How to Stop Trading Hours for Dollars as a Mom Entrepreneur | Tala Hershey

Hey, boss mama.

Welcome back to the show.

This is the space where ambitious moms come to talk business, motherhood, and what it really takes to stop doubting and start executing.

I'm your host, Manoushka Elephant, and I use my 15 years in marketing to help mompreneurs grow with more clarity, strategy and accountability.

Today, I'm joined by Tala Hershey.

She's the founder of Hershey Therapy Practice, a pediatric private practice focused on speech therapy and language coaching for parents across the globe.

She's dedicated to empowering parents with research based strategies to enhance their toddler's language development.

Yeah, hi, thanks for having me.

I'm so excited to be here.

My name is Tala Hershey.

I'm a pediatric speech pathologist and parent speech and language coach.

But most importantly, I am mom to two little boys.

They're now almost three and a half and one and a half.

So it's very loud and busy in my house.

So I own Hershey Therapy Practice, which is a private pediatric speech therapy practice.

We're located in Greenwich, Connecticut and parts of New York, and parent coaching is worldwide.

What I do in her she speech and language coaching is I actually work directly with parents, train them on the strategies and get their toddlers talking.

Beautiful.

I understand that when you started a private practice and then had children, you realized that some things weren't that compatible.

Can you tell us about that?

How did that go?

Yeah.

So when you are in school for being a speech pathologist or really sort of any field related to that, a lot of people, the dream is to open a private practice.

Right.

It'll give you freedom, it'll give you flexibility.

You don't have a boss, you work for yourself.

I worked at a private practice and I said the same thing.

I said, you know, this is great.

This is what I want to be doing.

I can make my own hours.

It's a better lifestyle, quite frankly, more money.

And so that's what I did.

I worked for four years in private practice in schools and agencies, and then I opened my own private practice.

And this was all before I had kids.

And it was great.

First I would travel into homes and I'd travel into schools and I said, I want to open a brick and mortar, which is actually where I am now, and have people come to me.

And it was sort of a journey figuring out how to be my own boss.

They don't teach you that in grad school.

They teach you how to be a speech pathologist.

So I had to learn along the way.

When I Had kids.

I was about two years into my private practice and everything changed.

I run my own business, I work for myself, I do everything by myself.

And now I have a kid.

And it was almost like a shock to the system because it was what everybody said you should do for freedom and flexibility and a better lifestyle.

You know, you make your own hours.

Sounds great on paper, but when you're the only one running the business and you are a parent now, you know, I have a kid at home.

It just changed everything.

So how did it go at the beginning?

Were you trying to be full time mom and full time entrepreneur?

I sort of winged it in a way.

I didn't really know what to do.

So when I had my son, who again is now three and a half, I went on maternity leave and I took three months because I thought that's the normal time to take.

But the problem with working for yourself in a business like speech pathology is that you trade dollars for hours.

And so if you're not working, you're not getting paid.

I had to figure out a way to change that.

Right.

Because I would have gone three months without getting paid.

That's when I hired my first clinician to take over my caseload and I actually hired two separate people to take over my caseload.

I went on maternity leave and when I came back, it happened to be the summertime.

Summer in speech, where I am at least is very slow for private practice.

So I went back part time.

We hired a babysitter.

I was working two or three days a week and then I just jumped right back in.

Our babysitter ended up coming full time.

I made it more like a 9 to 5.

And how did that feel and work out for you as a mom?

Like did you feel that the mom part of you was also being satisfied?

Yes and no.

I think I'm the type of person that needs a little bit of separation.

So I was okay being away and being at work once I got used to it.

I think at the beginning it's a shock to leave your baby with somebody that you don't really know.

What was very difficult for me was by the end of the day, I ended my schedule at 5 or so.

So I was home by 5:30.

But then he went to bed at 6:30 or 7.

In private practice, the bulk of what I do is in the afternoon.

It's after school.

Kids leave school and they come to speech therapy.

And that's my busiest time.

So the mornings were great because I could go in later, I could spend time with him.

In the morning, and that was fine.

But then by the time I got home, it was like, okay, dinner, bath, bed, that's it, you're done.

And that was really hard and honestly, continued.

I have two kids now, and it continues to be hard.

The afternoons are still my busiest time.

I'm still on the same schedule that I'm working on changing.

In some ways, having that separation for me was good.

I could use a different part of my brain.

I could have fun with my son and spend time with him in the mornings, go to work, have adult conversations for a little while.

But the evenings are probably the hardest.

Yeah, a lot of what you just said really echoes with my experience, too.

I've actually haven't jumped the gun yet of hiring people that I don't know, and that's on my to do list right now.

I've been lucky that my mom has been helping me out, but now that I'm starting this podcast, I need much more time.

And she also works, so she needs to be able to focus on her stuff.

And I see how it is for my partner.

He gets at home in the evening, and he's barely seemed a baby.

Like, I was able to carry on with my business, even though it wasn't the experience I thought it would be, because I'm able to mom as much as I want, basically to the trade of working with clients.

So there's also, like, a balance that I need to achieve there.

I fully understand you.

That's why I'm so happy that we're able to have this conversation, because I know there's so many other moms that are facing exactly those challenges.

Yeah, definitely.

And I think a point that's not really talked about very much is the resentment piece of you hate to admit it, but if you are full time caring for your child and you have calls and you have things that you need to do, and that happens to be the day that he decides not to nap.

You're supposed to be napping right now.

I'm supposed to have this time for myself, and I didn't want that difficulty.

It is almost resentment at that point.

Right, right.

Because I was supposed to have my time and I didn't get my time.

It depends on how you grew up.

I grew up with a babysitter, so I was used to that.

My husband grew up with a babysitter also, so we were used to that idea.

I was able to work from home a little bit more because it was Covid, so I wasn't totally gone, but I had that extra Hand that if he decided not to nap, I didn't have to drop everything.

One of the crutches that we have when you hire external help, it contrasts with when it's a parent or a friend, is that you can actually be a little bit more demanding.

Like, sometimes my mom will take my child and she'll be like, oh, but I also need to nap him for a few more hours.

Like in the middle of the day, I'm like, no, but I'm working right now.

Yeah, yeah.

Looking back at the experience you've had, you're looking at going more online rather than just a brick and mortar and working with other therapists.

How is that going?

Yeah, yeah.

So that's the next shift that I'm doing in my business.

When my older son was born, I hired clinicians and built the practice that way, if I have clinicians that are great, that I trust, then I'll take fewer cases.

But that was never actually the case.

I still had a full caseload.

My clinicians were working and I was doing everything.

It almost made it worse.

I started managing people on top of everything else.

So I took a step back and said, I think the biggest difficulty right now is that I am trading dollars for money.

So I have this thought that if there's a cancellation, if somebody's sick, if my family wants to go on vacation or my son is sick, I need to take him to the doctor.

Anything that comes up that interrupts my nine to five, I don't get paid.

And that was the biggest stressor for me.

I had to figure out something else.

So I said, how can I be a speech pathologist and do what I love and work with families, but not in this model?

And so that's how I opened Hershey Speech and Language Coaching, which is now I work online and I created a course.

It's a 12 week course that parents can take.

There's weekly coaching calls with me.

You know, it's an hour a week that I have a coaching call.

I answer questions all the time and I'm always available, but it's a different kind of available.

The idea is that parents sign up for this course.

They learn.

I get to help teach them how to get their toddlers talking.

I get to teach them the strategies just as I would if they were sitting in my room.

It's a different model now.

I'm not trading dollars for money.

It gives me that flexibility that I was looking for.

To get to the next part of your question, what does it look like right now?

So I'm still building it.

As any mompreneur, any entrepreneur knows, building the business is a lot of work.

Right now I'm working probably more than ever because I didn't stop seeing clients.

Two days a week, I see clients in my office because I don't think I could ever give that up.

I don't want to give up that model completely three days a week I'm building up this business.

Right now.

My life is a little bit crazy.

The idea is that once this business is built up and automated, it will give me that flexibility piece that I've been trying to figure out for so many years.

That's the dream, really.

It's having that flexibility.

And I like the fact that you want to keep part of it in the real world, still seeing clients in your clinic, but at the same time, having all the flexibility comes with an online business.

And at the same time being able to excel or accomplish yourself on different levels and different fields, you don't have to trade off being a mom, even though right now it's still complicated.

Trade off being a professional and earning your own money.

Because that's one of the things that I find also, like, I don't want to be dependent on my husband or partner.

I wanted to be my own woman, right?

And also for our kids, that's really important to show them that we're able to create something and decide how we want to run it.

Even though it might not always be simple.

But definitely that period of building, I think that's one where so many people just give up.

Because it's not easy.

It's not easy.

And I think it's made to look easy even in ads.

You'll see I did this one thing and it changed my entire business.

I implemented this one thing that set my business off to six, seven figures.

You'll see ads like that all the time when you do become an entrepreneur and you start looking into these things.

But it's never just that.

And I think that social media has a big hand.

It's one of my biggest platforms.

But it does have the effect that everything is easy, right?

You see my life videos of me.

It looks easy, right?

I'm sitting here recording videos.

But what you don't see behind the scenes is that I was stuck in traffic because I just had to take my son to camp and I had to fill the car with gas.

And we.

We're also moving.

So this morning, while my one and a half year old was like shoving his face with chocolate chip pancakes, I'm stuffing boxes.

You don't see that stuff on social media.

I'm building a business and look how great it is.

I really fell for that trap because even though I'm a marketer and I do social media as my job, when I was preparing for the maternity break, basically I fell for it.

I felt like, oh, they seem to make it, you know, easy.

It's possible.

I can do it.

I just have to do it, basically.

And then I thought, like, okay, I'm going to plan ahead.

I'm going to take fewer clients, I'm going to close a few deals, and that way I'm going to be able to just focus on my baby for three months.

I also did some work ahead of time, so I don't need to worry.

Except it doesn't go that smoothly.

Never does.

I was a bit shocked at how naive I was.

I say that to my husband all the time.

You know what?

Exactly what you just said.

I can do it.

I just need to do it.

But what does that actually look like behind the scenes?

And it's messier.

Very much.

It's messier than what social media makes it, especially when kids are involved.

Without kids, being an entrepreneur is hard, and building a business is hard, no matter what your lifestyle is.

When you add kids and being needed in a different way into the mix, it's just tenfold.

Because my mind is never completely on my business.

My mind is, where's my little guy right now?

How's the older one at camp?

Do we have enough diapers at home?

Did I make sure to pick up milk?

It's everywhere.

Now that you have that experience.

If you have a friend that's about to have a baby and she's running her own business, what would you tell her?

That's a really good question.

I think a lot of it would depend on the business.

But my biggest piece of advice right now, and it's something that I didn't do in my private practice, and quite frankly, it's still not really done in my private practice.

It's mostly done in my coaching, is automate things, get a great team in place.

I hired clinicians, and I thought that would cover it, but I ended up managing the clinicians and taking on my own caseload.

You're starting by yourself?

That can run.

I'm reading a book right now called it has to Run Like Clockwork.

I'll get the actual name.

And it's about building your business so that it runs like clockwork, so that you can step away and the business can run itself.

It's Something I learned late because I've only been an entrepreneur for maybe eight years, which in the grand scheme of things is not that long.

But it's something that I'm really taking to heart now with kids that you really need to automate and make it so that the business can run without you.

And that would be my biggest piece of advice, is to have your business run like clockwork without you.

I'm not there by any means, but I know that's what needs to happen.

Yeah, it's tough because we're so involved and I find it very difficult to delegate.

For this show, I hired an editor and I'm so glad I did because I'm learning enough new stuff already.

I don't need to learn how to edit, but at the same time, it's.

Is he going to do it right?

And it's definitely part of how do you organize the business in a way that makes sense so that you have less to do, but it's still yours and it's still fully you and you're actually making money out of it.

Exactly.

There are parts of the business that you should know how to do before you hand it off to somebody.

In coaching, there's something called closers, where if you have a sales call, you can hire somebody to have this call for you.

Their job is to close the sale.

They're a closer.

I don't have these yet, but the idea is that you have to do enough sales calls to be able to train someone to do that.

That's just one example, but you have to know your limitations.

Something like editing.

I don't feel like I need to know how to edit before I hand that off to someone or when I hire out for social media, someone to do that.

So it's really knowing how to delegate and delegating correctly.

Yeah.

It's something that I'm trying to incorporate in with this podcast.

I don't know yet if I'll hire out people to do social media or newsletters, but even for myself, I want to batch work from month to month.

There are things I might forget how to do.

Like what?

With the software, whatever.

So having standard operating procedures written down, that will be one way that whether it's me doing it or handing it off to someone else, everything is written down that you don't have to keep it all in your head.

You can actually just take the time, write it down on paper and so that there's no guesswork whether it's from yourself or someone else.

Yeah.

And I think jumping off of this topic, something that you don't see on social media with mompreneurs entrepreneurs, is the team behind it.

You see the face, you see the person.

And for a long time, that's why I ran my business the way I did, because I was supposed to do everything I did.

Billing, scheduling, hiring, paperwork, evaluations, everything.

I did everything because nobody told me otherwise.

And that's what social media does.

You see my face on social media, and you'll see me teaching you speech strategies, coaching parents and giving advice and tips.

But you don't see the team behind what's going on social media and hiring a team, having standard operating procedures, having things in place loom videos.

Right.

You can record your screen on exactly how to do things.

There are very easy ways to do this now, so.

So that when you do hire, you say, here's your folder.

Here's what you do, and that's it.

It's like raising a kid.

Exactly.

It's a team approach.

Exactly.

And so now I'd like to get a better understanding of how you help parents.

Because my son is only 11 months old, he's making syllables.

Sometimes it sounds like I'm imagining stuff because when he was a newborn, I was sure he was screaming milk in French.

So it's like an easy sound, like.

And I was like, my God, he's like, asking for milk.

And then I was like, no, I'm making this up in my own mind.

And now it sometimes sounds like he's saying maman.

And I'm like, he can't be saying mommy.

And my partner and my mom are both like, yes, yes, yes.

And I'm like, no, I know better.

Now tell us about how you help parents.

How does that work?

What are some of the issues that kids might be facing, and how do you help them?

I coach parents of toddlers who are late talking.

These are toddlers between about 17, 18 months, up to a little bit younger than three, who have expressive language difficulties, but no other concerns.

They don't have any receptive language difficulties.

And receptive language is how you understand language.

What's the directions being told to you, what you process as language versus expressive, which is talking and communicating.

And it's not always just talking.

It's gestures.

It's.

It's sign language.

It's other ways of communicating.

Communicating.

Only concern is expressive language.

And there are specific strategies to teaching these toddlers how to build their vocabulary.

When parents come to me in speech therapy, I'm using these strategies and I'm implementing them, and it looks a Lot like play, but there's a lot of going on.

It actually came to fruition during COVID which was also around the time I had my son.

And everything had to go virtual.

Whether you were 2 years old or 25 years old, if you wanted.

Speech therapy had to be virtual.

What I started doing then was no 2 year old is going to sit and look at a screen ever.

And so I had to shift my model and I shifted completely into parent coaching.

And what I would do is I'd have the parents set up play and follow their child.

I would have them put an AirPods so they could hear me and I could hear what was going on.

And I tell them exactly what to do and what strategy to use.

The screen was just there for the camera.

I was coaching the parents and these kids were making gains.

In a few weeks they were saying words.

In a few months they were done, they were discharged from therapy versus what I only knew how to do before, which was I always coach the parents a little bit.

They'd sit in on the sessions, but not to this extent.

And kids would end up coming to me for over a year to build their vocabulary, learn the skills to talk.

So that's how it started.

Fast forward to now.

I exclusively coach parents of these late talkers on the strategies.

So if you take my course, I teach you every strategy, how to implement it with videos of me doing it.

So the idea is that these kids are getting speech therapy at home, during play, at the grocery store, at the park, on the school pickup line, on the airplane.

They're getting speech everywhere for 50 plus hours a week because their parents know the strategies.

They're not relying on a speech therapist to come for 30 minutes a week and then leave.

That's incredible.

That's this model and it's unbelievable.

Like the accelerated progress that kids are making through parent coaching is honestly unmatched.

A big part of this specific program is that it's really hands on.

So you'd meet with me once a week, you get coached weekly and I'm making sure that you understand these strategies, you understand what you're doing, how you're doing it.

Because otherwise, you know, parents fall down the Google rabbit hole and look for strategies on how to teach their kids to talk.

What happens if the strategies don't work?

They have nowhere to turn, they have no one to go to, they have no coach, there's no one coaching them.

So it's very hands on.

Did you expect such a result when you started the online coaching?

I had a pretty good Idea because I shifted a lot of my model to parent coaching.

I think parents are very hesitant to do virtual therapy because they think their toddler might be sitting in front of a screen for a half hour when really it should be just parent coaching.

And so I knew it was incredibly effective because I've coached parents before.

It's incredible the progress they make.

And what's really cool is because you're training the parents, if they have another child, they know exactly what to do.

Yeah, right.

It's that team approach.

Everyone is trained.

A babysitter, a grandparent, both parents.

Whoever is in that toddler's circle, their team is being trained on these strategies.

So it's a really full approach versus the traditional one to one therapy, which just looks very different and takes a lot longer.

I want to ask you one last question.

In a few years time, when your sons are a little bit older, what do you wish they would say about you?

That's a really good question.

I would hope that they would say that I was always there, that I was always present.

I asked my son, my older one, I'll ask him, do you know what mommy does?

And because I bring home all these toys from work and I like switch out my toys all the time, I'll tell him, you know, I teach kids like you how to talk.

I would hope that once he understands what that means, they'll think I help a lot of people and make a difference in people's lives and in their lives.

So achieving that balance between being a mompreneur and being a mom, I want to reach that balance so that my kids can say, you're always there for everything that we do and you make a difference in other people's lives also, and somehow you do it all.

But I don't think they'll have the capacity to say that.

Maybe it will take them to be adults and have their own families to really understand all the efforts that came behind it.

Difference.

Exactly.

Where can we all find out more about you and the things that you do?

Sure.

So you can follow me on Instagram.

It's Hershey Speech Coach.

H E R S H E y Speech Coach.

You can join my Facebook group, which is called the Tiny Talkers Toolkit.

That's the name of my program for parent coaching, the Tiny Talkers Toolkit, teaching parents to teach their toddlers how to talk.

Wonderful.

We'll put the links in the show notes as well.

Yeah.

Thank you so much for being on this show.

I had a really great time.

It was lovely to get to know you.

Thank you so much for having me.

It's really nice to connect with other mompreneurs, talk about parenting, business, you know, lay it all out there.

So there you have it.

I really enjoyed this conversation with Tala.

One of the key takeaways for me is that building a business takes time and effort, that there are going to be a lot of challenges that come along the way.

And it's really about being realistic of what it is to run a business.

Our expectations, of course, our mindsets, but also that we can connect with others that are going through the same thing.

And that's basically why I started a Facebook group for hey Boss Mama podcast, because I want to be able to connect with other moms, other entrepreneurs, and I hope that we build a community where we can really support and encourage each other.

So join me on Facebook.

The link is in the description.