The A La Carte

On September 1, 2020, I took a gamble.

I had quit my job. I didn’t have a cushion. There wasn’t a giant savings account waiting for me if this didn’t work. I was just determined that somehow, some way, I was going to make it work.

Six years later, Admin A La Carte is still here.

Honestly, sometimes that’s the accomplishment.

When I started this business, my definition of success wasn’t particularly complicated. I wanted enough clients to pay my bills. I wanted to make at least what I had been making at a regular job, except I wanted to do it on my own time.

I’ve always been perfectly capable of working a 9-to-5.

The problem was that I was usually doing so much more than that anyway.

So why not do all that work for myself?

Six Years and a Couple Iterations Later

The Admin A La Carte of 2020 looked very different from the Admin A La Carte of today.

I started primarily as a real estate admin. I worked with a couple of real estate teams and the real estate office I was affiliated with. It was a lot of traditional admin and marketing work.

A couple years in, the business changed when I took on a large contract with Weyerhaeuser for about a year and a half.

Then it changed again.

I came back to working full time with smaller businesses, and somewhere along the way, I realized the thing people needed from me wasn’t just someone to complete their admin tasks.

They needed someone to look at the whole business.

What’s working? What’s not? Where are we making something harder than it needs to be? What system doesn’t exist that should? What are we doing because we’ve always done it that way? What needs to happen to actually get us where we’re trying to go?

Today, a lot more of my work is consulting on business organization and creating plans and systems that help small businesses operate more efficiently and reach their goals.

Turns out I’m really good at controlled chaos.

Mostly.

Am I “Making It”?

That’s actually harder to answer than I thought it would be.

Six years sounds like I should be able to confidently say, “Yes! I made it!”

But what does that even mean?

Do I have ups and downs? Absolutely.

Is the money okay? Yes.

Is the freedom good? Definitely.

Do I have a varied group of clients? Very.

Is my work-life balance fantastic?

HAHAHAHA.

No.

But one thing that has changed is that I’m much more selective about who gets my working time.

I’ve learned that being a good person and being a good client are two completely different things.

There are personality traits I recognize now that tell me a working relationship probably isn’t going to be a good fit. If someone needs to micromanage everything I do, that’s probably not going to work. If someone wants to give me absolutely no direction and then be upset when I didn’t magically produce what they had imagined, that’s probably not going to work either.

Neither makes someone a bad person.

They just aren’t necessarily my person to work with.

I have best friends I would never work for because I know exactly who they would be as a client.

Six years gives you enough experience to know the difference.

It has also given me the ability to spend more of my working hours around people I genuinely enjoy. Some clients have become friends. Sometimes I get to work with people who were already friends.

If I’m going to spend an absurd percentage of my life working, getting to choose who I spend that time with matters.

If You Don’t Want to Scream and Quit Once a Week…

I have a saying:

If you don’t want to scream and quit at least once a week, you’re doing it wrong.

Running a small business is hard.

Running one through economic ups and downs is hard. Running one in a state that isn’t particularly friendly to small businesses is hard. Inconsistent income is hard. Taking on too much is hard.

Having life completely kick your ass and realizing your clients still have deadlines is hard.

I’ve worked myself into burnout.

I’ve literally worked myself into kidney stones.

There have been plenty of times over six years when I have wondered what the hell I’m doing.

And yet…

This Business Gave Me a Life I Couldn’t Have Planned

Admin A La Carte has also given me something I don’t think most traditional jobs ever could.

Flexibility.

Not the Instagram version of entrepreneurship where you work for two hours from a beach and spend the rest of the afternoon drinking something with a tiny umbrella in it.

My version is more like: I can work myself to the bone OR sleep in one morning because I need to.

I can work from an office, my house, someone else’s house, or late at night with a dog sitting on my lap.

I can pursue my very serious side hobby of hanging out with my friends’ dogs while they’re out of town.

I can change settings. Change focus. Work creatively. Meet people I never would have met otherwise.

And some of the biggest things this business has given me have absolutely nothing to do with business.

The flexibility of this life allowed me to become best friends with my sister.

It has given me six years full of weird, fun, difficult, unexpected experiences I simply wouldn’t have had if I had spent them working a traditional 9-to-5.

That counts for something.

Actually, it counts for a lot.

Six Years In, I’ve Become My Own Client

Perhaps the funniest development in all of this is that Admin A La Carte has officially developed the exact problem Admin A La Carte exists to solve.

I need help.

I’ve reached that awkward stage so many small business owners hit where there is too much work for one person, but I’m not necessarily in a position to make the giant leap into hiring a full-time employee.

But I need work taken off my plate so I have room to grow.

Sound familiar?

Yeah.

I need to become my own client.

I’ve spent years helping other business owners bridge that exact gap. They need help before they feel completely “ready” to hire help. They need someone who can take pieces of the business, organize them, create systems, keep things moving and give the owner some capacity back.

Apparently it’s much easier to identify that problem when it belongs to someone else.

So that’s one of the challenges for year seven.

Because I don’t necessarily want year seven to mean MORE.

More clients. More hours. More things for me to personally manage.

I want Admin A La Carte to become more profitable.

And I want to be able to take a day or two off and have things still get done.

Hell, I’d eventually like to take an entire week off.

Imagine.

The Gamble

If I could sit across from the version of myself who was about to do this on September 1, 2020, knowing everything the next six years would hold, I’d still tell her to do it.

Do it again.

These will be some of the hardest years of your life.

They’ll also be some of the best.

You’re going to work too much. You’re going to worry about money. You’re going to question yourself. You’re going to scream about quitting approximately 312 times a year.

But you’re also going to build something that gives you freedom when you desperately need it.

You’re going to meet people you wouldn’t have known otherwise.

You’re going to have experiences you couldn’t possibly predict.

You’re going to create a life that doesn’t always make sense on paper, but somehow fits you.

And you’re going to discover that what looked like risking everything on an uncertain business wasn’t quite as reckless as it seemed.

Because it wasn’t an entirely blind gamble.

It was a calculated risk.

I was the calculation.

I knew how hard I would work.

I knew how stubborn I could be.

I knew that if I decided this had to work, I was going to do everything I could possibly think of to make sure it did.

And apparently, that wasn’t a terrible bet.

I’ve spent almost nothing on marketing over these six years. There wasn’t some enormous advertising machine behind this business. It grew through relationships, reputation, referrals, changing directions when something wasn’t working and continuing to figure it out.

Six years and a couple iterations later, I’m still making it work.

Is it perfect?

God, no.

Have I “made it”?

Ask me again later.

There are systems to build. Help to hire. Boundaries to create. Profitability to improve. And maybe, just maybe, a vacation somewhere in my future where I don’t bring my laptop.

But on September 1, Admin A La Carte turns six.

And when I think about the woman who quit her job without a cushion and decided she was stubborn enough to build something of her own, there’s really only one thing I want to say:

You were right to risk it all on yourself.

Six years later, I can’t believe I’m still going.