Episode 2 - My Journey From Teacher Burnout to Work at Home Mom

Full Episode Transcription:

(02:35):
Hello, my love. Welcome to episode two of the “Ditch the Classroom” podcast. In today’s episode, I’m going to be sharing my “Ditch the Classroom” journey, kind of from start to where I am now. Just so you can get to know a little more about who the heck you’re listening to. I am originally from Michigan – Michigander at heart. I went to school for graphic design, my freshman year of college. And that’s actually where I met my husband. We went to Grand Valley State University up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and lived in the same dorm. And yeah, that’s where we met. So like I said, I originally went to school for graphic design, but then after freshman year, I ended up switching. I have always had a passion for children and helping others. So just kind of naturally fell into teaching. I completely switched schools and I ended up transferring to Eastern Michigan University, closer to my parents.

(03:42):
And they’re just really well known for teaching. So it worked out very well. My husband actually transferred schools also. He transferred to the University of Toledo for engineering. We were still only an hour apart able to see each other on the weekend, so it worked out really well. After school, when I graduated, I decided to head to Texas for my new teaching career. Michigan – some of you may know – is not very good income-wise for teachers. Not that many states are, but Texas is better. At least in the area that I am in, it was significantly better. I came down here to really get us started off on a good foot income-wise. And so I originally came down to Texas by myself, didn’t know anybody down here. I spent my first year teaching first grade. And then after that year was up my husband and I, we got married the summer after my first year of teaching and he moved here as well.

(04:52):
I spent the next two years teaching kindergarten. So I got switched from first grade after my first year over to kindergarten. Absolutely loved it. I loved my students. I loved the curriculum. It was just a lot of fun for me. But I think as a lot of teachers can imagine all the extra bullsh*t <laugh> that’s placed on teachers, shoulders was really taxing and just not really what I envisioned wanting for the rest of my life. My third year teaching my second year in kindergarten, my husband and I got pregnant. And I knew that the type of mom that I wanted to be, I wasn’t going to be able to be her while also in the classroom. I wanted to be very present for my daughter. I wanted to witness all of her firsts. I didn’t want her spending a whole bunch of time in daycare and being that we were across the country from 98% of the rest of our family, we didn’t have family members that could watch her while I was in the classroom. So she would’ve been in daycare all day. And while that’s like fine for some people, and I’m totally not judging you if that works for you. That’s great. It just wasn’t going to work for me and the type of mother that I wanted to be. I wanted to see her first giggle her first laugh, her first, crawl her first everything. My husband and I talked, and the original plan was for me to take the first year of her life off of school, because the way that my maternity leave was going to fall was going to be the beginning of the school year. And being out at the beginning of the school year as a kindergarten teacher was gonna be extra challenging. We decided that I was just gonna take a year off.

(06:49):
And then after that year, the plan was for me to go back to teaching. After the first couple months of her life, I was either going to nanny where I could take her with me, or I was going to do some grocery delivery, something to kind of supplement my income. That was the original plan. I knew there had to be something else out there that I could do that would allow me the freedom that I wanted with my daughter and being home with her. But I didn’t know what. I did try direct sales company. I was with a company for a couple years while I was in college. Never saw that much income from it. I knew that that was not going to be my route for some people, some people are very successful with it.

(07:41):
I never made that much. Direct sales, MLM – that was not going to work for me, but I knew there had to be something else. I kept looking, kept praying, kept hoping for something that would allow me to be home with her full time and replace my teaching income. And then literally, God has a way of giving us what we need at the perfect time. Literally the day that I went into labor, I found out about the freelancing/virtual assistance world. Had never really heard about it before, but yeah, the day I went into labor, like having contractions and Googling what the heck this even is. So had my daughter, then I spent the next couple weeks really researching what this whole “freelancing/virtual assistance” world was, how I could start that journey.

(08:35):
I really dove in every time I was nursing or she was napping. I was figuring out how to do this thing. Within one month of really starting this journey, I landed my first client. Then within three months of starting, I was at $1,500 a month income. I already replaced half of my teaching income. And that was only working a maximum of 20 hours a week with my newborn daughter by my side. When I first started, I offered more general administrative services. That’s what a lot of virtual assistant kind of start out with, especially coming out of the classroom. You know, I taught kindergartners how to use scissors, stand in a line and not kill each other. And so I didn’t really know anything else. I really started with a general admin service, like email management, did some travel booking for my clients, data entry, kind of basic stuff like that. And then within shortly after I started with just the general admin services, I kind of dove into social media management and I’ll kind of dive into all the different terms and titles you can have as a freelancer in episode three, we’ll go really deep into that, but I’m just kind of giving an overview of what I did today.

(10:09):
So started with general admin, went into social media management. I didn’t love the social media management area just because it was a little bit more time specific. You had to be on your phone or whatever, checking to make sure the post went through for that client, had a specific time. And that just didn’t always work with a newborn. I didn’t do that for very long. And then within probably I’d say the first couple of months of this journey, I got into more website design – completely self-taught. I taught myself from watching tutorial videos on YouTube. I taught myself first by building my own website, and then a couple months into my business. I landed my first website design client. When I got that first website client, I was still doing more of the general services and the social media services, but I really, really enjoyed the website design about six months into my business.

(11:11):
I decided to kind of niche down. And this is an episode on talk about in the future as well. I niche my services down to just offer website and branding. I didn’t do the general admin services anymore. No social media management. I am now on the freelancing side of my business, just a website and branding designer. I help female entrepreneurs specifically, mostly coaches create the home of their business on the internet. And like I said was a kindergarten teacher didn’t know about this before, but I learned by watching tutorial videos on YouTube and just Googling the heck out of everything. Google is your best friend as a business owner. I guarantee that. I kind of wanna talk about what my day looks like now. I kind of start my day, just hanging out with my daughter, getting some time to myself, have a little bit of a morning routine, read my Bible, gratitude journal, things like that.

(12:20):
Usually, I don’t really start actual work until around 10:00 AM and then I’ll work for an hour-ish while my daughter’s playing independently or watching a little bit of TV. And then yeah, after about an hour of work, we’ll have lunch together and I’ll put her down for a nap and get a little more work done. She doesn’t nap as long as I wish she would, but really her nap time’s my time to get any client meetings done – things that need a little more, a hundred percent attention. And then after she wakes up from nap, sometimes we’ll play a little bit more, go run errands, and then I’ll try to work one to two hours more before my husband ends his work day. And then the evening is really my time with my family. So I stop work around 4:00pm, 4:30pm generally. I mean there’s some days where you have to get sh*t done. But generally I’m done by 4:00PM, 4:30PM And yeah, so this allows me to only work between 10 to 20 hours a week. Generally I take Fridays off. I get a three day weekend, or I’ll save Fridays to do stuff that I need to do for my own business. I don’t really do client work on Friday.

(13:46):
So yeah, this has just, like I said, been an overview of what my life looks like. If you have a question about any of this or something I didn’t cover as always, you can feel free to reach out to me on Instagram at arianna.vernier. Send me a message and ask away. I am an open book and I’m happy to talk to you about my journey and how you can get started with your “Ditch the Classroom” journey as well. Coming up, next episode, next week, episode three, we will be covering what the heck you can do as a freelancer and/or virtual assistant. They’re kind of almost interchangeable terms. And we’ll talk about that in episode three. We’ll get a deep dive into that. And I also do want to remind you about our giveaway. Make sure you’re entered into that. You have between now and October 29th to get entered. And I will be doing the drawing on October 29th, which is the Thursday on my Instagram stories. So yeah, I’m so grateful that y’all have tuned in for this episode. Like I said, reach out to me and I hope you have a great rest of your week.