We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Tracy Stanger. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Tracy below.

Tracy, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How do you think about vacations as a business owner? Do you take them and if so, how? If you don’t, why not?

Yes, I take vacations regularly – partly because they were so hard to come by at my 9-5 and partly because I know how important it is to your productivity, creativity, and the sustainability of your business to have regular periods of rest. Your brain needs that free space to do the work of dreaming up new ideas and finding your best solutions to problems.

The type of rest and the frequency are up to you and what you need in this season of your life and your business. When do you start feeling sluggish? When does stuff that’s usually easy start getting harder? It’s time for a break (or might be past time).

I’ve found I start heading toward burnout if I work more than three months straight without a break, so I schedule space to take about a week off every quarter. I also started giving myself about 3 weeks off in December and the whole month of July off.

A lot of my “vacations” are just spending time at home with my family, not working. But I also love to run off for a camping trip or a stay at the ocean. In the summer, we spend a lot of time up in the mountains, by the lakes.

You can make space for vacations, that rest you need to reset, by planning for them *first* and building your business revenue goals and tasks around that downtime.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’ve been in business in one way or another for about 26 years now – from working at my family’s diner to running my own online businesses to leading teams at a traditional 9-5 right before starting this business.

At my 9-5, I was moved around from team to team to help streamline their processes. With each new team, (thanks to my Questioner tendency), I’d ask alllllll the questions – what do we do here? why do we do it that way? how can we make this easier for you to get done even better? We focused on the desired results, and then found the best way for them to get there.

When I returned to that job after maternity leave, I quickly learned that juggling a 40-hour a week job with mothering my new baby was just not going to work for me. I was getting my job done (and done well) in way less hours than that, but still expected to be butt-in-seat at the office instead of at home with my kid where I wanted to be – and more often, needed to be – because she was constantly bringing home germs from daycare.

I knew my results-focused process could help moms (and myself) find the time for meaningful work AND motherhood, so I started this business to share it with busy moms in business.

I help my clients build businesses that matter (to them, to their clients, and to the world because we’re doing people-first business), that they can enjoy, profit from, and still have time for being a whole human person and parent.

I teach how to do just YOUR most impactful tasks, and make it easier to get those things done (what I call Less But Better™ business). You can do that by focusing on your personality tendencies and strengths to find the offers, marketing and sales strategies, and actual day-to-day work habits that work best for YOU. That’s how you make your work easier, come out faster, and get better results for your clients and your business.

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

I was preparing to debut my signature coaching program. But when I sat down to write the sales emails – you know, the series of emails that Online Business tells you you have to have during your “launch” – I just froze. I found myself sitting at my computer, staring at the window, very much NOT writing my emails.

When you feel a giant aversion to something, like I was here, that’s usually a hint that it’s not a thing that YOU should be doing. We don’t have to do all the “shoulds.” So instead, I assigned myself new work for that day: go sit outside and watch the birds. (Because giving your brain a rest like that will often kickstart it into figuring out whatever problem you’re facing, YOUR way.)

It was a beautiful spring day and I sat in my backyard, literally just looking up at the sky from my adirondack chair, kind of watching the clouds, kind of watching the birds, not TRYING to do anything.

Eventually my mind wandered back to this problem – how to prep for the launch of my program – but instead of “how to write those emails,” I let it think about “how to let my people (and new people) know the details about this program so they can make a confident decision about whether it’s for them” and “how to do all that in a way that actually sounds fun and I can bring myself to sit down and do.”

Within the hour, I had it all figured out: I would host a series of live interviews on Instagram (because I do better talking things out with people and Instagram is the only place I hang on social media), teaching how sales can be so much simpler when you just make sure you’re sharing the Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How with your people (because I’m in my element teaching and coaching, and I believe customers value clarity over clever copy), each episode showcasing one of my friends – and potential clients – as they discussed the Who, What, When, Where, Why, or How of their thing (and then I got to talk about that topic for my program, too).

This series, along with private conversations, a handful of emails I actually wanted to write, and probably most importantly, the ease that came from turning this launch into something more fun for ME, resulted in filling my program with perfect-fit clients (my most successful launch financially and energetically!).

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

The best strategy is always gonna be the one that works best for YOU, that uses your personality tendencies and strengths and forgets about all the Online Business “shoulds.”

So I’ve been trying to go all in on the Most Tracy ideas and it’s been working out, steadily building my clientele with my perfect-fit clients, that I enjoy working with (and even hanging out with), whose businesses I really believe in 100%.

Some of those strategies that have worked for me…

I pulled from my experience creating what our local business magazine called a “homey and quirky” atmosphere at my family’s diner, and my years of kinda holding court at my local coffeehouse – welcoming my friends, their friends, and the strangers at the next table to my table to talk about anything and everything – to create my Coffeehouse Table, a weekly Zoom meeting where people can get to know me and each other, which leads to deeper relationships and actual connection-making really easily.

I realized how much I love meeting people in small groups like my Coffeehouse Table, and how much more effective it was for actually socializing, so I’ve joined more groups and more opportunities to meet just a handful of people at a time, and then I nurture those new relationships with DM voice messages and just being human.

Instead of trying to please the Instagram algorithm or succumb to making the Reels I had no interest in, I used my friend Kristen Achziger’s 9-Grid strategy to turn my Instagram profile into a mini sales funnel and help the new people who find me to understand the work I do and how I can help them, which has lead to new faces turning into real relationships and clients much faster. All of my audience growth comes from clients and friends sharing my work, or just speaking my name in rooms I’m not in.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.tracystanger.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tracy.stanger/