Small Business Bestie
Entrepreneurship is hard, and sometimes we could use a friend to walk a mile in our shoes. Small Business Bestie is here to provide that friendship, support, and inspiration that small business owners need from time to time.
Small Business Bestie
53: Balancing Act: Navigating Business, Family, and Finding Your Flow
Have you ever wondered what happens when business partners who are married decide to separate? Or how successful entrepreneurs actually manage the chaos behind their seemingly perfect Instagram feeds? This raw and honest solo episode pulls back the curtain on real entrepreneurial life.
Michelle Smock delivers a refreshingly transparent update on major transitions happening in both her personal and professional worlds. She shares the thoughtful solution she and her husband Neal developed for their accounting firm after their separation—a practical example of how business relationships can evolve separately from personal ones when both parties prioritize client care. For entrepreneurs in similar situations, this conversation provides valuable insight into navigating complex transitions with grace.
The episode also announces an exciting merger between Small Business Besties and Women's Entrepreneurs Lex, a seven-year-old networking group for female business owners in the Lexington area. This expansion means both morning and evening networking opportunities for entrepreneurs seeking community support. Michelle details the schedule—second Monday mornings and fourth Wednesday evenings—creating multiple touchpoints for women who crave real connection in their entrepreneurial journey.
Perhaps most valuable is Michelle's candid discussion about managing overwhelm while juggling three businesses and family responsibilities. She introduces InMotion, an AI-assisted scheduling tool that has transformed her ability to prioritize effectively, and shares her ongoing struggle with delegation—particularly her decision to outsource social media management after recognizing it as a consistent energy drain. This vulnerability around perfectionism touches on a challenge many entrepreneurs face but rarely discuss publicly.
Subscribe to Small Business Besties for regular conversations that normalize the messy reality of entrepreneurship. Join our Facebook community, share episodes that resonate with you, and consider leaving a review to help other business owners discover this supportive network of like-minded professionals.
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Hey, besties, welcome back to another episode of Small Business Besties. I'm your host, michelle Smock, and today you have a solo episode from yours truly. So if you guys have been wondering kind of what's been going on behind the scenes with Small Business Bestie, cultivate Accounting and just my life in general, hold on to your britches because I'm going to give you guys all of the juicy details, or at least those that I feel comfortable sharing. So, as a lot of you guys know, there's been a lot of changes throughout the past 6, 12, 18 months of my life. I've shared a lot of that with you guys because, again, this is a space where I'm trying to be as transparent as possible.
Speaker 0:I know that for a lot of women, especially business owners, it can feel like we're supposed to be perfect. We have to kind of put on this front to the world, if you will, through social media, to always present ourselves as professional and put together and, you know, make it seem as though our life is just as perfect as can be. But we all know that that is absolutely the furthest thing from the truth and so, in an attempt to kind of normalize the idea that we are not perfect and that we don't have to be perfect and it's okay for life to happen and for us to juggle things the way that we do. I'm bringing my life and my story to you all through this podcast and hopefully through my social media as well, without just being a downer, because, let's face it, sometimes life is hard and sometimes there are tough things that we're going through. So I never want to be a drag to anybody, but I want you guys to know it's totally normal to go through things, whether it's professional, personal relationships, whatever it is like. You don't have to be perfect and at the end of the day, regardless, if there's change that happens in life, you're going to be okay, you're going to get to the other side and things are always going to work out, regardless of how scary or dark or uncertain they may seem at times. So, with all that said, I know I have gotten so many questions over the past couple of months about what is going to happen with Cultivate Accounting.
Speaker 0:As most of you guys know, cultivate Accounting is kind of how Small Business Besties came to be. It is the boutique white glove accounting service that Neil and I started almost three years ago now, and we started it as a husband-wife entrepreneurship team and over the past couple of months we have separated and we have been trying to figure out what is next for Cultivate. What does that look like If we do in fact decide to not, you know, work through our problems and remain married? What would that mean for our business? And I think this is an important topic to talk about, because there are a lot of husband-wife duos out there who get into business together and then, you know, sometimes relationships don't continue to work, and then what does that look like as a business-owning couple as you separate and try to figure things out? So I can't tell you the right or wrong answer for anybody else in anybody else's situation. And as our good friend Stephanie Spires has said before, you know the decision that we came to, it could either be the right one or it could be reckless, and we don't really know yet because we're kind of in the middle of it. But Neil and I have a great relationship. We are not, you know, warring or any of those things, and so that's been really easy for us to come to an understanding and an agreement about what happens with Cultivate Accounting.
Speaker 0:So I'm so excited to share with you guys that what we've come to is that I will remain a part of the team with Cultivate. I will be continuing to do the business development, if you will. So I'll be continuing to network on behalf of Cultivate Accounting, kind of doing that more out and about PR, brand awareness, marketing side of things. And Neil and the rest of the team will continue to provide amazing white glove accounting services to our small business owners in our community. And so, just kind of a reminder, the things that we love to do at Cultivate Accounting is small business accounting needs whether that's bookkeeping, tax preparation, tax advice and we also offer CFO services for businesses who maybe they need some advice on looking forward with their financials, making some strategic decisions in their business, and maybe they don't have the strongest accounting team in place yet because they're a small business and you can reach out to us and we are able to kind of analyze your financials with you and Neil, who is an absolute powerhouse genius accountant and has a master's of business administration, and so he is a really, really good resource to help with making those financial decisions like that. So that's kind of what we do at Cultivate Accounting and, like I said, after a couple of months of trying to figure out what's going to be best for everybody in this situation what's best for myself, for Neil, for our children, for our clients, for our community. This is what we've come to is that I'm going to remain a part of the team at Cultivate. We're going to continue to provide world-class service to our clients and to our community. I'm very excited to remain a part of the team at Cultivate, and we actually are growing the team as we speak. Our demand continues to grow and so we are expanding the team.
Speaker 0:Currently, we have two enrolled agents, and we've talked about it before on the podcast, but just a quick reminder an enrolled agent is a certified tax professional. They're certified through the IRS and they're able to do almost everything that a CPA can do. The main difference between CPAs and enrolled agents is that a CPA is certified to do almost everything that a CPA can do. The main difference between CPAs and enrolled agents is that a CPA is certified to do audits and an enrolled agent is not. So if you have a need for an audit, we have some great CPAs in town that we would love to refer you to, but we can take care of most other small business accounting needs. So that's the update with Cultivate. Thanks, guys, for cheering us on being a part of our journey as we continue to kind of pivot our way through this life and through our entrepreneurial journey. On behalf of both Neil and myself, we really appreciate the support and love that this community continues to show us.
Speaker 0:I mentioned Stephanie Spires by name just a moment ago and most of you guys know that Stephanie Spires was the founder of a group here in Lexington called Women's Entrepreneurs, lex, and they've been meeting for about seven and a half years now and, if I remember the story correctly, stephanie tells it that it basically kind of came out of around Christmas time rush. She and a couple of other women business owners were feeling a lot of pressure to be all the things and be perfect, if you will, to buy all the presents for the kids and plan the dinners and plan the parties and plan the meals and make sure that each kid had the right sweater on for the right day of the week, for the Christmas issues and all of the things, and they were just feeling overwhelmed and wanted to get together to support one another. And seven and a half years later they were still meeting monthly to just get together and support one another. So I've been attending pretty regularly that meeting for the past probably three years now. And Stephanie came to me last month and said that she's at a place in her life right now where she just really needed to take a step back and not have to focus on that group and on that meetup, to be able to focus on her career and her children right now. And she asked if I would be willing to kind of take a step into the leadership of that group and of that meetup. And of course I'm happy to do that. I'm honored that she asked me and trust me with this.
Speaker 0:And so Small Business Bestie is going to be merging with Women's Entrepreneur's Lex. So for those of you who are listening, if you are in the Women's Entrepreneur's Lex Facebook group that Stephanie Spires has been administrating, you're going to start to see some posts in there over the next month asking you to join Small Business Besties if you are not already in that Facebook group, because at the end of June we will be sunsetting the Women's Entrepreneurs Lex group, so it will cease to exist at the end of June. So if you're in the Women's Entrepreneurs Lex group, go ahead and join the Small Business Besties group and then everything will run out of that. Now, with that being said, we will continue to have the same monthly meetups that the Women's Entrepreneurs Lex group has been doing. So it will be branded as a Small Business Bestie meetup, but we will still meet on the second Monday of every month at 8.30am at Guide Realty. Thank you. Thank you to Raquel Carter and Tora Carter at Guide Realty for always welcoming us into that space and allowing us to meet there and share community in that space. They're always such a huge supporter of women in business and I can't thank you guys enough for everything that you do.
Speaker 0:In addition to that monthly morning meetup, we're going to add another meetup. It's going to be an evening meetup, a cocktail hour, if you will. You absolutely do not have to have a cocktail. You can have a mocktail or a water or nothing at all, but that will be on the fourth Wednesday of every month at five o'clock and we're going to actually do that one as a rotating meetup. So just check the Facebook group under the events tab and we will have those events posted each month so that you'll know what location we're going to be meeting at. And again, that'll be on the fourth Wednesday of every month at five o'clock and rotating around the city. Okay, so that's kind of the biggest changes, and then I have a couple of asks for you.
Speaker 0:As far as Small Business Bestie goes, I am really looking forward to having some great guests on the show. I have about 10 guests that I've got lined up, but I need new applications. So if you have been considering coming in as a guest on Small Business Bestie, or if you know somebody that you think would make an amazing guest on Small Business Bestie, please have them go to the website. Again, you can click on the conversations tab at the top conversations for podcasts and there's a form there to apply to be a guest on Small Business Bestie. I'd really like some new applications to come through for guests to be on the podcast. So I'm looking specifically Lexington, louisville, cincinnati, but if you know anybody in Kentucky that would make a great guest, I would love to have them on. Okay, that was a lot of updates.
Speaker 0:Now I just want to talk to you guys real talk about that imperfection thing that we were talking about at the beginning of the show, and I want to kind of touch on that a little bit more and just let you guys know that I've really been struggling lately to figure out how to balance everything in my life. So most of you guys know I've got Cultivate Accounting that I deal with, I have Small Business Bestie, which is the podcast and the Facebook group, and then I'm also a business coach and I have been able to have the great fortune to provide my business coaching services through the Women's Business Center of Kentucky again, and so for me I have basically kind of three hats that I'm wearing. So I've got Cultivate, women's Business Center and Small Business Bestie, on top of being the mom to a teenage son and a kindergarten year daughter. So to say that life is a little kind of crazy sometimes would be an understatement, in my opinion, and I have really struggled trying to figure out how to balance all of these things from a mental health perspective of not allowing myself to like over commit to things, but also just from like tools and resources perspective, like trying to juggle three totally different businesses all at one time while also maintaining everything that I have to do for my family with, you know, dance rehearsals and gymnastics and all of the things that my son has going on with his entrepreneurism and everything. So I've really struggled, but I wanted to tell you guys about a tool that I was introduced to back in January. I tried implementing it back then and it didn't really go over well because, to be honest, I was just in such a state of overwhelm that even that tool wasn't going to help me.
Speaker 0:But I have finally been able to implement InMotion, which is an AI-assisted scheduling software. So it's like a calendar that you can integrate with all of your different tools and you know CRMs and things like that that you may be using. But what I love about InMotion is that I can just create my task lists. So I have a separate board, if you will, for all three of the roles that I'm filling, and then I have another one for my family life. So I have my four boards that I work from and as I create my tasks and my projects within those boards, I give it the parameters for each of those tasks, and InMotion actually creates my daily agenda based on all of the tasks that I have and the priorities that I've set. It will notify me if something is past due and here's what I love the most about it If I do not mark one of the tasks as complete that InMotion said I should do today.
Speaker 0:So for example, let's say this morning it thought I should have returned a. So for example, let's say this morning it thought I should have returned a phone call at 8.30. And that was the time that it scheduled for me to return that call. If by 10 o'clock I haven't marked that phone call as complete, it's just going to rearrange my whole calendar to put that phone call back into my schedule. So it will continue to rearrange your schedule based on all of the different parameters that you feed it, to ensure that if you've missed something let's say you know there's a fire that you had to put out and you didn't get to whatever was on your agenda in the morning If you don't mark them as complete, it will automatically rearrange your entire calendar to get those things back on to your agenda. So for me that has been such a huge help because one of the things that I used to experience with some of the other software that I've tried using for testimony task management is that I would end up with just this huge list of overdue items when a fire came up. You know that I had to deal with and I didn't get to what I thought I was going to do that day, the task would just show as overdue and then, before you knew it, I was right back in that same state of overwhelm because I was just looking at this huge, long list of overdue tasks now.
Speaker 0:So for me, inmotion has been a new tool. I'm still learning it. I still think that there's a lot of capability that I haven't tapped into. But if that's something that interests you, I don't have a promo code or anything like that for you guys. I just wanted to share with you a tool that I have found helpful over the past couple of weeks, something I'm really excited about and you know, just let you guys know that it exists if you haven't heard of it, so that if you are also feeling a little bit of overwhelm and you haven't quite found that perfect task management software for you, maybe that's something that you would want to look into. So I will link that in the show notes. Again, I'm not getting paid to talk about InMotion, but I want you guys to know that that tool exists and it's out there for you. So please check it out and then, if you do end up using it, let me know how it works out for you Let me know you know the things that you're doing, the way that you're using it, because maybe you find out some features that it offers that are really helpful for you that I could also take advantage of.
Speaker 0:I think that with software a lot of times we kind of find what works for us in the beginning and then we get so, you know, wrapped up. In using the software we forget to continue to look at other features that it may have. So InMotion has been great for me to help with my overwhelm, with my analysis paralysis by looking at my task list so long and I just can't figure out what to do first. So it has helped me break through a lot of those boundaries that my neuro spicy brain creates for me, as well as just the overwhelm of having basically three jobs and in the family. So that has been a huge one for me. And the other thing that has been really big for me lately is learning to just delegate and quit saying I'm gonna take that back, like I'm gonna take that on.
Speaker 0:I mean, I think that delegation is something that I'm always gonna struggle with and I think that that's a very common thing for small business owners. We hear all the time that it's easier for me to just do something than to try to train somebody on how I want it done or to trust that I can just hand that off to somebody and they're going to do it the way that I would want to do it. So it's for me it's kind of like a yo-yo, like some days I'm like so loosey-goosey and I'm just like, yeah, sure you do it and you know, done is better than perfect, as they say Right? And then some days I'm feeling a little anxious, I'm feeling a little overprotective or whatever the, whatever the emotional block is that prevents it. But some days it's just really hard for me to let go of things. But I am working on delegating and I am actually currently in the market for a social media manager who can help me with the podcast, because I do believe that Small Business Bestie could help a lot of women entrepreneurs if more people knew about it, and so that's something that I'm ready to delegate.
Speaker 0:I'm actively looking for someone to help me with the social media management part of the podcast, and so that's just one area that I've been able to like really focus in on. Like where's my energy suck? Like, what do I dread doing and what do I know I need to do? But I get so overwhelmed every time I think about it and, to be honest with you guys full transparency it feels to me like every time I sit down to try to create social media assets, with the podcast especially, and I end up distracting myself with 90 million other things that are not important, because I'm so overwhelmed and terrified by the idea of doing social media content. So that's where I was like, okay, if every single time I sit down to do this, I am procrastinating and finding 90,000 other things to do, it's probably time for me to just delegate this out and let it go and focus on the things that I am good at, that I do enjoy doing and where I can make the biggest impact. So I think that that's just a lesson in like figuring out when to say yes to something and when to say no thank you to something, and so for me, social media content creation is definitely a no thank you. I don't enjoy it and I'm not good at it. So if you know anybody who is a great social media content creator, scheduler all of the things, please send them my way, because I need that.
Speaker 0:And then the last thing that I want to talk to you guys about is kind of some call to actions that I would appreciate if you guys would just take a couple of minutes and help me with. It would mean the world to me. So the first thing is tell other women entrepreneurs about the podcast. Send them a link to the podcast and say, hey, check this out. I think you might like it. Share the podcast on your social media pages. If there's a particular episode that speaks to you or that entertains you or that you get a lot of value out of, please just give it a little share on your social media and tag the guest that has appeared in that week's episode. That means the world to both me and to the guest. I promise you it's.
Speaker 0:The easiest way to support small businesses is to talk about us on social media, to review us, those types of things. So that leads right into reviewing the podcast. If you have a moment to review on Spotify or Apple, reviewing the podcast would really help for it to be recommended to people and have a little bit more reach. And then the last thing that I'm going to ask is for you to check out the Small Business Bestie website. So that's wwwsmallbusinessbestieorg. And again, the applications for guests, the applications to sponsor the podcast and the applications for the Bestie boardrooms are all on that website and I would really love to continue to grow this community and all three of those applications or ways to engage with Small Business Bestie would go a really long way to continue to help us grow this community and be a support network for women entrepreneurs across Central Kentucky and beyond. So that's kind of my ask.
Speaker 0:Ask for you guys right now is to review the podcast, share the podcast whether that's word of mouth or on social media and then also to check out the website and see if there's anything on there that's of interest to you, whether it's being a guest on the podcast, sponsoring the podcast or participating in the Besties boardroom. Any of those ways that you could support would really mean the world to me. And then, finally, I just want to take one more second to say huge thank you to Stephanie Spires for trusting me to kind of take the lead with the Women's Entrepreneurs Lex group, as well as a huge thank you to Guide Realty, raquel Carter and Tora Carter for all of the support and love that you guys give to all of the women entrepreneurs across the Lexington area. It's truly inspiring and you'll never know how much you've helped me, and I know that I speak for so many women when I say that that the support and community that you guys have built has just really impacted lives in ways that you probably have no idea that it does. So, with all of that said, I'm going to go ahead and leave you guys.
Speaker 0:Thanks, as always, for being my besties, for being my cheerleader, for supporting not only Cultivate Accounting but this podcast and each other. So join the Facebook group, stay connected. Let's have some great times together. Let's have some coffee meetups, some cocktail dates. Let's do all the things and continue to be amazing support systems for all of the women entrepreneurs across Central Kentucky and beyond. I will talk to you guys later. All right, besties. That does it for today. If you're interested in becoming a part of the Small Business Bestie community, join us in the Facebook group or find out more information on the website at smallbusinessbestieorg. Please share the podcast with your friends who could use a friend in business, and it would really mean so much to me if you follow the show and take just a few seconds to rate or review. A five-star rating really helps the show become visible to other besties who may just need the support and friendship that we offer.