grow it.

Sara Alter: Absolutely. I think another reason why women are slow to invest too is because I think a lot of the time, early on, you think you can do it yourself. And so there is this mentality of like before I invest any money, let me go out and try it on my own and see what I can do, which I think is incredible.

When I started my first business, I wasn’t married and I didn’t have kids. I had all the time in the world to experiment and try and fail and try and fail and ultimately figure it out where I needed to invest to support me in the areas where I wasn’t succeeding. I think for moms, which is primarily the people that you and I work with, they’re in a different situation. We have limited time. We have limited resources. There isn’t a lot of space to go and learn how to start, scale, market a business.

For a lot of moms in particular, it’s like, yes, you’re smart. You’re capable. All these women have had great education and careers in their previous life. But starting and growing a business is a totally different animal. So it’s like, could you do it with the time? Yes. But if you really want to get something up and running, and also have it set up and running in a way that feels like you can also be a mom and have your life at the same time that you’re making money and your business is continuing on, then it’s worth the investment.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, you touched on something that I actually had in my notes that I was going to bring up later — the idea of investing dollars versus time. This actually came up because somebody who I spoke to yesterday who’s interested in becoming a sleep consultant said to me that they have been thinking about entering this field for three years. I thought, wow. This person has been contemplating this and wavering and stewing over it for three years.

Could we even imagine where her business would be if she had just gotten started? There’s a cost associated with not investing in yourself, which is being stuck in the same place that you were three years ago.

Sara Alter: Yes, and that is probably the third reason why I think women don’t invest in themselves, which makes a lot of sense too, before you start. It’s that there is a fear of failure. There is a fear of imposter syndrome, particularly with moms that have left a career or put their career on pause to be at home with their families. A lot of times, when they come back to think about work again and think about starting businesses, it’s in a different field. So there is a lot of that impostor syndrome, of like this is my interest.

I work with a lot of service-based businesses because, I mean, it’s very common that — let’s just say when your kids get older, and you buy your first home, and then you decorate your first home, and you discover a love for interior design, for example. And so I had a few clients that were in that boat and then started interior design businesses, but they weren’t formally trained. This was just something that they were really good at, and people were asking them for help. They were like, “Maybe I could do this professionally.” That’s how a lot of these next chapters start.

But I think there is that insecurity of like, am I good enough? Can I really serve people or support people in the way that they need? Is this the kind of thing that I would put money towards? Maybe this is just a one off. Like one person liked what I did, and no one is going to hire me again. So I think there’s confidence and fear-based hesitation too.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, I actually really resonate with that story. I mean, even though I don’t work in interior design, that’s how my journey started. I was really good at getting my own kids to sleep. I sleep trained them early. My friends were asking for help. I did it as a hobby. I was like, I’m pretty good at this. And at some point, I decided to turn it from a hobby into a business.

Actually, for me, the most important thing that I did in that whole journey was invest in myself by taking a training. At that time, I actually thought I knew everything. I thought, like, I’m really good at this. I know exactly what I’m doing. I had nothing but success stories. I had helped all my friends, and I’d even helped friends of friends.

But the interesting thing is, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Right? And so I thought I knew everything, but I didn’t. I took a training, and I actually learned a ton. That made me realize, wow. There’s so much more out there than what I thought I knew. There are so many ways, different ways, to support families.

The other thing that I didn’t know is I didn’t know how to — I was just texting with friends. I was just helping them really informally. I didn’t know how to show up as a professional and to coach parents through sleep training in a way that was worthy of me charging. I was getting families results, but I wasn’t writing them a written sleep plan. I wasn’t getting on a coaching call with them. I wasn’t helping them in the way that was most productive, both for them as the client and for me as as the business owner.

I needed to learn all of those processes and systems so that I could run an efficient business. I got all of that by investing in myself and taking a training. I definitely had that thought in my head. Like, do I really need to take a course? Do these courses really mean anything? Are they accredited? Does it matter? Do clients care? I had all of those thoughts in my head.

Ultimately, I did it because I actually had some imposter syndrome. I felt like, who am I to charge for this support if I haven’t been properly trained? And so I literally did it just to kick the imposter syndrome to the curb. It was a great investment because I learned a ton, and it set me up to properly support families and to run a successful business.

Sara Alter: Yeah, and I think it’s twofold. If you’re talking about the investment in continuing education, it does build your credibility. I did the same thing before I started officially doing consulting. I took a couple of online accredited courses. I did that. I was the same. I was like, I don’t really need this to do what I’m going to be doing. But I think not only will it give my clients confidence in me, but it really gave — I needed confidence in myself.

So I think as we’ve seen in the last couple of years, as the world is shifting to such a huge focus on wellness, my hope is that this investment in continuing education, that it extends to self-care for women too. Because I think mentally, emotionally, what you get from continuing to learn and experience new things outside of your family life, whether you’re going to move on to start a business with that information or not, is so valuable.

Then, of course, that’s just one area of investing in yourself. There’s tons of other areas in a business where it’s really worth investing too.

Jayne Havens: The other thing that investing initially did for me, which I’m just realizing now but is so important, is it sort of held me accountable to actually show up and work hard on my business. Right?

Sara Alter: Yes.

Jayne Havens: And we say this, I say this all the time to people who are interested in hiring me for sleep support. Sometimes they want a deal. They want to get the cheapest price, or they want someone to support them, give them a little bit of free advice, whatever it is. I always tell my clients, like, actually, them paying me is a large part of what’s going to make them successful.

Whenever I’ve ever helped families for free, which I do from time to time for various reasons, it never goes as well as when I charged my full fee. I saw that to be true when I invested in my own business. When I spent a few thousand dollars to get my business up and running, all of a sudden, I had this fire under my tush to figure out a way to make it back and have a profitable business. Because I didn’t want to lose that money, and I wasn’t going to allow myself to not get a return on my investment. It just wasn’t in the cards for me.

Sara Alter: Absolutely. That’s another really important thing when it comes to investing in a business too. I think that a lot of women that I work with or that I talk to, they have big ideas about what they want to do professionally. When it gets to the point to start the business, they have all of the idea, the creative ideas. They have the product, or the service, or who they’re going to sell to kind of laid out in their heads.

But what they haven’t thought about yet is, how much am I willing to invest in this business upfront whether it succeeds, whether it fails? What am I comfortable with, whether it’s your own money that have saved a way to invest in this, or it’s your family’s finances? And you need to talk to your partner about it first, to say, okay, we’re going to start. I’m going to start off, and I’m going to take $5,000. That’s the money that I have to spend across this business over the next six months.

Let’s see what I can do during that time with this money. And if it doesn’t work, we’re going to be comfortable if we don’t see a return. But if I work my ass off and I do what I set out to do and I don’t give up, then I will know that based on the cost of my services that I’ve set out or based on the amount of product that I know that I need to sell, this is what I need to do to make the money back.

This should not be this arbitrary guessing game of like let me throw this in, and let me throw that in. When will I get it back? And I don’t know if I’ll get it back. You can really sit down and, simply, from an entry-level perspective, calculate this stuff out so that you know when you will see your investment come back.

Whenever I invest in my business, there’s a lot of anxiety around that. It’s not like I’m just throwing money into the wind and hoping for the best. There’s a plan in place. I’m investing this much money, but I am doing this because I know this will hopefully be my return, and this is when I will be able to make it back. Then from there, it’s like, okay. Great. Let’s start profiting. But it’s not like I’m just guessing how much I’m willing to invest.

Jayne Havens: Are you actually crunching the numbers? I’m just thinking in my business because it’s an easy number, and I know my own numbers. I don’t know your numbers. But I charge $750 for a two-week virtual consultation. Most of the women who enroll in my program, they start their pricing at maybe, let’s say, $500, which is an easy number to do math with. Right?

And so if they’re going to start their business with an investment of $5,000, it’s going to cost them $2,000 or $3,000 to take a course and another maybe $1,500 to have a website made for them. They’re going to pay for a couple of things like Canva, and Acuity, and whatever, a couple of business cards and thank you notes. There’s your $5,000, right?

They have it in their minds. Like, okay. If I’m setting my pricing at $500, then I need to have 10 clients to get a return on my investment. And based on, let’s go back to time, how many hours I have to spend on my business per week or per month, I’m going to aim to get two clients a month or three clients a month and make a return on investment in X amount of months. Right? Is that how you’re sort of wrapping your head around it in your business? Is that sort of what it looks like for you?

Sara Alter: 100%. Yes, that’s exactly what it looks like. Then also to keep in mind that what you’re comfortable, what your goal, what your financial goal is, let’s say, at the end of the year. Let’s say you invest the $5,000, and then you’re making money from your clients. You’re putting money back into — you’re paying off your debt to yourself, basically.

You can still go and continue to spend that money over and over and over again if you’re okay at the end of the year breaking even. Versus this is it, this is all I’m putting in. As soon as I put it in, I need to — just everything I make goes back into that pot of paying myself back or my family’s funds back or whatever.

Because I think a lot of women too feel guilty taking money from their family or from their kids. When in reality, a lot of the people that I work with, probably don’t need that money to support their families and their kids. But it is this guilt of like, why am I spending money on myself on this kind of frivolous thing? And so I think one of the most important things to think about as a woman when it comes to your business and investing is to, first, understand within yourself what is holding you back if you have the money there.

Is it that you don’t feel like you’re good enough? Is it that you don’t feel like this business model will actually profit? That’s a fair thing to not want to invest in something if you haven’t really tried it out in the market yet. Is it that you feel uncomfortable having to have this conversation with your partner about taking money from your family?

What is it? What is the deal? Because a lot of women that are in the position to have taken that pause to focus on their family life are also in a position where they’re being supported by their partner, while they support their partner in other ways, of course, financially supported by their partner. So it’s like, I guess my question is, like, if the money is there, if you have it, what’s holding you back?

Then if you don’t have it, go get it. Where do you go get it? I was just listening yesterday to The goop Podcast. Gwyneth Paltrow was interviewing Beatrix Dixon, who’s the founder of The Honey Pot. It’s an organic feminine care product line that she just sold for, valued at $380 million. This woman started while she was working at Whole Foods and could barely make ends meet to pay her rent.

She was like, I needed to find $500 to take the next steps to get this thing going. She hustled. She found that money, and then she got that first investment. I mean, it’s kind of like if you don’t have the money, what are you willing to do to commit to get it? And if you have it, why is it sitting there, and you’re feeling uncomfortable about it?

Jayne Havens: I really connect with that. I really connect with that because I’m not afraid to figure it out, and so many women are. I think you’re right. If the money is there, then why are you not making a move? Why are you not investing? I think it’s really important to dig deep and not to say, like, I don’t want to spend the money. It’s like, well, why? What are you afraid of?

Sara Alter: Yeah. Why? Because you can say, like, I’ve heard this. I’ve probably said this. It’s like for every cup of coffee you buy from Starbucks, if you add that up, you would have this money to invest in X. But ultimately, that’s not what it’s about. It’s not about not doing something, like buying your coffee that you love every day, to find the money. It’s like it is. It’s digging deeper. Like, what is it that you’re comfortable spending money on all these different things in your life, but not this?

Jayne Havens: Right. And I think that we all have to be really honest with ourselves to get to the root of that. Would you say that as your business has grown over the years, you’ve become more comfortable with investing in yourself? Does it get easier?

Sara Alter: I think, well, yes. The short answer is yes. I also think just with age, I’m more comfortable investing in myself. I think you just hopefully start to understand your own worth in this world and what you deserve. You don’t spend on things necessarily, or I don’t spend on things that don’t bring me happiness in some way. I don’t buy a ton of things that make me feel guilty. It’s like, I think a lot of the guilt is gone from my purchasing decisions and what I want for my life.

While I am more comfortable investing in my business, the further into entrepreneurship I get, it doesn’t mean that it’s any less scary, or overwhelming, or that there’s any more of a guarantee that the money will come back. I think it’s just an understanding of my own weaknesses and knowing that if I want to accomplish certain things at this stage in my life where I don’t have as much time, my priority is my kids and my family, but I really, really also want my business to succeed, that I need to hire people to do the things that either I don’t have time to do, that I am procrastinating doing, or that I’m just not good at.

Jayne Havens: Tell us about your business. Who are you supporting? What does your business look like today? I know you’ve evolved so many times. We’ve known each other since we were kids, and you’ve done a lot of really interesting things. What does your business look like now? How are you supporting your clients?

Sara Alter: I primarily support mom entrepreneurs that are, as we were just discussing, entering this next chapter in their professional lives — women that have left previous careers behind or taken a pause and are looking to start up again either in consulting, primarily service-based businesses and some product base, which is much harder or not as common for moms I’ve found.

I do one-on-one coaching. I’m launching an incubator program very soon that I’ve been working on for about a year. That’ll be a four-month program, where we basically take someone from the inception of an idea or the beginning of a rebrand or just like a shift in their existing business model, and take them through every single solitary step of building their business.

From visual identity, messaging, website, financial planning, marketing, social media, everything that you would need to know, understand, be educated on. We do all of the deliverables as well. So it’s really like all-inclusive incubator. I have my whole team that are experts in different areas. So it really eliminates that process of having to go out and find all of these different people. It’s like we’re all here, and we’re all working together to help you get this business up and running.

Jayne Havens: Is that like you coaching and supporting one person individually, or is it group coaching?

Sara Alter: No, it’s all individual.

Jayne Havens: Okay. I just have to say out loud for everybody listening. I know Sara’s style. I know her aesthetic. I know the way she presents herself and her business. And legit, anybody would be so lucky to have her vibe and her talents behind you. I mean, it’s a no-brainer, as far as I’m concerned.

Sara Alter: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Jayne Havens: Like if Sarah could make everybody’s business look as beautiful as her own, we’d all be winning in life.

Sara Alter: Thank you. I’m actually in the middle of this massive rebrand because I’m coming up on four years. I was kind of like, I’ve changed. And I’m ready to kind of shift the way it looks and feels.

Jayne Havens: I really can’t wait to see what that looks like. I think you just have impeccable taste in general. If we go back to your pretty pleased days, you’ve always just had an eye for making things look really desirable.

Sara Alter: Thank you.

Jayne Havens: I always want to buy anything from you. I’ll buy your stuff.

Sara Alter: Oh, thank you. Well, I will say this from a behind-the-scenes perspective. I invested more this year in my business than I have in any prior business. I made so many mistakes, and I grew way too fast than I was ready for. Realized I did not want half the things that I built. Scaled back down. Rearranged. It was just — it was a lot. I looked back and I was like, I really spent a lot of money in places that I didn’t need to. And it feels really bad in the moment.

Ultimately, I feel like — I mean, it’s cliche. It’s cliche for a reason. But I just learned so much about how to do it again and how to help clients not do what I did or understand how to think about scaling before you do it. And also, ultimately figuring out not just what will make your business grow but what you want from your business, and what success looks like to you. Where are you investing, and why are you investing there?

And so now I feel really good about the journey. Because it’s like, like I said earlier, I have it plotted out. I know when I’m going to make the money back. And it will come back because I won’t stop until I do. I think that’s the lesson. Then it comes back.

Jayne Havens: Yeah. I think that is the lesson. I was actually going to ask you, and I forgot. But I’m glad you said that. I truly believe that there are no bad investments. They’re all learning lessons. And as you pointed out, they can burn in the moment when you spend a bunch of money, and you hire somebody to help you, and they turn out to be useless. Or they don’t know what they’re doing, or they make you promises about their skills or qualifications that aren’t accurate.

I’ve done that. I’ve hired bloggers who don’t know how to blog. I’ve done all of that. But it’s learning lessons. Because now I know how to spot those bad apples. That’s a part of growth. It burns in a moment, and then you move on. You carry on, and it’s on to the next.

Sara Alter: Yes. Also, going back again to investing a certain amount of money that you’re comfortable with. So that should something go wrong in the moment, you’re not left like, I can’t buy x, y, and z for my kids because I overspend, or I can’t do this other thing. It’s like that money was already in your pot, in your honey pot.

Jayne Havens: It was allocated. Right.

Sara Alter: Yes, it was allocated. You were allocating to fail just as much as you were allocating to succeed.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, love it. I will leave — I know you don’t have a launch date just yet for your incubator program, but we will make sure that there are ways to contact you. Do you want to share a website or social media before we wrap up?

Sara Alter: Yes, so you can find me on themomentgroup.co on social. That will be relaunching pretty soon. Also, themomentgroup.co is the website as well. Then right now, I am just sharing kind of like my founder experience and life behind the scenes @heysaraalter. I just switched it over.

Jayne Havens: Okay. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this with me. I hope it won’t be another three years before we do it again.

Sara Alter: I know. See you in 2027, January.

Jayne Havens: Yeah, we’ll try and make it happen before that.

Sara Alter: Yeah, okay. Of course.

Jayne Havens: Thank you, and congrats on all that you’re working on.

Sara Alter: Thank you, too.

Jayne Havens: I can’t wait to see this newest launch.

Sara Alter: Thank you.

Outro: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Becoming a Sleep Consultant Podcast. If you enjoyed today’s episode, it would mean so much to me if you would rate, review, and subscribe. When you rate, review, and subscribe, this helps the podcast reach a greater audience. I am so grateful for your support.

If you would like to learn more about how you can become a certified sleep consultant, head over to my Facebook Group, Becoming a Sleep Consultant or to my website thecpsm.com. Thanks so much, and I hope you will tune in for the next episode.