I’ve been hosting Work at Home Moms Talk Radio for almost seven years now and have had the opportunity to talk with some awesome women.  I think it’d be great to share some of those interviews with you here on my personal blog so I’ve asked my terrific VA to transcribe a few, starting with the interview I did with Alice Seba on my 300th episode.  If you’d prefer to listen to the interview, you can find it here.

Alice shares a lot about what motivated her to sell several profitable businesses over the years, I know you’ll find our discussion really interesting.

Kelly McCausey: I’m excited to have you on this 300^th episode because of course you encouraged me to start the podcast way back in 2003. I can’t believe that I’ve done this 300 times now.

Alice Seba: Yeah that’s amazing. It seems such a huge number, I can’t believe the time has gone by so much and you’ve worked so hard on it to get to 300.

Kelly McCausey: Totally exciting. So Alice I want to talk to you about how things have changed for you over the years. Now, back in 2003 when I launched Work at Home Moms Talk Radio you were, your main gig was InternetBasedMoms.com and you, I can’t remember did you have your second child yet?

Alice Seba: No. First child was Internet Based Moms. Was I pregnant? Soon after.

Kelly McCausey: Yeah. So, you created Internet Based Moms while you were pregnant for and having Malcolm?

Alice Seba: No actually, you know what I mixed it up a little bit. I’m thinking; when I started Internet Based Moms I had one child, not pregnant yet but by the time; you started 2003 in the fall is that right?

Kelly McCausey: Yep.

Alice Seba: My second was born by then, that’s right. It’s hard to remember it was so long ago.

Kelly McCausey: You’re a Canadian.

Alice Seba: I am.

Kelly McCausey: You’re in Vancouver Canada and you’re one of those blessed Canadian moms that get to stay home for a whole year when you have a baby.

Alice Seba: That’s right.

Kelly McCausey: So you got to stay home for a whole year after your first and a whole year after your second and then a few years down the road you had a third, you’ve had a little girl.

Alice Seba: That’s right.

Kelly McCausey: But alas after all the; after being able to stay home for so long with your children now you actually had to go back to work.

Alice Seba: That’s right.

Kelly McCausey: Not because you needed to make money but because of the Canadian contract.

Alice Seba: Yeah and just to clarify, it’s not; people who are Canadian wondering what is she talking about? It’s not because of that Canadian law or the employment insurance benefits it’s because my employer specifically gave extra money. We would normally get 60% of our earnings for the year through employment insurance offered by the government and my employer topped us up until 90% and part of the agreement of taking that 90% is that you’ve got to come back and work equal time for what you took.

And so at the time it sounded so attractive and I said ok I’ll take that and then yes I was able to take some time off without pay. I haven’t been, it’s been about 6 1/2 years since I worked last. But yes they said it’s time to come back Alice, can’t stay at home anymore.

Kelly McCausey: That has to feel so strange. I try to imagine myself in your shoes not having to work anymore, having plenty of income from my own business if I had to go do my time to fulfill the contract oh it would be such a bummer!

Alice Seba: Well yeah and I was pretty upset to start with but you kind of adjust to it. And the situation with us at home is that my husband is actually going to school in the evenings so he’s at home with our daughter and takes the kids to school every day so we switched. And you know I want to look at it this way – we moms think that we have to do it all and stuff and so this was also a good chance for me to just let go a little bit. Let him, you know he can handle it. He enjoys it and he’s having a great time and bonding with the kids and me in the evening obviously too.

So, it’s worked out alright. I mean I would still prefer to not be working 37 1/2 hours a week but it’s the way it is and you know we are working around it.

Kelly McCausey: And how long? What’s the date you’ll be able to come back home?

Alice Seba: Is my employer listening to this? I have about 13 months left that I’ll need to finish up and then we’ll see where we go from there. And my husband will be finished with school so maybe we’ll switch again, however it works out.

Kelly McCausey: So even though you have gone back to work full-time you’re still running a home business but your businesses changed a lot over the years. And listeners who have been with us faithfully over the years they know that you reached a point where you felt like you’d done everything you wanted to do with Internet Based Moms and you sold it. And you created a new brand – The Internet Marketing Sweetie and then you reached a point where you felt like you’d done all you wanted to do with that and you sold that last year and now you have Contentrix.com.

A lot; in each change from when you were running Internet Based Moms, the type of business you were running versus Internet Marketing Sweetie there were a lot of changes. And then now again from Internet Marketing Sweetie to Contentrix there were a lot of changes.

I want to know, over the years how have you changed?

Alice Seba: Ok. Well how I’ve changed is very reflective of I guess what you see on the outside, what business I’m running. Because when I started, just like probably just about anybody else, any other mom who started an online business we’re consumed by it and we want to do the best we can. Sometimes we probably do more than we should and working very hard.

Internet Based Moms the way I was running it at the time was so time consuming and it required so much of me and also the way I positioned it. While it earned, had good search engine rankings and was earning good money that way as far as selling products to the readers the regulars and things like that that wasn’t as successful.

So I knew I kind of had to make a change and change the way I approached the way I ran my business because I didn’t want to work so much and I also wanted to sell more stuff.

Internet Marketing Sweetie was a little bit different perspective. It was focused on you’ve got to spend money to earn money. The way I approached the market was much more different and the results came.

But still it was a lot of me and while it was more profitable but because I still had to dedicate a lot of my time into it, and not that I don’t want to work at all but I wanted to work something that was less about me.

And Contentrix is a multi-author blog and it goes perfectly with the private label content that Mila Sidman and I sell and also the ghostwriting business that I co-own.

So I wanted to just focus instead of all of internet marketing and it being all about me just going into a specific area and removing myself from the picture a little bit more where I’m overseeing everything and doing that part, really managing the business as opposed to working so much in it.

And that reflects my desire to have more time with the family and now also I have no choice to not work as much. If I’m at work all day I’m certainly not going to be working all night. So creating a business that allows me to just manage it and a little bit of maintenance and planning and things like that every day.

That’s how it all happened and it’s great to learn from those things and I think having those fresh starts has really helped to do things, kind of a do over it helps to reach the goals I have.

Kelly McCausey: The kind of business that you could run when you had one little baby on your lap is very different from the kind of business you can run when you have a baby on your lap and two busy little boys, a husband and a full-time job.

One of the things that you’ve always tried to impress on especially us work at home moms is there’s only so many hours in a day, you can’t build a business around trading hours for dollars and expect it to grow, to see increase from that because you’re always going to be hitting that limit.

Alice Seba: Right.

Kelly McCausey: How have your expectations of a work at home business changed? If you can put yourself back in the mindset of 2003 what your goals were versus today what your goals are, how have your expectations changed?

Alice Seba: The trading hours for dollars thing kind of makes sense too because back then I assumed, you know I didn’t really look at it as a job – I hoped that I could do things and continue to get paid for them but I thought that I would be working. It would be like a full-time job but it would be at home. And so I quickly realized that it doesn’t have to be that way. You can outsource, you can plan things very well and just really focusing on what the things you are doing. I think when I expected; I actually want to say too I in some ways I expect less. I don’t expect less in the way of monetary reward but I expect less in what I have to do.

I think that a lot of times we look at what we have on our to do list and how we do it and there’s just too much stuff on there and there’s stuff that we don’t need to do and I’m always constantly thinking of how I can do this with the least amount of time and what’s the minimum I have to do. But not in a sense that I’m doing a bad job, what’s the minimum I have to do to get things done right? And when you start thinking that way you’ll be surprised at all the extra things that we really are doing all the time.

So in that way I expect less of myself and in return by doing that I make more. So it’s definitely a good trade off.

Kelly McCausey: Time and experience gives you a perspective on what activities are profitable and what aren’t.

Alice Seba: Right. Exactly. And a lot of people say they are new and they have to do this but you can begin that process. I’m sure you’re going to learn quickly but really start scrutinizing from the very beginning, not keep trying to do something for three years and then say well what happened?

Kelly McCausey: So here it is 2010 what are your long term dreams?

Alice Seba: Well really to continue to work with my family I guess as a team. The business is not a family business but we just all have different roles and those are going to change over time and I like the flexibility where we have where we are able to do this – where he’s at home, I’m at work. And when he finishes school he’s going to be looking at career opportunities or maybe freelance work from home as well. I’m positive that we can make, whatever we need to do we can make it work.

That’s the ideal goal. And you know to have time with family. My goals, dreams are more about that as opposed to the business. The business may change; it’s not the ultimate dream. I like helping people, all my business throughout the eight years has been about helping people and I want to continue doing that. But I have an end goal for myself as well. So that’s always the focus. I don’t need to be famous. I just want to do my thing and enjoy life.

Kelly McCausey: I know there are some people listening to this right now. Over the years I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say “I want to be like Alice.” They said it when you were the owner of Internet Based Moms. They said it when you were the owner of Internet Marketing Sweetie. Fewer say it today because you are different – you’re more behind the scenes, you’re not as out there. But the smart ones are still saying “I want to be like Alice” because they see that; they want to work smarter not harder.

Alice Seba: Yep.

Kelly McCausey: Which is always the smart thing.

Alice Seba: And I think the people who are really visible often in the internet marketing world or in the work at home mom world; I mean there are obviously probably many exceptions but generally speaking you’re looking at someone who is getting a lot of publicity and really out there. It doesn’t always translate into dollars!

Kelly McCausey: Right!

Alice Seba: It takes a lot of work. The fame doesn’t matter it’s having a really tight targeted audience. People who want to buy stuff from you. That’s what matters. Well to me maybe not to other people. Other people may not have the big income dreams but the feeling that they’re well known, making a difference and things like that. That’s fine for them. But if you’re looking at it from a perspective of having freedom in your life and earning money then the fame is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Kelly McCausey: Yeah. I think that people especially in the last two years have had to start thinking more critically about who to pay attention to and who to emulate because if you go back to 2003-2004 the big names were the moms that were making the money. And that’s why we knew who they were. Today the big names are moms who’ve learned how to get attention.

Alice Seba: Yep.

Kelly McCausey: Not the same thing! And so I know from coaching with new work at home moms; a lot of times they’ll come to me and four or five years ago it was I want to be like Alice, I want to be like you, I want to be like…uhm I’m going to have a brain mental pause…MyMommyBiz.com – the owner there – different names that they’ve …

Alice Seba: Oh Jennifer.

Kelly McCausey: Jennifer yep. I want to be like them, I want to have a great big beautiful site. And now people are coming to me and they are saying these names and I want to be like this person and this person and this person and I won’t say their names. But I feel so bad for them because these people aren’t making any money. I know they’re not because I just know. Unfortunately they’re big names but that doesn’t translate into money. And people have to get more critical about how do you know whether you should be following someone, emulating what they do?

Alice Seba: You don’t need to see their bank statements but you gotta look at what they say and read between the lines on things. I mean you’re reading this; I think what they call social media even though it’s been around forever because we were on message boards in 2002 and I was saying it was some kind of social media. But now that we have Twitter, Facebook and things like that that people can make a lot of friends and it looks a little different and people are all talking about relationships and you’ve gotta do this and you’ve gotta do that and this and it’s about the relationship.

It is about the relationship and I think that anyone who’s followed what I’ve done knows that I also agree giving a business comes back but if you’re just worried about the relationship and nothing else you’re missing a huge chunk of business. And I think a lot of the noise out there right now on how to do things correctly online, which correctly is a word I really hate, is steering people in the wrong direction and I think it’s a backlash to the guru and the hard direct selling. There’s gotta be some happy medium between that and I think personally that’s how I’ve approached my business the whole time is that happy medium instead of one extreme or the other.

I was watching a video of somebody who is I don’t know probably call him a social media expert – I’m not really sure what they call themselves – but it was a small portion of the video, it was just a sample so I didn’t see the whole content. But they said; they were talking about how yes you’ve got to build the relationship, you’ve got to do that, you don’t have to sell just right off the bat or whatever. And he’s talking about a viral video that he’d created and it ended up shutting down the site and then they got the site back up because the host put it back up and then they ended up with this $1500.00 bill for people watching his video and he was in shock.

And while I know that can happen and you could be like it was poorly planned my thought is that I wasn’t sure how that was a very good lesson in how powerful relationships can be when had you done the proper planning and built the interest, the viral part and the marketing part of it you would of made $1500.00 to cover your bill.

So there’s got to be some strategic planning to getting this exposure and doing all this stuff. And while I think the person who said that has that strategic planning it was the way the message was delivered to the audience and I was thinking wait a second that’s a bad message.

Kelly McCausey: I agree. Alright, I know we don’t have a lot of time but I want to ask you one more question. I know you’re not really serving the work at home mom community as directly, you’re serving a wider internet marketing world …

Alice Seba: The moms still like me, I think. That used to be a large chunk, definitely a big chunk of who I used to work with.

Kelly McCausey: You’re still a mom. You’re still juggling diapers and school and life and business. What do you think new work at home moms should be focusing on in 2010 if they want to get started smartly?

Alice Seba: Well I think, I guess a lot of what we said is that really managing your time and you’ve got to keep things in balance and keep it in perspective and really make smart decisions. That doesn’t mean you have to think about everything and never get started. But you try things, they don’t work you move on. And cut out a lot of I think the noise, we talked about the popularity contest whether it’s blogging stardom or being part of the Twitter or Facebook elite – whoever those people are – it’s not; don’t try to compete in the popularity contest.

If you want to start a business to make money, to have freedom in your life just stay focused. Also another thing is a lot of us started and we have no business background, don’t have an education in business and things like that. Go back to the basics and I think that’s one of the things that I’ve learned over the years too is really; the internet marketing part is important if you’re doing an online business and online work but you’ve also got to know how business work and understanding the different parts of it and managing your money and things like that.

So again cut out the noise and go back to the basics and start learning how you build and run a business

Kelly McCausey: Great advice. Alice Seba, contentrix.com thanks so much for being on my 300^th episode.

Alice Seba: Congratulations again.

Photo Credit to Rosalind Gardner

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