Design Your Dream Life

Speaker 1: [Music] hi I'm Melanie bar welcome to the she builted experience with Melanie you're here because you want to experience the life and business that you crave join me as I talk to women who have successfully built it a career and business that they love we dive into the topic of how they built it and talk about everything from Having the courage to make career leaps to the details of how to lead effectively create successful teams Implement strategies for growth and Infuse Tech innovation magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy so let's dive in Camille is the founder and editor-in chief of leading lifestyle digital publication Camille Styles an influential go-to resource for inspiration and advice on elevating everyday experiences with an audience that reaches more than 50 million impressions each month across its site and social media channels thank you for joining us Camille share with us who you are what you do and what gave you the courage to launch your business thank you so much for having me I am the founder and editorinchief of Camille Styles a lifestyle publication online where our team of editors shares daily content to help you live the life you dream about I started the site 12 years ago it was definitely the early days of blogging it was pre- Twitter definitely pre- Instagram things were really different when I think about what inspired me to start the site initially I have to admit it's very different than my motivation for the site right now at the time I was an event planner in my early 20s I started the site as kind of a side creative Outlet to have a chance to write more and to Market my business and it's hilarious looking back at those early posts there was definitely a Martha Stewart Vibe of planning the perfect party and making the perfect food and just overall perfection messaging and as I got older and my site became the full-time focus of what I do I started blogging full-time my purpose evolved into one that was less about perfection and more about encouraging our audience to be their authentic selves and embrace their imperfections and explore all of the different categories that we talk about from food to design to entertaining to Beauty in a way that's really about bringing their dream life life to be and not trying to create the dream life that someone else says that they're supposed to have coming out of Co having a party and having a beautiful event with lovely food sounds so good and it's so nice to be able to see everyone again yeah it's been really amazing to see people's excitement coming out of Co to just gather together with their friends and family again those couple of years reminded us all how important those in-person connections and experiences are are one thing that I've noticed that's a bit of a shift is preco we talked more about bigger parties and Gatherings and celebrations and postco I find myself wanting to lean into those intimate everyday kinds of gatherings inviting friends over on a random Wednesday evening to open a bottle of wine and just share some time together I think it's those like more everyday kind of opportunities to connect that people are really excited about maybe even more so than the big life celebrations that's so true we do family cooking now and before either my husband would cook or I would cook but we never cook together as a family and now we look forward to doing that and it's so much fun so I completely agree with you on the small Gatherings and those really intimate moments and I read one of the articles on your blog I can so appreciate a nicely designed Pantry or beautiful room but you're right we're not perfect and every day isn't going to look like that I will admit there is a calm that comes across when you walk into a room and it's and it's beautiful but you're right not every moment's going to look like that it's finding the things that light you up and that you actually find Joy from I definitely get a lot of Joy from my organized pantry and like you said even the ritual of organizing the pantry or prepping ingredients for a dinner designing a room those can all be things that are very calming and bring a lot of joy into your life if that's the intention it's more about doing it for yourself and in a way that like brings joy and meaning to you and your family's life and not doing it because someone else says that your pantry is supposed to look a certain way and even when I'm working if I have a busy day and I walk into my office and somehow my office becomes the place where everyone comes in because I'm usually sitting in my office and drops things and all of a sudden the office is a complete mess and I'll walk in I'll have a really busy day and I'll think okay I cannot think straight until the office is clean absolutely that connection the intersection between design and your home with mental health and wellness is something that I'm so interested in we create a lot of design content for the site and interview a lot of designers and there's no question that our surroundings have such a huge effect on our mental States as we realize how key our homes are to how we feel about our lives it's been fun for a lot of people to find their homes as this new canvas for creativity and approaching their homes from the perspective of part of their self-care or wellness and even when it comes to the way that I design a space I always like to start with that question of how do I want to feel when I'm in a room do I want my bedroom to make me feel calm and do I want my office to make me feel energized and those are the questions that I let guide my design choices that's so smart because when you walk into a room especially when you're ready to work you want to feel that energy yeah absolutely especially since so many of us are working from home now what is your approach to management leading your teams and what do you think is the most crucial element of leadership in order to grow I love talking about teams because it's something that especially for business owners the right team can be your greatest asset a team that's not structured properly or that doesn't necessarily have the right players on it can be truly your greatest detriment and all Al make your life a a nightmare so I'm passionate about the topic of how do you build the right team how do you manage them and it's something that I've learned by doing my team is structured in an interesting way relative to how it used to be we have five team members who I work with every single day five incredible women who just bring so much joy to my work life and I'm continuously so inspired by the creativity and intelligence and wisdom that they bring to each of their roles and then we have a team of 15 contributing editors who live around the country and all work remote and they're creating content for the site and we're meeting weekly the biggest shift that we've made over the last couple of years is going to a completely remote model like so many other companies and then also relying more heavily on contractors and Freelancers to build out our team but doing it in a way where those contractors are still such an integral part of our team team and share my vision for where we're taking the company and what we want to share with our audience a few years back by contrast we had a larger team I had I think including myself eight full-timers and we had a big beautiful Studio space in downtown Austin and on paper all the things that I dreamed about in terms of building my business but I discovered that I felt very restrained by that business model a lack of freedom I was constantly stressed out I had set up the business in a way where I hadn't been very thoughtful about the structure a few months before Co we ended up giving up our studio and changing up the team structure it was one of the best things I did but it was really hard because sometimes I think when you're building a business having a larger team is this vanity metric that makes you feel more successful and so the last few years I've been trying to get clear on what is the ideal size for our team and I've landed on around four or five five core team members is kind of The Sweet Spot for us and I think it's obviously different for every business owner depending on your needs and and what you're creating it's often trial and error to find what that right balance is making sure that every single person on the team is working in their zone of genius and doing what they're best at and what brings them more energy in a way where they're contributing something to the team that no one else can contribute in the same way that they can that's what I've tried to create create with our current team structure and it makes the managing aspect a lot easier because everyone is able to take ownership of what they're doing hopefully they're executing better than I could in their particular role and I've seen as a manager how much more excited and passionate my team members are when they own something that they are good at and constantly be evolving and improving and growing at and then of course as an organization we're that much stronger because everyone on the team is just a total rockar good for you for giving yourself permission to Pivot out of having your physical location because sometimes we think we want things especially when you run a business and the business has never existed before sometimes you don't know until you try and it's great that you pivoted out of that and I agree with you on working with contractors because you're right work is done so much better when someone is in their zone of Genius when they're doing what they like instead of turning on their computer and thinking oh I have to do this but I don't really love it yeah absolutely being able to bring the right contractors on the team has it's also just been such a financially Wise Way for us to continue to scale and grow this year we've worked with an SEO consultant and a new developer and some of these team members that as a small business I wouldn't be able to afford to have some of these experts full-time but the fact that I'm able to work with these incredibly skilled experts in their field on a contract basis and enables us to continue leveling up um and continue growing the business in a way that is much more scalable for us but also in a way that we can stay small and Scrappy from an overhead point of view and sometimes it's great to work with a contractor that can pop in for two months sometimes a contractor doesn't want a long-term project sometimes they do but you can gain so much knowledge working with someone on a project on a short-term basis absolutely especially when you have a very clear goal that you're trying to achieve whether it's the site redesign or right now we're going through a big SEO audit to clean out a lot of our old content and boost our ultimate SEO ranking so projects like that are really great to work with specific contractors on where you have a very clearly defined set of goals and then a clear end dat where you're not paying for them necessarily forever and ever and it makes room for to work with other people and other collaborations yeah and I'm a mom of twins and so I've learned if I want to learn something fast hire an expert or a contract for a couple months because then I get take get to take in the knowledge so much more quickly oh you learn so much working with people who are so good at what they do your media company reaches 50 million across all of your channels tell us more about it how you grew it and why you're so passionate about it I don't think that I could have ever dreamed that the site and our other channels like our newsletter and social media channels would be what they are today and I wish I could say that it was this master plan that I dreamed up 12 years ago slowly methodically work towards but it was definitely much more about starting with what I knew which was writing and and creating I was a journalism major in college so I've always loved telling stories and being really curious about digital media and learning as I go in the very beginning like I mentioned my the blog was kind of a a marketing tool for my event planning business a way for me to have fun and have a creative Outlet of my own as I continued learning about the digital media space and continued creating content I started to grow an audience and I got really excited about this platform to share with a a larger and larger number of people and then at some point a couple of years into it I'll never forget going to my first blogger conference and selling my first Banner ad and it was kind of a fake it till you make it situation I knew nothing about ad sales and even what that looked like in the digital space it was my first kind of aha moment that I could actually make this a business and it's something that I could make money from in the years since we've evolved so much as the digital media landscape has evolved social media has obviously become a huge component of what we do the whole digital media landscape has changed but for me that's been really exciting because it means continual growth and evolution and always being Nimble and flex ible enough to change even our strategy based on what's happening in the space What continues to excite me and what has stayed the same through all of that is my passion for creating great content that resonates with our audience and that speaks into their lives and speaks into their particular pain points our success has really been about that focus on content and having kind of an empathy for our readers I always encourage anyone writing for the site to put themselves in the shoes of the reader when they're writing and think about what is that actual pain point or problem that we're speaking to that we're helping solve and speaking to a person when you're writing not writing to a demographic but writing in the same way that you would if you were talking to your best friend or your mom and having that connection through the screen has been really important to just building this brand when it comes to creating great cont content in general one thing that I've learned and that has evolved more over time is not being afraid to have a point of view it's a scary times in media to have a point of view because obviously we've all seen a lot of very divisive thinking when people don't agree with a certain standpoint however I do believe that if you water down your message so much that it pleases everyone and doesn't ruffle any feathers it will get lost and no one will notice it pay attention to it care about it having a point of view and knowing what it is and then being able to communicate that in a way that feels authentic to you is really a key to just creating great content and resonating with your audience that's such good advice and so important to show up who we are and who we are is having a point of view and when I look through your website is so beautiful when I look through the pages of the beautifully organized rooms and you had posted a post on five things you should clean in your house that you're probably not cleaning I I had to know I thought what are those five things one of them I checked in my house and actually needed to do a little bit better job cleaning to your point about just staying true to what feels authentic to you that really comes through especially when when people ask my advice about their social media strategy or what they should be doing on Instagram or how to create a brand on social media I always go back to that same message that you really do have to stay authentic to who you truly are in the early days of creating content online it was really tempting for me to look at all the content that was out there and all the people doing amazing things and try to emulate little bits of what I was seeing that were seemingly working for other people and what I learned pretty quickly was that just because something was working for one person doesn't mean that it would work for me because that was probably authentic for that person and it was them showing themsel and that's why it was res res ating with people but it doesn't work if you're trying to emulate someone else if it's not reflective of who you are my biggest piece of advice there is to always do what actually lights you up and what makes you feel inspired and what feels natural for you it's okay to not be constantly consuming what everyone else is doing in fact I think that that can sometimes be a huge detriment because it can be a distraction to to what you should be doing online which is probably something that's more related to your core business than who you really are it's so true and even now on video it's so clear if you're not being your authentic self I actually read a quote the other day that I loved I wrote it down and shared with my entire team the quote was no one wants to eat a cake that you hated baking and I immediately thought about certain things that we tried on social media whether it was a certain Tik Tok Trend or something that felt like it was going to work for the algorithm that our heart wasn't in it and those things always fall flat because it's not fun to consume something that someone didn't enjoy creating always going back to what do you have fun creating and what feels natural for who you really are that's ultimately what will resonate the most so true magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy what is one tip that you can leave with us today about how you find and live your joy my morning ritual is something that I do every every single day that brings me so much joy it mostly consists of really looking at my goals for all the different parts of my life not just work also my health and my family my home dreams for the future and then I take that to a practical level and look at my calendar and look at how I'm spending my day and my week and how my schedule is reflecting my goals or not and I recalibrate where I need to and that's my number one daily practice that helps me stay intentional with the way I'm spending my time and make sure that I'm creating time in my life for the things that matter most to me thank you so much for joining me can you please tell our listeners how and where they can find you yes Camille styles.com is the website you can sign up for our newsletters to get every week emails and Camille Styles is my handle across all the socials thank you for joining us today I'd love to hear from you reach out to me at hello Sheil it.com on our Sheil it website or at Sheed on social thank you to my editor Rich draino who always makes us sound good until next time let nothing stop you from experiencing the life and business that you crave