February 18, 2021
Today we’re talking to Chelsie Antos. Chelsie is an entrepreneur, movement maker, wife, and mom. After founding Trades of Hope, a multi-million dollar company empowering women, she has gone on to begin the Outside Fam, Surf Girls Design and other successful businesses doing good in the world. She is passionate in her belief that being a mom and an entrepreneur can co-exist together and bring great fulfillment.
If you’re a woman who’s ever felt like you have to choose between kids or building a business, or you’re currently a mom struggling to balance the two, this episode is about to change your life. Chelsie is the QUEEN of motherhood (she’d probably argue that, but seriously she’s incredible) and today, we interview her all about how she balances the two, her top tips to make intentional space for both kids and work, and how she handles + embraces the messiness of life so beautifully. We also chat about how she balances technology and screen-time with her kids while also being an entrepreneur who needs to be on screens a lot, how to instill confidence in your kids, and how YOU can step up to the plate and be the greatest mom AND biz owner combined.
As an entrepreneur, mom, and wife; Chelsie has owned and ran multiple successful businesses. Ever since she was a little girl she has loved to start things that do good in the world and point people back to God’s goodness. Growing up in a very entrepreneurial family, both her parents had successful businesses and homeschooled all through middle and high school. Most of her parent classes focused on starting businesses, so it was no surprise at age seventeen she started her first multi-million dollar company: Trades of Hope. Then in 2018, she launched Outside Fam, which is a movement to get families offline and outside. Her husband and her also renovate and restore homes to create better communities for people in the Florida area they live in.
Realizing that her love of helping others and pointing people to God’s goodness is found as just an extension of being a mom and having children, and pointing her children to God’s goodness too.
Most women know that kids are in our future because we want to leave a legacy. We don’t want to be old and alone when we are seventy, we want people to surround us and take care of us. But that was as far as it went for Chelsie. Being a very driven person, not a very touchy-feely person, and goal-oriented and high achieving. She wanted kids but struggled to understand how kids could fit within her personality, how that worked with a very driven woman.
Growing up since both her parents were entrepreneurs growing up and driven, she was given this example of how to do it but thought she was too driven and crazy. It was a process of accepting that God can use anyone to be a business owner and God can use anyone to be a mom, even people that think they’re maybe not called into that.
Getting married young to her childhood sweetheart and then having Trades of Hope take off, at the age of nineteen-twenty she was trying to keep her head above water, grow her business and there wasn’t room for children in that. So she put it off and put it off and it was after building a team she realized that she did want kids.
It is easy to fear both because humans are drawn to boxes. Boxes make us feel safe because they are very easy and tidy. When you feel called to do something it is messy. It is messy to start a business, you have to accept that life can not be compartmentalized all the time. You will have to hustle and it will be hard.
When you also have kids, you’ll have to do the same thing. You have to accept that it is going to be messy. You can’t just be a mom and can’t just be a businesswoman, you will be both and it is going to be messy. As someone who is a recovering perfectionist, that was hard for Chelsie but once she accepted that, and understood that she could allow the boxes to go away and that she could be both.
You can accept the chaos of messy life with children and messy life as a business owner. It will be much easier to see yourself as both a mom and an entrepreneur.
As Chelsie began to think about having children, she remembered what her childhood was like and how they had structure but oftentimes math class for her was joining her dad for sales calls. Because he had to go out on a sales call and had to take her with him or play with toys at a speaking event while her mom was speaking. When she remembered that and dove back into her childhood, she had an amazing childhood and never felt like she got any less of her parents just because they choose to let the boxes be messy. Instead, she got to witness people that were fully living into their calling that allowed her to accept that she could do that too.
You don’t have to conform to what the world says just because you are a woman or just because you should work or stay home. You can do both.
You don’t have to choose, if you are willing to take the risk you can blend both. It is not easy, nobody is saying it’s easy or not messy, it is messy, but embrace that it can coexist together.
If you follow Chelsie you have seen her do #takebacktheweekend. It is something that they do every weekend, sign off ALL social media.
They want to teach their kids how to use the internet with intention and not obsession. So much of our life as entrepreneurs is online and it’s awesome, but it can be a time waster and disrupt intentional living. Every weekend they sign off and try not to be online, they delete all the social media apps on their phone and balance their week accordingly so that it is structured in a way to allow them to do that.
It can help with balancing the pressure of running a business, balancing when you’re spending time with your kids versus when you are working. As an entrepreneur, you love your business so you can kind of be obsessive about it and it’s really important if you want to do both well to turn off the side that can be very overwhelming. Which for them is the online world.
Embracing a whole sense of business and family. Letting it intermingle. We get this idea that we can perfectly align everything in an orderly box. Allow yourself to nurse while your working or in a meeting, it’s allowing the lines to be messy. It will help so much. In the beginning, Chelsie wasn’t allowing it to be messy and wasn’t balancing it well at all. Feeling like she could never switch her hats fast enough, but when she let the mom hat inform the entrepreneur hat and vice versa, let them both exist together. It allowed things to work a lot more.
The main one is getting a handle on the online world and not allowing yourself to be a slave to people’s tasks like emails, answering every DM that pops into your inbox. Having intentional time when you are answering emails, intentional time where you answer DM’s, and then shutting that off so you can be with your kids on the weekend.
At other times it may look like finding a good babysitter that you trust. We have to choose to invest in resources to help us out with these things. It’s hard to do that to spend money for something you could probably do like 70% well with kids there but if you are going to grow or have any capacity you have to use your money and resources to make more money and to allow you to have the peace of mind to get those tasks done.
You want your business to make it work for you. You don’t want to work for your businesses.
Everybody is created differently. Chelsie is a very routine person as well as type A, high achieving, but views herself now as a planned free spirits. From the outside looking in you would think they are a very free-spirited go with the flow family, but they believe without structure we are just slaves to whatever is happening around us and there is no ability to be a free spirit when you are a slave. Structure is the birthing place of being a free spirit. With kids, you do have to be more flexible and every day might look a little different, but that doesn’t mean you throw your structure out the window and don’t still have sanctioned times for different things.
You still have structure. It has to be a little more flexible. If you want to own a business or become an entrepreneur, whether you have kids or not, you can’t make excuses. You need a planned structure in your life.
You can still have structure and have kids. It can coexist. You just have discipline. If you want to accomplish anything in the world you have to have a target, you have to get up and choose to do things even when it is hard and you have to choose to be okay when those schedules, kids, and things change because you have to get up and do it again the next day.
Chelsie was blessed to watch her mom, who was so passionate about what she did, who she was, and who God was, that Chelsie was a happy addition to her life. Some might say, ‘you weren’t her whole life?’, but that can be crippling as a kid. Now that they have entered into the world they are their parent’s definition of identity? A kid is not meant to bear that type of identity of a parent. For Chelsie, it was freeing to watch her parents that loved who she was, welcomed her into their messy, crazy life. Telling her to take their hand, as they go do what God’s called them to do.
You are not the focus, you are here to do something bigger than yourself and that is what you can do together.
This works if you are a stay-at-home mom, work-at-home mom, or work out of the home mom. This is not to say that if you are a stay-at-home mom that you are focusing on your kids. There were periods wherein her mom’s life she was a stay-at-home mom and she still was doing things that we’re developing and disciple other people, which is what we are called to do in The Bible. Whether you are a stay-at-home mom or work at home mom or work out of the house mom you can do this. It works either way.
‘Take back the weekend’ is something they implemented to get off-line more when we weren’t going to be intentionally on it. Be online when you are being intentional. When you are adding to the world. When you are serving people. But if you are just scrolling for no reason, it is not being intentional when we are called to be intentional. Especially if you are called to start a business at the same time as having a family.
Every Friday night sign-off from 5 pm to 5 pm Sunday. You can keep your phones on you but don’t go on your emails or any social media app and take that time to be outside or be with your community. Your face-to-face community. There is a place for an online community, but especially in the world now where we are at, it is nice to know the people that if you were in the hospital they would show up.
Then hop back on Sunday night to set your schedule for the week and do some last-minute clean-up of your inboxes. It will give you two full days back to feeling like being parents or just not working mode. So that when the work week comes you won’t have guilt. There is none of that guilt because you had those clearly defined times for you.
The first one is that we can only be ‘one thing’, you’re either this or that. It’s easy to be one thing but we are not called to be one thing. We are called to be many things and people.
The second is that it’s going to be ‘easy and neat’. People think it’s so easy to start a business and have kids because it’s how you’re wired. No, that’s not true. There are a lot of hard moments and it is going to be hard for you just as it is hard for someone else. We all need the same thing and that is discipline and that is what gets us up in the morning, keeps us going and on track. It’s messy, it’s hard and it’s the same for every person. When we stop making those excuses we can overcome them. We can overcome the hard things instead of just thinking it must be easy for others.
The third one is wrapping our identity up in whatever we do is the lie that so many women believe. Whether it’s entrepreneurship, achievement, or motherhood. Once you have kids it is hard to not control and make sure everything they do is safe, but that is just wrapping our identity up in our kids. Even in a business, you can do that too as a woman. You are not your gifts or the tools God has given you, you are you. You are who He calls you to be. When we understand who God thinks we are, we don’t have to believe in being wrapped up in all these things of being a mom or entrepreneur.
At the end of the day, you are not confined to the box. You are not confined to the box of your personality test, of the box of being a mom, or the box of an entrepreneur. You are who God created you to be just essentially as who you are. When we allow those things to define us then they can be manipulated in ways that can make it unhealthy. We don’t find true freedom when we do that.
The first one is risk. If you are someone who doesn’t take risks, it is going to be hard to start a business. People who act quickly succeed more often. People that have a quick rebound time from mistakes. Those who see opportunities and seize opportunities, get ahead more. It doesn’t mean you don’t think about a few things but it means you won’t obsess about a lot of things.
The second is relationships. Everything you ever do will have mattered because of the people you are doing it with. You will need people in every business you ever own. It’s easy as an entrepreneur to be very controlling, but if you do that your capacity will be limited. You will never create something that will last. If you want to create something to last a breath of time at all you need people. Similarly, with children, all of this doesn’t matter if we don’t have people to pour it into. To leave a legacy for you.
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Follow along:
www.instagram.com/chelsieantos
www.instagram.com/tradesofhope
www.instagram.com/surfgirlsdesign
www.instagram.com/mrslindseyroman
www.instagram.com/theheartuniversity
WASSUP FRIENDS. We’re Evie + Lindsey, co-founders of this wild partayyy called The Heart University. Our goal is to empower entrepreneurs to kick freaking BUTT in their businesses, dive down into the heart of their why and how, and serve you with all possible tools you’ll need to up-level your business game and CRUSH those goals of yours.
Whether you’re coming to an in-person workshop, joining our online course, or soaking up all the strategies via this blog or our podcast, we’re STOKED you’re here + can’t wait to see you out there kicking butt.
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