#and this came as a surprise to me but I’ve received like 10x more support for the xenogenders than hate comments

[aphidclan-clangen]

Hi! Happy 2025 :D

You've done an amazing job this past year, Iridis! AphidClan is one of the only clangens I can follow without getting lost or bored within a few updates (including one of my own I tried to start lol); your designs are instantly recognizable and eye-catching, the darker lore is balanced out with enough cute, light moments that it never feels overwhelming or overcomplicated, you express such a wide range of emotions and dynamics so well! Plus the diversity in your character base and your care towards representing a variety of identities, just makes me so happy to see. Everything about this comic is so uniquely creative, it's honestly incredibly impressive.

Obviously nothing against other clangens– just that yours has something special I've been unable to find elsewhere :]

Thank you for everything you've done this year, and I hope the next goes well for you 💞

AWWWW man thank you so much <33 This is so sweet and honestly relieving to hear lol, I often feel like I don’t really know what I’m doing with Aphidclan. Like it’s a constant hazy state of cluelessness that I’ve just grown used to. Im not very aware of like… what my work reads as to others? Man I dunno if you guys even know what’s going on lmao. So it’s really nice to hear an outside perspective and realize that’s probably just a me thing. And that it’s impressive??? Damn, man, thank you lol

I’ve never quite done anything like Aphidclan before. It started at a time in my life when I was…technically my gender exploration journey started months earlier than this, but it was kinda started at the cusp of my own gender identity exploration,,explosion. The first thing I wanted to explore was being xenogender (other folk go from “cisgender —> maybe I’m non-binary or trans…” in their journey like normal people but nah man. before anything else occurred to me I went from “im cisgender” to “maybe I’m a neon rainbow insect with neopronouns actually :)” lmao) and that coincided really well with the rise of the clangen trend, so I figured I’d use some brand new OCs to explore gender identity in a…safe way? In a safe little pocket where it was all,,,nonconsequential and only tangential to my own identity. And I ended up exploring transgender and non-binary identities as well very frequently, which was mostly helped by the game giving me cats with assigned genders/sexes and me squinting at them and going “…nah. that’s a unicorncore trans man if I ever seen one” and reversing it, and then transing half the cast lmao.

I was not transgender going into this comic. I am now coming out of our first year with Aphidclan as a transmasc nonbinary man <3

I never intended it to be a thing for representation points exactly? I was certainly surprised by the lack of xenogender and more complicated/unusual LGBTQ gender identities depicted in all media ever! I still don’t really understand why something like neopronouns aren’t more present? They’re the coolest shit ever. Like- we’ve broken down gender norms and gender roles so much that now gender is not just “feminine” and “masculine,” it’s anything and everything you could ever want it to be. It’s ultimate freedom. It’s not just what it means to be “man” or “woman,” it’s “but what if I was more than that? What if I felt like a bug? Or a rainbow? Or a cloud? Or a connection to nature and the ocean and the stars? What if I felt like I was part of the universe? Or a music genre, or a concept, or a candy bar, an animal, a fairy, a slice of fruit!” You could be anything you’ve ever dreamed of being and more.

And once you get used to the funky grammar of neopronouns, it’s not that polarizingly different from other identities at all, honestly. And plus, it’s really fkin fun lol.

Aphidclan’s helped me explore a lot throughout this year. There were often times where I was struggling with my own femininity as a trans man and I remembered Firebeetle and the support I’ve received for his character, and using “well, if it’s okay for firebeetle to wear dresses and flowers and feminine things, then it’s okay for me to do that too, and it doesn’t invalidate my identity at all” and it really helped. 2024 was a great year for me creatively and exploration-wise, and I’ll certainly never be the same. Thank you guys for all your support, it means a lot <3

[gucciwins]

how does bel react to her 10x Grammy nominated boyfriend? Did they watch the nominations together?????

I'm incredibly proud of Harry and his team on the success of this album. hope you enjoy this little blurb of bel and harry 🤍

//

it’s their final days in Los Angeles before they return home to London. Harry had planned to ask Bel to move in, but he would be touring most of 2023, so he changed his mind instead, promising her a vacation of her choice, and to his surprise, she asked him to surprise her instead. 

Tonight is his final show in Los Angeles (until January), and it’s Grammy Nominations time. There are various awards he can be chosen for, but there’s that fear that none will say his name. Bel sits next to him, holding his hand tight in her lap. She’s grounding him, and he’s thankful. His team asked if he would like them to be there, and the truth was as much as he would love that, he wanted to celebrate (or not) on his own terms, which meant only him and Bel. Everyone understood and promised to be in touch as they’d be watching as well. 

The live stream was set to begin at 9am, and it would likely drag on as there were 91 categories to announce. It’s not like they’d mind; with their nerves, time would fly by. 

Bel had been strangely quiet, and he was concerned. 

“Baby, doing alright?” 

“Can I be honest?” 

Harry squeezes her hand, “always.” 

“I’m really nervous. I’ve heard many say the academy doesn’t matter, and that’s true, but there also is a big recognition in having your album be honored, and I want that for you.” 

“Bel,” he sighs. 

“Award season should not exist.”

“Ba–” 

“It’s starting!” 

They watch through the first few taking deep breaths and keeping each other steady when Best Pop Solo Performance is announced. Bel doesn’t react to hearing her friend Benito being called until she hears “As It Was” and jumps up in excitement. She turns to Harry, who looks calm as he smiles at her. 

“Good?” She asks. 

“Good,” he confirms.

It goes like this every time his name is called. She jumps in excitement and then checks in with him. He promises he’s happy and gives her a kiss. Harry feels his nerves get the best of him and pulls her to sit in his lap. 

The big categories are to be named, and he tries to relax, and he isn’t able to until Bel gives him a kiss promising everything will be okay. “As It Was” is nominated for record of the year, but there’s no reaction. 

“Bel?” 

He turns her to look at him, and he sees she’s crying, “lovie, baby, it’s okay.” 

“I’m so happy for you. I’m so proud. You told me so much about this album as you created it, and I’m honored to see you receive these nominations.” 

Harry feels himself fill with tears and hugs her close. It’s not long now. 

As Harry’s House is announced as the last album for “Album of the Year,” Bel breaks down in tears letting Harry hold her as she repeats how proud of him she is. That this album came from his heart, and everyone could see that. He deserved every bit of success. 

Harry’s phone has not stopped ringing, and they don’t spare it a glance. Harry’s House received seven nominations. 

Seven. 

There was so much Bel wanted to say, but she was at a loss for words. 

“I love you. I’m so proud of you.” 

Harry smiled, hearing the two phrases that made his heart skip a beat. His girlfriend was here to support him in his triumphs and failures. He felt so lucky. He felt so loved. 

Harry knew it would be okay come February, win or lose, because he had the best support system with Bel at the forefront. 

For now, he had seven nominations to celebrate with Bel, who was more than ready to show him how proud of him she was. 

[jiannaeloise]

Generous December

This month got me feeling like I’m an unstoppable force. I don’t know what came to me but I started seeing the Christmas charities from a few of my friends and thought: “Hmm, maybe I should post these donation drives on my social media account and publish it, so many people can see and help more people in need this season.”

To my surprise, my crush reached out to me, asking me if I can do a visual for these charities. Before this simple plan that we both had, I showed him a couple of tricks on how to use Canva. I never would have thought I would send him a short video tutorial but I did, twice! 😂 I think this must be my most favorite conversation that we had. Because for the first time, it feels like my world is merging with his. Man, this guy’s heart is really different from the other men I’ve liked before. I just posted the donation drives but he’s the one who initiated for me to make the visuals which means he completely trusts me with what I can do. You bet my heart melted when he said: “Yung simple plan NATIN naging formal na talaga. Gusto ko lang three logos in one pic. Biglang BOOM 10x better!”

My crush and I suddenly became outreach partners simply because I posted the drives I gathered from the friends I know and am familiar with. It really warmed my heart. Last year because I was jobless, I felt that I was inadequate to help people. Even if I wanted to so badly, I was not able to support any charity or cause because I lacked financial stability. But that desire has been planted into my heart since last year and promised that if I find a stable job, I will do something in my power to be able to help the people in need and share my blessings with them. I was unexpectedly able to do it this year and I’m so extremely proud of the person I have become because of this.

Aside from giving gifts to my friends this Christmas, the grandest of generosity I never thought would outpour from me has been dedicated to my community and my own family. I never thought I would say this but giving feels so good than receiving, especially this season.

I hope next year will be the same December. A month filled with peace, healing, love, generosity, and kindness. I’m so glad I’m ending this year with the simple things I’ve accomplished.

I’ve been loving this version of me. I hope she shows up more often because she is so beautiful, inside and out. 🥲

Happy holidays,

Jianna Eloise

[justalittlemango]

Putting things into perspective.

So.. obviously.. this feels like the worst I’ve felt in a long time or maybe ever. Or, I’m just dissociating like crazy and things feel really wack, but maybe I’ve been through wacker things? I’m not sure. I guess that’s the point of this post to put my thoughts into perspective and compare to past experiences. And with some hope it may make me feel a little more positive about what’s going on right now..

Well, I guess the present moment. Why do I feel wack? I mean, I feel lonely. Even though I’m not, I’m friends with and speaking to quite a few people. Probably the most I’ve ever actually spoken to at any point in my life. So not lonely in terms of friendships, I guess it’s the “love” type of loneliness. Because my boyfriend has gone. I don’t know where. He’s been gone for a while. And it’s affecting me like crazy. Most of this stress and anxiety is being triggered by the thought of him. It all happened quite quickly, a couple months ago he was so clingy and sweet and I’d be the same back. A month after, that all changed completely. It was like the boy I fell in love with had gone. I do blame the meds, but I also blame his lack of accountability. And unfortunately, there were a couple of fallouts, both of us ending up getting hurt. I apologised but got nothing. Nothing at all. Just...ghosted. He came back temporarily for a day or so, but left again. It’s quite wack when someone you felt a new level of love for just disappears.

So yeah.. that’s rough. I’m constantly thinking what he could be doing, how he feels about me and all that. Constantly those thoughts dominate my mind. To the point where it’s disrupted my sleep majorly. I keep stressing in my sleep. Insomnia became a nightly occurrence until I was able to retake control of it more recently. However I’m still waking up in the middle of the night, having distressing dreams, sleep paralysis and all that.. I’m going to assume that’s due to all the stress I’m experiencing. My body doesn’t feel too great either so it’s kind of triggering my health anxiety.

This may also be a part of my seasonal depression because I fucking hate the winter and early dark nights. Feels so depressing. I feel quite isolated. So yes, all those issues in one combination isn’t too great. It doesn’t help that I don’t have a house key here so I can’t really go out early in the day. So I’m stuck inside until it’s night. Oh well, not much I can do anyway.. it is a national lockdown again.. and this lockdown has been the roughest one yet. 10x worse than the one last year. Everything seems so bleak on that front but seems like there may be light at the end of the tunnel soon... I hope.

I think there are some similarities with major negative events I’ve had in the past, such as my first love, when I went to uni in 2016 and whatnot. I mean, the predominant feeling here is loneliness, overthinking and stress. Loneliness always has made me feel ultra shitty in comparison to other things. I hate that I feel lonely since I have so many people to speak to, a lot of friends now.. but it still feels lonely.

So. What’s positive right now? Well.. positive news is that this pandemic seems to be coming to an end (at least here) in a few months. I hope. Positive is that my parents are alive and healthy. I’m currently with my parents right now and I don’t have to worry about money, I don’t have to worry about going grocery shopping or anything like that. I myself, I think, am physically healthy too. My health anxiety tells me otherwise, but I’m trying to just believe it when I feel it yknow? I have friends too that are supporting me. I have a lot of stuff that I would’ve only dreamt of as a kid.. like.. all this technology and a big TV, the only important things to me when I was younger lol.

Money is usually a big stress causer for me, but now I am financially stable and should be good for a while as long as I don’t spend like an idiot. So there’s no need to stress over that at least.

So if I compare this moment to times in the past, maybe I can start being more happy and grateful for what I got right now.

Lets rewind to when I was working as a baker. Having to take a 30 minute train and then a 15 minute bus to the supermarket I worked at. Working those horrid weekend shifts. Having to pick up other people’s pieces because they wouldn’t work as hard as I did. I didn’t like the job mostly because colleagues were lazy and the distance I worked. In all fairness, I hated living in that town. There was nothing to do. It felt trashy and grimey. I hated living there when I decided to move there. I was in a relationship that didn’t feel like it was really working out, but held on anyway. It never did get better really. So.. things in reality weren’t better. It felt nice to get a paycheck. But I remember the stress of public transport, the mixed shifts, not knowing what I’m coming into.. et cetera. So things weren’t as good back then.

Fast forward to summer 2018. I mean, I won’t bother here, summer 2018 was one of the most fun time periods I had. Even winter 2018 was fun despite getting robbed. But it was fun going to Coventry a lot, all the bars/gay clubs around there. Going to Pride. Winning free tickets to Comic Con. Integrating with the Splat community on Twitter, feeling so welcomed and happy. It was the best I had felt for a long time.

Summer 2019. Things got dull! Surprise surprise. Health anxiety was still a new concept to me, so when I did have panic attacks, I would go to A&E. I remember those experiences and how awful it felt, especially just being told it was anxiety. That was a frequent worry for me back then. Another worry was my depression. I felt stuck. Still hated living in that town. Nothing to do. Bored. Working long hours. Not too great pay. Having to cover my colleague and doing that wack warehouse job. Having to deal with annoying customers. The stress of all that would be so bad. I remember being sad because I didn’t have enough time in the day to do my hobbies. Arguing with my ex-bf over who’s doing the dishes and cooking etc. I felt like a zombie in that job. Only thing keeping my head up high was my upcoming trip to Canada, quitting my job, moving out and starting university. I didn’t even really have friends at all back then.. I had my one friend, Drop. I didn’t have anybody else necessarily... imagine that now.. though that has happened at points in 2020 too. So yeah, summer 2019 was arguably worse. Mostly with the situation I was in. Dead end job. Stressed. No time. Hated that town. Lonely.

A bit further back.. September 2016 to Early 2017. This was shit. I hated uni. I didn’t get on with my flatmates. My anxiety held me back so much. I felt like such a mess. I was drinking almost everyday to cope. I blew so much of my money. I didn’t go to any lectures. I felt like a failure because I wasn’t attending. Not making friends either. Just in my room doing jack shit. Relationship didn’t feel great either. So I dropped out a couple months later, found a rather unpleasant message said about me in a group chat, and uh yeah, that made me feel wack XD though.. I can’t blame them, I was isolating myself for legit no reason. I also received lovely news that I had a debt needing to be paid off since I dropped out, and it was one I had to pay instantly. I had no choice but to sign on at the job centre and claim jobseeking welfare. It didn’t go well. I slept over some appointments and got penalised. I then left the jobcentre and extended my overdraft to help cover time for my debts. I then went to a different jobcentre. Took me a couple months but then I got my baker job. I just need to remember how horrible that was. I felt like such a mess. A no-hoper. I was partying and going out with my welfare money and a bit of my ex’s money lol (with him of course!) so yeah. That was an extemely difficult situation to escape. It felt impossible to find a job that wanted me. I was grateful for the job I got. Until it got shitty.

And now... fast forward to 2020. The last time I was at my parents house was summer 2020. It felt really strange coming back here for Christmas with all that happened over the summer. I broke up with my ex-bf. It felt like a relief weirdly. I fell in love with a lad that I felt so heavily for. It went well until we would fall out. He and I did break up around July 2020, and then I met somebody who comforted me and made me feel good. But that didn’t last, since I didn’t “love” him and he did for me. So I ended that around Sept 2020. And then, when I started uni for a couple months, that was also one of the worst times I had. I felt lonely. Lost a lot of the friends I made this year (almost all.) My ex-bf was bringing his lad over and having fun and that made me feel weird. Dealing with being single was stressful. I was drinking to cope once again. And yeahhhh...

How I feel right now is similar to Sept 2020 feels when I started uni. Just stressed. Overthinking. Lonely. Wanting to drink a lot. But I won’t let myself abuse alcohol like that. I think I’m coping well for how shitty I feel.. I mean not all the time I feel like this.. but a lot of days I do. But.. at least I am getting on with my work. I am attempting to do my workouts and my Spanish stuff, as well as my portfolio stuff too. Also keeping up contact with a lot of friends. Pushing myself outside my comfort zone. Not being scared to VC friends anymore. I have come quite a long way.

I just need to fix my sleep. And to do that, I need to stop thinking about him. My brain is just so confused about him. One time I will love and miss him, other time I won’t care and want to meet other people. And I’m not really sure how to maintain a dominant side, if that makes sense? The side I would like to stick to is just thinking he’s a time-waster, he’s ghosting me to try and remain distant and that I should just move on... I try my hardest to keep that in my head, but despite all that, whenever I see old messages or pictures, my soft sensitive side comes out again. I really don’t know how to tackle it. THe thing is, I need to tackle it otherwise I will continue to be stressed and not be able to sleep like a normal human again (and god knows I was a normal human before... smh)

I want to retain my view that he’s no good for me, that I deserve better etc.. but it’s like, the meds messed him up.. but why wasn’t he open about it with me? Why did he get so distant from him.. why did he react so bad to my concerns.. why can’t he communicate with me? And now why is he ghosting me rather than sorting it out? Does he want it sorting? Is he wanting to move on? So many questions and unfortunately I just don’t know. Maybe I need to just put my foot down here.

Easier said than done, but if I put my foot down and keep telling myself I deserve better. Listen to what Drop says, I do deserve better and that he is not well, and that the boy I fell in love with is no longer around. He’s gone. Instead, there is a dark shadow of his former self that is ghosting me. I gotta keep reminding myself that there will be better people out there for me. People who won’t treat me like this. And that, as much as I feel bad that the meds did this to him, I can’t respect how he treated me. He’s made me feel all this shit. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t care to reply to me. He made a rude remark about my anxiety in a public forum. He’s manipulative. Think about it.. he’s there, he could easily message me, it takes 5 seconds, but it’s CLEAR as ICE that he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t care to do it. And that should be enough for me to put my foot down and remember that he is no sweetheart. He’s not the Dylan I fell in love with, period.

I think if I keep telling myself this, I can do it. I just need to remind myself that I deserve better. It’s not normal to be treated like this, and that honestly it’s a good thing this all happened before him and I met. On the plus side, I could do something with that £250 I was saving to go see him.. I gotta stop being sensitive. I am way better than this. I gotta remember what my mom said too. Mom always knows better. I was a fighter with all the problems I had when I was younger. I shouldn’t let this present shit bring me down. I’m way better than this!

I’m too good for that kind of treatment. I know my worth. I know my values. And now I know his. And yet here I am losing fucking sleep and stressing over him! Imagine!! Well, I want February to be different. Jan was shit. Feb I hope to be better. I will not think about him as much. I just got to remember that he has disrespected me and treated me like trash. I am no longer going to feel bad. He needs to grow up and take some responsibility. I don’t care if this sounds harsh, this is truly coming from the heart. I know for a fact I didn’t deserve the backlash I got from him. Yeah.. maybe I’ll try that. I should try to avoid the habits I tend to do.. like checking his Discord... or his twitter.. or his Switch activity and that. Avoid looking at my twitter cover also. I wish at this point I could just remove him from my bio and cover but I don’t want to fully break.. or do I? I mean.. how can I hold a relationship with someone who acts like this? So yeah. I need to treat this like a breakup.. an official breakup. And that he and I broke up a month or so ago when he decided to ditch me. I shouldn’t feel bad.

And remember the positives: my parents are alive and healthy, I’m with them right now! And that I don’t have to worry about money. No money problems! Not having to worry about groceries either. All I gotta do is my uni work. Pace myself. And I can try find time to do my workouts and Spanish at some point soon. We gonna have a good time Kurt. 

[topicprinter]

We had been working to create podcasts as a hobby and side hustle for about a year and a half before we came up with the idea to brand ourselves as a single company (or duo) creating multiple shows. As we create more shows, we established Fool & Scholar Productions as a way to organize our works and establish brand recognition.It was a gradual decision to start our own company. We saw that, over time, the podcasting space was becoming more prevalent in our lives and amounting to more of our income, so we sat down, worked out the numbers, and set about starting the company and solidifying our lives as entertainers. By the time we started Season Two of The White Vault, we knew we were in for the long haul.How did you get your first hundred listeners?Travis: We surprised ourselves quite honestly. It was a mix of good timing, word of mouth, advertising at live events, and marketing on social media. I feel like if there’s a particular event that got us over the 100 listener mark it was maybe a particularly successful Imgur post that Kaitlin put together showcasing Modern Audio Drama. The post reached the front page of Imgur overnight, and got a spike in listeners for almost every show on the list.Kaitlin: We tried a lot of different things in the beginning, from normal social media marketing, to spending hours making curated lists of shows to help establish ourselves as quality listeners and creators. There are a lot of shows out there, so when you say ‘Hey, I make a show you may enjoy’, people need to trust you enough to believe you. We work on Twitter to discuss our favorite shows, we started talking to others about how we wrote/designed/edits our works, and we built from the (digital) ground up. Our first 100 listeners seems to materialize rather quickly, and after that, everything kept growing.How did you validate the idea?Travis: Podcasting is still a new and growing medium, with only about 70% of Americans even knowing what a podcast is, so the metrics by which creators in our space can validate their work is ever shifting, based on the growth of the industry.Our original lofty goal of 100 listeners has long since been surpassed. We’ve won awards. We’ve far exceeded the dream of getting ‘1 million downloads’, and we’ve done the impossible in making podcasting a full time career. Those were our goals. There are many sources of validation both internal (lines in the sand or cool factor variables) and external (awards and download numbers), and we’re still struggling to find what we feel is valuable validation.What are the keys to a good podcast?Kaitlin: ‘Quality, character, and consistency’ is my go-to mantra for creating a good podcast. Without quality, anyone who listens will turn away after the first few minutes. Without characters that attracts emotion and connection, be it in a podcast host or in a story, listeners won’t have a string tying them to your creations. Without consistency listeners would never know when to expect your work, or when to return, and this is breaking the trust podcasters try to establish with their listeners.How many listeners do you need to start making money from podcasting?Travis: This is a tricky question, because if you don’t spend anything creating your podcast then your first dollar is considered income.Because every podcast is different, I’ll answer the next best question and you can reverse engineer the math to suit your personal goals. Expect to only see about 1% of your listeners support your show through merch sales or crowdsourcing with any regularity (assuming that you are offering something of value). If you are able to get a sponsor, assume that you will see between $20-$50 per thousand listeners, per sponsorship.Did you have any experience/expertise in the area?Kaitlin: Podcasting? No.Writing? Does a thesis count?Marketing? I wish.When we started creating our first show, it was the first time I had written anything for entertainment purposes in… years. I was still at university studying Archaeological Sciences and drowning under the amount of work Oxford could pour over me in a single week. My only free time I spent writing, and I’ve written nearly every day since. Now, I have the experience and I try to encourage others to pursue creative endeavors, even when they don’t have the training for it. I’m proof that this can be done without a professional background in creative writing, marketing, or media.Have you raised any money? How much?Travis: We actually did this backwards, creating multiple seasons of free content, then realizing afterwards that we might be able to break even if we asked listeners to join our Patreon. To date, we still haven’t done any type of project-based fundraising in podcasting, but our Patreon has grown to 500+ active members.Who is your target demographic?Travis: Our listeners are comprised largely of women and men between the ages of 24-34 who speak English or are learning to speak English. We have listeners in over 80 countries and from all walks of life. Most of our listeners are in the US, Canada, and UK, but we have a growing number of fans from Australia.How do you attract listeners now?Travis: I spend a lot of time on social media, using new hashtags, promoting our works, and adding meaningful dialogue to places where people talk about fiction podcasts. Kaitlin does 10x what I do and spends a great deal of time marketing.What is the funniest/most strange request you have received from a listener?We don’t get many random requests, but one fan has a tattoo from one of our shows.How did you fund the idea initially?Travis: The initial seasons were done on almost no budget. We did everything in our spare time. The sound effects at our disposal were whatever we could record in our Oxford flat, and all of our actors were friends and family. It was only after we expanded our resources and tried to improve upon our shows that we found we needed funding. At that point we turned to our listeners for support to offset the costs of these improvements. They really have allowed us to get where we are and realize the growth we’ve seen.Any tips for finding first employees?Kaitlin: Think about the people you trust in your field. Ask them to recommend someone, rather than putting out a call or a listing. If you trust someone, trust the quality of their work, then the odds are they’ll be able to recommend someone who would easily fit into your workflow.Did you run any companies prior?Travis: I’ve had some experience in the corporate world as the president of a collection agency, the managing partner of a property management company, and the creator/president of a small publishing company. I’m still involved in all of those businesses.Kaitlin: No, I was still a graduate student when I started podcasting.What were your family and friends first thoughts you creating your own your company?Kaitlin: By the time I had decided to make podcasting my full time job, we were already doing very well within the podcasting community. When we established the company, it was something my family supported because they saw it as a way to legitimize the time, effort, and money I put into creating my future career. Nowadays, my family and friends come to see me talk, or to our live performances, and they listen to most of our podcasts. My father is actually my script editor for most of our shows, so he’s very supportive and enjoys having an inside scoop on the shows before their public release.Travis: When he was alive, my father didn’t understand podcasting and couldn’t grasp the crowdsourcing side of it. My mother has been extremely supportive from day one and said that this is exactly what I need to be doing. We moved across the country a year ago, so I haven’t really told most of my friends from Florida as it doesn’t organically come up in conversations.What motivates you when things go wrong?Travis: At first it was the finished product in and of itself. I was fascinated by the process of bringing a story to life, hearing the voices read the words on the page, and the soundscape bringing us to new places. While this is still true, a bigger motivator for me of late has been the enthusiasm of our listeners. I take a particular delight in considering how they will experience the show, and working to make that experience memorable, even as things sometimes go horribly wrong during production.Do you have any advice for someone just starting out?Kaitlin: Podcasting is still new, still growing, and still expanding. Even if you already have a business and just want to start, say, a real estate podcast to better reach your potential clients, then just start. Look up how to do it, look up how it works; the recording, editing, uploading, marketing, and more. And then do it. The most difficult hurdle for me has always been my own mindset.‘It looks so complicated, I couldn’t possibly do that.’ Well, now I am, and it doesn’t seem impossible from the inside.Travis: I’d also add that if you’re already podcasting or innovating, focus on creating more new and meaningful content regularly. The more you make, the better you’ll get.What is stopping you from being 3x the size you are now?Kaitlin: Time. Travis and I are the core of Fool & Scholar Productions. We are the dynamic duo. People trust my writing and his sound design; they know our names and our works. So, to triple our reach and our audience we would need to create more shows and work even more diligently at getting out work out there. Problem being, we are booked-up already as it is. Even with new ideas stacked up like blocks on my desk, I don’t have time to write new stories given that I’m still actively writing our core shows. And even if I did, Travis would not have time to give them life as producer and sound-designer. So, time is our limiting factor, because we certainly have no shortage of ideas.What apps could your business not run without?Kaitlin: Creating podcasts is all well and good, but without marketing the shows we would have a difficult time building or engaging our audience. Even though our shows are audio based, much of social media relies on visual marketing. For crafting visuals, both at home and on the go, I use Canva religiously.Travis: We rely heavily on Dropbox to share files across our devices and with our teams. I also couldn’t function without Mixcraft, which is my Digital Audio Workspace (the program I edit in). I’m working in Mixcraft every day and it’s both affordable and reliable. Another very important tool is Microsoft Excel, which we use to track download numbers, growth, sales, and expenses. Beyond the accounting benefits, it shows us what was effective in helping us grow by creating a timeline with a perspective.Are there any new podcasts you’re working on?Travis: We just returned with Season 3 of The White Vault. I cannot recommend the show enough if you’re a fan of horror, or just value hearing voices and languages from around the world showcased.Would you ever sell the company?T&K: Fool & Scholar Productions is so tied to our identities that the brand is somewhat useless without us. We are able to build ourselves as a company because of community trust in who we are; if we were to remove the Fool and Scholar from Fool & Scholar Productions, we would have doubts that our community of supporters and fans would stay loyal to just the name alone.If you enjoyed this interview, the original is here.

[samuelfields]

How To Negotiate A Severance As A High-Performing Employee

Since negotiating my own severance in 2012, I’ve consulted with several dozen individuals about how to best negotiate a severance. Although I’ve taken a hiatus on 1X1 consulting since the birth of our son, I can’t help but think of my favorite consultation this Memorial Day weekend: my wife’s.

One of the most common questions I get from people who haven’t bought my severance negotiation book is: why would a company ever give a high performing employee a severance?

Hopefully with my wife’s severance negotiation example, I can convince some of you it’s possible. I’ve already published a guest post from a client who shared his successful severance negotiation strategy. He had been with his firm for over a decade and was also a high performer. 

Negotiating A Severance As A High Performer

For the last two years of my wife’s 9.5 career with one firm, I felt she was underpaid and overworked. I told her she should be more aggressive in asking for a raise and a promotion, but every time I brought up the subject she said she didn’t want to be too pushy.

Her style is very different from mine when I was working. I always kept track of how much my competitors at other firms were getting paid for what they were doing. Whenever I felt my compensation had fallen behind by more than 10%, I would sit my managers down for a heart-to-heart and make sure they were aware of my concerns.

When it was time for her to get promoted in early 2014 she was passed over for two guys. One guy was a slacker and the other guy always talked about how unsatisfied he was at the firm. Both of the guys were a couple years older than my wife, but my wife had the same amount of experience.

My wife was finally pissed off enough to realize the importance of self-advocacy. She had naively believed if she did good work, her bosses would always reward her efforts.

Important lesson: The longer you stay at one firm, the more you will be taken for granted.  A boss’s favorite employee is one who never complains and never speaks up about getting paid or promoted. The less your boss can pay you, the better s/he looks.

No longer was my wife willing to stay late and deal with PITA clients. She finally asked me to help her come up with a severance plan. Ah, music to my ears!

Formulating The Severance Plan

During the year she was passed over for promotion, Financial Samurai was earning enough money to support the both of us. She was turning 34 and we agreed that it would be nice if she joined me in early retirement. After all, I was also 34 when I left work, so it seemed only fair she did the same. Hooray for equality!

We reviewed various severance negotiation case studies, and chose the archetype that best fit her: female high performer, long-term employee, large private firm, got a long with her managers, the company would sorely miss her services.

Step #1: The most important thing I did to help my wife was to make her KNOW HER WORTH. She didn’t want to entertain other job offers because after 9.5 years, she felt loyal to her firm. If she was absolutely truthful, she would also admit that she enjoyed the routine. Once she understood what her market value was, she began to negotiate.

Step #2: She demanded a meeting with her bosses at which she implied to them that if they did not promote her mid-year, she was gone. Her bosses were surprised, which is a bad thing because she hadn’t properly managed their expectations. But now, her feelings were out in the open.

She played chicken with her firm, knowing they would swerve in the final seconds because she was the point person for several major clients. Nobody else had the relationships and nobody else could do what she could do. If she left, they were screwed by more than 10X her salary in lost revenue.

Six months later they agreed to promote her and give her a 20% raise. Excellent. Better late than never. Management realized their mistake and were quiet apologetic.

During this time, Financial Samurai grew by another 50%, giving both of us even more confidence that she could walk away and never return. But of course, I never recommend anybody quit their jobs, especially after almost 10 years of service. A severance had to be negotiated!

Step #3: We went over in detail how she felt after she got promoted. Her response, “Satisfaction. I feel great knowing that I got what I deserved.” When I asked her what about getting to that next level of promotion she said, “I have zero desire to go through the stress my boss goes through every day. I can leave this unhappy place without any regrets.” Alrighty then! She was now in a very powerful position of having nothing for her to lose.

Step #4: It was now time to make the move. Five months after her promotion (11 months after she was first passed over), she walked into her boss’s office and asked for a severance equal to what some recent employees had gotten when their department shut down. Her managers balked, as expected, given she had recently gotten promoted and was an excellent performer.

About a couple weeks went by before they realized my wife was serious about leaving. Her heart was no longer into the job and they realized something had to be done. They knew they had messed up by not promoting her earlier in the year. At the same time, the needed to keep her.

They had another meeting about what they could do to make her happy. They implied she would get another 20% raise in the new year. My wife told them there was nothing they could do. Even a 50% raise wasn’t going to keep her motivated because she no longer enjoyed the work and didn’t fully trust management to promote people based on a meritocracy. She reiterated she wanted a severance, and they told her they’d get back to her in a week.

Initial Severance Offer

A week passed, and they had another meeting. All this while, my wife continued to come in on time, but leave right when the clock struck 5pm. She was always courteous to her colleagues, but she never put in more effort than expected. Good behavior during the severance negotiation process is important.

Management decided it was best to pay her a severance and arrange some type of long-term transition so that everybody wins.

Here’s what they initially came back with:

* Three months base salary (the actual severance lump sum payment)

* All her vacation days paid (required by law).

* Six months of free health insurance.

* Stay for six more months full-time

After 9.5 years of working at her firm, I knew their proposal was WEAK SAUCE. She should have gotten at least two weeks of pay per year worked.

We tried our best to negotiate a higher severance lump sum, but she was working at a private company that was on the decline. They refused. They said they were handcuffed by headquarters based in Europe.

Step #5: The only logical next step was to get creative. This step is where many severance negotiators fail.

Given her firm wouldn’t budge on the lump sum severance payment, we proposed a compromise for the remaining six months of full-time work requested.

Instead of coming in five days a week, we went back and said she’d be willing to come in two days a week and work from home one day a week. Further, she would no longer have to interact with clients, which was the main stressor of her job. During this time, she would train other people to fully take over her job and get paid her FULL salary.

After another week of deliberation, they said yes! They were afraid she’d quit and leave them in the ditch. They needed her to manage her large clients until they found capable replacements.

By working 40% fewer hours and getting paid the same, she got a 67% raise for six months. In other words, the value of her severance package increased by over $85,000. Not only was she getting another six months of full company 401k matching (worth $9,000), she got to accumulate 15 more days of paid vacation (worth $7,800), and continued to receive health care insurance.

What’s even better is that she LOVED her last six months at the firm! With the stress of dealing with clients gone, everyday she went to work felt like a casual get together. The responsibility was on her managers and her trainees. She came home with a big smile every day for six months.

An interesting incident from her final months occurred when management transferred two employees from its New Jersey office. From this one might conclude my wife had been doing the work of two people. Therefore, she felt even less guilt leaving work behind.

When she finally left, she felt like she had won. Not only had she gotten her raise and promotion, she had been able to get a severance and also feel vindicated. They threw her a wonderful party and even invited her to the company holiday party where she won a $500 iPad.

Total value of her severance package: ~$140,000, up from the initial $40,000.

The Next Stage Of The Severance Package

For the next eight months following her retirement, we traveled around Europe and spent time up at our place in Lake Tahoe. We were having a lot of fun when she got an e-mail from her old boss asking if she could return in a part-time capacity. She politely said no, but told him to check back in six months.

Six months later, he checked back with her and this time, my wife was amenable to going back to work as a consultant. She had just enjoyed 14 months of absolute freedom and felt sufficiently rejuvenated to hang out with old colleagues and start making some money again.

But of course she wasn’t going to go back to her same role with the same package. It was they who wanted her back, so she asked for a 40% hourly rate raise because they wouldn’t have to pay her benefits. Further, she requested no client interaction. In other words, her job would be to manage employees to do the work she used to do and leave with no responsibilities.

Related: How Much Do You Need To Make As A Contractor To Replicate Your Day Job Income

Once again they agreed! For the next 10 months, they paid her 40% more and she felt like she was winning every time she went to the office. Further, no longer was she taking a crowded bus to and from work because ridesharing prices had become so cheap.

She saved and invested 100% of her consulting income during this time period because she didn’t need the money. Our online business had grown by another 100%+ since she first left.

I hope my wife’s severance example highlights what is possible if you maintain a good relationship with your employer and talk things out. So long as you create value, good things will happen.

Readers, have a severance negotiation success story? I’d love to hear it. 

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from Finance https://www.financialsamurai.com/how-to-negotiate-a-severance-as-an-excellent-employee/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[ronaldmrashid]

How To Negotiate A Severance As A High-Performing Employee

Since negotiating my own severance in 2012, I’ve consulted with several dozen individuals about how to best negotiate a severance. Although I’ve taken a hiatus on 1X1 consulting since the birth of our son, I can’t help but think of my favorite consultation this Memorial Day weekend: my wife’s.

One of the most common questions I get from people who haven’t bought my severance negotiation book is: why would a company ever give a high performing employee a severance?

Hopefully with my wife’s severance negotiation example, I can convince some of you it’s possible. I’ve already published a guest post from a client who shared his successful severance negotiation strategy. He had been with his firm for over a decade and was also a high performer. 

Negotiating A Severance As A High Performer

For the last two years of my wife’s 9.5 career with one firm, I felt she was underpaid and overworked. I told her she should be more aggressive in asking for a raise and a promotion, but every time I brought up the subject she said she didn’t want to be too pushy.

Her style is very different from mine when I was working. I always kept track of how much my competitors at other firms were getting paid for what they were doing. Whenever I felt my compensation had fallen behind by more than 10%, I would sit my managers down for a heart-to-heart and make sure they were aware of my concerns.

When it was time for her to get promoted in early 2014 she was passed over for two guys. One guy was a slacker and the other guy always talked about how unsatisfied he was at the firm. Both of the guys were a couple years older than my wife, but my wife had the same amount of experience.

My wife was finally pissed off enough to realize the importance of self-advocacy. She had naively believed if she did good work, her bosses would always reward her efforts.

Important lesson: The longer you stay at one firm, the more you will be taken for granted.  A boss’s favorite employee is one who never complains and never speaks up about getting paid or promoted. The less your boss can pay you, the better s/he looks.

No longer was my wife willing to stay late and deal with PITA clients. She finally asked me to help her come up with a severance plan. Ah, music to my ears!

Formulating The Severance Plan

During the year she was passed over for promotion, Financial Samurai was earning enough money to support the both of us. She was turning 34 and we agreed that it would be nice if she joined me in early retirement. After all, I was also 34 when I left work, so it seemed only fair she did the same. Hooray for equality!

We reviewed various severance negotiation case studies, and chose the archetype that best fit her: female high performer, long-term employee, large private firm, got a long with her managers, the company would sorely miss her services.

Step #1: The most important thing I did to help my wife was to make her KNOW HER WORTH. She didn’t want to entertain other job offers because after 9.5 years, she felt loyal to her firm. If she was absolutely truthful, she would also admit that she enjoyed the routine. Once she understood what her market value was, she began to negotiate.

Step #2: She demanded a meeting with her bosses at which she implied to them that if they did not promote her mid-year, she was gone. Her bosses were surprised, which is a bad thing because she hadn’t properly managed their expectations. But now, her feelings were out in the open.

She played chicken with her firm, knowing they would swerve in the final seconds because she was the point person for several major clients. Nobody else had the relationships and nobody else could do what she could do. If she left, they were screwed by more than 10X her salary in lost revenue.

Six months later they agreed to promote her and give her a 20% raise. Excellent. Better late than never. Management realized their mistake and were quiet apologetic.

During this time, Financial Samurai grew by another 50%, giving both of us even more confidence that she could walk away and never return. But of course, I never recommend anybody quit their jobs, especially after almost 10 years of service. A severance had to be negotiated!

Step #3: We went over in detail how she felt after she got promoted. Her response, “Satisfaction. I feel great knowing that I got what I deserved.” When I asked her what about getting to that next level of promotion she said, “I have zero desire to go through the stress my boss goes through every day. I can leave this unhappy place without any regrets.” Alrighty then! She was now in a very powerful position of having nothing for her to lose.

Step #4: It was now time to make the move. Five months after her promotion (11 months after she was first passed over), she walked into her boss’s office and asked for a severance equal to what some recent employees had gotten when their department shut down. Her managers balked, as expected, given she had recently gotten promoted and was an excellent performer.

About a couple weeks went by before they realized my wife was serious about leaving. Her heart was no longer into the job and they realized something had to be done. They knew they had messed up by not promoting her earlier in the year. At the same time, the needed to keep her.

They had another meeting about what they could do to make her happy. They implied she would get another 20% raise in the new year. My wife told them there was nothing they could do. Even a 50% raise wasn’t going to keep her motivated because she no longer enjoyed the work and didn’t fully trust management to promote people based on a meritocracy. She reiterated she wanted a severance, and they told her they’d get back to her in a week.

Initial Severance Offer

A week passed, and they had another meeting. All this while, my wife continued to come in on time, but leave right when the clock struck 5pm. She was always courteous to her colleagues, but she never put in more effort than expected. Good behavior during the severance negotiation process is important.

Management decided it was best to pay her a severance and arrange some type of long-term transition so that everybody wins.

Here’s what they initially came back with:

* Three months base salary (the actual severance lump sum payment)

* All her vacation days paid (required by law).

* Six months of free health insurance.

* Stay for six more months full-time

After 9.5 years of working at her firm, I knew their proposal was WEAK SAUCE. She should have gotten at least two weeks of pay per year worked.

We tried our best to negotiate a higher severance lump sum, but she was working at a private company that was on the decline. They refused. They said they were handcuffed by headquarters based in Europe.

Step #5: The only logical next step was to get creative. This step is where many severance negotiators fail.

Given her firm wouldn’t budge on the lump sum severance payment, we proposed a compromise for the remaining six months of full-time work requested.

Instead of coming in five days a week, we went back and said she’d be willing to come in two days a week and work from home one day a week. Further, she would no longer have to interact with clients, which was the main stressor of her job. During this time, she would train other people to fully take over her job and get paid her FULL salary.

After another week of deliberation, they said yes! They were afraid she’d quit and leave them in the ditch. They needed her to manage her large clients until they found capable replacements.

By working 40% fewer hours and getting paid the same, she got a 67% raise for six months. In other words, the value of her severance package increased by over $85,000. Not only was she getting another six months of full company 401k matching (worth $9,000), she got to accumulate 15 more days of paid vacation (worth $7,800), and continued to receive health care insurance.

What’s even better is that she LOVED her last six months at the firm! With the stress of dealing with clients gone, everyday she went to work felt like a casual get together. The responsibility was on her managers and her trainees. She came home with a big smile every day for six months.

An interesting incident from her final months occurred when management transferred two employees from its New Jersey office. From this one might conclude my wife had been doing the work of two people. Therefore, she felt even less guilt leaving work behind.

When she finally left, she felt like she had won. Not only had she gotten her raise and promotion, she had been able to get a severance and also feel vindicated. They threw her a wonderful party and even invited her to the company holiday party where she won a $500 iPad.

Total value of her severance package: ~$140,000, up from the initial $40,000.

The Next Stage Of The Severance Package

For the next eight months following her retirement, we traveled around Europe and spent time up at our place in Lake Tahoe. We were having a lot of fun when she got an e-mail from her old boss asking if she could return in a part-time capacity. She politely said no, but told him to check back in six months.

Six months later, he checked back with her and this time, my wife was amenable to going back to work as a consultant. She had just enjoyed 14 months of absolute freedom and felt sufficiently rejuvenated to hang out with old colleagues and start making some money again.

But of course she wasn’t going to go back to her same role with the same package. It was they who wanted her back, so she asked for a 40% hourly rate raise because they wouldn’t have to pay her benefits. Further, she requested no client interaction. In other words, her job would be to manage employees to do the work she used to do and leave with no responsibilities.

Related: How Much Do You Need To Make As A Contractor To Replicate Your Day Job Income

Once again they agreed! For the next 10 months, they paid her 40% more and she felt like she was winning every time she went to the office. Further, no longer was she taking a crowded bus to and from work because ridesharing prices had become so cheap.

She saved and invested 100% of her consulting income during this time period because she didn’t need the money. Our online business had grown by another 100%+ since she first left.

I hope my wife’s severance example highlights what is possible if you maintain a good relationship with your employer and talk things out. So long as you create value, good things will happen.

Readers, have a severance negotiation success story? I’d love to hear it. 

https://www.financialsamurai.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/How-did-negotiate-a-severance-as-an-excellent-employee.m4a

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from https://www.financialsamurai.com/how-to-negotiate-a-severance-as-an-excellent-employee/

[fesahaawit]

Reflections on a Year of Slow Living Experiments

Well, my friends, I can hardly believe we are days into the new year—and 2017 is behind us. Part of me wanted to let the date change without putting much energy into reminiscing and thinking about all that the year held for me. But I think that’s simply a combination of knowing it will always be the year I remember losing the girls + feeling excited for a fresh start. I can’t predict what 2018 will hold, of course, and I don’t like to put pressure on new calendar years and new beginnings. In saying that, I can’t deny that I’m ready to leave my sadness behind in 2017, and continue to move forward in general. Because even with all the sadness, I do feel as though I made some big steps forward last year—particularly when it came to my mental health.

It’s been interesting to look back at my first post from 2017 when I announced I was going to complete a year of slow living experiments. People still ask why I decided to start those experiments, and the only answer I can come up with is because I felt as though I genuinely needed to. My anxiety was at about a low-to-medium level, compared to what it would later climb to in March and April. But it was high enough then that I knew I couldn’t handle all the other messaging that filled my feeds before that new year had even begun. You know, the ones about how to be bigger (or skinnier), better, faster, stronger and richer. I couldn’t stand to read those messages, because I had enough to be anxious about. So, I decided to opt out of it all and simply slow down, instead.

I didn’t have a plan, before I got started. Instead, I had a general list of the areas in my life that I might consider slowing down and being more intentional about. Before the beginning of each new month, I checked in with myself + the list and considered which area of my life needed the most attention. And then I wrote out a list of intentions—not hard goals I had to stick to, but intentions for things I wanted in my life—and got started.

Things didn’t always go as planned. As an example, my plan was to complete 12 slow living experiments—one every month—but life (and anxiety and grief) took me down a couple unexpected paths, so I decided to opt out yet again. And that felt better. Since I had created this whole experiment for myself, I was allowed to change the rules, or simply opt out. So, that’s exactly what I did for the month of June after the girls died, and again in September when I decided my only intention was to spend 30 minutes outside each day. That’s what I could handle, so that’s what I did. As a result, I (mostly) completed 10 slow living experiments in 2017—and I would like to share some reflections on them all, in the event that it might help you plan for something similar.

Experiment #1: Slow Mornings

wake up naturally

make the bed

eat breakfast

enjoy my coffee

read a book (audiobooks work too)

I always knew I was going to start with the slow morning experiment—I just didn’t know it would end up being one of the most important experiments I would do all year. My list of intentions was simple enough. Each day, I woke up naturally (without an alarm clock), turned on an audiobook, made coffee and breakfast, and just relaxed a little bit before diving into work. It was so simple, but it was also such a treat. January was the month I finished the first draft of The Year of Less and it was a complete blur. I holed myself up in an Airbnb in downtown Squamish and was basically in isolation for five weeks, aside from going snowshoeing with Krystal once and having an old friend from high school over once too (and that wasn’t even until after I submitted the book). All I did was work—and enjoy my slow mornings. I’m happy to say this is something I’ve kept up with ever since, including making my bed every day, which was something I didn’t do often before. It feels good to start each day at a slower pace rather than rush into things, and it feels really good to crawl into a fresh-looking bed every night. Oh, and I read 5 books that month, which prompted a year where I read a lot more. :)

Experiment #2: Slow Money

set new financial goals for 2017

track my spending / make sure it aligns with new goals

change my budgeting strategy

change my investing strategy

analyze / find ways to reduce business expenses

bonus: file my taxes (or at least input all the numbers)

The idea behind the slow money experiment wasn’t so much that I would slow my money down (what does that even mean!?), but that I would do one big check-in with my finances overall. The intention was to simply make sure I was happy with how things were going and shift anything that felt like it needed a change. In February, I crossed most of these things off the list! But, as it often goes, things changed as time went on. For starters, I did NOT run a lean business. In 2016, my business expenses added up to exactly $14,000 and I wanted to attempt to cut that in half. Instead, I ended up spending $17,000 in 2017. This wasn’t a surprise, though. I track my business finances (invoices, payments, expenses, etc.) every month in FreshBooks, so I always know how things are adding up. There are only two financial decisions I regret (costing me about $2,300). Otherwise, it was all intentional (vs. impulsive) and I feel good about my final numbers. I’m just aware now that it will likely be impossible to ever spend less than $14,000 on my business. The one money move I’m extremely happy I made was the decision to start investing regularly. In an attempt to adopt an abundance mindset, I setup a weekly automatic deposit into my Wealthsimple account and have kept that going all year! (Though I did decrease the amount in the summer, when I wasn’t earning much.) Nearly one year later, I’ve learned I won’t run out of money—and that was a lesson I really needed.

Experiment #3: Slow Move

go through all of my belongings again / only pack what I want to keep

sell / donate everything I don’t want to bring with me

make a list of things I think I want to buy (like a standing desk)

settle into my new home, before actually buying anything

reach out and make plans with new friends :)

March was a tough month for me, personally (you might have guessed that if you read this post), but it finished on a high note when I moved to Squamish. At the beginning, I was definitely living small, having no couch or coffee table or desk or basically anything in my living space. But in June, I bought a couch. At the end of the summer, I pieced together a DIY standup desk (for about $450 vs. the $600-$1,200 you’d pay in stores). And I even commissioned my friend Amanda Sandlin to do a custom painting for me. I still don’t have a coffee table, but it’s not a priority right now (saving for my trip to the UK is). It’s taken almost a year but I really do feel at home here—not because of the stuff, but because of the life I’ve built and the friends I’ve made. For the first time in years, I’m not wondering where I can move to next. I just want to be here, and that feels really good.

Experiment #4: Slow Breathing

have slow mornings

do yoga 10x (short practices are fine)

meditate for 7 days in a row

listen to audiobooks/podcasts on this subject

go floating at the end of the month

At the beginning of April, I sat down to write a post about how I was going to do the slow work experiment next, but I couldn’t finish it. It felt impossible to string words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs about things that didn’t actually matter to me then. All I could think about was news I had received on March 28th that shot my anxiety up higher than I knew it could go. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t write or do any kind of work. Some days, the elephant on my chest was so heavy that I couldn’t even breathe. So, I decided to do the slow breathing experiment instead. Only I didn’t end up crossing much off this list. Instead, I published that post then read all the comments that poured in, and took all of your suggestions to heart—particularly the ones that asked if I’d ever considered talking to someone about this stuff. I had thought about it, but I had never taken action on those thoughts. Your comments helped me get the courage to. A few hours later, with the help of my friend Clare, I crafted an email to a therapist. She called me shortly after, and I started seeing her the very next day. I’ve written about this enough times now, I think, but want to make sure I say it again for anyone who is considering doing the same: therapy is the best investment I’ve ever made. It definitely changed—and saved—my life. And I will always be grateful I started it in April, because things got so much tougher in May.

Experiment #5: Slow Technology

do a 30-day social media detox (April 29th – May 28th)

figure out the role I want social media to play in my life

check / reply to email less often (also experiment with not checking on my phone)

figure out the role I want technology to play in my life (phone, computers, TV, etc.)

read from a book every day

With how much anxiety I was experiencing, May was the best month for me to take a step back from social media and attempt the slow technology experiment. And I know I’m not the only one who felt like opting out from it altogether this year. But I decided to log off all social media for a month and think about how I could have a better experience with it when I went back—because I didn’t actually want to quit it altogether, I just didn’t want it to always feel so negative. Like any social media detox, it came with the realization that I was addicted to my phone and I knew I wanted to have a healthier relationship with it too. But I ended up quitting early and going back online after Molly died (May 22nd) so I could share the news and also support my family while they shared it too. I don’t regret that decision. Because of the detox, I have kept Twitter off my phone all year, and even deleted the email app from it (until recently because the book launch has required that I be a little more connected). So, I do feel a lot better about how (much less) I use my phone now. I’m not even that great at replying to text messages anymore! The most important lesson I took away from that experiment was that, when it comes to social media (and technology as a whole), you’re allowed to create your own rules on how to use it. In fact, you should. I am continuing to do this, and made another big decision I’ll share with you later this month.

June – No Experiment

After both dogs died (Lexie on May 31st), I decided not to force myself to do a slow living experiment. Instead, I spent the first week of June in Victoria, then flew to Minneapolis to see friends, and drove all the way back from there with a friend + his dog. It was exactly what I needed.

Experiment #6: Slow Food

eat mostly* home-cooked meals

*eat out max. once/week at restaurants that use locally-sourced ingredients

swap out some ingredients for stuff that can be sourced in Squamish or BC

switch back to a vegetarian diet

eat slowly :)

After dealing with some of my grief, and then coming home from a two-week road trip throughout the US, it was obvious that my next slow living experiment should involve taking care of myself—and I decided to do that through the slow food experiment. Aside from slow mornings, this was the easiest experiment to complete. I loved walking to the farmer’s market every Saturday, buying local produce + eggs, cooking my meals, and only eating out at Fergie’s once a week. It felt really good to be at home, spend time in the kitchen and fuel my body. So, this one was easy. I even had a little fun and shared pictures of my simple kitchen + minimalist pantry. (I will say though that the contents of my pantry has basically quadrupled, as I’ve been cooking and baking more!)

Experiment #7: Slow Consumption!? Sure, let’s go with that. ;)

complete a 30-day shopping ban (August 3rd – September 1st)

do a small declutter/purge + take inventory of some of my stuff

organize my digital life (inbox, blog post drafts folder, files/folders, pictures, etc.)

do some values + goal-setting exercises

get back into alignment with myself :)

The slow food experiment was a huge success, and taking care of myself in one area of my life helped me realize I had to do it in another. See, grief has this way of causing you to shutdown a little. Maybe not completely. But you start to let things go, including some of the control you had. For the first couple of months after losing the girls, I found I was a little more impulsive in most areas of my life—but specifically with my spending. I wasn’t blowing hundreds of dollars or anything. I simply wasn’t being intentional, and that can eventually add up to a lot of wasted money. So, I decided to do a 30-day shopping ban. Not shopping for a month was easy, though I did make two purchases so I could complete projects I had started: some fabric to repair a blanket, and the supplies to finally make a top for my DIY standup desk. But not shopping for anything I didn’t need was easy, and it helped me stop thinking short-term and start dreaming about what I wanted again. The result: I realized I was done with doing small trips, and wanted to finally save and go on a big trip to the UK in 2018! On top of not shopping, I also decluttered my home + my online life, and got to the beginning of September feeling ready for a fresh start.

September – 30 Days in Nature

For this fresh start, I knew the one thing I needed more than anything else was to spend more time outdoors again. I documented this slow living experiment on my Instagram account.

Experiment #8: Slow Work

track how many hours I work every day (and how many per project)

set realistic expectations of what I can get done (with timelines)

explore other creative outlets (this could be fun – stay tuned!)

share how I slowly grew my blog (incl. dollars + blog stats)

share plans for what’s next :)

By October, I finally felt like I had gotten back into alignment with myself. The last piece of the puzzle was to find my focus with work again. Unlike April, when I would have tried to force myself to complete the slow work experiment (and really needed to focus on my mental health instead), I actually felt ready—and excited—to do it in October. And it’s not surprising to me that I got to the end feeling like it was another successful experiment, because that’s often what happens when you listen to your body and intuition, and focus on the thing that needs your attention. Anyway, I tracked my hours, and not only figured out how much I was working but also how long it would realistically take me to get projects done (which helped me make some executive decisions about which projects/ideas to let go of). I also started to dream big again and ask myself what I really wanted. I don’t have all the answers, but I know that 2018 will include more in-person, face-to-face time with this community, rather than just hanging out online. I also know I’m going to let go of one social media platform (you might notice I removed it from the top nav bar on the website), and spend more time on the one I enjoy the most. These two things feel really good to me. While my business is going to look different, in terms of how I make my money, all the decisions I’ve made were further examples of how I have grown this blog slowly (and my own way). (And speaking of how I make money, I also shared what it’s like to budget with extremely irregular income—including real numbers! For those who are curious, my total income for 2017 was around $76,000.)

Experiment #9: Slow Travel

spend a week in NYC (Nov 3-10)

spend a week in Toronto (Nov 11-18)

spend a week at home (Nov 1-2, 19-23)

spend a week or so in Victoria (Nov 24-Dec 3?)

enjoy downtime in every city :)

For November, I almost had no choice but to do the slow travel experiment—because I was gone for most of the month! In that post, I wrote about why I set travel intentions vs. make travel plans. I also wrote about how every good trip makes you appreciate home. <3

Experiment #10: Slow Evenings

no work / social media after 7pm

after work, write down the next day’s schedule / to-do list

no TV / phone after 8pm (and definitely not in bed)

read a book every night (probably in the bathtub)

create / practice / share my new bedtime routine

Finally, there’s one experiment I haven’t updated you on yet, and that’s the slow evening experiment. Even though I didn’t have a plan for which order I would do all of these experiments in, I had a feeling it would come full circle with this one—and I was right. Unfortunately, it didn’t really go as planned. I had a feeling it might not, because I knew how much work I had to do (and how stressed I was) in December. But I wanted to try it anyway, and can now share some of the results.

I will start by saying that while I had the freedom to work slowly for most of the rest of the year, that didn’t feel like an option in December. With my first book launch just weeks away, there was a lot of work that needed to be done. So the to-do list was long, and any extra task that was added to it seemed to double my anxiety. Then I started hearing that Amazon was going to ship it 5 weeks early and my anxiety doubled (or maybe quadrupled) yet again. In the process of trying to get that mistake corrected, I had a full-blown meltdown that I had to quite literally pick myself up off the floor from. (Note that I laughed at myself too, during this particular meltdown. But they are always eye-opening, aren’t they?)

The biggest problem was that I didn’t sleep much, in the first half of the month. I did have slow evenings, long baths, read from a book, etc. And I could fall asleep easily. But then I would wake up between 3:30-4:30am each morning and that was it—I was just up for the day (thank you, anxiety). I managed to get through the week, but noted that the two big meltdowns I had both happened on Friday mornings—likely because I was completely exhausted and my body was just shutting down by then. After a few conversations about this with close friends, I knew I didn’t want to remember the book launch as something that I hated. I was ok with it being busy, but I also wanted to look back and have some good memories from it. With that, I shifted my strategy and decided to cut back on a lot of commitments (and pressures I’d put on myself) and do things slowly. That had been working for me all year, and I have to believe it will work for me now and in the future.

As for the rest, I had good intentions with the no work after 7pm and no phone/TV after 8pm thing, in the beginning. But that also slipped away, as time passed and life changed. When there are only so many hours in a day, sometimes you can’t log off at 7pm, because it means the work really won’t get done. And when your best friend is going through a tough time, you don’t say, “sorry, I can’t talk after 8pm”. I have learned to create boundaries for myself and my relationships, but that will never be one of them. Now, even though it wasn’t a very successful experiment, the one thing I will consider a success is that I think about this every evening now. Just yesterday, I thought about how it was time to shut down my computer and have a bath and read a book. And the experiment is over. I don’t have to do this, but I now have the habit of at least thinking about it—and awareness is often what prompts change. So, overall, I am glad I at least attempted to do this experiment, and I think it’s one I’ll be considering how to bring forward in my future. Maybe after the book launches, haha.

So, that’s it! My year of slow living experiments is complete. And I hope it’s been obvious to anyone reading this, or anyone who was following along all year, but the goal was never to complete each experiment perfectly or cross anything off a list. It was simply to slow down, check-in with myself and consider which area of my life might need a little more attention. At the end of the day, that’s all I was doing: paying attention to what was causing me any kind of anxiety or stress, and then giving it the time + attention it needed to feel better. If you attempt something similar, I hope you’ll come at it the same way. <3

Reflections on a Year of Slow Living Experiments posted first on http://ift.tt/2lnwIdQ

[jeremyau]

There’s No Magic in Venture-Backed Home Care

HomeHero hangs up its cape, pivoting new direction.

In September, 2016 my family held funeral proceedings in Los Angeles to say goodbye to my grandmother, Flavor Bell Booker, who was only a few weeks away from her 99th birthday. Until that time, she was our first and longest-standing client, dating back to 2013 when HomeHero was nothing more than a paper checklist of screening requirements for the mixed bag of caregivers my dad would find on Craigslist. But today, in what seems like the most bizarre strokes of fate, it brings me great sadness to announce that Flavor will also be one of our last clients at HomeHero.

Almost exactly one year ago, HomeHero lost its core identity when we were effectively forced to terminate our working relationships with 95% of our 1099 caregivers and required to adopt an inferior employment business model. In the process, HomeHero also lost a majority of its competitive differentiators in price, speed and scalability that allowed us to be so disruptive in 2014 and 2015, and it had nothing to do with competition.

HomeHero, for the better half of the last year, has been caught in one of the toughest dilemmas a startup can be in: to A) keep building an “evolutionary business”, or B) hit the reset button and use the remaining capital to take a swing at building the “revolutionary business”.

While this may come as a surprise to a lot of people, today we are announcing that HomeHero has decided to cease all operations and remove itself entirely from the industry of home care to focus on a new healthcare venture. This article should help people understand the forces that led us to this decision.

Early Days

When we started HomeHero in 2013 our vision was very ambitious — to build the fastest, most affordable way to find quality in-home care, and disrupt the $30 billion home care market. For many years I watched with shock and sadness the struggles my father went through finding reliable caregivers for my grandmother in Seattle. So I decided to dedicate my life to fixing one of the biggest (and hardest) problems facing our generation today. For me, HomeHero has always been very personal.

Coming into HomeHero, my cofounder (Mike Townsend) and I had a taste of success and failure in startups. Mike founded a web-based point-of-sale company called ZingCheckout in 2012 that I joined and left before it was acquired by BigCommerce ahead of their IPO. After that, we started a mobile ordering and payments company together called Flowtab, where we made it a lot further on $100k than I ever thought possible in San Francisco. But we knew healthcare would be a lot harder than anything we did before.

Science Incubation

In May 2013, Mike and I packed everything we owned into a small sedan and we moved from San Francisco to Santa Monica for an opportunity to work with Mike Jones at Science, one of the top incubators in Los Angeles. We had the vision to tackle a big problem in the home care industry and Jones was crazy enough to do it with us. As you may know, home care is a large and fragmented industry with over 25,000 franchises nationwide. We saw agencies as being grossly inefficient, as evidenced by caregivers only taking home 40% of the hourly rates paid by families.

It felt inevitable that a company would introduce a disruptive technology model to improve access to affordable home care. We even published an article “10 reasons a marketplace for senior care is inevitable”, citing other factors such as highly-recurring needs, high number of unhappy caregivers and lack of trust and quality.

Marketplace Model

We launched with a workforce of vetted independent contractor (1099) caregivers, who we endearingly referred to as “Heroes”. We created a more user-friendly client intake flow, equipped with beautiful online profiles. Our marketplace grew quickly due to our lower prices and our ability to match caregivers with clients so quickly.

We protected the marketplace by offering the support of a care management team, the personalization of profiles with photos and video interviews, a robust algorithm to control matching and dispatching, lengthy reviews from past clients, and a rating system to ensure quality. We were bringing transparency to a market that was notorious for lack thereof.

Scaling Friction

By the Summer of 2015, we had onboarded over 1,200 Heroes, provided care to a few hundred clients and we expanded to Orange County, San Diego and San Francisco (and the entire Bay Area). In June 2015, we raised a $20 million Series A, bringing total funding to $23 million.

HomeHero had distinct advantages of geographic coverage.

One distinct advantage of HomeHero was our ability to expand to different geographies quickly, whereas most agencies could only keep a 10–15% buffer on supply above their expected billable hours. Still, while our new markets showed early signs of growth via online acquisition, we found ourselves competing with local home care agencies who were staffing experienced teams of field marketers whose primary purpose was to grow leads and coordinate discharges of patients from acute care facilities — such as hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, senior centers and outpatient facilities. They were willing to drive across town to meet a family, bring them coffee and pastries, conduct a free home safety inspection and a two-hour consultation.

We were very reluctant to add the additional headcount, but we realized the best way to win the highest net worth clients (spending over $3k per month) was not to build faster and fancier technology, but to engage in the hand-holding and spend long hours with the family. Friction builds trust.

The 1099 independent contractor model, below, is very attractive as it removes excess cost and restrictions for employers. We were charging clients 30–40% less than industry average, and we were paying caregivers 25% higher than industry average. Both sides were winning. Our first million dollars in revenue in Los Angeles came mostly through SEO, SEM and light marketing efforts from part-time brand ambassadors.

Regulatory Challenges

On Oct 15th 2015, the entire home care industry got rocked. The Department of Labor upheld a federal ruling stating that over 2 million home care workers would qualify for the Fair Labor Standards Act —essentially requiring all home care workers to be treated as W-2 employees and receive overtime benefits. This was viewed as a huge win by the controversial and outspoken labor union SEIU, as well as the “Fight for $15” crowd in California.

This ruling would immediately and sharply increase home care prices — especially for live-in rates — and eventually cause hundreds of domestic referral home care agencies to shut down.

The biggest implication of the ruling was that the DOL removed the caregiver overtime exemption for all home care workers — mandating that all caregivers must be paid overtime. While the intentions were likely positive, the result was immediately negative for every party involved.

In a survey we conducted internally, the cost for live-in/24-hour care doubled from $250 to $550 per day average in Los Angeles, pushing the price above a skilled nursing facility on a per day basis.

Families were forced to reduce caregiver hours or fire their agency completely (and go under the table).

Hundreds of thousands of caregivers who were unable or unwilling to be employed as W-2 workers were either removed from their families or let go by their domestic referral agency.

Seniors struggled with “continuity of care” issues as agencies started rotating multiple caregivers in and out of houses throughout the day to avoid overtime costs. This had an especially negative impact on Alzheimer’s and dementia patients.

The additional rotations in shifts increased gas, parking and transportation costs and added a layer of complexity to scheduling.

Caregivers saw their working hours and income reduced, seniors weren’t able to get the 24/7 care they needed, and home care agencies saw a significant a decline in revenue from live-ins.

By the end of 2016, the nation’s largest 1099 home care agency, Griswold Home Care, closed down most of its California locations.

I’ve heard this ruling described by industry veterans as the “death of the live-in care”, a classic example of regulation having huge unforeseen consequences on the same people it’s intended to protect.

Shift to Enterprise

This court ruling put a huge target on our backs, especially with prominent agencies like Griswold Home Care closing all California operations. We also acknowledged the growing threat of class action lawsuits (similar to what Handy faced). The independent contractor model was under attack and we felt intense pressure to change.

From any angle, the W-2 model is not very attractive. The switch to W-2 would increase our caregiver onboarding costs by 10X. The additional costs of payroll taxes, overtime, paid sick leave, minimum wage regulations, benefits and health insurance, unemployment tax, workers comp insurance, and potential for lawsuits in a highly litigious industry put us in heavy handcuffs. We would also be forced to implement a 4-hour minimum and raise our prices by 32% — much closer to industry average.

This was the same model we had been publicly shaming for almost three years, but we really didn’t have any other choice. According to Federal law, these caregivers had to be employed by someone.

The only way the W-2 model is profitable is at a price point of $25–30 per hour (industry average).

Making the model even less attractive, in mid-March 2016, California legislators moved toward an agreement with labor unions to gradually increase the statewide minimum wage until it reached $15 in 2022, meaning our prices would have to increase $1 per year over the same period. If our goal was to make home care more affordable to families, we were headed in the wrong direction.

The silver lining was that moving to a W2 model would finally give us the opportunity to contract with enterprise health systems — who were mostly blocked from working with us due to the 1099 contractor relationship.

In spite of the added costs, in March 2016 we launched our enterprise initiative and declared that we were moving our Heroes from 1099 to W-2 and becoming a HIPAA-compliant, state licensed home care agency.

We hired a Chief Medical Officer, Chief Nursing Officer, Patient Safety Advocate and named a HIPAA Security Officer. We hired an ex-Cambia healthcare investor as VP of Strategy, Kiel Dowlin, to help navigate the transition and assemble an impressive advisory board (including ex-hospital CEO and “healthcare futurist” Josh Luke). We partnered with one of the world’s leading experts in readmission prevention, Andrey Ostrovsky, MD (who later went on to become the Chief Medical Officer of Medicaid) and started building our own predictive insights algorithm to help predict and prevent adverse events in the home.

We now had the ability to manage and train our Heroes, although practically this didn’t change much. More importantly, we could now get paid directly from hospitals and other risk-bearing entities.

For anyone outside of healthcare, a major goal of the Affordable Care Act was to reduce readmissions and the overall costs of post-acute care. One way of doing that was to change the way hospitals got paid by Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Instead of paying them on a volume basis (fee-for-service), CMS is now paying them based on the quality of care they deliver to patients (fee-for-value).

This created enormous opportunities for companies like HomeHero to partner with hospitals and help them find more cost-effective options for post-acute care and reduce their reliance on skilled nursing facilities and medical home health. We doubled down on the belief that the big winner in this space would be the one who could win the largest contracts with hospitals and health systems.

Hospital Education

In April 2016, we joined the Cedars-Sinai Healthcare Accelerator (in partnership with Techstars) to learn from the top minds in healthcare about the operations and inner-workings of a world-renowned hospital. Cedars-Sinai, the largest non-profit academic medical center in the western United States, helped us launch the Safe Transition Home program to provide safe transitions out of the hospital and they worked with us to build evidence-based home care products for health systems.

Thanks to its adoption of the HomeHero iOS app, Cedars-Sinai became the nation’s first hospital system to successfully integrate with Apple’s CareKit platform and extend their healthcare system into the home.

One thing we learned about enterprise was that our growth would be somewhat limited due to the lack of financial incentive for certain health systems across the country to pay for non-medical home care, especially if they are only at-risk for a few thousand patients.

We also faced challenges in the mandated screening requirements for our caregivers — such as measles, mumps, rubella, TB, Live Scan fingerprinting, state registration fees, state mandated training and drug screening.

Nevertheless, the education and mentorship we gained from the accelerator program proved to be invaluable. We met with hundreds of executives at large health systems and payors and we were able to successfully define larger pilot opportunities.

We made incredible progress in a very short period of time, and in October 2016 we were chosen to lead a ~$1 million pilot opportunity with a large health system in Southeastern Michigan.

This was an exciting opportunity, but we had one important decision to make… and perhaps, the biggest decision of our lives.

Pilots ≠ Contracts

One danger working with large health systems on pilots is being dragged out in the middle of an ocean and abandoned.

The seemingly logical thing to do after winning a pilot of this size is to ramp up spend, start hiring in the new city and design technology sprints to support the new contract. However, it became evident that this particular health system, like many others we were talking to, had a genuine desire to conduct pilots to prove the actuarial value of home care, but there was no long term financial incentive to pay for home care in the same capacity.

It became evident that most of our pilots were being constructed solely for case studies and had slim chances of turning into sustainable contracts. We were still going to be reliant on private pay for the foreseeable future. This gentle realization was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

So in Q1 2017, with significant capital left in the bank, we made the difficult and heart-wrenching decision to shut down all home care operations, transition our clients to local home care agencies and start executing on an entirely new business venture.

Simply put, despite serving thousands of patients since 2013, we do not believe a technology-enabled W-2 home care agency is our most attractive business opportunity going forward. Rather than continuing to push the boulder up the hill and risk a spectacular failure, we will attempt to leverage our talented team, unique experience and technology IP to build a more sustainable healthcare business outside of home care.

In Retrospect

Looking back, our three learnings were as follows:

1. We underestimated the timing, effects and intensity of state and federal regulatory changes in home care.

The only thing worse than losing a fight is being told you can’t even compete anymore. And there’s nothing more painful as a CEO than losing vision for your company, especially if you’ve been holding onto that vision for years.

2. We overestimated the ability for health systems and insurance companies to pay for non-medical home care.

We knew we were in for an uphill battle when we shifted our focus to enterprise contacts. The “what ifs” of this decision will likely haunt me for the rest of my life. Was there a way to avoid the W-2 agency model and pass along employment responsibilities to families and still ensure they comply with all state and federal laws? Could we have kept the 1099 model? Will the Republicans’ repeal and replace of Obamacare somehow result in more money being allocated for post-acute care? Most of these questions we will never know for sure.

3. We underestimated the ability for home care agencies to adopt new technology.

A majority of the 20,000 home care agencies are financially efficient, software enabled and have entrenched relationships within their local communities. While file cabinets are still popular, they are not sitting in the stone ages with technology.

Venture-Backed Home Care

From an outsider’s perspective, home care is a big and attractive market. As evidence, investors poured almost $200 million into various home care companies in the last 16 months. However, this is also an industry built on relationships at a hyper-local level, which isn’t exactly the M.O. of startups. And since 2013, the industry moved from lightly regulated to heavily regulated, making the economics challenging (if not untenable) for any company with huge growth expectations.

Source: Aging in Place Technology Watch (2017)

To break away with enough escape velocity in home care, a company needs to effectively leverage technology to deliver a faster and better experience at a drastically lower price. Currently, none of the venture-backed home care companies have been able to do that. Not one is price-disruptive.

In a recent interview with Home Health Care News, the CEO of one of the largest US home care franchises, Senior Helpers, chimed in on the state of “disruption” in the industry right now:

“In the last couple years you’ve seen Honor, Hometeam and HomeHero.

I’ve talked to all of them. I think everyone was worried that was going to be a big tech disruption that would change how home care is done. But I’ve seen they’ve all had to change their model. They’re now directly employing the caregivers. They’re still using tech to communicate with clients, but a lot of us were doing that��already.

Now that Honor is converting itself to an employer model, they’re just like us. Maybe they’re using tech a little better than we are, and they might have some bells and whistles, but we feel confident that client acquisition is not an issue for us. We have great referral sources.

In this industry, you’re dealing with people on a community level, where 80% of your clients come from referrals and the rest from advertising or the internet. I think Honor’s a good company, I like the people managing it, but I look at them like I look at HomeInstead, Maxim or Bayada, just another competitor. I think Honor will do well over time, but they’re going to be just like us.”

As you can see, the incumbents are singing a different tune than taxi companies were in 2013 — three years after Uber‘s launch.

We spent the last three years keeping up with technology vendors like ClearCare in areas like scheduling, timesheet tracking, billing, reporting, analytics and readmission prevention. But what really set us apart was our price, massive geographic coverage of caregivers across 10,000 square miles, our 10-second matching speeds, caregiver video interviews, evidence-based predictive analytics, and most of all, our 1099 model. For obvious reasons, this was far more disruptive to the incumbents — we were offering the same quality caregivers for less than half the price.

It’s sad to say, but today only the very wealthy can afford home care prices of $25 per hour, which typically comes out to over $4,000 a month. Because home care is extremely fragmented, it’s the agencies who can establish long-lasting relationships and deliver highly-personalized experiences who ultimately win. It’s not a technology problem.

The Future of Home Care

Today, I would estimate 60% of transactions in the home care industry occur under the table, as caregivers are sourced through Craigslist, Care.com or within families and social networks. Home care agencies are left fighting for the top 40% of the market which can only be won by leveraging personal relationships and high-touch interactions — including field marketers, home safety auditors and care coordinators—all things that do not scale well for technology companies.

Because of this economic reality, it is our belief that the W-2 home care industry will remain hyper local and fragmented for the foreseeable future. This does not mean that home care is a bad industry to go into if you are looking for a rewarding lifestyle business, but don’t expect any massive scale beyond a few zip codes.

This announcement is by no means intended to be a death sentence to other venture-backed home care companies. I have the utmost respect for the founders of the other home care startups, and I definitely would’t bet against any of them. But Mike and I deeply believe families across the country need better access to affordable home care, and with increasing regulation and thriving B2B technology vendors, it would be irresponsible for us to continue down this path with unlikely probability of liquidation. We mustn’t assume big fundraising rounds are synonymous with market success, this is certainly not the case in home care.

What’s Next

It breaks our hearts to leave home care, as we still believe there needs to be better and significantly cheaper option for families to find quality home care. Unfortunately, we don’t see a path for HomeHero or any other current company to achieve that goal.

The good news is we are pulling out early enough, with significant cash remaining, so we can find a new path forward and continue our same mission of promoting health and wellness in the home.

We will share more details about our new strategy and venture within the coming months, but our goal is still to positively improve the lives of millions of patients.

The hardest part of this announcement is saying goodbye to not only our compassionate caregivers, but all the team members who I recruited and hand-picked. Many of them I convinced to leave their jobs, move across the country, and take time away from their families to fight this difficult battle with me and Mike. For over three years, they were our trusted team of soldiers who would bleed terracotta and follow us into a fireblaze in order to make HomeHero a success.

We will forever be thankful for your loyalty and sacrifices.

To all our family, friends, Heroes, patients, clients, partners, employees, investors and advisors who helped make HomeHero what it was over the past three years, we extend the most sincere gratitude. We are so proud of you and the progress we made together. Deep in my heart I know the world is a better place because HomeHero existed.

Get in touch: @kaleazy.

[fesahaawit]

Reflections on a Year of Slow Living Experiments

Well, my friends, I can hardly believe we are days into the new year—and 2017 is behind us. Part of me wanted to let the date change without putting much energy into reminiscing and thinking about all that the year held for me. But I think that’s simply a combination of knowing it will always be the year I remember losing the girls + feeling excited for a fresh start. I can’t predict what 2018 will hold, of course, and I don’t like to put pressure on new calendar years and new beginnings. In saying that, I can’t deny that I’m ready to leave my sadness behind in 2017, and continue to move forward in general. Because even with all the sadness, I do feel as though I made some big steps forward last year—particularly when it came to my mental health.

It’s been interesting to look back at my first post from 2017 when I announced I was going to complete a year of slow living experiments. People still ask why I decided to start those experiments, and the only answer I can come up with is because I felt as though I genuinely needed to. My anxiety was at about a low-to-medium level, compared to what it would later climb to in March and April. But it was high enough then that I knew I couldn’t handle all the other messaging that filled my feeds before that new year had even begun. You know, the ones about how to be bigger (or skinnier), better, faster, stronger and richer. I couldn’t stand to read those messages, because I had enough to be anxious about. So, I decided to opt out of it all and simply slow down, instead.

I didn’t have a plan, before I got started. Instead, I had a general list of the areas in my life that I might consider slowing down and being more intentional about. Before the beginning of each new month, I checked in with myself + the list and considered which area of my life needed the most attention. And then I wrote out a list of intentions—not hard goals I had to stick to, but intentions for things I wanted in my life—and got started.

Things didn’t always go as planned. As an example, my plan was to complete 12 slow living experiments—one every month—but life (and anxiety and grief) took me down a couple unexpected paths, so I decided to opt out yet again. And that felt better. Since I had created this whole experiment for myself, I was allowed to change the rules, or simply opt out. So, that’s exactly what I did for the month of June after the girls died, and again in September when I decided my only intention was to spend 30 minutes outside each day. That’s what I could handle, so that’s what I did. As a result, I (mostly) completed 10 slow living experiments in 2017—and I would like to share some reflections on them all, in the event that it might help you plan for something similar.

Experiment #1: Slow Mornings

wake up naturally

make the bed

eat breakfast

enjoy my coffee

read a book (audiobooks work too)

I always knew I was going to start with the slow morning experiment—I just didn’t know it would end up being one of the most important experiments I would do all year. My list of intentions was simple enough. Each day, I woke up naturally (without an alarm clock), turned on an audiobook, made coffee and breakfast, and just relaxed a little bit before diving into work. It was so simple, but it was also such a treat. January was the month I finished the first draft of The Year of Less and it was a complete blur. I holed myself up in an Airbnb in downtown Squamish and was basically in isolation for five weeks, aside from going snowshoeing with Krystal once and having an old friend from high school over once too (and that wasn’t even until after I submitted the book). All I did was work—and enjoy my slow mornings. I’m happy to say this is something I’ve kept up with ever since, including making my bed every day, which was something I didn’t do often before. It feels good to start each day at a slower pace rather than rush into things, and it feels really good to crawl into a fresh-looking bed every night. Oh, and I read 5 books that month, which prompted a year where I read a lot more. :)

Experiment #2: Slow Money

set new financial goals for 2017

track my spending / make sure it aligns with new goals

change my budgeting strategy

change my investing strategy

analyze / find ways to reduce business expenses

bonus: file my taxes (or at least input all the numbers)

The idea behind the slow money experiment wasn’t so much that I would slow my money down (what does that even mean!?), but that I would do one big check-in with my finances overall. The intention was to simply make sure I was happy with how things were going and shift anything that felt like it needed a change. In February, I crossed most of these things off the list! But, as it often goes, things changed as time went on. For starters, I did NOT run a lean business. In 2016, my business expenses added up to exactly $14,000 and I wanted to attempt to cut that in half. Instead, I ended up spending $17,000 in 2017. This wasn’t a surprise, though. I track my business finances (invoices, payments, expenses, etc.) every month in FreshBooks, so I always know how things are adding up. There are only two financial decisions I regret (costing me about $2,300). Otherwise, it was all intentional (vs. impulsive) and I feel good about my final numbers. I’m just aware now that it will likely be impossible to ever spend less than $14,000 on my business. The one money move I’m extremely happy I made was the decision to start investing regularly. In an attempt to adopt an abundance mindset, I setup a weekly automatic deposit into my Wealthsimple account and have kept that going all year! (Though I did decrease the amount in the summer, when I wasn’t earning much.) Nearly one year later, I’ve learned I won’t run out of money—and that was a lesson I really needed.

Experiment #3: Slow Move

go through all of my belongings again / only pack what I want to keep

sell / donate everything I don’t want to bring with me

make a list of things I think I want to buy (like a standing desk)

settle into my new home, before actually buying anything

reach out and make plans with new friends :)

March was a tough month for me, personally (you might have guessed that if you read this post), but it finished on a high note when I moved to Squamish. At the beginning, I was definitely living small, having no couch or coffee table or desk or basically anything in my living space. But in June, I bought a couch. At the end of the summer, I pieced together a DIY standup desk (for about $450 vs. the $600-$1,200 you’d pay in stores). And I even commissioned my friend Amanda Sandlin to do a custom painting for me. I still don’t have a coffee table, but it’s not a priority right now (saving for my trip to the UK is). It’s taken almost a year but I really do feel at home here—not because of the stuff, but because of the life I’ve built and the friends I’ve made. For the first time in years, I’m not wondering where I can move to next. I just want to be here, and that feels really good.

Experiment #4: Slow Breathing

have slow mornings

do yoga 10x (short practices are fine)

meditate for 7 days in a row

listen to audiobooks/podcasts on this subject

go floating at the end of the month

At the beginning of April, I sat down to write a post about how I was going to do the slow work experiment next, but I couldn’t finish it. It felt impossible to string words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs about things that didn’t actually matter to me then. All I could think about was news I had received on March 28th that shot my anxiety up higher than I knew it could go. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t write or do any kind of work. Some days, the elephant on my chest was so heavy that I couldn’t even breathe. So, I decided to do the slow breathing experiment instead. Only I didn’t end up crossing much off this list. Instead, I published that post then read all the comments that poured in, and took all of your suggestions to heart—particularly the ones that asked if I’d ever considered talking to someone about this stuff. I had thought about it, but I had never taken action on those thoughts. Your comments helped me get the courage to. A few hours later, with the help of my friend Clare, I crafted an email to a therapist. She called me shortly after, and I started seeing her the very next day. I’ve written about this enough times now, I think, but want to make sure I say it again for anyone who is considering doing the same: therapy is the best investment I’ve ever made. It definitely changed—and saved—my life. And I will always be grateful I started it in April, because things got so much tougher in May.

Experiment #5: Slow Technology

do a 30-day social media detox (April 29th – May 28th)

figure out the role I want social media to play in my life

check / reply to email less often (also experiment with not checking on my phone)

figure out the role I want technology to play in my life (phone, computers, TV, etc.)

read from a book every day

With how much anxiety I was experiencing, May was the best month for me to take a step back from social media and attempt the slow technology experiment. And I know I’m not the only one who felt like opting out from it altogether this year. But I decided to log off all social media for a month and think about how I could have a better experience with it when I went back—because I didn’t actually want to quit it altogether, I just didn’t want it to always feel so negative. Like any social media detox, it came with the realization that I was addicted to my phone and I knew I wanted to have a healthier relationship with it too. But I ended up quitting early and going back online after Molly died (May 22nd) so I could share the news and also support my family while they shared it too. I don’t regret that decision. Because of the detox, I have kept Twitter off my phone all year, and even deleted the email app from it (until recently because the book launch has required that I be a little more connected). So, I do feel a lot better about how (much less) I use my phone now. I’m not even that great at replying to text messages anymore! The most important lesson I took away from that experiment was that, when it comes to social media (and technology as a whole), you’re allowed to create your own rules on how to use it. In fact, you should. I am continuing to do this, and made another big decision I’ll share with you later this month.

June – No Experiment

After both dogs died (Lexie on May 31st), I decided not to force myself to do a slow living experiment. Instead, I spent the first week of June in Victoria, then flew to Minneapolis to see friends, and drove all the way back from there with a friend + his dog. It was exactly what I needed.

Experiment #6: Slow Food

eat mostly* home-cooked meals

*eat out max. once/week at restaurants that use locally-sourced ingredients

swap out some ingredients for stuff that can be sourced in Squamish or BC

switch back to a vegetarian diet

eat slowly :)

After dealing with some of my grief, and then coming home from a two-week road trip throughout the US, it was obvious that my next slow living experiment should involve taking care of myself—and I decided to do that through the slow food experiment. Aside from slow mornings, this was the easiest experiment to complete. I loved walking to the farmer’s market every Saturday, buying local produce + eggs, cooking my meals, and only eating out at Fergie’s once a week. It felt really good to be at home, spend time in the kitchen and fuel my body. So, this one was easy. I even had a little fun and shared pictures of my simple kitchen + minimalist pantry. (I will say though that the contents of my pantry has basically quadrupled, as I’ve been cooking and baking more!)

Experiment #7: Slow Consumption!? Sure, let’s go with that. ;)

complete a 30-day shopping ban (August 3rd – September 1st)

do a small declutter/purge + take inventory of some of my stuff

organize my digital life (inbox, blog post drafts folder, files/folders, pictures, etc.)

do some values + goal-setting exercises

get back into alignment with myself :)

The slow food experiment was a huge success, and taking care of myself in one area of my life helped me realize I had to do it in another. See, grief has this way of causing you to shutdown a little. Maybe not completely. But you start to let things go, including some of the control you had. For the first couple of months after losing the girls, I found I was a little more impulsive in most areas of my life—but specifically with my spending. I wasn’t blowing hundreds of dollars or anything. I simply wasn’t being intentional, and that can eventually add up to a lot of wasted money. So, I decided to do a 30-day shopping ban. Not shopping for a month was easy, though I did make two purchases so I could complete projects I had started: some fabric to repair a blanket, and the supplies to finally make a top for my DIY standup desk. But not shopping for anything I didn’t need was easy, and it helped me stop thinking short-term and start dreaming about what I wanted again. The result: I realized I was done with doing small trips, and wanted to finally save and go on a big trip to the UK in 2018! On top of not shopping, I also decluttered my home + my online life, and got to the beginning of September feeling ready for a fresh start.

September – 30 Days in Nature

For this fresh start, I knew the one thing I needed more than anything else was to spend more time outdoors again. I documented this slow living experiment on my Instagram account.

Experiment #8: Slow Work

track how many hours I work every day (and how many per project)

set realistic expectations of what I can get done (with timelines)

explore other creative outlets (this could be fun – stay tuned!)

share how I slowly grew my blog (incl. dollars + blog stats)

share plans for what’s next :)

By October, I finally felt like I had gotten back into alignment with myself. The last piece of the puzzle was to find my focus with work again. Unlike April, when I would have tried to force myself to complete the slow work experiment (and really needed to focus on my mental health instead), I actually felt ready—and excited—to do it in October. And it’s not surprising to me that I got to the end feeling like it was another successful experiment, because that’s often what happens when you listen to your body and intuition, and focus on the thing that needs your attention. Anyway, I tracked my hours, and not only figured out how much I was working but also how long it would realistically take me to get projects done (which helped me make some executive decisions about which projects/ideas to let go of). I also started to dream big again and ask myself what I really wanted. I don’t have all the answers, but I know that 2018 will include more in-person, face-to-face time with this community, rather than just hanging out online. I also know I’m going to let go of one social media platform (you might notice I removed it from the top nav bar on the website), and spend more time on the one I enjoy the most. These two things feel really good to me. While my business is going to look different, in terms of how I make my money, all the decisions I’ve made were further examples of how I have grown this blog slowly (and my own way). (And speaking of how I make money, I also shared what it’s like to budget with extremely irregular income—including real numbers! For those who are curious, my total income for 2017 was around $76,000.)

Experiment #9: Slow Travel

spend a week in NYC (Nov 3-10)

spend a week in Toronto (Nov 11-18)

spend a week at home (Nov 1-2, 19-23)

spend a week or so in Victoria (Nov 24-Dec 3?)

enjoy downtime in every city :)

For November, I almost had no choice but to do the slow travel experiment—because I was gone for most of the month! In that post, I wrote about why I set travel intentions vs. make travel plans. I also wrote about how every good trip makes you appreciate home. <3

Experiment #10: Slow Evenings

no work / social media after 7pm

after work, write down the next day’s schedule / to-do list

no TV / phone after 8pm (and definitely not in bed)

read a book every night (probably in the bathtub)

create / practice / share my new bedtime routine

Finally, there’s one experiment I haven’t updated you on yet, and that’s the slow evening experiment. Even though I didn’t have a plan for which order I would do all of these experiments in, I had a feeling it would come full circle with this one—and I was right. Unfortunately, it didn’t really go as planned. I had a feeling it might not, because I knew how much work I had to do (and how stressed I was) in December. But I wanted to try it anyway, and can now share some of the results.

I will start by saying that while I had the freedom to work slowly for most of the rest of the year, that didn’t feel like an option in December. With my first book launch just weeks away, there was a lot of work that needed to be done. So the to-do list was long, and any extra task that was added to it seemed to double my anxiety. Then I started hearing that Amazon was going to ship it 5 weeks early and my anxiety doubled (or maybe quadrupled) yet again. In the process of trying to get that mistake corrected, I had a full-blown meltdown that I had to quite literally pick myself up off the floor from. (Note that I laughed at myself too, during this particular meltdown. But they are always eye-opening, aren’t they?)

The biggest problem was that I didn’t sleep much, in the first half of the month. I did have slow evenings, long baths, read from a book, etc. And I could fall asleep easily. But then I would wake up between 3:30-4:30am each morning and that was it—I was just up for the day (thank you, anxiety). I managed to get through the week, but noted that the two big meltdowns I had both happened on Friday mornings—likely because I was completely exhausted and my body was just shutting down by then. After a few conversations about this with close friends, I knew I didn’t want to remember the book launch as something that I hated. I was ok with it being busy, but I also wanted to look back and have some good memories from it. With that, I shifted my strategy and decided to cut back on a lot of commitments (and pressures I’d put on myself) and do things slowly. That had been working for me all year, and I have to believe it will work for me now and in the future.

As for the rest, I had good intentions with the no work after 7pm and no phone/TV after 8pm thing, in the beginning. But that also slipped away, as time passed and life changed. When there are only so many hours in a day, sometimes you can’t log off at 7pm, because it means the work really won’t get done. And when your best friend is going through a tough time, you don’t say, “sorry, I can’t talk after 8pm”. I have learned to create boundaries for myself and my relationships, but that will never be one of them. Now, even though it wasn’t a very successful experiment, the one thing I will consider a success is that I think about this every evening now. Just yesterday, I thought about how it was time to shut down my computer and have a bath and read a book. And the experiment is over. I don’t have to do this, but I now have the habit of at least thinking about it—and awareness is often what prompts change. So, overall, I am glad I at least attempted to do this experiment, and I think it’s one I’ll be considering how to bring forward in my future. Maybe after the book launches, haha.

So, that’s it! My year of slow living experiments is complete. And I hope it’s been obvious to anyone reading this, or anyone who was following along all year, but the goal was never to complete each experiment perfectly or cross anything off a list. It was simply to slow down, check-in with myself and consider which area of my life might need a little more attention. At the end of the day, that’s all I was doing: paying attention to what was causing me any kind of anxiety or stress, and then giving it the time + attention it needed to feel better. If you attempt something similar, I hope you’ll come at it the same way. <3

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Reflections on a Year of Slow Living Experiments

Well, my friends, I can hardly believe we are days into the new year—and 2017 is behind us. Part of me wanted to let the date change without putting much energy into reminiscing and thinking about all that the year held for me. But I think that’s simply a combination of knowing it will always be the year I remember losing the girls + feeling excited for a fresh start. I can’t predict what 2018 will hold, of course, and I don’t like to put pressure on new calendar years and new beginnings. In saying that, I can’t deny that I’m ready to leave my sadness behind in 2017, and continue to move forward in general. Because even with all the sadness, I do feel as though I made some big steps forward last year—particularly when it came to my mental health.

It’s been interesting to look back at my first post from 2017 when I announced I was going to complete a year of slow living experiments. People still ask why I decided to start those experiments, and the only answer I can come up with is because I felt as though I genuinely needed to. My anxiety was at about a low-to-medium level, compared to what it would later climb to in March and April. But it was high enough then that I knew I couldn’t handle all the other messaging that filled my feeds before that new year had even begun. You know, the ones about how to be bigger (or skinnier), better, faster, stronger and richer. I couldn’t stand to read those messages, because I had enough to be anxious about. So, I decided to opt out of it all and simply slow down, instead.

I didn’t have a plan, before I got started. Instead, I had a general list of the areas in my life that I might consider slowing down and being more intentional about. Before the beginning of each new month, I checked in with myself + the list and considered which area of my life needed the most attention. And then I wrote out a list of intentions—not hard goals I had to stick to, but intentions for things I wanted in my life—and got started.

Things didn’t always go as planned. As an example, my plan was to complete 12 slow living experiments—one every month—but life (and anxiety and grief) took me down a couple unexpected paths, so I decided to opt out yet again. And that felt better. Since I had created this whole experiment for myself, I was allowed to change the rules, or simply opt out. So, that’s exactly what I did for the month of June after the girls died, and again in September when I decided my only intention was to spend 30 minutes outside each day. That’s what I could handle, so that’s what I did. As a result, I (mostly) completed 10 slow living experiments in 2017—and I would like to share some reflections on them all, in the event that it might help you plan for something similar.

Experiment #1: Slow Mornings

wake up naturally

make the bed

eat breakfast

enjoy my coffee

read a book (audiobooks work too)

I always knew I was going to start with the slow morning experiment—I just didn’t know it would end up being one of the most important experiments I would do all year. My list of intentions was simple enough. Each day, I woke up naturally (without an alarm clock), turned on an audiobook, made coffee and breakfast, and just relaxed a little bit before diving into work. It was so simple, but it was also such a treat. January was the month I finished the first draft of The Year of Less and it was a complete blur. I holed myself up in an Airbnb in downtown Squamish and was basically in isolation for five weeks, aside from going snowshoeing with Krystal once and having an old friend from high school over once too (and that wasn’t even until after I submitted the book). All I did was work—and enjoy my slow mornings. I’m happy to say this is something I’ve kept up with ever since, including making my bed every day, which was something I didn’t do often before. It feels good to start each day at a slower pace rather than rush into things, and it feels really good to crawl into a fresh-looking bed every night. Oh, and I read 5 books that month, which prompted a year where I read a lot more. :)

Experiment #2: Slow Money

set new financial goals for 2017

track my spending / make sure it aligns with new goals

change my budgeting strategy

change my investing strategy

analyze / find ways to reduce business expenses

bonus: file my taxes (or at least input all the numbers)

The idea behind the slow money experiment wasn’t so much that I would slow my money down (what does that even mean!?), but that I would do one big check-in with my finances overall. The intention was to simply make sure I was happy with how things were going and shift anything that felt like it needed a change. In February, I crossed most of these things off the list! But, as it often goes, things changed as time went on. For starters, I did NOT run a lean business. In 2016, my business expenses added up to exactly $14,000 and I wanted to attempt to cut that in half. Instead, I ended up spending $17,000 in 2017. This wasn’t a surprise, though. I track my business finances (invoices, payments, expenses, etc.) every month in FreshBooks, so I always know how things are adding up. There are only two financial decisions I regret (costing me about $2,300). Otherwise, it was all intentional (vs. impulsive) and I feel good about my final numbers. I’m just aware now that it will likely be impossible to ever spend less than $14,000 on my business. The one money move I’m extremely happy I made was the decision to start investing regularly. In an attempt to adopt an abundance mindset, I setup a weekly automatic deposit into my Wealthsimple account and have kept that going all year! (Though I did decrease the amount in the summer, when I wasn’t earning much.) Nearly one year later, I’ve learned I won’t run out of money—and that was a lesson I really needed.

Experiment #3: Slow Move

go through all of my belongings again / only pack what I want to keep

sell / donate everything I don’t want to bring with me

make a list of things I think I want to buy (like a standing desk)

settle into my new home, before actually buying anything

reach out and make plans with new friends :)

March was a tough month for me, personally (you might have guessed that if you read this post), but it finished on a high note when I moved to Squamish. At the beginning, I was definitely living small, having no couch or coffee table or desk or basically anything in my living space. But in June, I bought a couch. At the end of the summer, I pieced together a DIY standup desk (for about $450 vs. the $600-$1,200 you’d pay in stores). And I even commissioned my friend Amanda Sandlin to do a custom painting for me. I still don’t have a coffee table, but it’s not a priority right now (saving for my trip to the UK is). It’s taken almost a year but I really do feel at home here—not because of the stuff, but because of the life I’ve built and the friends I’ve made. For the first time in years, I’m not wondering where I can move to next. I just want to be here, and that feels really good.

Experiment #4: Slow Breathing

have slow mornings

do yoga 10x (short practices are fine)

meditate for 7 days in a row

listen to audiobooks/podcasts on this subject

go floating at the end of the month

At the beginning of April, I sat down to write a post about how I was going to do the slow work experiment next, but I couldn’t finish it. It felt impossible to string words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs about things that didn’t actually matter to me then. All I could think about was news I had received on March 28th that shot my anxiety up higher than I knew it could go. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t write or do any kind of work. Some days, the elephant on my chest was so heavy that I couldn’t even breathe. So, I decided to do the slow breathing experiment instead. Only I didn’t end up crossing much off this list. Instead, I published that post then read all the comments that poured in, and took all of your suggestions to heart—particularly the ones that asked if I’d ever considered talking to someone about this stuff. I had thought about it, but I had never taken action on those thoughts. Your comments helped me get the courage to. A few hours later, with the help of my friend Clare, I crafted an email to a therapist. She called me shortly after, and I started seeing her the very next day. I’ve written about this enough times now, I think, but want to make sure I say it again for anyone who is considering doing the same: therapy is the best investment I’ve ever made. It definitely changed—and saved—my life. And I will always be grateful I started it in April, because things got so much tougher in May.

Experiment #5: Slow Technology

do a 30-day social media detox (April 29th – May 28th)

figure out the role I want social media to play in my life

check / reply to email less often (also experiment with not checking on my phone)

figure out the role I want technology to play in my life (phone, computers, TV, etc.)

read from a book every day

With how much anxiety I was experiencing, May was the best month for me to take a step back from social media and attempt the slow technology experiment. And I know I’m not the only one who felt like opting out from it altogether this year. But I decided to log off all social media for a month and think about how I could have a better experience with it when I went back—because I didn’t actually want to quit it altogether, I just didn’t want it to always feel so negative. Like any social media detox, it came with the realization that I was addicted to my phone and I knew I wanted to have a healthier relationship with it too. But I ended up quitting early and going back online after Molly died (May 22nd) so I could share the news and also support my family while they shared it too. I don’t regret that decision. Because of the detox, I have kept Twitter off my phone all year, and even deleted the email app from it (until recently because the book launch has required that I be a little more connected). So, I do feel a lot better about how (much less) I use my phone now. I’m not even that great at replying to text messages anymore! The most important lesson I took away from that experiment was that, when it comes to social media (and technology as a whole), you’re allowed to create your own rules on how to use it. In fact, you should. I am continuing to do this, and made another big decision I’ll share with you later this month.

June – No Experiment

After both dogs died (Lexie on May 31st), I decided not to force myself to do a slow living experiment. Instead, I spent the first week of June in Victoria, then flew to Minneapolis to see friends, and drove all the way back from there with a friend + his dog. It was exactly what I needed.

Experiment #6: Slow Food

eat mostly* home-cooked meals

*eat out max. once/week at restaurants that use locally-sourced ingredients

swap out some ingredients for stuff that can be sourced in Squamish or BC

switch back to a vegetarian diet

eat slowly :)

After dealing with some of my grief, and then coming home from a two-week road trip throughout the US, it was obvious that my next slow living experiment should involve taking care of myself—and I decided to do that through the slow food experiment. Aside from slow mornings, this was the easiest experiment to complete. I loved walking to the farmer’s market every Saturday, buying local produce + eggs, cooking my meals, and only eating out at Fergie’s once a week. It felt really good to be at home, spend time in the kitchen and fuel my body. So, this one was easy. I even had a little fun and shared pictures of my simple kitchen + minimalist pantry. (I will say though that the contents of my pantry has basically quadrupled, as I’ve been cooking and baking more!)

Experiment #7: Slow Consumption!? Sure, let’s go with that. ;)

complete a 30-day shopping ban (August 3rd – September 1st)

do a small declutter/purge + take inventory of some of my stuff

organize my digital life (inbox, blog post drafts folder, files/folders, pictures, etc.)

do some values + goal-setting exercises

get back into alignment with myself :)

The slow food experiment was a huge success, and taking care of myself in one area of my life helped me realize I had to do it in another. See, grief has this way of causing you to shutdown a little. Maybe not completely. But you start to let things go, including some of the control you had. For the first couple of months after losing the girls, I found I was a little more impulsive in most areas of my life—but specifically with my spending. I wasn’t blowing hundreds of dollars or anything. I simply wasn’t being intentional, and that can eventually add up to a lot of wasted money. So, I decided to do a 30-day shopping ban. Not shopping for a month was easy, though I did make two purchases so I could complete projects I had started: some fabric to repair a blanket, and the supplies to finally make a top for my DIY standup desk. But not shopping for anything I didn’t need was easy, and it helped me stop thinking short-term and start dreaming about what I wanted again. The result: I realized I was done with doing small trips, and wanted to finally save and go on a big trip to the UK in 2018! On top of not shopping, I also decluttered my home + my online life, and got to the beginning of September feeling ready for a fresh start.

September – 30 Days in Nature

For this fresh start, I knew the one thing I needed more than anything else was to spend more time outdoors again. I documented this slow living experiment on my Instagram account.

Experiment #8: Slow Work

track how many hours I work every day (and how many per project)

set realistic expectations of what I can get done (with timelines)

explore other creative outlets (this could be fun – stay tuned!)

share how I slowly grew my blog (incl. dollars + blog stats)

share plans for what’s next :)

By October, I finally felt like I had gotten back into alignment with myself. The last piece of the puzzle was to find my focus with work again. Unlike April, when I would have tried to force myself to complete the slow work experiment (and really needed to focus on my mental health instead), I actually felt ready—and excited—to do it in October. And it’s not surprising to me that I got to the end feeling like it was another successful experiment, because that’s often what happens when you listen to your body and intuition, and focus on the thing that needs your attention. Anyway, I tracked my hours, and not only figured out how much I was working but also how long it would realistically take me to get projects done (which helped me make some executive decisions about which projects/ideas to let go of). I also started to dream big again and ask myself what I really wanted. I don’t have all the answers, but I know that 2018 will include more in-person, face-to-face time with this community, rather than just hanging out online. I also know I’m going to let go of one social media platform (you might notice I removed it from the top nav bar on the website), and spend more time on the one I enjoy the most. These two things feel really good to me. While my business is going to look different, in terms of how I make my money, all the decisions I’ve made were further examples of how I have grown this blog slowly (and my own way). (And speaking of how I make money, I also shared what it’s like to budget with extremely irregular income—including real numbers! For those who are curious, my total income for 2017 was around $76,000.)

Experiment #9: Slow Travel

spend a week in NYC (Nov 3-10)

spend a week in Toronto (Nov 11-18)

spend a week at home (Nov 1-2, 19-23)

spend a week or so in Victoria (Nov 24-Dec 3?)

enjoy downtime in every city :)

For November, I almost had no choice but to do the slow travel experiment—because I was gone for most of the month! In that post, I wrote about why I set travel intentions vs. make travel plans. I also wrote about how every good trip makes you appreciate home. <3

Experiment #10: Slow Evenings

no work / social media after 7pm

after work, write down the next day’s schedule / to-do list

no TV / phone after 8pm (and definitely not in bed)

read a book every night (probably in the bathtub)

create / practice / share my new bedtime routine

Finally, there’s one experiment I haven’t updated you on yet, and that’s the slow evening experiment. Even though I didn’t have a plan for which order I would do all of these experiments in, I had a feeling it would come full circle with this one—and I was right. Unfortunately, it didn’t really go as planned. I had a feeling it might not, because I knew how much work I had to do (and how stressed I was) in December. But I wanted to try it anyway, and can now share some of the results.

I will start by saying that while I had the freedom to work slowly for most of the rest of the year, that didn’t feel like an option in December. With my first book launch just weeks away, there was a lot of work that needed to be done. So the to-do list was long, and any extra task that was added to it seemed to double my anxiety. Then I started hearing that Amazon was going to ship it 5 weeks early and my anxiety doubled (or maybe quadrupled) yet again. In the process of trying to get that mistake corrected, I had a full-blown meltdown that I had to quite literally pick myself up off the floor from. (Note that I laughed at myself too, during this particular meltdown. But they are always eye-opening, aren’t they?)

The biggest problem was that I didn’t sleep much, in the first half of the month. I did have slow evenings, long baths, read from a book, etc. And I could fall asleep easily. But then I would wake up between 3:30-4:30am each morning and that was it—I was just up for the day (thank you, anxiety). I managed to get through the week, but noted that the two big meltdowns I had both happened on Friday mornings—likely because I was completely exhausted and my body was just shutting down by then. After a few conversations about this with close friends, I knew I didn’t want to remember the book launch as something that I hated. I was ok with it being busy, but I also wanted to look back and have some good memories from it. With that, I shifted my strategy and decided to cut back on a lot of commitments (and pressures I’d put on myself) and do things slowly. That had been working for me all year, and I have to believe it will work for me now and in the future.

As for the rest, I had good intentions with the no work after 7pm and no phone/TV after 8pm thing, in the beginning. But that also slipped away, as time passed and life changed. When there are only so many hours in a day, sometimes you can’t log off at 7pm, because it means the work really won’t get done. And when your best friend is going through a tough time, you don’t say, “sorry, I can’t talk after 8pm”. I have learned to create boundaries for myself and my relationships, but that will never be one of them. Now, even though it wasn’t a very successful experiment, the one thing I will consider a success is that I think about this every evening now. Just yesterday, I thought about how it was time to shut down my computer and have a bath and read a book. And the experiment is over. I don’t have to do this, but I now have the habit of at least thinking about it—and awareness is often what prompts change. So, overall, I am glad I at least attempted to do this experiment, and I think it’s one I’ll be considering how to bring forward in my future. Maybe after the book launches, haha.

So, that’s it! My year of slow living experiments is complete. And I hope it’s been obvious to anyone reading this, or anyone who was following along all year, but the goal was never to complete each experiment perfectly or cross anything off a list. It was simply to slow down, check-in with myself and consider which area of my life might need a little more attention. At the end of the day, that’s all I was doing: paying attention to what was causing me any kind of anxiety or stress, and then giving it the time + attention it needed to feel better. If you attempt something similar, I hope you’ll come at it the same way. <3

Reflections on a Year of Slow Living Experiments posted first on http://ift.tt/2lnwIdQ

[fesahaawit]

Reflections on a Year of Slow Living Experiments

Well, my friends, I can hardly believe we are days into the new year—and 2017 is behind us. Part of me wanted to let the date change without putting much energy into reminiscing and thinking about all that the year held for me. But I think that’s simply a combination of knowing it will always be the year I remember losing the girls + feeling excited for a fresh start. I can’t predict what 2018 will hold, of course, and I don’t like to put pressure on new calendar years and new beginnings. In saying that, I can’t deny that I’m ready to leave my sadness behind in 2017, and continue to move forward in general. Because even with all the sadness, I do feel as though I made some big steps forward last year—particularly when it came to my mental health.

It’s been interesting to look back at my first post from 2017 when I announced I was going to complete a year of slow living experiments. People still ask why I decided to start those experiments, and the only answer I can come up with is because I felt as though I genuinely needed to. My anxiety was at about a low-to-medium level, compared to what it would later climb to in March and April. But it was high enough then that I knew I couldn’t handle all the other messaging that filled my feeds before that new year had even begun. You know, the ones about how to be bigger (or skinnier), better, faster, stronger and richer. I couldn’t stand to read those messages, because I had enough to be anxious about. So, I decided to opt out of it all and simply slow down, instead.

I didn’t have a plan, before I got started. Instead, I had a general list of the areas in my life that I might consider slowing down and being more intentional about. Before the beginning of each new month, I checked in with myself + the list and considered which area of my life needed the most attention. And then I wrote out a list of intentions—not hard goals I had to stick to, but intentions for things I wanted in my life—and got started.

Things didn’t always go as planned. As an example, my plan was to complete 12 slow living experiments—one every month—but life (and anxiety and grief) took me down a couple unexpected paths, so I decided to opt out yet again. And that felt better. Since I had created this whole experiment for myself, I was allowed to change the rules, or simply opt out. So, that’s exactly what I did for the month of June after the girls died, and again in September when I decided my only intention was to spend 30 minutes outside each day. That’s what I could handle, so that’s what I did. As a result, I (mostly) completed 10 slow living experiments in 2017—and I would like to share some reflections on them all, in the event that it might help you plan for something similar.

Experiment #1: Slow Mornings

wake up naturally

make the bed

eat breakfast

enjoy my coffee

read a book (audiobooks work too)

I always knew I was going to start with the slow morning experiment—I just didn’t know it would end up being one of the most important experiments I would do all year. My list of intentions was simple enough. Each day, I woke up naturally (without an alarm clock), turned on an audiobook, made coffee and breakfast, and just relaxed a little bit before diving into work. It was so simple, but it was also such a treat. January was the month I finished the first draft of The Year of Less and it was a complete blur. I holed myself up in an Airbnb in downtown Squamish and was basically in isolation for five weeks, aside from going snowshoeing with Krystal once and having an old friend from high school over once too (and that wasn’t even until after I submitted the book). All I did was work—and enjoy my slow mornings. I’m happy to say this is something I’ve kept up with ever since, including making my bed every day, which was something I didn’t do often before. It feels good to start each day at a slower pace rather than rush into things, and it feels really good to crawl into a fresh-looking bed every night. Oh, and I read 5 books that month, which prompted a year where I read a lot more. :)

Experiment #2: Slow Money

set new financial goals for 2017

track my spending / make sure it aligns with new goals

change my budgeting strategy

change my investing strategy

analyze / find ways to reduce business expenses

bonus: file my taxes (or at least input all the numbers)

The idea behind the slow money experiment wasn’t so much that I would slow my money down (what does that even mean!?), but that I would do one big check-in with my finances overall. The intention was to simply make sure I was happy with how things were going and shift anything that felt like it needed a change. In February, I crossed most of these things off the list! But, as it often goes, things changed as time went on. For starters, I did NOT run a lean business. In 2016, my business expenses added up to exactly $14,000 and I wanted to attempt to cut that in half. Instead, I ended up spending $17,000 in 2017. This wasn’t a surprise, though. I track my business finances (invoices, payments, expenses, etc.) every month in FreshBooks, so I always know how things are adding up. There are only two financial decisions I regret (costing me about $2,300). Otherwise, it was all intentional (vs. impulsive) and I feel good about my final numbers. I’m just aware now that it will likely be impossible to ever spend less than $14,000 on my business. The one money move I’m extremely happy I made was the decision to start investing regularly. In an attempt to adopt an abundance mindset, I setup a weekly automatic deposit into my Wealthsimple account and have kept that going all year! (Though I did decrease the amount in the summer, when I wasn’t earning much.) Nearly one year later, I’ve learned I won’t run out of money—and that was a lesson I really needed.

Experiment #3: Slow Move

go through all of my belongings again / only pack what I want to keep

sell / donate everything I don’t want to bring with me

make a list of things I think I want to buy (like a standing desk)

settle into my new home, before actually buying anything

reach out and make plans with new friends :)

March was a tough month for me, personally (you might have guessed that if you read this post), but it finished on a high note when I moved to Squamish. At the beginning, I was definitely living small, having no couch or coffee table or desk or basically anything in my living space. But in June, I bought a couch. At the end of the summer, I pieced together a DIY standup desk (for about $450 vs. the $600-$1,200 you’d pay in stores). And I even commissioned my friend Amanda Sandlin to do a custom painting for me. I still don’t have a coffee table, but it’s not a priority right now (saving for my trip to the UK is). It’s taken almost a year but I really do feel at home here—not because of the stuff, but because of the life I’ve built and the friends I’ve made. For the first time in years, I’m not wondering where I can move to next. I just want to be here, and that feels really good.

Experiment #4: Slow Breathing

have slow mornings

do yoga 10x (short practices are fine)

meditate for 7 days in a row

listen to audiobooks/podcasts on this subject

go floating at the end of the month

At the beginning of April, I sat down to write a post about how I was going to do the slow work experiment next, but I couldn’t finish it. It felt impossible to string words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs about things that didn’t actually matter to me then. All I could think about was news I had received on March 28th that shot my anxiety up higher than I knew it could go. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t write or do any kind of work. Some days, the elephant on my chest was so heavy that I couldn’t even breathe. So, I decided to do the slow breathing experiment instead. Only I didn’t end up crossing much off this list. Instead, I published that post then read all the comments that poured in, and took all of your suggestions to heart—particularly the ones that asked if I’d ever considered talking to someone about this stuff. I had thought about it, but I had never taken action on those thoughts. Your comments helped me get the courage to. A few hours later, with the help of my friend Clare, I crafted an email to a therapist. She called me shortly after, and I started seeing her the very next day. I’ve written about this enough times now, I think, but want to make sure I say it again for anyone who is considering doing the same: therapy is the best investment I’ve ever made. It definitely changed—and saved—my life. And I will always be grateful I started it in April, because things got so much tougher in May.

Experiment #5: Slow Technology

do a 30-day social media detox (April 29th – May 28th)

figure out the role I want social media to play in my life

check / reply to email less often (also experiment with not checking on my phone)

figure out the role I want technology to play in my life (phone, computers, TV, etc.)

read from a book every day

With how much anxiety I was experiencing, May was the best month for me to take a step back from social media and attempt the slow technology experiment. And I know I’m not the only one who felt like opting out from it altogether this year. But I decided to log off all social media for a month and think about how I could have a better experience with it when I went back—because I didn’t actually want to quit it altogether, I just didn’t want it to always feel so negative. Like any social media detox, it came with the realization that I was addicted to my phone and I knew I wanted to have a healthier relationship with it too. But I ended up quitting early and going back online after Molly died (May 22nd) so I could share the news and also support my family while they shared it too. I don’t regret that decision. Because of the detox, I have kept Twitter off my phone all year, and even deleted the email app from it (until recently because the book launch has required that I be a little more connected). So, I do feel a lot better about how (much less) I use my phone now. I’m not even that great at replying to text messages anymore! The most important lesson I took away from that experiment was that, when it comes to social media (and technology as a whole), you’re allowed to create your own rules on how to use it. In fact, you should. I am continuing to do this, and made another big decision I’ll share with you later this month.

June – No Experiment

After both dogs died (Lexie on May 31st), I decided not to force myself to do a slow living experiment. Instead, I spent the first week of June in Victoria, then flew to Minneapolis to see friends, and drove all the way back from there with a friend + his dog. It was exactly what I needed.

Experiment #6: Slow Food

eat mostly* home-cooked meals

*eat out max. once/week at restaurants that use locally-sourced ingredients

swap out some ingredients for stuff that can be sourced in Squamish or BC

switch back to a vegetarian diet

eat slowly :)

After dealing with some of my grief, and then coming home from a two-week road trip throughout the US, it was obvious that my next slow living experiment should involve taking care of myself—and I decided to do that through the slow food experiment. Aside from slow mornings, this was the easiest experiment to complete. I loved walking to the farmer’s market every Saturday, buying local produce + eggs, cooking my meals, and only eating out at Fergie’s once a week. It felt really good to be at home, spend time in the kitchen and fuel my body. So, this one was easy. I even had a little fun and shared pictures of my simple kitchen + minimalist pantry. (I will say though that the contents of my pantry has basically quadrupled, as I’ve been cooking and baking more!)

Experiment #7: Slow Consumption!? Sure, let’s go with that. ;)

complete a 30-day shopping ban (August 3rd – September 1st)

do a small declutter/purge + take inventory of some of my stuff

organize my digital life (inbox, blog post drafts folder, files/folders, pictures, etc.)

do some values + goal-setting exercises

get back into alignment with myself :)

The slow food experiment was a huge success, and taking care of myself in one area of my life helped me realize I had to do it in another. See, grief has this way of causing you to shutdown a little. Maybe not completely. But you start to let things go, including some of the control you had. For the first couple of months after losing the girls, I found I was a little more impulsive in most areas of my life—but specifically with my spending. I wasn’t blowing hundreds of dollars or anything. I simply wasn’t being intentional, and that can eventually add up to a lot of wasted money. So, I decided to do a 30-day shopping ban. Not shopping for a month was easy, though I did make two purchases so I could complete projects I had started: some fabric to repair a blanket, and the supplies to finally make a top for my DIY standup desk. But not shopping for anything I didn’t need was easy, and it helped me stop thinking short-term and start dreaming about what I wanted again. The result: I realized I was done with doing small trips, and wanted to finally save and go on a big trip to the UK in 2018! On top of not shopping, I also decluttered my home + my online life, and got to the beginning of September feeling ready for a fresh start.

September – 30 Days in Nature

For this fresh start, I knew the one thing I needed more than anything else was to spend more time outdoors again. I documented this slow living experiment on my Instagram account.

Experiment #8: Slow Work

track how many hours I work every day (and how many per project)

set realistic expectations of what I can get done (with timelines)

explore other creative outlets (this could be fun – stay tuned!)

share how I slowly grew my blog (incl. dollars + blog stats)

share plans for what’s next :)

By October, I finally felt like I had gotten back into alignment with myself. The last piece of the puzzle was to find my focus with work again. Unlike April, when I would have tried to force myself to complete the slow work experiment (and really needed to focus on my mental health instead), I actually felt ready—and excited—to do it in October. And it’s not surprising to me that I got to the end feeling like it was another successful experiment, because that’s often what happens when you listen to your body and intuition, and focus on the thing that needs your attention. Anyway, I tracked my hours, and not only figured out how much I was working but also how long it would realistically take me to get projects done (which helped me make some executive decisions about which projects/ideas to let go of). I also started to dream big again and ask myself what I really wanted. I don’t have all the answers, but I know that 2018 will include more in-person, face-to-face time with this community, rather than just hanging out online. I also know I’m going to let go of one social media platform (you might notice I removed it from the top nav bar on the website), and spend more time on the one I enjoy the most. These two things feel really good to me. While my business is going to look different, in terms of how I make my money, all the decisions I’ve made were further examples of how I have grown this blog slowly (and my own way). (And speaking of how I make money, I also shared what it’s like to budget with extremely irregular income—including real numbers! For those who are curious, my total income for 2017 was around $76,000.)

Experiment #9: Slow Travel

spend a week in NYC (Nov 3-10)

spend a week in Toronto (Nov 11-18)

spend a week at home (Nov 1-2, 19-23)

spend a week or so in Victoria (Nov 24-Dec 3?)

enjoy downtime in every city :)

For November, I almost had no choice but to do the slow travel experiment—because I was gone for most of the month! In that post, I wrote about why I set travel intentions vs. make travel plans. I also wrote about how every good trip makes you appreciate home. <3

Experiment #10: Slow Evenings

no work / social media after 7pm

after work, write down the next day’s schedule / to-do list

no TV / phone after 8pm (and definitely not in bed)

read a book every night (probably in the bathtub)

create / practice / share my new bedtime routine

Finally, there’s one experiment I haven’t updated you on yet, and that’s the slow evening experiment. Even though I didn’t have a plan for which order I would do all of these experiments in, I had a feeling it would come full circle with this one—and I was right. Unfortunately, it didn’t really go as planned. I had a feeling it might not, because I knew how much work I had to do (and how stressed I was) in December. But I wanted to try it anyway, and can now share some of the results.

I will start by saying that while I had the freedom to work slowly for most of the rest of the year, that didn’t feel like an option in December. With my first book launch just weeks away, there was a lot of work that needed to be done. So the to-do list was long, and any extra task that was added to it seemed to double my anxiety. Then I started hearing that Amazon was going to ship it 5 weeks early and my anxiety doubled (or maybe quadrupled) yet again. In the process of trying to get that mistake corrected, I had a full-blown meltdown that I had to quite literally pick myself up off the floor from. (Note that I laughed at myself too, during this particular meltdown. But they are always eye-opening, aren’t they?)

The biggest problem was that I didn’t sleep much, in the first half of the month. I did have slow evenings, long baths, read from a book, etc. And I could fall asleep easily. But then I would wake up between 3:30-4:30am each morning and that was it—I was just up for the day (thank you, anxiety). I managed to get through the week, but noted that the two big meltdowns I had both happened on Friday mornings—likely because I was completely exhausted and my body was just shutting down by then. After a few conversations about this with close friends, I knew I didn’t want to remember the book launch as something that I hated. I was ok with it being busy, but I also wanted to look back and have some good memories from it. With that, I shifted my strategy and decided to cut back on a lot of commitments (and pressures I’d put on myself) and do things slowly. That had been working for me all year, and I have to believe it will work for me now and in the future.

As for the rest, I had good intentions with the no work after 7pm and no phone/TV after 8pm thing, in the beginning. But that also slipped away, as time passed and life changed. When there are only so many hours in a day, sometimes you can’t log off at 7pm, because it means the work really won’t get done. And when your best friend is going through a tough time, you don’t say, “sorry, I can’t talk after 8pm”. I have learned to create boundaries for myself and my relationships, but that will never be one of them. Now, even though it wasn’t a very successful experiment, the one thing I will consider a success is that I think about this every evening now. Just yesterday, I thought about how it was time to shut down my computer and have a bath and read a book. And the experiment is over. I don’t have to do this, but I now have the habit of at least thinking about it—and awareness is often what prompts change. So, overall, I am glad I at least attempted to do this experiment, and I think it’s one I’ll be considering how to bring forward in my future. Maybe after the book launches, haha.

So, that’s it! My year of slow living experiments is complete. And I hope it’s been obvious to anyone reading this, or anyone who was following along all year, but the goal was never to complete each experiment perfectly or cross anything off a list. It was simply to slow down, check-in with myself and consider which area of my life might need a little more attention. At the end of the day, that’s all I was doing: paying attention to what was causing me any kind of anxiety or stress, and then giving it the time + attention it needed to feel better. If you attempt something similar, I hope you’ll come at it the same way. <3

Reflections on a Year of Slow Living Experiments posted first on http://ift.tt/2lnwIdQ

[jeremyau]

There’s No Magic in Venture-Backed Home Care – Kyle Hill – Medium

https://medium.com/@kaleazy/theres-no-magic-in-venture-backed-home-care-8f5389528279

There’s No Magic in Venture-Backed Home Care

HomeHero hangs up its cape, pivoting new direction.

In September, 2016 my family held funeral proceedings in Los Angeles to say goodbye to my grandmother, Flavor Bell Booker, who was only a few weeks away from her 99th birthday. Until that time, she was our first and longest-standing client, dating back to 2013 when HomeHero was nothing more than a paper checklist of screening requirements for the mixed bag of caregivers my dad would find on Craigslist. But today, in what seems like the most bizarre strokes of fate, it brings me great sadness to announce that Flavor will also be one of our last clients at HomeHero.

Almost exactly one year ago, HomeHero lost its core identity when we were effectively forced to terminate our working relationships with 95% of our 1099 caregivers and required to adopt an inferior employment business model. In the process, HomeHero also lost a majority of its competitive differentiators in price, speed and scalability that allowed us to be so disruptive in 2014 and 2015, and it had nothing to do with competition.

HomeHero, for the better half of the last year, has been caught in one of the toughest dilemmas a startup can be in: to A) keep building an “evolutionary business”, or B) hit the reset button and use the remaining capital to take a swing at building the “revolutionary business”.

While this may come as a surprise to a lot of people, today we are announcing that HomeHero has decided to cease all operations and remove itself entirely from the industry of home care to focus on a new healthcare venture. This article should help people understand the forces that led us to this decision.

Early Days

When we started HomeHero in 2013 our vision was very ambitious — to build the fastest, most affordable way to find quality in-home care, and disrupt the $30 billion home care market. For many years I watched with shock and sadness the struggles my father went through finding reliable caregivers for my grandmother in Seattle. So I decided to dedicate my life to fixing one of the biggest (and hardest) problems facing our generation today. For me, HomeHero has always been very personal.

Coming into HomeHero, my cofounder (Mike Townsend) and I had a taste of success and failure in startups. Mike founded a web-based point-of-sale company called ZingCheckout in 2012 that I joined and left before it was acquired by BigCommerce ahead of their IPO. After that, we started a mobile ordering and payments company together called Flowtab, where we made it a lot further on $100k than I ever thought possible in San Francisco. But we knew healthcare would be a lot harder than anything we did before.

Science Incubation

In May 2013, Mike and I packed everything we owned into a small sedan and we moved from San Francisco to Santa Monica for an opportunity to work with Mike Jones at Science, one of the top incubators in Los Angeles. We had the vision to tackle a big problem in the home care industry and Jones was crazy enough to do it with us. As you may know, home care is a large and fragmented industry with over 25,000 franchises nationwide. We saw agencies as being grossly inefficient, as evidenced by caregivers only taking home 40% of the hourly rates paid by families.

It felt inevitable that a company would introduce a disruptive technology model to improve access to affordable home care. We even published an article “10 reasons a marketplace for senior care is inevitable”, citing other factors such as highly-recurring needs, high number of unhappy caregivers and lack of trust and quality.

Marketplace Model

We launched with a workforce of vetted independent contractor (1099) caregivers, who we endearingly referred to as “Heroes”. We created a more user-friendly client intake flow, equipped with beautiful online profiles. Our marketplace grew quickly due to our lower prices and our ability to match caregivers with clients so quickly.

We protected the marketplace by offering the support of a care management team, the personalization of profiles with photos and video interviews, a robust algorithm to control matching and dispatching, lengthy reviews from past clients, and a rating system to ensure quality. We were bringing transparency to a market that was notorious for lack thereof.

Scaling Friction

By the Summer of 2015, we had onboarded over 1,200 Heroes, provided care to a few hundred clients and we expanded to Orange County, San Diego and San Francisco (and the entire Bay Area). In June 2015, we raised a $20 million Series A, bringing total funding to $23 million.

HomeHero had distinct advantages of geographic coverage.

One distinct advantage of HomeHero was our ability to expand to different geographies quickly, whereas most agencies could only keep a 10–15% buffer on supply above their expected billable hours. Still, while our new markets showed early signs of growth via online acquisition, we found ourselves competing with local home care agencies who were staffing experienced teams of field marketers whose primary purpose was to grow leads and coordinate discharges of patients from acute care facilities — such as hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, senior centers and outpatient facilities. They were willing to drive across town to meet a family, bring them coffee and pastries, conduct a free home safety inspection and a two-hour consultation.

We were very reluctant to add the additional headcount, but we realized the best way to win the highest net worth clients (spending over $3k per month) was not to build faster and fancier technology, but to engage in the hand-holding and spend long hours with the family. Friction builds trust.

The 1099 independent contractor model, below, is very attractive as it removes excess cost and restrictions for employers. We were charging clients 30–40% less than industry average, and we were paying caregivers 25% higher than industry average. Both sides were winning. Our first million dollars in revenue in Los Angeles came mostly through SEO, SEM and light marketing efforts from part-time brand ambassadors.

Regulatory Challenges

On Oct 15th 2015, the entire home care industry got rocked. The Department of Labor upheld a federal ruling stating that over 2 million home care workers would qualify for the Fair Labor Standards Act —essentially requiring all home care workers to be treated as W-2 employees and receive overtime benefits. This was viewed as a huge win by the controversial and outspoken labor union SEIU, as well as the “Fight for $15” crowd in California.

This ruling would immediately and sharply increase home care prices — especially for live-in rates — and eventually cause hundreds of domestic referral home care agencies to shut down.

The biggest implication of the ruling was that the DOL removed the caregiver overtime exemption for all home care workers — mandating that all caregivers must be paid overtime. While the intentions were likely positive, the result was immediately negative for every party involved.

In a survey we conducted internally, the cost for live-in/24-hour care doubled from $250 to $550 per day average in Los Angeles, pushing the price above a skilled nursing facility on a per day basis.

Families were forced to reduce caregiver hours or fire their agency completely (and go under the table).

Hundreds of thousands of caregivers who were unable or unwilling to be employed as W-2 workers were either removed from their families or let go by their domestic referral agency.

Seniors struggled with “continuity of care” issues as agencies started rotating multiple caregivers in and out of houses throughout the day to avoid overtime costs. This had an especially negative impact on Alzheimer’s and dementia patients.

The additional rotations in shifts increased gas, parking and transportation costs and added a layer of complexity to scheduling.

Caregivers saw their working hours and income reduced, seniors weren’t able to get the 24/7 care they needed, and home care agencies saw a significant a decline in revenue from live-ins.

By the end of 2016, the nation’s largest 1099 home care agency, Griswold Home Care, closed down most of its California locations.

I’ve heard this ruling described by industry veterans as the “death of the live-in care”, a classic example of regulation having huge unforeseen consequences on the same people it’s intended to protect.

Shift to Enterprise

This court ruling put a huge target on our backs, especially with prominent agencies like Griswold Home Care closing all California operations. We also acknowledged the growing threat of class action lawsuits (similar to what Handy faced). The independent contractor model was under attack and we felt intense pressure to change.

From any angle, the W-2 model is not very attractive. The switch to W-2 would increase our caregiver onboarding costs by 10X. The additional costs of payroll taxes, overtime, paid sick leave, minimum wage regulations, benefits and health insurance, unemployment tax, workers comp insurance, and potential for lawsuits in a highly litigious industry put us in heavy handcuffs. We would also be forced to implement a 4-hour minimum and raise our prices by 32% — much closer to industry average.

This was the same model we had been publicly shaming for almost three years, but we really didn’t have any other choice. According to Federal law, these caregivers had to be employed by someone.

The only way the W-2 model is profitable is at a price point of $25–30 per hour (industry average).

Making the model even less attractive, in mid-March 2016, California legislators moved toward an agreement with labor unions to gradually increase the statewide minimum wage until it reached $15 in 2022, meaning our prices would have to increase $1 per year over the same period. If our goal was to make home care more affordable to families, we were headed in the wrong direction.

The silver lining was that moving to a W2 model would finally give us the opportunity to contract with enterprise health systems — who were mostly blocked from working with us due to the 1099 contractor relationship.

In spite of the added costs, in March 2016 we launched our enterprise initiative and declared that we were moving our Heroes from 1099 to W-2 and becoming a HIPAA-compliant, state licensed home care agency.

We hired a Chief Medical Officer, Chief Nursing Officer, Patient Safety Advocate and named a HIPAA Security Officer. We hired an ex-Cambia healthcare investor as VP of Strategy, Kiel Dowlin, to help navigate the transition and assemble an impressive advisory board (including ex-hospital CEO and “healthcare futurist” Josh Luke). We partnered with one of the world’s leading experts in readmission prevention, Andrey Ostrovsky, MD (who later went on to become the Chief Medical Officer of Medicaid) and started building our own predictive insights algorithm to help predict and prevent adverse events in the home.

We now had the ability to manage and train our Heroes, although practically this didn’t change much. More importantly, we could now get paid directly from hospitals and other risk-bearing entities.

For anyone outside of healthcare, a major goal of the Affordable Care Act was to reduce readmissions and the overall costs of post-acute care. One way of doing that was to change the way hospitals got paid by Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Instead of paying them on a volume basis (fee-for-service), CMS is now paying them based on the quality of care they deliver to patients (fee-for-value).

This created enormous opportunities for companies like HomeHero to partner with hospitals and help them find more cost-effective options for post-acute care and reduce their reliance on skilled nursing facilities and medical home health. We doubled down on the belief that the big winner in this space would be the one who could win the largest contracts with hospitals and health systems.

Hospital Education

In April 2016, we joined the Cedars-Sinai Healthcare Accelerator (in partnership with Techstars) to learn from the top minds in healthcare about the operations and inner-workings of a world-renowned hospital. Cedars-Sinai, the largest non-profit academic medical center in the western United States, helped us launch the Safe Transition Home program to provide safe transitions out of the hospital and they worked with us to build evidence-based home care products for health systems.

Thanks to its adoption of the HomeHero iOS app, Cedars-Sinai became the nation’s first hospital system to successfully integrate with Apple’s CareKit platform and extend their healthcare system into the home.

One thing we learned about enterprise was that our growth would be somewhat limited due to the lack of financial incentive for certain health systems across the country to pay for non-medical home care, especially if they are only at-risk for a few thousand patients.

We also faced challenges in the mandated screening requirements for our caregivers — such as measles, mumps, rubella, TB, Live Scan fingerprinting, state registration fees, state mandated training and drug screening.

Nevertheless, the education and mentorship we gained from the accelerator program proved to be invaluable. We met with hundreds of executives at large health systems and payors and we were able to successfully define larger pilot opportunities.

We made incredible progress in a very short period of time, and in October 2016 we were chosen to lead a ~$1 million pilot opportunity with a large health system in Southeastern Michigan.

This was an exciting opportunity, but we had one important decision to make… and perhaps, the biggest decision of our lives.

Pilots ≠ Contracts

One danger working with large health systems on pilots is being dragged out in the middle of an ocean and abandoned.

The seemingly logical thing to do after winning a pilot of this size is to ramp up spend, start hiring in the new city and design technology sprints to support the new contract. However, it became evident that this particular health system, like many others we were talking to, had a genuine desire to conduct pilots to prove the actuarial value of home care, but there was no long term financial incentive to pay for home care in the same capacity.

It became evident that most of our pilots were being constructed solely for case studies and had slim chances of turning into sustainable contracts. We were still going to be reliant on private pay for the foreseeable future. This gentle realization was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

So in Q1 2017, with significant capital left in the bank, we made the difficult and heart-wrenching decision to shut down all home care operations, transition our clients to local home care agencies and start executing on an entirely new business venture.

Simply put, despite serving thousands of patients since 2013, we do not believe a technology-enabled W-2 home care agency is our most attractive business opportunity going forward. Rather than continuing to push the boulder up the hill and risk a spectacular failure, we will attempt to leverage our talented team, unique experience and technology IP to build a more sustainable healthcare business outside of home care.

In Retrospect

Looking back, our three learnings were as follows:

1. We underestimated the timing, effects and intensity of state and federal regulatory changes in home care.

The only thing worse than losing a fight is being told you can’t even compete anymore. And there’s nothing more painful as a CEO than losing vision for your company, especially if you’ve been holding onto that vision for years.

2. We overestimated the ability for health systems and insurance companies to pay for non-medical home care.

We knew we were in for an uphill battle when we shifted our focus to enterprise contacts. The “what ifs” of this decision will likely haunt me for the rest of my life. Was there a way to avoid the W-2 agency model and pass along employment responsibilities to families and still ensure they comply with all state and federal laws? Could we have kept the 1099 model? Will the Republicans’ repeal and replace of Obamacare somehow result in more money being allocated for post-acute care? Most of these questions we will never know for sure.

3. We underestimated the ability for home care agencies to adopt new technology.

A majority of the 20,000 home care agencies are financially efficient, software enabled and have entrenched relationships within their local communities. While file cabinets are still popular, they are not sitting in the stone ages with technology.

Venture-Backed Home Care

From an outsider’s perspective, home care is a big and attractive market. As evidence, investors poured almost $200 million into various home care companies in the last 16 months. However, this is also an industry built on relationships at a hyper-local level, which isn’t exactly the M.O. of startups. And since 2013, the industry moved from lightly regulated to heavily regulated, making the economics challenging (if not untenable) for any company with huge growth expectations.

Source: Aging in Place Technology Watch (2017)

To break away with enough escape velocity in home care, a company needs to effectively leverage technology to deliver a faster and better experience at a drastically lower price. Currently, none of the venture-backed home care companies have been able to do that. Not one is price-disruptive.

In a recent interview with Home Health Care News, the CEO of one of the largest US home care franchises, Senior Helpers, chimed in on the state of “disruption” in the industry right now:

“In the last couple years you’ve seen Honor, Hometeam and HomeHero.

I’ve talked to all of them. I think everyone was worried that was going to be a big tech disruption that would change how home care is done. But I’ve seen they’ve all had to change their model. They’re now directly employing the caregivers. They’re still using tech to communicate with clients, but a lot of us were doing that already.

Now that Honor is converting itself to an employer model, they’re just like us. Maybe they’re using tech a little better than we are, and they might have some bells and whistles, but we feel confident that client acquisition is not an issue for us. We have great referral sources.

In this industry, you’re dealing with people on a community level, where 80% of your clients come from referrals and the rest from advertising or the internet. I think Honor’s a good company, I like the people managing it, but I look at them like I look at HomeInstead, Maxim or Bayada, just another competitor. I think Honor will do well over time, but they’re going to be just like us.”

As you can see, the incumbents are singing a different tune than taxi companies were in 2013 — three years after Uber‘s launch.

We spent the last three years keeping up with technology vendors like ClearCare in areas like scheduling, timesheet tracking, billing, reporting, analytics and readmission prevention. But what really set us apart was our price, massive geographic coverage of caregivers across 10,000 square miles, our 10-second matching speeds, caregiver video interviews, evidence-based predictive analytics, and most of all, our 1099 model. For obvious reasons, this was far more disruptive to the incumbents — we were offering the same quality caregivers for less than half the price.

It’s sad to say, but today only the very wealthy can afford home care prices of $25 per hour, which typically comes out to over $4,000 a month. Because home care is extremely fragmented, it’s the agencies who can establish long-lasting relationships and deliver highly-personalized experiences who ultimately win. It’s not a technology problem.

The Future of Home Care

Today, I would estimate 60% of transactions in the home care industry occur under the table, as caregivers are sourced through Craigslist, Care.com or within families and social networks. Home care agencies are left fighting for the top 40% of the market which can only be won by leveraging personal relationships and high-touch interactions — including field marketers, home safety auditors and care coordinators—all things that do not scale well for technology companies.

Because of this economic reality, it is our belief that the W-2 home care industry will remain hyper local and fragmented for the foreseeable future. This does not mean that home care is a bad industry to go into if you are looking for a rewarding lifestyle business, but don’t expect any massive scale beyond a few zip codes.

This announcement is by no means intended to be a death sentence to other venture-backed home care companies. I have the utmost respect for the founders of the other home care startups, and I definitely would’t bet against any of them. But Mike and I deeply believe families across the country need better access to affordable home care, and with increasing regulation and thriving B2B technology vendors, it would be irresponsible for us to continue down this path with unlikely probability of liquidation. We mustn’t assume big fundraising rounds are synonymous with market success, this is certainly not the case in home care.

What’s Next

It breaks our hearts to leave home care, as we still believe there needs to be better and significantly cheaper option for families to find quality home care. Unfortunately, we don’t see a path for HomeHero or any other current company to achieve that goal.

The good news is we are pulling out early enough, with significant cash remaining, so we can find a new path forward and continue our same mission of promoting health and wellness in the home.

We will share more details about our new strategy and venture within the coming months, but our goal is still to positively improve the lives of millions of patients.

The hardest part of this announcement is saying goodbye to not only our compassionate caregivers, but all the team members who I recruited and hand-picked. Many of them I convinced to leave their jobs, move across the country, and take time away from their families to fight this difficult battle with me and Mike. For over three years, they were our trusted team of soldiers who would bleed terracotta and follow us into a fireblaze in order to make HomeHero a success.

We will forever be thankful for your loyalty and sacrifices.

To all our family, friends, Heroes, patients, clients, partners, employees, investors and advisors who helped make HomeHero what it was over the past three years, we extend the most sincere gratitude. We are so proud of you and the progress we made together. Deep in my heart I know the world is a better place because HomeHero existed.

Get in touch: @kaleazy.