What It Actually Takes with Jayne Havens

Links: first paying client

If you would like to learn more about becoming a Sleep Consultant, please join our Facebook Group: Becoming A Sleep Consultant

CPSM Website: Center for Pediatric Sleep Management

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

 

---

 

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.

Jayne Havens: I’m going to do something that I haven’t done in a really long time.

I am outside. It is beautiful out. It is 70-some degrees and sunny, but not too sunny. I’m just enjoying the weather and thought I’d record a podcast episode from outside. So, hopefully, the audio quality is good enough. I’m on my phone with an AirPod, and so we’ll see how it goes. But actually, something happened today that I thought would be such, such good content for the podcast. And so here I am telling the story.

So the story goes back eight years. My son Sid was about four years old at the time, and we had just moved to our new neighborhood in Baltimore. It happened to be a beautiful day outside, and our neighborhood was hosting a neighborhood-wide yard sale. My family is not — we’re not yard sale people. But it was a beautiful day out, and so we were just enjoying the company of our neighbors.

My four-year-old was feeling left out. He wanted to participate in the yard sale, and we just kept saying to him, like, “Sid, just have fun. Just be outside. Just enjoy the day. We’re not selling stuff. Just hang out.” And so, fine, fine, he was playing outside. And our neighbors, two doors down, have a son—a little bit older than Sid. Maybe he was seven or eight years old at the time. He was wearing a bright red T-shirt that said “Red Shoe Shuffle” on it. And Sid, being the curious little kid that he was, and still is, asked Dominic what his T-shirt was all about.

Dominic explained to him that the Red Shoe Shuffle is an event that his family goes to every single year. You can walk or you can run. And it’s to raise money and to raise awareness for the Ronald McDonald House in Baltimore. And Sid was like, “What’s the Ronald McDonald House?” And so we all helped to explain what the Ronald McDonald House is and how they support families and kids. He was just so interested. And then on his own, he totally came up with this idea that he wanted to sell stuff at the yard sale to raise money for the Ronald McDonald House. And who were we to say no to that, right?

Luckily, I think we had some cookies inside of the house, probably cookies that my mom made. I don’t even remember, to be honest. We let him bring out some cookies and maybe some lemonade, and we told him he could sell the cookies and lemonade and raise money for the Ronald McDonald House. It was all very spontaneous. I think he made $46 or $64, something like that. He was just so proud and so excited. And honestly, we were really proud of him too.

We decided to take it a step further. We took some pictures. We posted it on Facebook, and we asked our friends and family if they would be willing to either match the amount of money that he raised or just make whatever contribution they were comfortable making. And we were going to collect all of this money and hopefully make a really nice donation to the Ronald McDonald House in Baltimore. I think that first year we made, maybe it was $1,500. Maybe it was $2,000. I don’t remember. But we were all so excited.

He was four, and we took him to the Ronald McDonald House downtown in Baltimore. He met the woman who’s, like, head of fundraising there. They were all so enamored with this little four-year-old child that was bringing a check for whatever it was. It really turned into something that Sid became very passionate about, and it was something that he looked forward to every single year. You know, he kept asking, “When’s the yard sale? When’s the yard sale?” Because he knew that we were going to set him up to sell his cookies and lemonade and raise money for the Ronald McDonald House.

Eight years later, last year — and our neighborhood doesn’t even do a yard sale anymore. It’s not even a thing. But Sid, every single spring, sets up his cookies and lemonade stand. And last year, we raised $20,000 for the Ronald McDonald House of Baltimore. And, you know, Ivy, who is four years younger than Sid, has always sort of watched him do this. She participates and she’s helpful. She stands there and sells cookies and lemonade with him. But it’s always sort of been his thing, and it’s always like she’s tagging along. It just sort of is what it is.

She’s watched him grow this. She’s watched him do it year after year after year. And so, fast forward now to yesterday, my kids are home from school. It’s spring break. Ivy decided that she wanted to make art and sell it in the neighborhood. She was going to sell it—well, she was going to raise money for ‘tzedakah.’ Tzedakah is the Hebrew word for, I guess, charitable donations. And so I thought, okay, what a beautiful idea. So she spent all day yesterday making art, like lots of little boxed Target art projects. And then today, we set her up outside in the neighborhood, and she was out there selling her art for probably two hours.

Sid even went out to help her for a little bit, but I think she wasn’t liking that he was trying to tell her how to do things. This was her project. And so she sent him away, and she pretty much did it all on her own. And thankfully, we didn’t promote this. We didn’t — you know, I didn’t put it on Facebook. Nothing like that. Thankfully, my brother, who lives in the neighborhood, happened to be driving by. So he stopped and he bought some art. A family friend happened to be dropping something off at my brother’s house, so she stopped by and she bought some art.

One other kind lady from the neighborhood stopped by, and she said, “Oh, I don’t have any money on me, but I’m going to come back in 15 minutes.” And she did. She came back with $5, and she bought some art. I had given Ivy some startup money just in case people didn’t have change. I gave her a stack of ones, and I told her all of that money she could keep and give to tzedakah.

And so when all was said and done, I think she had $57, and I rounded it up to $60. I thought, well, she did great. She should be really proud. And she was so upset. She was so disappointed. She was so frustrated. She felt like she did not have a successful fundraiser, and it was a huge flop. I was thinking about it and I was like, “Why does she feel this way? She did great.”

She was comparing. She even said, she’s like, “How is it that Sid can make $20,000 at his cookies and lemonade stand and I only made $60?” Oh, gosh, when she said it, it broke my heart. Because, you know, I don’t want her to be constantly comparing herself to him. They’re very big shoes to fill. He’s a very, very special kid.

When I was thinking about it, I was thinking, well, this is very, very similar to what I see in the sleep consulting community a lot. There are people who have been at this for years, and they’re running wildly successful businesses. But it didn’t happen overnight. It took persistence. It took building momentum. It took just time—year after year after year—showing up with similar messaging and a typical experience time after time after time.

Over the years, these sleep consultants are building a name for themselves. They’re building a reputation. They’re building trust, and they’re also just getting better at what they do. And that’s why they are successful. And then there are brand-new sleep consultants that are literally days or weeks or months out of the gate, and they’re even having some moments of what I would consider to be early success. They’re feeling down on themselves because they are comparing themselves to others who have far more experience and just more time under their belts than them.

I just wanted to share this story because I think so much of it lies in the mindset. When I was helping Ivy to wrap up, to clean up, and to bring her back home, I was feeling so proud of her. I was feeling like she did really, really great work. She did it. She made $57—that was incredible—and she was feeling like a huge failure.

When I think about the brand-new sleep consultants, sometimes I see it the same way. I feel like they’re doing great. They’re just getting started. They’re just figuring things out. They haven’t yet built an audience. They haven’t yet found their voice. They haven’t yet found their footing. But they’re still having small victories here and there, and that is not for nothing. That is what we build on.

And so if you’re listening today and you’re one of those brand-new sleep consultants that’s just feeling like a failure, I am here to tell you that actually you’re not. You’re probably doing a lot of things that are going to point you in the direction of more and more success as you continue on on this journey. And if you are listening to this episode and you’re not yet a sleep consultant, you’re thinking about becoming a sleep consultant, I hope this story will inspire you and motivate you to just take that first step. Because I do believe that, to some degree, success just takes time.

And if you spend three years thinking about something, mulling over it, wondering if you’re capable, wondering if you’ll have success, trying to imagine what it might look like, all of that time could be spent actually working on it, right? And if you actually take all of that time and put in the work and show up day after day, month after month, year after year, three years from now, you’re going to look like those seasoned graduates, those seasoned sleep consultants who are running wildly successful businesses. You’re going to look like Sid, okay?

And so I hope this story is inspiring to you. And as I always say, stop stewing. Start doing. Take action. Get to work. Accept the fact that good things come to those who work hard and also are willing to put in the time, the effort, and the energy.

You know, if I think back to, like, if I’m going to compare my two kids, if I had to guess, Ivy is never going to do another art sale. Like, she’s just that. She did it once. She doesn’t feel like she did great. She is going to give up, and that’s going to be the end. And that’s okay. That’s not necessarily her personality in a nutshell. I think it is how she’s going to handle this specific situation.

I don’t think it’s going to turn into anything other than the activity that she did this one time, and that is totally fine. But that is not going to lead to anything else for her in this category, right? Like, her tiny little fundraiser is never going to grow because she only did it once. And that’s just not the way the world works, right?

On the flip side, Sid, from age four, he had a level of passion and drive and commitment to this that has taken him into his teens. I mean, he was literally a four-year-old, and now he’s 13. And to see how it’s evolved and seeing what it’s turned into—and now he really does believe that he is capable of so much more because he’s built it organically over time.

There are a lot of ways where Ivy is persistent, she’s passionate and she’s hardworking when she wants to be. But in this particular situation, I think this is a one-and-done for her, and that’s okay. But that’s the end, right? It’s not going to grow if you don’t do it again and you don’t do it again and you don’t do it again.

So if you’re a sleep consultant, if you’re a small business owner, you have to be in the category of people who are willing to do things over and over and over again. And even when you feel like you’ve failed—which I didn’t think she did, but she had this sense of failure—you have to be willing to get back up, try again, continue to work on it, continue to put yourself out there. And with that consistent effort, there will come growth. And a year, two years, three years down the road, you’ll be in a totally different place than where you are today.

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. first paying client