How Rainbow Plant Life is Growing Her Team as a Content Creator

I'm interested to know what does your, how do you do that? Like, what does your day to day look like? Are you, are you still working 12 hour days? But it just feels better because it's work that you like. What, what does the day to day, week to week look like for you as a creator?

So the one thing I will say real quick is that this is my planner and this is what helps me stay like super organized in terms of like the different buckets. Because I like, we'll do a weekly review. I just did it this morning. And like there are the buckets of like, okay, here are the things I need to get done for YouTube. Here are the things that get me done for Instagram and for blog and Pinterest and all the different things. And some of it overlaps and some of it's like very distinct. So I try to set aside certain days for those kinds of things. Although now that I'm writing my second cookbook, it's like a little bit messier. But also I mentioned my partner, he unofficially works part time with Rainbow Plant Life and his name is Max.

Yeah, okay.

He does a lot of like the administrative upkeep and the operational stuff that like, I don't have time to. So that helps to keep me organized. I have like various people on my team who aren't like full time but are really good at what they do. And so they help to like, pick up the things in certain areas that I don't have time for. And yeah, I still work a lot, but I also love it. And it's really exciting to be able to work on a business that I'm building that is super valuable to, I think at least valuable to my readers and to my audience members and also super valuable to me. So I probably should work a little bit less. But I also at the same time really enjoy it. So it's. Yeah, it's a tricky balance.

I think that's the thing that's interesting to observe is you could potentially be working the exact same amount that you were when you were a lawyer, but your relationship with that work might be different. I know that's the case for me if I have a really long day with work that I have a bad relationship with, that I don't look forward to or that I don't enjoy. The feeling of that is different if I have a really long day of work that I really enjoy. And so we kind of use this. It's kind of like there's only one word for snow in the English language, but like in, in other countries where there's like snow all the time. Minnesota, we should probably have more than one word. Like they have multiple ways to describe snow. But like, I feel like the same could be true for work, right? So you could work a 12 hour day and it could be like terrible work or awesome work. And what it feels like to come out of that is very different. At the same time, you had talked about starting to work with people who are supporting you. A lot of times that happens within our family, whether that be I know people who have like hired or brought on their parents, sometimes a spouse, kids, depending on where people are at in, in their family and who's available and interested and willing to help out. But it sounds like you're also working with some people to kind of support you who are outside of your family. What did that look like to start building that team? And I saw that you're now also hiring somebody in kind of like a 20 to 30 hour capacity. So it's like, oh, this is like officially starting to get into building a team. And kind of. It's not just you now and your daily planner. It's now building that out into other people and sharing tasks and projects. So what does it look like now and what are you building towards in terms of building a team?

So my goal, at least for now, is to take off everything off my. Take everything off my plate that I don't think I'm the best at or that I really don't have the time for and don't want to make the time for. So I hired a video editor last year to edit a lot of my videos. Not all of them, but the YouTube ones. Some other things, I don't dislike video editing, but I don't have like advanced skills. And it also takes a lot of time. I have an assistant who works remotely and does a lot of behind the scenes social media stuff, Pinterest stuff, like again, stuff that I could do but I'm not necessarily great at and she's much better at and it's off my plate. I am hiring right now for an in person role to be like in the kitchen with me, who's gonna test all the recipes, who's gonna like help me tweak recipes. Just do a lot of kitchen things that like, I could for instance, develop three recipes a week instead of one right now if I had someone else doing that kind of stuff for me. I hired a cpa. Cause I literally have zero interest or desire to like totally look at the taxes and the financial stuff. So like finding little areas where I'm like, this could save 10 hours of my week, or this could save 5 hours a week or this could save 20 hours of my week. Like, how can I do that? And now that I, you know, Covid is sort of slowly lifting up and people are getting vaccinated better than what.

It was at its worst for sure.

Yes. I wanted to start hiring somebody in person. Literally I was thinking about it last March and then obviously that couldn't be done. So as things start to get back into a little bit of a safer place, definitely interested in continuing to like build it more of a team that like I can work with. Maybe not every day in person, but a little bit more for structure and things like that.

Yep, yep. How did you find some of those, like the assistant that you worked with and then the video editor? I think that's, I think once you get into the rhythm of doing it, you kind of discover, oh, especially as a, as a creator blogger, you have a built in audience and people who understand you and kind of, you know that they've self selected into being. You know, in your case, it's like there's a good chance they'll be vegan and that's probably an important piece for somebody who's going to be recipe testing that they understand that. But how did you find those early people? What did that look like to, to bring on, you know, employee number one or team member number two or whatever you would want to call it.

So my assistant was someone in my community who reached out and we kind of took it from there for like the more contractor roles, I would say, where they're like we do video editing or we do blog maintenance or whatever. It was a lot of looking at what other people were doing in terms of like if they listed who they worked with or if it was someone I knew. And I asked like, who are you working with and are you willing to share that information? Or like looking at websites for instance, and seeing like who did the website or who do they list as like their point of contact for X thing that they do or Y thing and kind of like going down a rabbit hole. So it's a little bit of a mix of both. Yeah.

What I love about that is I think one of the shortcuts that we can have as business owners is figuring out who, not what. It's actually the title of a book. I was talking with my friend Bruno the other day who has a site called Influence Kit and Dan, it looks like Dan Sullivan, Benjamin Hardy are the Authors. But the idea is, you know that you need blog maintenance. You don't know exactly specifically what it is that you want, but you know, if you find who it is that does it and does it well, it's going to be a shortcut to getting that done. I feel like accounting and CPA work is a great example of that, but essentially finding the people who are really good at it, bringing them on and saying, I want you to do what you are good at in this capacity. I think of another example of for tinybit, which is the parent company over pinch of Yum Food Blogger Pro, we knew that it's going to get really complicated from a finance perspective because we have one parent company and then these companies underneath. So we were working with a fractional CFO who has a history in private equity, which is they would buy all these companies and then operate them. And so we're like this really tiny version of what he used to do. But it's great because I don't even know sometimes what I need to know. And it sounds like you're starting to look at doing that where it's like, hey, bring in a cpa, great. I don't want to do accounting. They know accounting. And the key piece to what you've talked about is finding people in similar industries. So it's helpful if you can reach out to people. You know, maybe you're in a group Food Blogger Pro, you could go in and post to the forums. People have done this. Hey, we need a cpa, ideally somebody in California. Does anybody know anybody? If you have somebody who you can say, yeah, we work with this person and they understand blogging and publishing, there's going to be a shortcut there. You, you're not gonna have to explain stuff. They're gonna know and they're gonna understand it. Do you have thoughts on how big you'd wanna grow that? Do you have an ideal of like, hey, I would love to be a five person team, but no bigger than that. And then the second piece of that is, do you always want to be kind of the front and center? Is this gonna be a personality driven brand where Nisha is the business and the brand or can you see it kind of building beyond that at some point?

For the first question, I don't know. I am not someone who has like a five year plan or a ten year plan. Like I am very organized, but I also try to like stick to what's happening now or what's happening like in the near future. And so I don't have Any specific thoughts about, like, how big I want the team to grow or how big I might be able to grow it?

Yeah, I wouldn't have an answer for that either. Yeah.

As for the personality, like, I love what I do and I love the community I've created and I'm creating, so I don't see that changing anytime soon. But I have been having these conversations recently with other creators who have written cookbooks as well. As I think alluded to. I'm writing my second one now, and it's hard to be both a social media personality and a cookbook person. Like, I think they're kind of separate realms where, like, most people who write successful cookbooks are either chefs or have worked in test kitchens or in food publications or things like that. They're taken very seriously as, like, food writers and as chefs or as cooks. And maybe some of them do social media really well, but most of them, it's a little bit like, they have it, but it's not like their main thing. And a lot of social media people are like, they might have a huge audience and a huge community, but they're not necessarily thought of as like, serious recipe developers or really people where you're going to get the best recipes from. And so I've been having these, like, just internal conversations, a little bit external, but mostly internal thoughts about, like, which one do I want to be? Can I be both successfully? Because it's really hard to do both from a time perspective, but also from a. Just like, how do you want to be perceived? Like, yeah, so those are the. That's kind of what I've been thinking about.

And do. Do you have a leaning at this point?

Like, I would like to be able to do both, and I just don't know if that's. Like, I. Technically I am doing both right now, but, yeah, like, I think I need to have the conversation with myself. Like, do I want to continue writing cookbooks? Like, do I want to be a cookbook person? Like, I'm writing my second one now, but, like, do I want to maybe write like five cookbooks in the future, or do I want to just continue building my business through social media and through my blog? Um, and maybe if I expand the team, I can do both, but it's just an open question I have for myself.

Yeah. Do you have to pause on certain things that you are doing within kind of your operating business, social media, recipe development, things like that for the blog in order to do the cookbook, or do you try and do both at the same Same capacity.

I mean, currently I'm doing both. Um, I have like a few days of the week where I'm just mostly primarily working on the cookbook. So yeah, as a result, like I can only upload to YouTube twice every two weeks instead of every week. I'm probably only sharing one new recipe on my blog per week as opposed to like two or three, which is probably what I was doing last year. Yeah, I post to Instagram now probably two or three times a week as opposed to every day. And it hasn't really made a huge difference. Maybe a small difference, but I also am really, really excited about the cookbook stuff and need to just like spend more time on it. I'm telling you to like ingrain it into my head for sure.

I think one of the interesting things that I've noticed is I think those complement each other. So I think more and more you're seeing people have success with cookbooks because they have a following, they have a strong YouTube following, they have a strong Instagram, they have a strong blog following. And publishers being really interested in people who can do like built in promotion, which to some sense like somebody who is even a celebrity chef, unless they do have a strong following, maybe doesn't have in the same regard. I guess celebrity chef would more than somebody who's like really deep experience without a following. But I think also what you're seeing is writing, going through the process of publishing a cookbook is a huge validation for areas that don't have as much like credential validation. Like anybody can start a blog, anybody can start an Instagram account, but not everybody can sign a deal to publish a cookbook. And those two complement each other really well. The hard thing to your point is actually executing on both of those things, especially at the same time. But I see like both of those being such a great compliment and something that allows you to, on both sides, grow quicker and faster if you're able to, to pull that, to pull that.