An interview with Katie Santoro, founder of River City Virtual Asistants. Katie combined years of experience in the legal and insurance industry with the experience gained running her first business venture, a yoga studio, to assist clients in a wide array of industries with everything from basic admin tasks, to marketing and website building.
Katie Santoro founded River City Virtual Assistants in 2020 at the beginning of the global pandemic and at the end of a very long period of burnout.
When the weight of the world feels like it's resting on your shoulders, sometimes the bravest thing you can do is set it down. That's exactly what Katie Santoro, founder of River City Virtual Assistants, teaches us through her own story of overcoming burnout and reshaping her life's priorities.
Our discussion revolves around Katie's experiences navigating career paths, establishing boundaries at work, addressing burnout, and crafting a balanced life. Katie's entrepreneurial journey has led her to create a flexible, supportive work environment for her team and forge a path towards a world free from the stresses of burnout
“Our mission has evolved from keeping women in the workforce to crafting world free of burnout. So we help our team members do that by allowing them to balance their caretaking and work responsibilities, and then we help our clients do the same. So entrepreneurs, solo entrepreneurs they're trying to do it all. And we believe you shouldn't have to do it all and you don't have to do it all. So we help them craft a world free of burnout by matching with one of our assistants who has the skills that they need to help them take some things off their plate.” - Katie Santoro
Key takeaways:
- Before going on to graduate school, see if you will actually enjoy working in the profession you’re choosing to study. Katie had assumed that she would attend graduate school in order to improve her earnings power, and started “playing” with the idea of attending law school. She decided to work at a law firm and is so glad she did because, six months later, she realized that the culture was not for her. She figures she saved herself hundreds of thousands of dollars of tuition costs!
- Notice when you’re choosing the burnout. Katie described experiencing classic symptoms of burnout: gaining weight, skin breaking out, being exhausted but not sleeping. Upon further exploration, it became clear that that burnout wasn’t simply from working in an unfulfilling job. Instead, it came from having too much on her plate as she tried to find alignment by opening and managing a yoga studio while keeping her full time job! She had bought into the cultural message that she had to do it all!
- Take an inventory of your skills when considering a career pivot. Running a yoga studio was no longer enjoyable for Katie, to say the least, when the pandemic hit in 2020. So, Katie took an inventory of her skills. She had worked as a paralegal for a number of years. She had litigation experience, as well as a number of licenses and certifications on the insurance side. She put the word out that she was available to freelance, and what became River City Virtual Assistants snowballed from there!
About the Guest:
Katie Santoro is a burnout survivor on a mission to help others avoid the same by offering virtual assistance to business owners and busy professionals, while simultaneously creating employment for individuals who need flexibility in their work style in order to care for their families. In 2019, after a long period of burnout, Katie left her corporate job in the insurance industry to run her first business, a yoga studio. Next, came River City Virtual Assistants where she combined her years of experience in the legal and insurance industry, blended it with her experience running a small business, and began assisting clients as a freelancer.
Now, she and her team of trained virtual assistants assist clients in a wide array of industries with everything from basic admin tasks to content management and website building. River City Virtual Assistants is dedicated to providing reliable, consistent, and intelligent assistance to clients and is committed to providing meaningful employment to parents and caretakers within the USA.
Website: https://rivercity-va.com/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katiesantoro/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rivercity_va/
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Disclaimer: Please remember that the information shared on this podcast does not constitute accounting, legal, tax, investment or financial advice. It’s for informational purposes only. You should seek appropriate professional advice for your specific information.
Katie Santoro
Our mission has evolved from keeping women in the workforce to crafting a world free of burnout. So we help our, you know, our, our team members do that by allowing them to balance their caretaking responsibilities and their work responsibilities. And then we help our clients do the same. So entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, they're really trying to do it all.
And we believe you, you shouldn't have to do it all and you don't have to do it all. So we help them craft a world free of burnout by I'm not sharing with one of our assistants who has the skills that they need to help them take some things off their plate.
Narrator
Welcome to making change with your money, a podcast that highlights the stories and strategies of women who experienced a big life transition and overcame challenges as they redefined financial success for themselves.
Now here's your host. Certified Financial Planner, Laura Rotter.
Laura Rotter
I am so excited to have as my guest today, Katie Santoro. She is a burnout survivor who's on a mission to help others avoid the same by offering virtual assistance to business owners and busy professionals, while simultaneously creating employment for individuals who need flexibility in their work style in order to care for their families.
Katie founded River City Virtual Assistance, combining her years of experience in the legal and insurance industry with her experience running a small business. So welcome Katie to the Making Change With Your Money podcast.
Katie Santoro
Thank you for having me.
Laura Rotter
So I'm going to ask the question I always start my podcast with, which is Katie, what was money like in your family growing up?
Katie Santoro
This is such a good question, like way to just dive into the deep end. So I would say for me, it was a very complex character in our lives. I have. Divorce parents. So, you know, it's not that one parent was didn't want to contribute. Everyone was contributing, but you're handling two different households at that point.
So sometimes. There was plenty. Sometimes there was, you know, not enough and it was just kind of the, you know, the flow of it. It's really interesting because I look now on how growing up with a single mom and having those kind of like height financial spots, how that affects me and and my money management.
And then I'm actually 1 of 4. So I have 2 older brothers that are. We share a mom and then my younger sister has a different mom with with my dad and my stepmomand we all have vastly different ideas of money and different ways that we see it in our lives. And for me, it's always a character that's there.
It's always something that I'm very aware of and pay a lot of attention to. And for some of my siblings, it's not at all. So I just think it's very interesting how we all grew up with a similar situation, but yet very, very different outcomes. So where were you in the birth order? My two brothers are older than me, and then my younger sister is ten years younger than me.
So we've got a big gap, but I'm very fortunate in that we all get along really well, and I'm close with all of them, so that's great. It's kind of hard to do when there's that many, but they're great.
Laura Rotter
Oh, so nice. And I think it's very true, Katie, that though we grow up perhaps with the same parents and some might write, you grew up with the same mother.
And yet she was certainly different when you were born than when your younger daughter was born than when your older brothers. We're born and you were a different personality. So I think we all get different parenting and different messages.
Katie Santoro
Yeah. And it depends on what it hits us, right? Like where in your formative years are you and how aware are you even of the things that are going on?
Because when you're younger, you're not aware of money being there or not there. And it's not really something that hits you until you're older, at which point. Life can be completely different than it is for your siblings who may have moved out already, you know?
Laura Rotter
Very, very true. And we all are born with our own personalities and our own predispositions, which I have seen with my own children in terms of some being more easy to spend and others, you know, hoarding everything.
So where were you on that continuum?
Katie Santoro
Oh, I am the hoarder. I am the money hoarder. Always been the saver. I always, I've been a save first and then spend. So I always do that, uh, that analysis of need versus want needs. You have to pay for your needs, but then I really like sit hard on something I want before I, before I get it.
So. And how did that play out when you were younger? I think that I've always been a little bit like loan giver to the siblings. You know, like when we were, when we were younger, it was, you know, I always had my piggy bank full of money. And, and now that we're older, I mean, I don't have to do it as much, but certainly in our, in our twenties, you know, every once in a while, it'd be, Hey, Kate, can I get a couple hundred dollars?
And I always had it because I was a saver. And always interest free, interest free.
Laura Rotter
And clearly that was your reputation, so they knew who to turn to. Yep. So growing up, Katie, did you take it for granted that you were going to go to college, you know, given the family finances?
Katie Santoro
You know, it was 1 of those things where I was told that I should go to college.
It wasn't something that was necessarily saved for. We did have my grandfather had saved money for us, but we didn't have access to him to that due to the way that the trust is set up. We didn't have access until he passed away. And I was very fortunate. He didn't pass away until his. Early 90s, so he was with me all through college, but, you know, when I, when I decided to go to college, the money was not there.
I was not emotionally ready to go to college. I think. So, the 1st, couple of years, I goofed off. I took semesters off. I. You know, went back and one semester I took nothing but physical education courses because I had to keep my health insurance. So I was taking like kickboxing and tennis and finally got to the point where I said, you know what?
I don't think that I'm going to take this seriously. If anybody is helping me, so I cut myself off. I worked full time. I. I paid for my associates and then my bachelors. I paid for my associates myself. I did take a couple of loans with my bachelors that I was able to pay off a couple of years after graduating because my grandfather passed away.
So it. You know, it was something that I was told I had to do. I'd never really thought about how I would pay for it. And then it all just kind of worked out. And I am one of the very, very fortunate ones who does not carry loans.
Laura Rotter
That's so true. I mean, so many people have student loans. It's something that I think it's so important to advise on because the banks or the government will just lend to you and.
The advice I always give is look at what you think your salary is going to be first year out, depending on what you may insure in, and over the four years, don't take more than that amount of loans. And that's a hard thing to hear because, again, you can take as many loans as you want, but then you're going to spend the rest of your life paying them off.
Katie Santoro
Yeah. And I think also understanding how that loan works, not just with student loans, but any loan you're taking, you know, student loans, the way that the interest works and you kind of defer it while you're in school and. You end up paying it off until, I mean, my husband carries a loan and he's still, he's in his mid forties.
I mean, some people carry those until they're in their sixties. And it's because you don't understand what you're doing when you're 18. When somebody's saying, here's this money, you're like, Oh, heck yeah. Like let's take a vacation and I'll buy my textbooks and some new shoes. And you're just not thinking about it.
Right. And it really comes back to bite you. But I know my generation, I don't know how high school has changed now, but we weren't taught any financial literacy in high school at all. Nothing. I can make scrambled eggs and fried rice, but I can't balance a checkbook. So those are the skills we were taught, right?
More of the homemaking skills and the finance skills, so.
Laura Rotter
Or woodworking, if you're, if you're a guy. No, very, very true. It's really, I think, a big failing that we don't know about credit cards and how they work. We don't know about loans and how they work. We don't know how much we should spend, as you said, on needs versus wants.
So when you went back and took it seriously. What was your interest? What did you, what did you major in?
Katie Santoro
Oh yes, so my major was in religious studies, which is completely random and off the wall. I kind of got to the point where I realized I had to just choose something that I enjoyed studying or I wasn't going to finish.
So I chose that I was, you know, working full time. I went to school full time and I just loved it. I started a club. I started the religious studies society because there wasn't 1 at our school. I studied abroad. I went to Israel and did a study and independent study abroad there and it's just something that that I loved.
Loved my major. I focused on women in the Western religions. So Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and I always wanted to, you know, young 20 year old Katie wanted to go out and save the world and make the world a better place for women. And that's kind of played into what I do now.
Laura Rotter
I love that you were mission driven and clearly a leader, even in your younger.
age that you started this club, that you, and I love that you followed your heart. I'm assuming when you graduated though, you know, you did not pursue an academic career?
Katie Santoro
I did not. No, I, so I got a job because that's what you're supposed to do, right? And I was kind of trying to figure out the next steps that I wanted to take.
And I wanted to go back to school. I didn't think that my bachelor's would be the end of my education. And I started kind of playing with the idea of law school. So I decided to work at a law firm. How else better to figure out what the culture is all about. And I'm so glad I did that because within 6 months, I was like, I do not want to do this.
And that would have been, you know, the law degrees are not. Inexpensive to come by.So I'm, I'm happy that I did that. I think I saved myself hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Laura Rotter
What kind of law did they practice? That's why I come from a family of law of lawyers, most of them not particularly happy. So I think you've made a good choice.
Katie Santoro
I think there are some happy ones. I think there are. I was insurance defense. So I started as a legal assistant and then worked as a paralegal.
Laura Rotter
So heavy litigation. Representing the insurance companies?
Katie Santoro
The insurance company and the insurance.
Laura Rotter
So when you decided that wasn't for you, what, what was the next thing you explored?
Katie Santoro
So I mean, at that point, I think you just kind of fall into, you know, that the idea that like, you have to have a career. I was always told I had to have a career. You know, my mom never went to college. She struggled with raising us because of that. And she always said, you need to go to college and have a career and take care of yourself first.
Make sure that you can take care of yourself without the help of anyone else. And I was very driven to do that. Perhaps that's part of my trauma that maybe my siblings didn't have the same way that I did. And so I moved into insurance, which is, I went from insurance defense on the legal side to insurance defense as the claims examiner.
So kind of going to being the client of the, of the law firms at that point and. It was a great financial move. I mean, it paid me really well. I was able to save a lot of money. I bought a house saving for retirement, doing all those things, took care of myself and. It was what I was supposed to do. And I hated it. I was miserable.
Laura Rotter
You said that with such a smile. I was about to ask like, you know, what about it did you enjoy?
Katie Santoro
I mean, so I enjoyed in that field, in the insurance side and the legal side. You always have to learn something, right? You get a new case and you're like, This business that we're representing does such and such, and you've never even heard of this type of business before, but you have to research it to understand what's going on.
So there's always something to learn. There's always a new direction to look at. There's always, you've got to look at things from like every single angle to kind of anticipate what could happen, what could go wrong. You always have to prepare, like we would always prepare as if going to trial, whether or not you get there, like you always prepare for it.
So I loved that aspect of it. My brain was always working. I always felt like I was learning something new. I liked the pace of it, but I think what I ended up not liking is I didn't feel like I was doing anything good for my soul. It was, it was the golden handcuffs going to work, doing these things. And at the end of the day, I wasn't satisfied in what I was doing.
Money isn't everything, right? I mean, you can do all the things you're supposed to do and have all the things that you need to have, but if you're not happy with. truly happy with what you're doing and feel aligned, then you're going to, you're going to burn out, which is where I went complete burnout.
Laura Rotter
So can you describe like, what does burnout mean to you?
I mean, because of course I can, I can feel the description because I lived it myself of sort of getting up and doing the same thing every day you're learning, but it's not a mission driven pursuit. But how else were you feeling the burnout?
Katie Santoro
Yeah, I am. So I, I felt it a lot of ways spiritually, right? Like not feeling aligned with who I was and what I was doing physically, weight gain, skin breaking out, exhausted, but not sleeping, just not really taking care of myself.
And then you spiral, right? You feel bad. So you're like, I'm going to have this glass of wine and this piece of cake to make myself feel better. And you wake up the next day and you feel worse because you're living off of sugar, you know, and it's just that spiral. And energetically, like I just felt, I always felt frayed.
I always felt like I was just like a live wire, just couldn't calm down. I couldn't regulate my emotions and I started to destroy relationships because I could not stay connected with other people. It was too much for me. Wow.
Laura Rotter
Well, I'm really hearing classic symptoms of burnout. When you say you couldn't keep in touch, is that you were just too busy? You didn't have time?
Katie Santoro
I didn't have the energy. You know, when, when you're putting all your energy into just.Getting through the day, putting one foot in front of the other. You don't have the energy to spend time with your loved ones. You can't show up as your best self.
Laura Rotter
It's very, very true. At that point, I'm assuming you were still single.
Katie Santoro
No, I wasn't.I met my husband. We met in 2016. We started dating in 2016. In 2017, I decided to open my first business and he was there with me for that journey. I opened it in 2018. I left my career in 2019.
Laura Rotter
How long were you at with the insurance? Company, how long were you in insurance claims?
Katie Santoro
About five years, a little over five years.
And the last year of that being working full time in that position. And then I owned a yoga studio. So I was teaching yoga on the side. I was, it was a physical studio. So I was going in cleaning the floors, cleaning the bathrooms, doing all the restocking, managing a team of yoga teachers, and then working full time.
So I really, I like. The burnout was because I had too much on my plate. There was, there was a lot going on and I was trying to find that alignment, right? I knew there was something in yoga that really spoke to me and I wanted to bring it to other people, but it, it took me down a dark path because I had to do it all.
Laura Rotter
I'm curious when you found yoga because I think we shared this that I had a similar path of finding yoga while I was working on Wall Street and doing a yoga teacher training. I did not attempt to open a studio. I did teach in my home when I would get home from work in the evening. So how did you find yoga? When did you find yoga?
Katie Santoro
I can't tell you like a precise time. I think it was one of those things that was always kind of Maybe it's just my generation. Like it was always there. Like we'd go take yoga classes at the, at the gym in college or, you know, take videos on online. I'm sure we had D at one point, but when I, when I turned 30,I decided that I needed to take better care of my body.
Traditionally had not done a great job of doing that. And I started running and.When you run, you injure yourself, especially if you're not doing the right strength training and the right stretching. So yoga kind of became my way to take better care of my body as I was running and then as I did more and more of it, it became the way to take better care of my energy and my, you know, you could call it soul or whatever you feel it is for me.
It's, it's my energy and it just kind of yeah. It became more and more important in my life. And in 2017, with a conversation with my husband, we were on vacation, not married yet. But we were, we were sitting there talking. I said, like, like, is this all there is to life? Like, we go to work every day and we do all the things we're supposed to do.
Right? We contribute to our 401k and we buy a house and we buy a car and we live in the suburbs and we do all these things. I'm like, is this it? Like, is this what we worked for? And he said, well, if you could do anything in life, what would you do? And I was like. Okay. I don't quit my job and open a yoga studio.
And he was like, well, how do you do that? I said, well, I have no idea. I'm going to figure it out. So that's kind of, you know, yoga was there and then it became something that I really wanted to pursue. And I saw it as a way to. kind of get out of this rut that I was in.
Laura Rotter
So you're, you're, you strike me as someone, Katie, who first you described burnout, but it's really because you love to learn.
You love to lead. It sounds like on some level, again, I sort of identify you like to be busy. You almost chose the burnout.
Katie Santoro
I did. And You know, some, there's this theory, we don't really know what causes burnout and why some people get it and some people don't, but there's the theory that it's, you know, you're fighting against your own expectations.
So it was nobody else's expectations. Everybody else thought I was doing great. They were very proud of me. My family has always been proud of me and very vocal about that and supportive. Same with my husband. It was me. It was me pushing myself and never being able to meet my own expectations. So what finally broke?
So in 2017, I had the conversation with my husband in 2018. I opened the yoga studio almost a year to the week of that conversation with him. And in 2019, so I was running the yoga studio. I was working full time. Early 2019, a friend of mine came to visit and she came with her husband and her 2 year old, and they are, we're visiting from, they live in another country.
We grew up together. She's spent her adult life in this other country and she came to visit and I didn't have any time to spend with them. I was working all day. I was in the studio at night. I was doing, you know, marketing things in the evenings and I just didn't have time to spend with them. I didn't get to spend time with her daughter or her or her husband.
And when they left, I realized. I was ruining relationships and that that was it for me. I said, I can't do it anymore. I have to leave my job. And then as the adult I am, I waited for some stock options to vet. So I waited another 6 months before I finally left and I left. My career in 2019, September 19, towards the end of the year, and it all kind of lined up like that.
That month that I left, we had to put my dog down. I had him since college. My husband's mom passed away and my little sister got married. So we had like these really big life events that I was able to be there for. Maybe not 100 percent all in because I was not, it took me a lot longer to recover from burnout than I thought I would.
But for those things to happen in that 1st, month of me leaving my job, I was like, you know what? I made the right choice. Like, these are the things that I wanted to be there for and support people through that. I couldn't before because I didn't have the emotional energy to do it. So, although really, really scary almost immediately.
The universe was like, yep. Great choice. Good job.
Laura Rotter
So I love that and I love that you recognize the role the universe played. Has that always been the case, this sense that you're co creating the universe as opposed to just making it on your own?
Katie Santoro
Yeah, I mean, I guess for a while there, it didn't feel co creating, right?
Like, that's when I was out of alignment. But since I've since I left my, my corporate career and started on this new path, everything has felt very aligned. You know, you asked earlier if I was. You know, single through all this, and my husband was there with me through all of it. But in 2020, when I closed the yoga studio, I talked about going back to work.
And he's the one who said, absolutely not. You were a monster. And we've since had conversations about that conversation, how pivotal that was for me. And he said, we wouldn't be married. 2021. But we never would have gotten there because I was, I was impossible. I was a monster and it's, it's true. I couldn't connect.
I had no patience for people. So I'm very lucky that he was there with me throughout it and stuck through it. But.
Laura Rotter
So you really see that like your personality shifted by giving yourself the freedom to pursue what was important. I just feel the need to share. How important it is to have the support of our partners that I, when I first started my financial planning practice, I think I shared with you, if you build it, they don't always come.
And I remember walking with my husband during the pandemic and thinking, maybe I should go back and look for a position so that I have, you know, a certain amount of income. And It wasn't quite that I had been a monster, but he looked at me and said, you're the most creative I have ever known you to be in your life.
And, and, and so I'm going to ask you, Katie, cause it was scary for me, though. I had, I knew I had the financial means to go without a certain amount of income, but it was scary for me. And it also made me question my worth and, you know, who I was and what I was contributing. And hence it was helpful to have my partner say, no, it's more important that you pursue this path.
So what came up for you? I know you mentioned the practical part of waiting for options to vest, but how did it feel?
Katie Santoro
Yeah, I think very similar. And even still now in my marriage, I don't make as much as him. I run a business. So it's very, you know, I have a salary, but there's still a lot of fluctuation in what I get paid.
And for a while, I had connected my self worth with, with what my income was, and I don't think that was fair, but I had to learnhow to get through that and start to look at other things that I do in my life that bring value, you know. little things like I make dinner every night and I do the meal planning and I keep the house clean like kind of these traditional gender roles that I never would have, you know, wanted to do before.
But now I see that that is, that brings value to my relationship. It brings value to my family and it brings value to myself. Like I never thought I would like mopping the floor, but I mopped the floor. I'm like, right. Like I, there's other ways to kind of value myself, but, but yeah, it was a struggle and it was part of my.
Journey of healing from burnout really like separating myself from like financial or even just like what I do. So, you know, when you're in your corporate career, people ask what you do and well, I'm senior claims examiner and blah blah. And like, I had to separate myself from that because you are not what you you're not your job.
You're not your finances. You're so much more than that.
Laura Rotter
So beautiful message and culturally outside of the box, because everywhere we go, people ask who we are and what we do. Well, now you're a founder of River City Virtual Assistants. How did that come about?
Katie Santoro
So that came about by wanting to go back to work in 2020.
I had a yoga studio that I was still paying the rent on and was still running classes and doing all those things from my office and I wasn't enjoying, enjoying it. And I was going to go back and my husband said, what else can you do? And I said, well, I've always had this idea of like freelancing. You know, I worked as a paralegal for a long time.
I have litigation experience. I have a certification also on the insurance side. I have licenses and certifications that would help me. I'll just freelance. So I kind of just put the word out there that I was going to freelance as, you know, an assistant or whatever anybody needed, and it spiraled from there.
I would say snowballed from there. I started getting clients. I've actually never done any freelance paralegal work. I've, I've, Worked for one attorney on a kind of freelance basis to help with the admin side of it, but not much more than that. And that's just not the direction that I ended up going and started getting clients, started getting really, really busy and then started bringing in my friends that were leaving the workforce or not returning because of childcare.
So I got to go back and connect to that helping women, which is what I wanted to do when I originally went to college and wanted to save the world. This became our original mission was. Keeping women in the workforce, so I was really able to pull from my network. And now we're a team of 18 all women. Now, we say parents and caretakers, but it's, it's mostly women who want to be in the workforce who want to learn new things, but maybe don't want to be in that traditional 9 to 5, or maybe don't have the.
The need or the desire to work full time and being able to kind of balance their lives with their other caretaking responsibilities and not just caretaking responsibilities of their Children, but also caretaking responsibilities of themselves. I don't have children. We're not going to have children, but the amount of care that I have to give to myself on a regular basis for my mental health and stability and to show up and be the best.
Wife and leader and daughter and friend that I can be, it takes a lot of my time to do that. So we, we are open to caregivers that are taking care of children, parents themselves, their dogs, anything. We all have a lot of caretaking to do in our lives.
Laura Rotter
I, I love that you recognize that and the need for our self-care, Katie.
What you just described is a tremendous job administratively. Can you help our listeners understand how you knew you had that skill set? Did you have to develop that skill set? I mean, running a team of 18 people and I don't know how many clients you serve, but it's a business.
It's a business and it's evolved, right?
Katie Santoro
Like it just started as freelancing and I was doing it on my own. And I've always been someone who loves. I love to do things. Obviously, like I'm a doer and I love processes. I love organization. So running a business, you have to have processes in place. And I learned that very early on with the yoga studio because I had such a short, limited amount of time to get things done in the day.
I was all about the checklist, right? Like, I've got an hour. I can, I know I can knock out this checklist and do everything I need to do, stay on task and get the things done. So I just kind of use that skill. I guess it's a skill.
Laura Rotter
It's totally a skill. I am not a lover of process.
Katie Santoro
But everybody loves the process.
I've just used that as, as we've grown really and everything, you know, everything that we do, I say, is there a process to this? And then we. Okay. Look at the processes and we adjust the processes as needed. And I like to say that failure is failure is a mindset like you've only failed if you think you failed.
So when something goes wrong in the business, I say, okay, why did this go wrong? How do we fix this? And how do we make sure it doesn't happen going forward? And it's usually adjusting the process. So, yeah, I don't know. I've had to learn a lot. I've had to learn leadership. I haven't had a lot of good.
Leadership teachers, and I pulled a lot from my yoga practice. So in yoga, we talk a lot about being like trauma informed and really making space for. People's experiences without knowing their experiences. And as I lead my team, I'd like to say we're like a trauma informed workspace because we have so many people coming from diverse career backgrounds.
We don't know what those backgrounds are, but a lot of times if you watch the way that they respond to, you know, feedback or communication, you can see that there's some kind of trauma there. They had a boss that was awful to them or they were in a toxic situation. So I've just let that guide me in how I lead my team.
I lead them with the care that I would give to myself. And that's been hard to learn because I had to learn to give myself that care first.
Laura Rotter
Um, do you have an example of maybe decisions you made about leadership?
Katie Santoro
So we have Mentorship program that we have that we put into place that we built. We mentor all of our team members and we do that so that they have someone to go to and ask questions in a very nonjudgmental way.
We recognize that we, a virtual assistant cannot know everything that they need to know for 1 client. There's no way there's like, such a vast amount of information that we have to learn along the way. And in past jobs, if you didn't know something, it was looked down upon and shamed if you didn't know quite how something worked.
And so we've really made sure that we're not letting people get in that position where they feel bad to ask a question or feel stupid for not knowing something. We're trying to give them the space and the support that they need to ask. Even the dumbest of questions, because, you know, we have that saying, like, no question is a stupid question.
People still don't ask them. They're still afraid to. So we try and make it as, you know, unscary as possible to ask questions. I also don't really believe in.Like, discipline, right? Like, if somebody does something that maybe is not the way that we would do it, or maybe they do make a mistake, we say, okay, admit to your mistake, figure out why the mistake happened and then let's work together to figure out how it's not going to happen again going forward, but we're going to do it together.
It's not like you did this and you need to get yourself out of it. It's very much like, okay, cool. Like, mistakes happen. No big deal. How do we work together to make sure that it doesn't happen again? Which I think in the, in the traditional workforce, that's not always the way it goes.
Laura Rotter
No, it sounds like you really work, Katie, at creating a safe space for your employees, similar to we do in the yoga space and similar to what You know, I try to create when talking to people about their money because, you know, who wants to talk about their money in front of a complete stranger.
And so it's important to make it a safe space where there are no questions that are, you know, stupid to ask or, and as you just stated, not many people work. At creating a space like that. Are there certain kind of businesses or clients that you enjoy working with more than others?
Katie Santoro
Yeah. So obviously you can tell that I'm very like mission and value driven.
So the clients that we work with, they have to adhere to our boundaries. I'm really big on boundaries. I'm really big on saying, you know, these are the hours that our assistants work. No, you can't text them on the weekend or call them on a weekend. And those are usually the, the, the businesses that we attract to us, the business owners and the entrepreneurs and the executives that we attract attract to us.
They, Understand our mission and values and they align with them. So is there 1 industry? No, there's more of a type entrepreneur or executive that wants. to work with an organization like ours. Our mission has evolved from keeping women in the workforce to crafting a world free of burnout. So we help our, you know, our team members do that by allowing them to balance their caretaking responsibilities and their work responsibilities.
And then we help our clients do the same. So entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, they're really trying to do it all. And we believe you, you shouldn't have to do it all and you don't have to do it all. So we help them craft a world free of burnout by I'm not shaming with one of her assistants who has the skills that they need to help them take some things off their plate.
Laura Rotter
So Katie, how do you put your money where your mouth is? How do you help? How do you continue to help yourself craft a life free of burnout as you tell me that you're you know Mopping the floor in your home
Katie Santoro
So, I I recently learned the fun behind cleaning and mowing the lawn. I enjoy it because I enjoy movement but Early 2023.
I was in a position where I was spiraling again, right? I think that once you've taken that, that tip into burnout, it's not hard to do again. The pathway is open in your brain and you're just ready to like full force dive over the edge into burnout again. And I realized that in the beginning of 2023, that that's what was going on.
And I decided to just unsubscribe from the hustle. So I got an assistant to help me do the things that I couldn't do. I made sure that, yay, I rearranged the way that I structure my days. I am, you know, I don't work a full eight, nine hour day, but the hours that I am at my desk are very efficient. And then I Have the time afterwards or before to take care of myself.
So the day we starts with some nature and a walk with my dogs who hopefully you can't hear whining behind me, but one of them is whining and then the day always ends with some type of movement because that's the care that I need for myself. So, it was really like, I had to walk the walk, right? Like, if I was going to tell people, this is a way that we're crafting a life free of burnout.
I had to do it myself. And that meant stepping back, asking for help, allowing people to help me. And that's actually allowed for a ton of growth for the business. Because I'm not trying to hold on to everything anymore.
Laura Rotter
So important to be able to do that again. It's a skill we need to learn to ask for help, to know where we can use help.
So Katie, if our listeners are hearing this and saying, I can use, I could use some help, what. Can you share some of the services that your assistants provide?
Katie Santoro
Sure. Probably the best way would be our website is rivercity va. com and we've got a services list because we do a lot. I think our kind of biggest thing that we do is that executive assistant services, right?
So helping you with your calendar management, scheduling, travel, helping with, we're also very digital. Visual literacy is really big for us. So helping you with your CRM, helping you, maybe you need to build a new landing page. We have people on our team who can help you with that. We build out courses for people.
We really do. It's kind of like everything is figureoutable. We'll do it all. So we like to take our scope and say, okay, our scope is we're going to help you with where you need help and we're going to help you figure it out. And we're going to source from our team. We all work together to teach each other skills.
If we need new skills, we start with a big scope and then we take out things like we don't do copywriting and we don't do cold calls. There's just a couple of things that we don't do because we don't believe they're in our skill set and they're not something that. That we want to have in our skill set.
So yeah, so really there's a lot of things that an assistant can do for you.
Laura Rotter
Yes, very true. And I just also want to hear right email management. I'm sure they do. So you don't have to be in your email constantly, which is such a sapper of energy and time.
Katie Santoro
Content management is really big. Even, you know, repurposing content that you already have to make sure that you're staying active on social media, helping you with new content.
Coming up with ideas of things to write about. So you can be a thought leader where you need to be. Yeah, there's just it is. There's a vast amount of things we do. We actually 1 of the things that we did to take some work off of my plate is hire someone to help me with business development and these past.
Two months I've been trying to tell her the things that we do. I've been trying to teach her about what we do. And like we, we have to meet for like an hour and a half every week to talk more about the things that we do because we do so much.
Laura Rotter
So I love that though, because it's really necessary. Again, as a business owner myself, I see how hard it is.
To delegate and how important it is to delegate, to avoid the burnout that you described, Katie. Yeah.
Katie Santoro
And you know, we also, we also do personal assistance because we know that like, if you are a business owner, you cannot show up as your best self for your business. If your personal life is, is a mess. And then vice versa, you can't show up for your family if your business is a mess.
So we, we kind of like go back and forth, like you're an executive assistant. Your executive assistant can also help you, you know, find camps for your kids or schedule a doctor's appointment for you or do whatever you need to take that mental burden off so that you can show up where you need to show up at that time as your best self.
Laura Rotter
I love that as a solopreneur, I know they're both important and they're both intertwined.
And yeah, so as we come towards the end of our conversation, I'll, of course, put in the show notes, your website and link to services. Katie, how has your definition of success shifted?
Katie Santoro
So, Like I said earlier, I really use the time I worth to my money and what I was making and, and that's how I define success and it shifted.
I now define success as my own happiness and inner peace and how that plays out in my relationships. So I now have, I mean, I'm married. We never would have gotten married had I been still in burnout. It would not have worked out. And I'm able to have time for my friends and for my family. And, and I'm happy.
I don't wake up every day, dreading it. I don't cry as I brush my teeth in the morning anymore. It's success for me has just become finding happiness and peace.
Laura Rotter
So important. I would assume that you're also human. And so there are ups and downs. Do you have particular practices that you do to help stay centered?
Are you still a yoga practitioner?
Katie Santoro
Yeah, I'm like, I love schedules. I love processes. So yoga on Tuesdays and Thursday mornings. I have a, an infrared sauna that I get in at least like three days a week. I do that after work when I'm feeling that spray of energy again, but I really find like so much peace in physical movement.
So there's always some sort of physical movement, but then it ebbs and flows right yesterday. I did nothing all day. Just nothing. I just laid on the couch and like five, 10 years ago, that would have made me feel like a trash human. And now it just makes me feel like, you know what, like this is important.
This is important for my energy and for my mental well being.
Laura Rotter
It's amazing that you've gotten there, you know, because so many of us really don't are stuck in that. Self judgment of what our day should look like, what we should be achieving, and it's really a testament to your journey, Katie, that you, you're able to share that.
I'm actually a little jealous.
Katie Santoro
Don't be jealous because it's not every day. I still fight against myself and what I think I should be doing every single day. But it's just knowing the patterns and trying to step ahead of them. And I fail. Sometimes I fail. But is it a failure? No, it is a just a place for more improvement.
Laura Rotter
Exactly.
So Katie, is there a message you'd like to leave our listeners with perhaps that you haven't said yet?
Katie Santoro
I think, I think I've said it like you, you can't do it all and you shouldn't have to do it all.
Laura Rotter
Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to have you as a guest.
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Katie Santoro, founder of River City Virtual Assistants, and some takeaways I'd like to share. Before going on to graduate school, see if you will actually enjoy working in the profession you're choosing to study. Katie had assumed that she would attend graduate school in order to improve her earnings power, and started playing with the idea of attending law school.
She decided to work at a law firm and is so glad she did because six months later, she realized that the culture was not for her. She figured she saved herself hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition costs. My second takeaway, notice when you're choosing the burnout. Katie described experiencing classic symptoms of burnout, gaining weight, skin breaking out, Being exhausted, but not sleeping.
Upon further exploration, though, it became clear that that burnout wasn't simply from working in an unfulfilling job. Instead, it came from having too much on her plate, as she tried to find alignment by opening and managing a yoga studio while keeping her full time job. She had bought into the cultural message that she had to do it all.
And was choosing burnout. And finally,when considering a career pivot, take an inventory of your skills. Running a yoga studio was no longer enjoyable for Katie to say the least when the pandemic hit in 2020. So, Katie took an inventory of her skills. She had worked as a paralegal for a number of years.
She had litigation experience, as well as a number of licenses and certifications on the insurance side. She put the word out that she was available to freelance and what became River City Virtual Assistance snowballed from there. Are you enjoying this podcast? Don't forget to subscribe. So you won't miss next week's episode.
And please leave a rating and a review if you'd like other women just like you to be able to find it. And I'd really appreciate it if you're enjoying the show. Thank you so much.
Narrator
Thanks for listening to Making Change With Your Money. Certified Financial Planner, Laura Roder, specializes in helping people just like you organized, clarify, and invest their money in order to support a life of purpose and meaning. Go to www.trueabundanceadvisors.com/workbook for a free resource to help you on your journey.
Disclaimer, please remember that the information shared by this podcast does not constitute accounting, legal, tax, investment, or financial advice. It's for information purposes only. You should seek appropriate professional advice for your specific information.