Listen to at least the first five minutes before you decide whether or not this episode is for you. And I’d love to hear your feedback.
Resources mentioned:
- Episode 29 of the Bright Method podcast regarding Outsourcing, including our complicated emotions around the topic
- Here’s where to find more about Kelly Hubbell of Sage Haus:
- Website – https://www.mysagehaus.com/
- Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mysagehaus/
- Store – https://stan.store/mysagehaus
A full transcript of this episode is available on my website about two weeks after the episode is published. To find it, click here and then select the episode.
Full Transcript
Episode 52. [Listen Before You Rule It Out] Hiring a House Manager
with Kelly Hubbell of Sage Haus
[Upbeat Intro Music]
Kelly Nolan: Welcome to The Bright Method Podcast where we’ll discuss practical time management strategies designed for the professional working woman. I’m Kelly Nolan, a former patent litigator who now works with women to set up The Bright Method in their lives. The Bright Method is a realistic time management system that helps you manage it all, personally and professionally. Let’s get you falling asleep proud of what you got done today and calm about what’s on tap tomorrow. All right, let’s dig in!
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Kelly Nolan: Hey hey! Okay, before we dig into today’s topic, I want to encourage you not to turn this off if you feel like it’s not for you, at least until I address a couple of points that I want to talk about. So I’m gonna tell you what we’re gonna talk about (I think two-to-four points that I want to cover) and then we’ll get to the episode. So don’t skip until you’ve heard those points, which will happen in the next two minutes, and then you can decide.
Okay, so today we are going to talk about hiring someone, why and how to hire more of like a household manager role in your house. If you’ve ever wanted to clone yourself, this is the episode that you might want to listen to. But as I said, I know some people will immediately feel like this is not the right episode for them. They will think it’s not in their budget. They will think it’s just not for them. They will feel that constrict-y feeling that I am very familiar with when it comes to spending money. And so, I want to just address these points so that you don’t rule this out for you right now without listening to the rest of this episode or at least the following points.
Five Points Before You Rule This Episode Out – 1:27
So point number one is I think, from my own experience, more of us rule this out than reality should dictate, and what I mean by that is we think, “That’s not for me. I can’t afford it,” and we move on without understanding, “Maybe this actually is more attainable than I thought. Maybe I could hire someone for five hours a week to help with these specific things that would really give me a lot more breathing space in my life.”
In addition, even if it’s not in your means right now, it might become in your means in the next few years (within the next five, ten years), and I want you to know it’s an option because when you get to that stage, I want you to know, “Oh, this is somewhere that I thought when I make more money each year, this is where I would want some of that money to go to buy back my time and my peace of mind and my brain space.”
The second point of this that I want to make is even if this is not for you, I want you to listen to it and think about it creatively. So Kelly Hubbell, who’s the guest I’m gonna have, mentions this in the episode, but maybe I don’t hire someone part time (five hours a week or more) to help me with this stuff, but are there certain tasks that I might want to hire the kid down the street or a college kid to do one of these things every so often? So even if you’re not buying into the full element of what we’re talking about here, are there concepts that you could bring to life that could get you some of the relief in a more creative and different way?
Point three is if you haven’t listened to episode 29, I talk a lot about outsourcing in it, and in that episode, I dig into a lot of the kind of more emotional, body-feeling hang-ups that we have when it comes to spending money on outsourcing home stuff. So if you haven’t listened to that yet, I encourage you to actually pause this episode, go back to listen to episode 29 on outsourcing, and then come back because I hope that it will give you a little bit more of a freeing headspace to contemplate doing this type of thing in your life.
The last point I want to make before we dive in and before you can move on if you decide this still isn’t for you is that a lot of us can be very overwhelmed in our lives, in our careers, and the option that seems to be on the table even before hiring some sort of household manager is leaving our jobs. A lot of people I talk to — for example, I had Dr. Shani Esparaz on the podcast a couple episodes ago, maybe more, about how she stayed in medicine but made some big changes to help her stay in medicine. And I got feedback from people saying, “Thank you for having people on the podcast who make changes to their work/life but don’t leave their career because I love my job. I’m a little overwhelmed. I’d like to change my job, but I love my career. I love my industry. I want to stay in this.” This topic today that we’re gonna talk about of getting real, significant support at home on this side of things is an avenue that might allow you to stay in your field longer, in the way that you want to be there in your career, without exiting it entirely, but get you that breathing space that you’re looking at because, as I’ve said, time is time is time is time is time. So if we can get you relief on the homefront, you are going to feel more relief throughout your life, including at work.
So I encourage you to listen and keep an open mind to it, and if you have any questions or concerns after the episode or just thoughts you want to share please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at ke***@ke********.com or on Instagram.
Okay, so my guest on today’s podcast is Kelly Hubbell. Kelly helps busy moms have it all without doing it all. She’s a full-time working mom of three and founder of Sage Haus, a platform that helps busy parents reclaim their time by outsourcing the mental load. Her goal is to help moms on any budget get the support they deserve so they can feel more present in everything they do, whether it’s spending time with their family, growing their business, or doing the things that they love. She started Sage Haus because she wants to share her wisdoms and learnings with other mothers and rewrite the narrative to normalize building the village and hiring a household dream team. Kelly’s method can help you move past the permission-slip phase and into practical solutions to relieve the mental load. Her offerings include digital courses, small group cohorts, and one-on-one recruiting services.
I also want to nudge here that I really believe that a lot of what we talk about isn’t just for moms. So if you are someone who doesn’t have children or lives alone or is in a couple or whatever it might be, and you feel like the load of managing the home and household is too much, then this is an episode you also want to listen to because I think it’s just as applicable to you. All right, let’s dig into the episode!
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Kelly Nolan: Awesome. Well, welcome, Kelly! I am so excited you’re here! And for the sake of the listener, we will do our best to add in our last names so that we know who’s talking at which point. But Kelly Hubbell, why don’t you just give us a brief background of who you are, how you got into this whole industry of helping people with house managers and other household help. I think everyone is curious to learn how you got there and how you can help them too.
Kelly’s Background and How She Got Into This Industry – 6:43
Kelly Hubbell: Yeah, well, I’m super excited to be here, so thank you for having me. My name’s Kelly Hubbell, and not to be confused with Kelly Nolan, but there are a lot of Kellys out there. And I am a mom of three. I work full time in technology sales and have started Sage Haus over the course of the last year or so to help moms reclaim their time, and I’m really helping them do that by outsourcing. Here’s kind of how I got here. I didn’t think that this would be my sort of path, but here I am, and I’m so passionate about it.
I guess my outsourcing journey kind of started, I think, really similarly to how many moms start their outsourcing journey, by just hiring cleaners because I got to a point where I was actually eight months pregnant, and I couldn’t even tie my own shoes, and I thought, “There’s no way I can clean this floor, so I need to hire some cleaners to help me.”
Fast forward after we had our first (my son), I realized that weekends were such precious time for our family to be spending together because we were both working full time, and when you have a baby you know you have limited hours in the day. They sleep for 11 or 12 hours, and so, you’re like, “Well, we have a little bit of time in the morning and then a little bit of time at night. I don’t really want to spend my weekends doing a lot of those chores, and especially preparing meals and food for the week.”
So I just kind of had gotten in this routine in my twenties of Sundays are for hitting the farmer’s market, going to the grocery store, prepping a bunch of healthy food just so it’s on hand. And I realized, “Oh, my gosh. I don’t think I can fit this in anymore because I really just want to spend time with my kiddo on the weekends.”
And so, that was sort of my second outsourcing because I thought to myself, “Okay, this is a job. Someone would probably love to spend four or five hours in my kitchen preparing food,” and it’s not like they have to be some Michelin Star culinary chef, right? They just have to know how to roast veggies, make some grains, exactly what I’m doing.
So we ended up doing that, and that was sort of my second foray into outsourcing. Fast forward, add two kids, add a dog, add a house, and I went back to work after my second and was like, “I just am burnt out. I cannot handle not just the physical tasks that I’m doing to manage my household. But the energy and the mental load that I’m spending on making sure they’re all getting done is taking away from me just being able to focus in my job, being able to focus and really be present with my kids.
And so, that finally, I was like — well, we can talk a little bit more about how I got to that point, but I realized there are all these things. I made a big list, and then I allocated time. To your audience and listeners, Kelly, if you start allocating time, if you start thinking about calendaring and blocking time for all of those household tasks, you’re realizing that this is a part-time job on top of my full-time job of either my job, my career, my nine-to-five, or raising kids (which is my focus).
Kelly Nolan: Yeah, it’s really your third job. You have two full-time jobs and this part-time job.
Kelly Hubbell: Right, and you realize, “Oh, my gosh. This is a role, and this is a job, and this is a job description.” And so, I brought that to my husband, and we ended up hiring a house manager. Some people call it a family assistant. There are various names for it. That is where we are today.
So we have this sort of mix of what I call our village who support us, which is the cleaners, a meal prep chef (who now drops off food for us), and a house manager who, basically, we can talk a little bit more about everything she does to help me, but she’s the clone of me. She helps me with everything, and it’s so life changing. So I set all of this up, and I started getting questions from moms in my network and friends, and they were like, “Oh, you’re feeling burnt out? You’re feeling overwhelmed? You should go talk to Kelly. It feels like she’s got the systems figured out.”
And so, I started just chatting with friends and people, and I was like, “Here’s a job description you can use. Here’s what my house manager does for me. Here’s some lists I use, checklists and home systems.” And I started taking so many calls that I was like, “I think moms just need this information out there, and how do I get this out in front of more busy moms and parents to just help them realize that they can set up systems for division of labor and they can outsource things that don’t necessarily need to be done by them.”
Kelly Nolan: Absolutely. And so, I just love all of this. How do you address the person who I’m sure — because I’ve been this person in the past — that’s listening to this and kind of feeling that constricted feeling where they’re thinking, “That sounds great, but I can’t afford that,” or “That’s not for me.” How do you kind of approach that dynamic of this?
Approaching How to Budget For Outsourcing – 11:55
Kelly Hubbell: Yeah, I mean, I will say that I think, as with many things in life, having the ability and the financial means to be able to hire your village is certainly a massive privilege. But I will also say that I think that it’s not as big of a luxury, if you will, as some people might think. By the way, a lot of busy moms that I talk to, I think, tell themselves a story and a narrative about the financial thing being a barrier to them, and it’s interesting just in the way that we perceive it. I’ll give you an interesting statistic, which is 80% of dual income households hire and outsource the cleaning of their homes.
So what I would say is people are budgeting for outsourcing cleaning. I don’t think it’s very different to also budget for things that you’re trading your time for. Things like having someone help you prepare meals for the week or doing your laundry or running errands. And then what I’ll also say is I don’t think it’s as unattainable as many people think, and I’ll tell you why. Because you don’t have to start big. You don’t have to have a twenty-hour-a-week, part-time person working in your home and make some big, huge investment. What you need to do is figure out what kind of support would work for you and for your family and what kind of things can you tick off your plate and your partner’s plate that are the top-of-the-list priorities that would give you back not only time in your day but like I mentioned the energy and the headspace to then either be more present in what you’re doing or find ways to spend your time that really fill you up and make you feel present.
Kelly Nolan: Yep.
Kelly Hubbell: So, you know, I’ll give you an example. Some moms that I work with just start with five hours a week. They realize that five hours a week can get them all of their laundry done and folded, it can get them two grocery runs and walking their dog. That five hours gets them two extra workouts, two opportunities to spend with friends or family that really fills them up, and then maybe more time growing their business or doing something else that they love doing.
So I think it is more attainable. You can start really small, and you can get creative. So it’s not about necessarily hiring someone at some wage. It’s like, “Hey, the middle school kid down the street gets out of school at 3:00 PM. What if I pay them $10 bucks to walk my dog for 30 minutes?” or “My cleaners who are already coming to clean my house, can I just say to them, ‘Can I pay you for one extra hour to fold the laundry? I’ll have it ready, but can you spend the extra hour to fold it, and I’ll put it away?’” And so, it’s just like getting creative and thinking, again, about just putting systems in place to build your own village.
One more thing that I’ll say is that we’re living in a different time now where 70% of families live an hour or more away from their nuclear or extended family. And so, I think a lot of times those other 30% are really relying heavily on family like parents, aunts and uncles, siblings, to help them like, “Hey, can you watch the kids? Hey, can you walk the dog?” I think that’s fantastic. That’s your village. Your family is certainly your village, but the other 70% of us (like me and my family) who live away from family, we need to find our own support systems because we don’t have them otherwise.
Kelly Nolan: Yeah.
Kelly Hubbell: And so, I think it’s okay to let people in. People want to take care of you and your family, and I think it’s okay to not stop doing it all and really hire your own village.
Kelly Nolan: Well, and I really appreciate your point of — I mean, this was a big lightbulb moment for me a couple years ago, and I talked about this in episode 29 on outsourcing, that I’ve hired a meal prep person as well. But it was a big, weird shift that it took me reading — I don’t know if you’ve read Rachel Rodgers’ book on how we should all be millionaires, but…
Kelly Hubbell: Oh, yeah!
Kelly Nolan: Yeah, so she talks about, “You know, just research it.” And that’s I think a lot of what you’re talking about here too is just look into it.
Kelly Hubbell: Yeah.
Kelly Nolan: You don’t have to say, “This is what we’re doing, and now let me look into it, and this is a big sticker-shock thing,” or things like that. Just research, “How much would this cost? Okay, maybe that’s unattainable,” but it’s not all or nothing. Could some middle ground be found? And I love that because you’re right, the value of our time. So often in our culture, we value money over time, and I really think that the push to pay for the freeing up of our time and the mental load and all that is so, so worth it. So thank you for sharing all that!
You’ve kind of already gone through this, but I’d love to hear you talk about kind of what your current setup is and maybe more specifically, since you’ve kind of addressed it, what are the types of things, particularly, that household manager is doing just to help people get their wheels turning on that front?
Things a Household Manager Can Do For You – 17:31
Kelly Hubbell: Yeah, definitely. So I mentioned that, really, our village is made up of three sort of groups. We’ve got house cleaners that come and deep clean every other week. However, we all know, I’ve got three kids. There’s a lot of cleaning that needs to take place in between those two weeks. So having someone like my house manager who’s wiping down the counters every day, taking out the trash, the compost, the recycles, using the Dyson to vacuum up all of the cereal crumbs off the floor and the couch, that’s super helpful on a cleaning front.
I’ll tell you a little bit about how my meal prep chef works with me and my family. She comes and drops off food every week on Mondays, and basically, we’re at the point now where we’ve created this big, huge spreadsheet of all of the recipes that my family loves that she makes that are easy to reheat, like big enchilada dishes or spaghetti and meatballs. By the way, she’s been cooking all gluten free for us because we just are kind of on a gluten free journey, and it’s amazing. We basically spend maybe two- or three-minutes coordinating on a Friday or a Saturday via email or text like, “Hey, anything you’re craving this week?” “Nope, surprise me!” or “Yeah, we really want breakfast burritos!” And so, there isn’t a ton of mental load anymore that goes into that. And then we pay her on an hourly basis. She does the grocery shopping, she prepares the food, and then she drops it off to us. So then I reimburse her for groceries, and then I pay her at an hourly rate.
My house manager — and by the way, when I went to hire a house manager, I originally wanted someone who could do the meal prep and house management together in one role, which a lot of my clients end up doing and finding. So I think that that’s a huge possibility to combine those things and consolidate. But it just so happened for us that that house manager we found and loved who really connected with our kids, because she provides childcare for us, she’s like a raw vegan, and so, she doesn’t do a lot of cooking on her own, and so, she didn’t feel that comfortable cooking for us and my family who eats meat. And so, we ended up just going that route, but it works out really well. All that to say, there are different setups that work for different families, right?
Anyway, let me give you an idea of basically what our house manager does for us. I think you can kind of compartmentalize it a little bit, but she’s like basically my clone, right? So she cares for my home just as I would. So she sees something on the floor, she picks it up, you know? She’s super attentive to detail. But there are daily tasks that she does that are things I kind of already mentioned like just general tidy up. She takes out the garbage. She waters plants once a week. She unloads the dishwasher. She does the laundry. I feel like laundry is just constant. It’s always going in my house.
Kelly Nolan: Yeah. [Laughs]
Kelly Hubbell: Oh, she just does a lot a lot of laundry! She walks my dog every single day because, typically, me or my husband can get him out once a day, and then she does the other walk, which is a huge bonus. She runs errands for us. She vacuums out the car seats one a week.
Kelly Nolan: Nice.
Kelly Hubbell: Because you know how crazy car seats get. And then she fills up the cars with gas when she’s out running errands.
Here’s one thing that I feel like basically every mom could offload and outsource, which is your standing grocery list, your pantry-stocking list. We all have one, right? We all need bananas. You’ve got to have bananas. You’ve got to have milk. You’ve got to have bread. You know, whatever that list is for your family, she does the check every day when she’s here (she works four days a week for us), and then she goes to the grocery store, and she just makes sure we’re stocked up on those things. So I no longer think about, “Do we have bananas, and is my toddler gonna have a full meltdown when I’m out of bananas tomorrow,” you know?
Kelly Nolan: Yeah.
Kelly Hubbell: And just that gives me so much — I know it sounds silly.
Kelly Nolan: Even I would have a meltdown if we’re out of coffee. We’re gonna be out of coffee, and I’m gonna have the meltdown. [Laughs]
Kelly Hubbell: Yeah! So yeah, you’ve got to have a constant stream of coffee beans.
Kelly Nolan: [Laughs] Well, I love this because I think that giving the real examples helps people bring to life. One thing that you have shared with me that you do that I was like, “Ooh, I want that,” is also handling car maintenance, because car maintenance —
Kelly Hubbell: Oh, the worst.
Kelly Nolan: — it’s not common, but it takes so much time, and it’s just inconvenient. So that was another thing that you said, and I was like, “Wow, that would be really nice.”
Kelly Hubbell: Yes.
Kelly Nolan: So I really back that.
Kelly Hubbell: And to your point, I think there are a lot of tasks that just end up falling off of our plate. We’re so busy that car maintenance, I mean, how long is your check engine light on before you’re like, “Oh, man, I should really do something about this”?
Kelly Nolan: Yeah.
Kelly Hubbell: And how nice would it be to just sort of outsource that? There are also big quarterly tasks that we have a list of, and it’s like, “Go through the kids’ clothes, because they’ve outgrown them. They’re on the next size.” So every quarter or six months, clean it out, put it in the box, take it to donate, declutter every quarter. There are big jobs like descaling the coffee machine or oiling your cutting boards because I use mine every day. So these are just things that fall off our list, but how amazing are they when they’re just taken care of?
Kelly Nolan: Yeah. So I think this is awesome, and people are probably like, “Okay, but.” And I’ve had a lot of clients do this where they’ve gone down this road. They’re like, “I think I need someone to be me, to clone me and be a household manager.”
Kelly Hubbell: Yeah.
Kelly Nolan: But it is so hard like, “How do I do that?” Because when you’re on the frontend, and you’ve decided to do it, it’s such a daunting task to look at, “This is a whole nother job to hire me, to hire someone to do that.” So how do you handle that now working with clients in just a broad overview of how that works?
Recruiting and Hiring a House Manager – 23:41
Kelly Hubbell: I think, yeah, you’re right. You can’t just say, “Hmm, I need more help, so let me just jump on care.com and see who’s around,” right? It’s like you need to be more intentional about what you need first. What do you need help with, and how do you prioritize that? And so, what I’ve done is I’ve shared all of the hard work that I did. Remember I told you I put together this huge, long list of all the things that are taking place in my home? What I did was it’s on my website, and anyone can access it, but by answering eight questions on a quiz on my website, what it does is it creates a custom house checklist of probably all of the things that are happening in your home with time that’s allocated to each of those tasks, and it gives you a dashboard so you can see, “Oh, my gosh. Wow.” For me, I was spending 22 hours a week managing my household when I broke it down for how much time I’m spending.
So I think step one in my Sage Haus Method is what do you need the most help with? How would you go in and figure out what you’re doing today, what are the top things that you would love to take off your plate, and then think about, “What’s my budget,” right? “If I could translate my budget into someone’s hours, what can I afford? Can I get someone for five hours a week? Can I get someone for 10 or 15? What works for me and my family?” And then from there, it’s about finding the right fit and the right person.
So I have sort of like a four-step process method for hiring and recruiting, and I talk about this in super depth in my digital course:
So step one is create the job. If you go and take my quiz and get that checklist, you’ve already done a lot of the work in creating the job, and that is putting together a job description, putting down how much you would be willing to pay someone per hour to do it, what your ideal schedule is for someone. For me, my house manager has a super flexible schedule, because to me, it doesn’t really matter when things get done, it’s just like, “They need to get done!” And so, for us, the two things she does every week that are on a specific time schedule is she does drop off for daycare for us every Tuesday morning, and she babysits for us every Friday night, so we have a standing date night. So those are kind of the only things that otherwise she’s just kind of flexible.
Step two to recruiting and hiring is posting the job. My recommendation is find the places that are maybe local to where you live, like we have a Facebook Group in Portland, Oregon where I live that’s Portland Nanny Network. A lot of times you can find people like a house manager slash nanny or someone like that through this network. I also recommend places like care.com, Sitter City. I have an entire download in my store called Where to Find My Village, so go check that out. It’s the top five places to post a job.
Step three is interviewing that person, and I think there are a lot of nuances, actually, to interviewing someone. And so, I encourage parents to get really clear on, “What are my interview questions?” I have a whole list of interview questions that are available for download in my digital course, and I think it’s really important to ask the right questions because you want the right fit. And then, to that point, reference questions too. So it’s important that you call references (people who have worked with this person in the past) so that you can make sure that they’re gonna be good at the role. And so, having questions ready for them too is also really important.
The last and final step, which is a big one, is actually hiring them. So thinking through what are the expectations for the role? How can I use the home systems I’ve thought through to onboard this person to make sure that they’re doing all of the things I really want them to do and the way that I want them to do them. A lot of moms I talk to are like, “Well, I have hesitations about hiring someone because I can just do it better,” you know? “I know how to do it, so I should just do it.” Well, it’s so funny because this is delegation. This is delegating things, and we do this all day. For those of us especially who work in corporate, we’re delegating every day. You are literally managing people to do things in a certain way. You can translate this into your home, and you most certainly can find someone else who can figure out how to wash things on cold and hang dry them for you. It’s really not rocket science; it’s just a matter of communicating and delegating and providing feedback.
So all that to say, the last step is really hiring them, onboarding them to make them successful. And so, those are a lot of things that I also provide in my digital course, and then we go really in-depth in my small group cohort, which will be launching soon. And so, that’s kind of like the process, but I think there are a lot of nuances. [Laughs]
Kelly Nolan: And I think it’s so valuable because you’re right. I mean, so many of us do this all day long in our day jobs, but I find it more awkward in the home setting to give direction, to give feedback, to kind of have performance reviews, which I know you talk about. Maybe not a performance review, per say, but the feedback and that kind of stuff.
Kelly Hubbell: Yeah.
Kelly Nolan: You provide a lot of support on that front, and I think that’s great because there are a lot of people that struggle with that struggle with that, at least like me where you kind of have these blurred lines where they’re kind of a part of your family now, or it’s supposed to feel that way but it’s not. It’s this strange dynamic, and so, to have the support of, “Here are the interview questions to ask. Here’s how to onboard someone. Here’s how to run feedback,” is really valuable for the long-term play of this relationship that you’re creating.
Kelly Hubbell: Yeah, I mean, you want it to be successful. You want it to work. And I think what I hear more times from families and moms who say, “Yeah, I tried that, but it didn’t really work,” and my response is, “Did you have clear expectations for the role?” One mom was like, “Oh, well, they just didn’t stock the diapers when they saw that the diapers were out, and they didn’t –.” Certainly there is an aspect of finding and hiring someone who has attention to detail like that.
But also, if you create a system like a checklist, every week, “Check to make sure diaper pail is filled.” Things like that are gonna set whoever you hire in your home up for success. They want it to be black and white, too, right? They don’t want to have to guess what you want them to do. They want you to tell them —
Kelly Nolan: Yeah.
Kelly Hubbell: — and help them to be successful. So yeah, I think —
Kelly Nolan: At least until they get to know you and understand what your comforts are with them taking initiative and things like that.
Kelly Hubbell: Yeah, exactly. And then the other thing, like you mentioned, is yes, I think there is a transition period where you’re like, “Ooh, this kind of feels weird! It does feel a little bit weird for someone else to be doing my laundry.” I talk to a lot of clients who are like, “Yeah, my spouse, my partner feels kind of weird about this.” Fast forward three months, and they’re like, “We can’t live without this person. I can’t believe that my laundry goes in the laundry basket, and then it’s folded and it’s in my closet and it’s ready for me.” Sure, it feels maybe weird at first, just like any transition, but I think the benefits outweigh the awkward transition of that.
Kelly Nolan: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Kelly. I feel like this has just been something that keeps coming up, not frequently all the time in my programs, but always one or two people are like, “I think I really need to hire someone like this,” and it was an area that I felt like I don’t have the experience of figuring this out, and there is so much that goes into it. I know that I feel like I’m making you be salesy by talking about your course, but I really want people to know I’ve been on the inside of the course, and I’ve seen — it’s hard to address in a podcast interview, right — the amount of checklists and templates and employment agreement and all sorts of things you provided, it’s a little bit hard to address in a podcast, as I said, but that’s the legwork that I think prevents people from doing this (which is when I saw Kelly shouted out somewhere, I think on Mother Untitled) about your work. I was like, “Oh, my gosh. This is what people need,” because that hiring process is so much work. And so, you’ve really distilled it down into a way that people can use and run with the material you’ve created.
And so, I just appreciate you coming on and sharing it. It is a very reasonable price point for anyone interested in buying her course, so I encourage you to check it out. Kelly, do you want to tell people more where they can find you or how they can work with you if they’d like to, things like that?
Work with Kelly and Sage Haus – 33:06
Kelly Hubbell: Yes, absolutely. So there are a couple different ways. I’ve got a lot of freebies. So let me just say that my goal is to help every busy mom get the support that they deserve on any budget. I want to help because I feel like I have discovered ways and I have some wisdom that I want to share.
Kelly Nolan: And I would also interject here. Any working woman in here too because there are a lot of especially single women who are working who are carrying this load all by themselves to hire support there as well. So don’t rule yourselves out just if you’re not a mom listening because, of course, some things might not apply, but a lot of what we’re talking about does. And so, definitely take that and run with it as well. But keep going!
Kelly Hubbell: You’re absolutely right, and so, my goal is to get this out into the world and help as many busy professionals, moms, single parents that I possibly can. So I’ve got a ton of freebies, and that quiz and house checklist I talked about are completely and totally free. So you can go on my website www.mysagehaus.com, and you can take that. So I feel like that is a good initial.
Also, on May first I’m launching a free five-day program similar to yours, Kelly Nolan, because again I’m just trying to get people to start spinning their wheels on how they can start thinking and contextualizing this in their home.
And then I have my digital course. So my digital course is an hour. It basically takes you from zero to hero, like from, “I don’t even know what I’m doing,” to “I have a job description ready to post, and I’m ready to hire someone.” So there is so much packed into that course.
Kelly Nolan: And what are all the templates in there? Because, I mean, obviously you don’t know them all off the top of your head, but just to give people an idea of what’s in there from a template standpoint because that really blew my mind.
Kelly Hubbell: Yeah, well, the first thing in terms of prioritizing is it makes the house checklist editable for you and your family and downloadable and printable. So, like, hello, amazing home systems just on what’s taking place in your home. You can sort it by daily tasks, weekly tasks, quarterly tasks. So you have more access to the prioritization. And then job descriptions, interview questions for both the candidate you’re interviewing as well as reference questions. I have an employment agreement, which, regardless of how you end up paying someone (whether it’s under the table, over the table – that’s also something I talk about in my course), it’s just important to set expectations, and you can use this attorney-drafted employment agreement that I’ve put together with attorneys that you can use sort of as a universal document to set expectations.
And then there are also checklists and home system documents. I also have a lot of meal prep planning ideas that you can download. So that’s all part of the course.
Kelly Nolan: Awesome!
Kelly Hubbell: Yeah, and then this summer, I will be launching my first cohort, so a small group of women who are ready to hire or they’re ready to take the next steps in operationalizing and systematizing their home to get them to a point of, “Hey, I’m ready to do this on my own,” or “Yes, there are things I want more support with, and I’m ready to hire.” So I will be launching that just after the Fourth of July.
And then for those executive mommas or those who are like, “I just really want Kelly Hubbell (me) to do the work for me,” I have been taking on a few clients every month who just say, “Hey, Kelly, I need a house manager like yesterday, and I want you to help me find that person.” And so, I basically handle the start-to-finish recruiting, hiring, and the support to onboard that person in your home. So that’s sort of my more upper, white-glove service, if you will.
Kelly Nolan: Awesome, awesome. Well, and people can find you on Instagram. I’ll link that in the show notes as well along with the links to everything we’ve been talking about but thank you so much for being here. I know it’s not for everyone, and I want to be sensitive to that, but there is a gap in the market to help women who could afford this (and I think it’s more of us than we think), help them do this with as much ease as possible so that it doesn’t become yet another job for you that becomes too much and we don’t do it, and then we’re just stuck doing it all ourselves as well.
Kelly Hubbell: Yeah.
Kelly Nolan: So thank you, Kelly.
Kelly Hubbell: Thank you for having me! Thank you for supporting this movement (I’ll call it a movement because I really think it is) of women who are no longer doing it all and realizing they don’t have to do it all and normalizing support, more support in our household, more support just for us as busy humans and individuals and moms. And so, thank you for doing that.
One more thing I’ll just say is I think the biggest point of feedback I get is from people who learn about Sage Haus and what I’m doing is they’re like, “I didn’t even realize this was an option for me! It didn’t even occur to me that, huh, I should outsource more, I should do this more.” So I think just getting the wheels turning is my goal, and I do think that this is so much more approachable and attainable and affordable than people think. So thank you for having me!
Kelly Nolan: Absolutely.
Kelly Hubbell: It’s been really fun.
Kelly Nolan: Yeah!
Kelly Hubbell: Yeah.
Kelly Nolan: Well, thank you for being here. And to you listening, thank you for being here, and I’ll catch you in the next episode!
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