Sleeping Giant

In this powerful episode of Kinore’s Real Business Conversations Podcast, we dive into the incredible journey of Erica Hargaden, founder of Babogue.

Erica has transformed a personal struggle with her child’s sleep into a “Sleeping Giant”—a global business that has helped over 5,000 families across 37 countries.

This is not just a story of success; it’s a raw and honest look at the strategies that took a passionate entrepreneur from surviving to scaling.

This episode is a master class if you’ve found a gap in the market, are looking to scale a one-to-one business, or feel like you are giving away too much of your expertise free of charge.

We also delve into the benefits of delegation, virtual assistants, whether or not you should advertise your prices upfront, and balancing the demands of social media marketing.

Learn more about Erica Hargaden and Babogue here: https://www.babogue.com/

TRANSCRIPTION

For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription.

Erica Hargaden  0:01  [Introduction clips]

At one point, I was actually told by a professional I was a woman who was falling apart. I was crying all the time. I was talking about moving home like I just couldn’t do this.

Don’t be the person who holds yourself back. Feel the fear and do it anyway, like I was absolutely sweating buckets and was like, Oh God, I’ll get no response here. But sure I did.

If you don’t take time out to work on the business, you will get drowned in working in the business, and then there will be no business at all,

Voiceover  0:32

No unicorns, no brands, just hard working people who built their business from the ground up, sharing their experience so others can learn. Presented by Larissa Feeney from Kinore. This is Real Business Conversations.

Larissa Feeney 0:50

For many people, running a business, it can be easy to find yourself running on empty that can affect everything you do, from decision making to relationships and ability to lead. Today, we’re joined by the founder of Babogue, who turned her running on empty struggle into a business helping over 5000 families across 37 countries. She’s about to share how she transformed her lowest point into her greatest opportunity, and the strategies that took her from surviving to scaling globally. It’s a pleasure to welcome the founder of Babogue, Erica, Hargadon…

Erica Hargaden 1:25

God Larissa, I have a lump in my throat. That’s some intro, and it’s like so true. It was my love. 5000 family. Yeah, 5000 families. 37 countries. And my lowest point that brought my my passion, I suppose, on my, um, my purpose

Larissa Feeney 1:44

Amazing. And I can’t wait to hear all about it. I think if you could tell us, first of all, what it is that you do, where did the idea come from? How did it start?

Erica Hargaden 1:54

So Babogue helps families with its children sleep. So that’s, you know, basic way of describing what the what the business does, and it was born out of my own sleep struggles with my first child, who’s now 16. He literally did not sleep. Woke every 45 minutes overnight. And the biggest thing for me was that everywhere I turned for help with his sleep, I was met with blank faces. So this was back in 2009 you know, I went to my GP, my public health nurse, I spoke to friends, but nobody knew how to help me. Help him sleep better. And at one point I was actually told by a professional that I wasn’t coping. And I was a woman who was falling apart. So telling somebody who’s falling apart that they’re not coping is like pushing them over the edge. And in the end, my mother came to visit, and she said what opened the door to her was, you know, a gray and lifeless version of Erica. And that’s, that’s not me at all. I’m, I’m none of those things. I was crying all the time, you know, my husband and I were only married a year, and we were I was talking about moving home, like I just couldn’t do this. And my mum, I remember her distinctly calling my dad and saying, I’m going to stay with Erica, you know, for a week. And she did for me what I now do for families. She helped me formulate a routine. She helped me, you know, gradually bring him towards self settling. She helped me to understand his sleep and what he needed. And that then instilled in me this deep love of sleep, but also a respect, first, because I had gone to the absolute brink, and now, when I got sleep under my belt, I was back. So I had lost myself, and I was restored, and I was able to thrive as a mother and thrive as a parent and thrive as a woman, you know, moving into a new stage in her life,

Larissa Feeney 3:58

your mum coming that gave you the support as a mother in a role that you’d never performed before. Yeah, and obviously your mother was more experienced.

Erica Hargaden 4:09

She had the knowledge. She had reared four children herself. She knew the type of person that I am, she knew me. She knew that I thrived in structure myself, so she was able to reassure me, but also support me in the transition to him sleeping independently. Now he was eight months at this stage, so he was well on solids, and he was like he was thriving. He was meeting all of his milestones. He was doing amazingly, but I was, he wasn’t sleeping, and I was crashing and burning. And, you know, all of my facets of my life were, you know, a struggle at that time, yeah, and going through that though helped me to realize that, you know, sleep needed to be a priority in our house. And I literally, Larissa read. Did everything that I could find about sleep. Now this is before iPhones. I didn’t have an iPhone at the time. I didn’t even have Wi Fi in the house. It was like, plug in broadband, like it makes me sound like I’m ancient. But things have moved on so much in terms of connectivity and access to information. Now my husband used to cut things out of the paper and bring them home to me. You know, when I was on maternity leave about sleep, but when I went on to have more children, I have two more children, three in total, I put everything I had learned on him into play with them and Kate, who’s my middle girl. She’s 14. She slept through the night at seven or eight weeks, and when, I suppose, I had three children who were all sleeping well, and I was in a full time job, not, obviously what I do now, people used to turn around to me and go, Erica, like my little fella’s doing this. Like, how do you, how do you have your kids in such a good like, you know, way with sleep. And, you know, they come into meetings in the office, and they come back a month later having done what I had advised them to do, and they’d be like, Oh my God, that worked. My wife said to give you this bottle of wine. This kept happening to me

Larissa Feeney 6:13

like you’ve said it already. You read everything, you’ve done a lot of research outside of what the tools that your mum had taught you to build on that knowledge, I suppose, and implemented over probably a few years at that point.

Erica Hargaden 6:23

Yeah, it was a really good friend who had miracle twins, and she turned round to me because, you know, she hadn’t had a huge maternity leave, and they still weren’t sleeping through the night, and the tears blobbed down her face, and she said, Please, Erica, help me. So anyway, I advised her, and I helped her, and this is before I was certified. And lo and behold, the two boys started to sleep great. And her husband jokingly said, you should be doing this for a living. And the light bulb went off. I was like, Is it a thing? Is this a thing? I found out that it is a thing, and that you could become certified as a sleep consultant, and you could develop a business around this and legitimately help people.

Larissa Feeney 7:07

So that was the light bulb moment for you. Yeah, and that sent you on a journey.

Erica Hargaden 7:14 Totally. I spent four months researching how to become a sleep consultant like I’m I’m a builder’s daughter from Cavan. My degree is in accounting and law. I’m a brilliant event manager, but I’m not medical. I’ve no medical background. I’m not a nurse, I’m not a doctor, and I’m really, really honest about that. So when I went to become a sleep consultant, I wanted it to be the most robust certification that I could find globally, like I was willing to go and do anything to make sure that what I had was really concrete. Because I think when you qualify in anything, parents in particular, they need to really be able to trust it. They need to know that you are really qualified at what you do.

Larissa Feeney 8:06 So how did you get your first customer? Oh, that’s

Erica Hargaden 8:09 an interesting one. A friend of mine sent me a screenshot of a well known public figure seeking support with their child’s sleep after the massive snow storm that we had had in 2018 I don’t know if you remember that we’d huge from the Easter. No, it wasn’t the beast from the east. It was, it was, it was a different one, but it was big, and it did like it stopped the country in its tracks for about two days. Okay? And I went, god, okay. I said, right, I’ll send her a message and see Would she like some support? She was my very first client. I slept in her house for two nights. Oh, my God, no joke, Larissa, I stayed up all night with this woman and her baby and helped her to put shape on her children’s sleep. I’m not going to name her because I don’t have permission to name her in this. And I do like to, I do like to ask for her permission, but that was the launch pad, literally having the courage to go, I can do this. I know what I’m doing. I am good at this, and I am not afraid to sit with this really well known person and help her, but

Larissa Feeney 9:28 having that courage to go to somebody’s house, never mind a well known person, and to sit up with her for two nights and have the confidence in your own ability that what you’re doing works. I mean, that’s unbelievable, and it must have worked, did it? You got

Erica Hargaden 9:44 all the child? Yeah, yeah, he became an amazing little sleeper. And still is. We still keep in touch. I’ve helped this lady with her other second child as well. I’d consider her in my friendship group. And. Am. You know, she’s a fabulous advocate for Babogue and for me, and she was my launch pad, and I’m very grateful to her for that. She did a lovely review on Instagram and put me out into the world in terms of services. And I was she launched you. She launched me. Now I guess I had the courage to send the message. And I always say to people, Don’t be the person who holds yourself back. Like, send the message. Like, feel the fear and do it anyway. Like I was absolutely sweating buckets and was like, Oh God, I’ll get no response here. But sure I did.

Larissa Feeney 10:38 I’d say you were I was just thinking that you must have been terrified, yeah, like,

Erica Hargaden 10:42 yeah, totally terrified. And terrified, pulling up outside the house and terrified, like, you know, bubbly told me couldn’t eat, couldn’t eat for like, the two days that I was there. Was just nervous as hell, and obviously running on no sleep and all the rest. But I did it. Wow. I was still in my full time job at that time, and six months later, I left it.

Larissa Feeney 11:07 So the courage that you had to send the message, well, identify the problem. First of all, you know, you can help, and then send the message, and then to show up and make a difference. That’s amazing. So then you were operating a one to one model, where the customer will come to you and you will go to them, and you would work with them one on one directly, yeah. And what I’m really interested in is how that changed, because I know you’ve done acorns, yes, and I’m, I’m in lead on acorns, yes. Whenever I work with the acorns groups, it’s a common theme, the conversations that small service businesses have is how we can transform a one to one service into a one to many service, how you can scale a service business, I suppose, yeah, absolutely. Which was the next step for you? Erica, it

Erica Hargaden 11:53 totally was. And I that was born out of realizing quite quickly that my my revenue was capped every month because there was only a certain amount of families I could work with on a monthly basis, not just from an hour’s perspective, but from a how do I describe this energy? Yeah, energy, my energy. You know, when you are working with families, one to one, you very much become part of what’s going on with them cognitively, there’s only so many names you can hold in your head. What’s going on with that baby, what’s going on with that baby. And I found that I had, I had a limit, and I needed to respect that limit so as not to burn myself out.

Larissa Feeney 12:36 And did you find that you would have got emotionally attached to the family?

Erica Hargaden 12:40 Ah, yeah, particularly the women, particularly the mommies, you, you, you do create a great bond with them. You’re in touch with them every single day. You become part of their journey. You’re you’re happy bum dancing for them. Equally, you’re feeling the tough days with them. I am an emotional person. I very much wear my heart on my sleeve. So I found working with families, one to one, extremely rewarding, and I still love it and do it to this day, but there was only so many families that I could work with. So from a business model perspective, I had a choice to make. Was this a lifestyle business where I was just tipping away, or or did I want something more? And, and the ambitious side of me wanted something more. So every time I got in the car to drive to another family, and that family could be anywhere, like it could be in loud could have been

Larissa Feeney 13:36 in which you’ve gone all over the country, yeah,

Erica Hargaden 13:39 I was driving. I was driving all over the place. I was driving to people’s homes. People were using video calls as well, but people really liked the in person. And I was like, how do, how do I like scale this? How do I get I was like, do I take on more sleep consultants? So there wasn’t a lot of sleep consultants in the country at that time, at a similar time, I was kind of developing my Instagram presence, and I was releasing video content on a weekly basis. It was called Sleep topic Tuesday, I had come up with a seven steps to better sleep framework, which is like the core of everything I do. So I released one step at a time every week, over seven weeks, okay, and the followers ate it up. The messages were unbelievable. Around, oh, my God, this has changed my life. This, this what you’ve released, makes so much sense. When is the next video coming out? And I was going, how this is unbelievable, and how do I make money out of it? Yeah, so driving to a family in Wicklow, I came up with the idea for what is now known as the sleep series. So I took this. Seven Steps to better sleep. And I developed a sleep program around the seven steps, broken into different age ranges, all video based. It was the first ever sleep program to be released in Ireland. Oh, wow. I spent, I probably spent the guts of nine months working on it. It was 40 hours of filming and 40 hours of editing. And I’m very grateful to Jackie McNabb, who’s the head of the local enterprise office in Kildare. She supported me with a priming grant to release the sleep series, and has been an incredible support to me that was released in November 2019 and we went into lockdown in March 2020, and the sleep series took off. Over 2000 people accessed the sleep series that year.

Larissa Feeney 15:58 Oh, my God, Erica, that was in year one. That

Erica Hargaden 16:02 was year one, and that was very much my launch pad. And I was flat to the mat with one to ones. Larissa. I was so so busy throughout covid. Covid was, you know, a challenging time for lots and lots of businesses. From a business perspective, it was very, very good to me, because I had pivoted already into the online space. And when covid hit, I obviously stopped doing one to ones in people’s homes, and I’ve never gone back to doing one to ones in people’s homes. I’ve taken the business completely online,

Larissa Feeney 16:40 yeah, and you’d already started on that journey, which helps. It wasn’t a complete switch. I suppose. Whenever covid hit, that’s so that’s

Erica Hargaden 16:47 positive, very, very positive, very, very positive. Now, with anything you you have learnings, and I think it’s always good to talk about the learnings. When I released the sleep series, I didn’t release it as a subscription model,

Larissa Feeney 17:05 okay, so you pay your money once, yeah, and then you’ve accessed the entire series. That that was a model at that time,

Erica Hargaden 17:11 you could have access to what you purchased unlimited. And that wasn’t without its challenges, because I was looking for new customers constantly, all the time, all the time,

Larissa Feeney 17:25 obviously, if you were to do it now, because we talk about it so much, you know the subscription model, the recurring revenue model, building value in your business through recurring revenue, because we talk about it a lot. You would know, if you were a new business, that that’s the way you should go. But at that time, Erica, it wasn’t talked about, no, or we didn’t know, we didn’t know about it, I’m not too sure. So you had to learn that.

Erica Hargaden 17:50 I had to learn it, and I have since moved into it. So I had to make that move last year in order to protect the business, protect the revenue stream, and protect the viability and the further scalability and further growth of the business, and to be able to add on more value to the customer alongside the sleep series.

Larissa Feeney 18:17 And how did that shift go? I mean, did your customers feel it, or was it just a case of, you had to learn a new way to sell. You had to learn a new way to explain the value,

Erica Hargaden 18:28 all of the above. So there was customers that were impacted absolutely but we worked with them, offered them value, offered them the ability to transition over with us offered them lots and lots of opportunities in terms of getting involved with the new platform, and also had to learn a new way to position it and sell it as well, because although I adore Working with my my my B to C, my like mommies and daddies. I adore working with them, and I adore getting to know them and and hearing their wins. I really want the business to also move into the corporate space and the wellness space, and this, be able to support parents via those programs as well. And that’s a that’s a shift that we very strategically are making, and moving into the subscription model has really helped position that well.

Larissa Feeney 19:34 That’s really interesting, because I know exactly, exactly what you mean. You know you get very close to the people you work with whenever you work one on one. Selling to corporate is different, again, though not it only is it, you know, the one to many and B to C, it’s, it’s a very different customer, very different sales cycle, very different lead time, yes, um, you’re delivering, you know, a different message. Your tone of voice is different. Everything is different, everything. Are you navigating through that right now? Or have you gone through it? No, you’re in the messy

Erica Hargaden 20:07 middle. I’m in the messy middle. Larissa, it is a transition that I started to make 12 months ago now, obviously B to C is still a huge part of my what I do like huge and I’m still so involved in that, but more quietly, maybe that my B to C customers wouldn’t be aware of at all. I am working on a project of the corporate space, and taking the subscription model and the platform that we’ve created, because we now have the sleep series and a huge master class hub and a resource library and a community to support parents inside it, and like guest speakers coming in, it’s very much a parent Support Hub, as well as somewhere you can get that sleep support too. And we’re taking that now and meeting the corporates in terms of what their their KPIs are for employee wellbeing. Are they focusing in on parenting at the moment? Where are they at and trying to speak to have those conversations with them, you know, around how somebody who is sleep deprived or completely overwhelmed as a result of juggling their parenting and their work is not going to be able to show up to work in the way that they could if they felt they had some level of balance. And that’s where thrive, which is the name of the membership, can come in to support the corporate market

Larissa Feeney 21:44 there. Sounds like there will be a lot of opportunity there in that space. It makes complete sense. Yes. How are those conversations going? Are you able to get the message across to the teams that you’re talking to?

Erica Hargaden 21:54 Yeah, going really, really well. I’m really pleased with the work that I’ve done over the last 12 months, that side of the business is growing. I had a fabulous second meeting with a corporate yesterday. And when I’m saying when, when this gets over the line 2026, could be a very different place for Babogue. Very, very different. Amazing. And you talked about the lead times, Larissa, like, this conversation has been going on since March, and we are now in, you know, nearly in August. And it will be, yeah, it’ll be January before this comes out, yeah. But if it, if when, when it gets over the line, it’d be game changing, and it will be what I wanted, like that company’s logo is on a vision board here at my

Larissa Feeney 22:48 desk. Amazing. For the last eight years, there’s so much learnings there, though, for the listener, Erica, because you’ve talked about selling one to one, selling one to many, right? That is one big, big, big shift, yeah, and then selling B to C and selling B to B, very different markets, very different way of selling. And not many businesses can do both well. And it sounds like you’re doing both well. So well

Erica Hargaden 23:11 done. Oh, and certainly trying, certainly trying and like, it’s not all me. I do have a team. I do have people. I have great support. I’ve brilliant people in marketing and in terms of the tech side of things, and I have virtual assistants who I would be lost without. So I think you have to build a level of a team around you. As an entrepreneur, I don’t think it is possible for you to scale and do it all, you just can’t, I think particularly for women, I think particularly for women with family. It’s very hard to do it all like I did try, but you you have to invest and budget in order to be able to grow. And I’m adding in more sleep consultants as well, because at the end of the day, I can’t support everyone. I can’t be all things to all people. And so by seeking out the best qualified sleep consultants that we have in the UK and Ireland and adding them into my team. I’m giving more availability to families from a B to C perspective, because if you’re if you’re like sleep deprived, you want help now, not in two or three weeks time. You want help now. But equally, from a corporate perspective, you know, if they’re going to plug in a platform to their wellbeing package, adding in the ability to phone a sleep consultant, to make an appointment with a sleep consultant, and equally, not wait two or three weeks to have that call is is a brilliant add on as well. So I just really believe that whole thing of you know, pushing the boundaries at your desk till 12 o’clock at night because. You can’t afford to take somebody on, or you don’t want to spend the budget. Sometimes you have to in order to be able

Larissa Feeney 25:05 to grow. You do. And I mean, it’s, it’s really important that we talk about that, because I hear it all the time, and I’m sure you do as well, especially talking to, well, female business owners, I’m going to say, but it does happen as well with with male business owners, where you do think that you have to do it all yourself, for some for some reason, how did you develop that mindset? Erica, what changed for you? You know, how did you shift from I need to do all of this to actually, I don’t need to do

Erica Hargaden 25:34 all of this. I have been very lucky to be involved in some amazing mentorship groups like acorns, which you mentioned, I am. I am an acorn. And through being open to learning from other successful entrepreneurs, listening to their stories, constantly seeking out advice, I’m a big networker. I love talking to people, and by listening to how other people have scaled and and being successful, all of them have built a team around them. And you, you sometimes, like I said earlier, to feel the fear and do it anyway. You know you’ve you’ve got to go, Okay, well, what can I legitimately budget here? What do I need to take off my table and put on somebody else’s table so that I’m freed up to do that strategic thing? Like, even just today, I was working on that, you know, in terms of, like, okay, what can I take off my desk and give to somebody else here? Because I just can’t, can’t juggle it all. There’s great like programs out there, mentors. Work is won by the small firms Association. It’s fantastic. My local enterprise office is amazing. The courses they run, the supports they do, particularly around female entrepreneurship. I have also been an active member of network Ireland, which is a female networking group over the last number of years, and they have brilliant programs as well. I just think you have to put yourself out there and talk to people and and be honest. I you know, we’re great at painting the front doorstep in Ireland, aren’t we? And like, Everything’s fine. Everything’s fine. I kind of have never been that person. I’ve always been like, Oh my God. Like, and maybe I draw people down. But when people like, how are you Erica, I’m like, Do you know what? I’m grand, but I could actually do with a little bit of help with this. Do you know anybody who could do this? Or here’s something I’m struggling with. Have you struggled with this? And just think, if you do that, you the universe will send you what you need. They might do it there and then, but they’ll send it eventually.

Larissa Feeney 27:49 You mentioned the virtual assistant that you have. I also have a virtual assistant, and I’ve had one, I think, for probably two years or so. It’s another topic that comes up constantly, whenever we talk to small businesses, you know, how do you make the first move to delegate and a virtual assistant? I know, and you know, is a really great step to full time support in the areas of admin or social media or wherever, yeah, how did you make that relationship work with a virtual assistant.

Erica Hargaden 28:22 It wasn’t easy. Larissa, I’m going to be honest about that. I found moving into the delegation piece quite challenging because I had to do additional work to create the system to make the relationship between myself and the virtual assistant seamless and work well. And I think that can hold a lot of people back where they’re like, oh, in order to delegate that, I have to do extra work. But it’s not Yeah, yeah. My My husband says I’d be quicker doing

Speaker 1 28:54 it myself. My husband put it on

Erica Hargaden 28:57 it’s worth it, if you can identify the things that you don’t necessarily like doing and are drawing on your time, then you have a job for a virtual assistant. So for me, a new thing that I’ve added in for my virtual assistant is some community management within my membership, the repurposing of content within my membership, so looking at what I’ve already created and coming up with fresh content based on that, looking at directing the members towards the resources within their membership, you know, and making sure that they’re getting the value out of it by making them aware that it’s that it’s there, and also the onboarding and the off boarding of my one to one clients. So, you know, they get their sequence of emails, they get all the information they need, and everything is populated into the files and folders that I need them to be in. So I literally can just go to the client’s file. Yeah, and everything I need is there for me to get started on that new client, whereas I was doing all of that, and that’s not Time Well Spent when I could be off having a B to B call that could be game changing for the entire business. So looking at what you’re doing that somebody else could be doing to free you up to do the strategic thing that could change your business. That’s That’s why I went down the road of the VA

Larissa Feeney 30:30 the business that you’ve built Erica is, well, it was a consultancy business, and now it’s very much a tech business. And whenever you look at the market, the available market for your current business. It is global, and we’ve already talked about 5000 people across 37 countries. You’ve proven the model. You’ve proven the concept. Did you have any help? I’m thinking of strategic advisors, objective advisors, people who have built businesses like that before that was able to guide you along the way. Yeah, did you have any that kind of help on the journey so far?

Erica Hargaden 31:04 Well, before 2021 I did new frontiers, which is, you know, a local enterprise office and enterprise Ireland initiative, you know, to help you grow, establish your business. And I went through the three rounds of that, and I along that, got great advice in terms of the scalability piece and the strategic piece along the same time I was doing acorns as well, and I got, I put myself forward, or put the business forward, should I say, for the competitive Start fund. And, wow, yeah. And we received the competitive start fund in 2021 which involved at the time. It doesn’t exist anymore. It’s kind of changed into a different investment now, I think it’s called the pre seed now, which was a 50,000 euro investment by enterprise Ireland in your business, for which they got a stake in your business, a small shareholding. So I have been supported by enterprise Ireland since, and have had access to their mentors over the last number of years. So I’ve, I’ve had various brilliant, you know, tech mentors, marketing mentors. I had an amazing lady support us on a project around the development of the B to B aspect of the business, and really looking at, well, is there actually a market here for that, you know? So, you know, all of those supports, you know, have been amazing, yeah. But I do think if you don’t, if you aren’t on those programs, or you haven’t applied for them, I think there are brilliant resources out there in terms of, like podcasts like this. If you go looking for it, you will find super advice out there to help you figure out, maybe where you could take this or where you want to go, you just have to be open to listening and reading like I I’m a runner. I’m marathon training at the moment, like I’m out tomorrow for two hour run. Wow, good woman. I will be listening to it. Well, I’ll be listening to a business book. Yeah, if I’m not listening to a parenting book about parenting my teenagers, I’m listening to a business book. It’s one or the other, because they’re the things that are consuming me at the moment. So I’m taking that time to try and figure it out. Like, there’s just so much information out there.

Larissa Feeney 33:33 Yeah, there is. And I think the programs you’ve already mentioned, there’s a lot of choice there. And like, what I hear sometimes is that I’m too busy. I’m too busy to take a day out of the business to do the course or whatever. What do you say to that entrepreneur who’s too busy doing the day to day?

Erica Hargaden 33:50 Oh, if you don’t take time out to work on the business, you will get drowned in working in the business, and then there will be no business at all. You have to take your head out of it. You have to, yeah, and everybody is guilty of this, myself included, where you get sucked in, but you won’t regret the day that you take a little bit of time out and you focus on one particular thing that needs attention. It’s the most

Larissa Feeney 34:19 important thing you can do to grow your business, actually, I think, is to take time away. Is to take time away from it. You know, it sounds like it’s counterproductive, but that’s,

Erica Hargaden 34:26 that’s the truth. Oh, it’s 100% the truth. Like, we can all be on the hamster wheel, just going, going, going, going. But if you get off the hamster wheel and just take a little bit of a look around you, you could actually see something that could be could change, like I could have just totally kept going with one to ones, one to ones, one to ones.

Larissa Feeney 34:47 And you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that, actually, for, I mean, for the business owner that decides that that’s where their strengths lie, totally, that’s what they like to do, you know? And in many cases, you can charge much. More than you can for the, you know, the online delivery of services anyway, there’s a premium attached to the in person, consultation type work. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. And I think it’s not about what’s right or wrong, it’s about the individual business owner and what the goals are. What are you trying to achieve? You know, because going down the path that you went down, that’s a different skill set. Which brings me to another question, actually, Erica, and that’s around funding the business. So you’ve mentioned um enterprise Ireland, you’ve and CSF, you’ve mentioned Leo and priming, is that the only external funding the business has received so far?

Erica Hargaden 35:36 Yeah, I have. I’ve been funding the business, and the business has been funding itself since. I did go down the road of looking for funding with the support of enterprise Ireland, but the business wasn’t ready at the time, Larissa and I was I was barking up the wrong tree. That’s the truth at the time, would I go back to looking for funding? Yes, I would, yeah, but I would like to make some more gains in the B to B side of the business before, and maybe get some strategic contracts in place to put some value there

Larissa Feeney 36:16 before I approve the concept, to prove the

Erica Hargaden 36:18 concept, and before I would go down that road again. I found at the time I actually didn’t have as much support around me. I took my eye off the ball.

Larissa Feeney 36:29 Do you mean that you took your eye off the ball whenever you were looking to raise that you weren’t able to run the business because it’s almost a full time job,

Erica Hargaden 36:38 that’s exactly what happened if you’re going to go down that road in terms of funding and that type of thing, you need to be prepared for how consuming that is, and pressurized and short notice and a lot of networking, a lot of events, a lot, a lot, a lot, and I was glad I made the decision to park that for a period of time and focus in on getting back into revenue generating, getting back into the what do I want this business to look like? What’s the future of this business? Because I actually think I could have lost Babogue. If I had have continued down that road, I would have certainly lost my market really, yes, yeah, in the time frame where that started, sleep consultancy in Ireland as an industry exploded, and I think if I had kept down that road, I would have lost my market share. I would have lost kind of being the first mover advantage side of things.

Larissa Feeney 37:46 Okay, okay. And just whenever you talk about market share, can you tell us a little bit about marketing in general? I’m interested again, in the split B to B, B to C. So you’re you have a strategy for B to C, if you can touch a little bit on that, and then you must have a different strategy for B to B, if you can touch a little bit on that.

Erica Hargaden 38:06 So from a B to C perspective, social media is honestly my biggest marketing tool, and I reuse content there constantly, and I have an excellent person supporting me in the production of that and putting together ideas. That is an animal that you could be feeding all the time. So you need to be strategic around that, particularly with Instagram. You could, you could be producing content on Instagram constantly, and it’d be the only thing you do, and it generates you nothing. So you, you have to be putting it out there with a view to it converting. And in, if it’s not converting, you need to move to something else, you as in, you need to move to a different a different strategy around it, or a different piece of content, or, you know, taking a different thread with it, with B to B, I have found, obviously, LinkedIn is absolutely fantastic. I have found lead generation tools within LinkedIn, Sales Navigator to be the best asset, and it worked for you. Erica, it has worked for me, but only with the help of somebody who knew what they were doing around it. Larissa, so I employed, last year the assistance of somebody to create events for me, and that brought together key decision makers in different organizations, but underneath the kind of HR health and wellness bracket so that we could talk about sleep within their organizations from their employees perspective, and how they were showing up, and really conversations around and what they could see maybe their employees needed what the companies were providing, and they were really just very open conversations. Conversations. I was surprised that every single one of the events that we ran over the six months were full people wanted to talk. You know, we had maybe eight to 12 people on each we call them round tables, and they were all done online. That gave me huge leads, because we had had this conversation together as a group, I was able to contact them all afterwards, and I still continue to contact them all. And then it has actually nearly cultivated my LinkedIn as a result of doing this into the type of people that I need to be putting myself in front of. So like my my background prior to Babogue‘s event management, so a lot of my LinkedIn was event management based, whereas now it’s it’s shifted into the space that I needed to be in. I use content that is specifically geared towards what businesses would be looking at on LinkedIn. So if you looked at my Instagram and looked at my LinkedIn, two totally different messages going

Larissa Feeney 41:05 on there. That’s fascinating, because I see the same messages going out from businesses across both platforms, and I always question that I use LinkedIn a lot. I use Instagram rarely, and really just for personal stuff, but I see the same messages coming from businesses across both platforms, and I always wonder if that works, because they’re very different platforms, and they’re very different with the same people that’s on both platforms in a lot of cases, yeah, but it’s different customers for you, I suppose,

Erica Hargaden 41:38 very different customers, very different decision makers, I will say, though, sometimes what a person will see on Instagram, then might send them over to LinkedIn to look at it from their business perspective, or their position in the business perspective, like they might say to me, Oh, I have seen you on on Instagram or my I know my sister follows you on Instagram, and I’ve heard somebody talk about you. So there is a little bit of overlap between both sometimes, but I’ve, I’ve never approached, even before I had help from a marketing perspective, I never approached LinkedIn in the same way that I approached Instagram. Instagram is a very busy place. Now, when I started, it wasn’t it was it was, you know, there wasn’t a whole lot of noise on it. Now, it’s a very noisy place. And you know, everyone following you is not buying from you.

Larissa Feeney 42:42 No, that’s true. The followers mean nothing. Have you made the move to Tiktok? Yet

Erica Hargaden 42:49 I am being encouraged to go over to Tiktok. But I guess, rightly or wrongly, Larissa, I have had to make the decision that I only have time for, you know, the two platforms at the minute, I can see, though, that I I wasn’t going to lose that battle around staying off Tiktok. Everyone talks about it being amazing place and an amazing place to do business, and a totally different place than Instagram. So I’m very open minded around it, but it just time when the kids get back to school, maybe that’s when I might

Larissa Feeney 43:24 look at it. I think it’s, you know? It’s, well, it’s probably doing what you’ve always done, and that’s to look at it strategically. And where your customer on Instagram is the mommy, probably, and maybe the daddy, and those mommies and daddies are getting younger, not they’re getting younger. We’re getting older, you know? And there’s their their use of social media is changing, and Gen Z is on Tiktok, and that’s probably what’s going to force your change. Your customer will move from Instagram to Tiktok, and therefore you’ll follow.

Erica Hargaden 43:55 Look at totally. We started on Facebook, right? That was where we started. We have shifted to Instagram, and we will shift to another platform again. But I very firmly believe that this is engineered by the companies themselves, because they want their platforms to evolve and grow. They want they want it to shift. They want all of that completely. Yeah, I’m not, I’m not closed off about it. I will, I will end up there eventually, but I’m not there

Larissa Feeney 44:26 yet. Well, I’m in the exact same position as you. We’ve had very similar conversations about Tiktok, and some, some of the firms in our industry are doing great stuff on Tiktok for me right now, I made a decision not to very similar my clients not there, and when they are I’ll be there. That’s the way I will view it.

Erica Hargaden 44:45 Yeah, and my clients are there, but I’m not ready to service them there. I don’t have the time, the energy, the, you know, to be able to create more content for over there. Because very often the content I. On every platform has to be different. That’s three, that’s three streams of content to be created. And so, yeah, I find that challenge

Larissa Feeney 45:07 completely overwhelming. Yeah, it is overwhelming for a small business to know. I think you do one. In your case, two, you do them very, very well, yeah. And you very intentional about what you’re doing, because to be everywhere is is impossible. Erica, I’m really interested in how you balance giving away information, or, I suppose, building content that might give away information, and then charging for information, or the need to charge for the information in order to run the business. How do you balance those two?

Erica Hargaden 45:40 And that’s a really good question in the beginning. So I’m doing this eight years. In the beginning, I was probably giving away far too much Larissa, that’s the truth. In order to build a following and to get people to know Babogue and know me now, my content on social media is more about identification of a problem. This is the problem that you are experiencing, and I can help you via this solution, rather than this is the problem you’re experiencing. And here’s the solution. Okay, do you know what I mean? Okay, so I’ve taken away the from social media, the how you solve the problem, and shifted to the I can solve your problem, or I can help you solve the problem. The other thing that I do is I do a discovery call. If families want to work with me, one to one, I do discovery call, where you know, I hear the sleep challenges and I listen. A lot of people would like those to be advice calls, but they’re not. So I have very much to shift towards. I hear you. I can see ways that I can help you with this problem via these services. And in those calls, it does become very apparent to me who will become a client and who won’t, who’s there to learn about how my services can help them, rather than how. How do I solve this? And please tell me now for free. So you have to become confident as a business owner to be able to navigate that sphere and understand that unless somebody is paying you, you don’t have to solve their problems. You know you you’re you’re there to sell your expertise and be paid for it, and that’s okay.

Larissa Feeney 47:31 You have your prices on your site. Now your service isn’t too dissimilar to our service, because every parent is different and every child is different. How do you manage to charge the same for every consultation that you do? Or is it a case of you might have to tailor it, depending on the situation,

Erica Hargaden 47:52 in terms of the one to one, I don’t tailor it anymore. I was trying to be all things to all people when I started, and that just left me stretched and really nearly not knowing what each customer was getting. I found when I drilled down into the product suite and identified the two core things that people wanted. One was advice. Some people just want advice, and that is the sleep success consultation. They get one hour of my time, and I advise them on their sleep challenges, on a video call over that one hour. The other is the customer who wants advice, tailored plan and support. They they’re they’re a different customer. They don’t feel they can go it alone. They need the hand holding. They need the support. They need the person the other end of the phone who’s going to be the voice of reason. They need the the advice on pretty much a con not constant, because they’re obviously not texting me in the middle of the night, but they want access to a sleep consultant to guide them through the process. Totally different customer. So being able to identify those two products meant that I have now got a system in place for both of them, and I can service them really, really well, whereas, when I was trying to do a bit of everything, nobody was getting serviced really

Larissa Feeney 49:25 well. So you were able to focus down on two products, on two customer profiles, yeah, build a product around the customer profile in terms of the customer’s pain, yeah. And come up with a figure, a price that works? Yes, and then you can publicize that price, and it doesn’t change. It doesn’t because

Erica Hargaden 49:45 you’re very clear. I’m very, very clear. And then I was able to identify the third customer who wants the advice, they want the information, they want, the support, but they don’t have the budget, and they are. Are the membership they are the subscription model people. They’re the people using the sleep series. So you’ve kind of got three little revenue streams. There three customers, from A, B to C perspective. And I found by being really clear and transparent about that, it means as well that the customer that is coming to me knows what they’re getting themselves in for. This is the price. Erica will deliver this, this, this, this, and this, and deliver to an excellent level. So I’m getting the customers that that I know I can work

Larissa Feeney 50:36 with really, really well, Erica. I have one last question for you, okay, and that is, I’m wondering what advice you would give, because, say, for example, last night I received an email, and I didn’t open the email I received, and I received it quite late, and I didn’t open it, which would be unusual for me, because normally I would be honest, right? And I didn’t open it, but I did open it this morning. Okay, now, had I opened that email last night, I wouldn’t have slept, right? Oh, yeah, because the contents of the email would have led to me overthinking and I wouldn’t have slept. Yep. So my question to you is, as a sleep consultant, what advice would you give to listeners who can’t sleep because they worry about their business?

Erica Hargaden 51:16 Well, turn off your phone at nine o’clock at night and plug it in in your kitchen and leave it there. Leave it downstairs, leave it downstairs, leave it out of your bedroom, and give yourself the time and the space to decompress and unplug and, you know, be present within your yourself and your household. That is something that I have pretty religiously followed myself since I moved into this house. We moved into this house 10 years ago. We’ve no TV points upstairs, none. The builder thought I was insane. No TV points, no TVs upstairs in this house, and there’s no phones allowed upstairs. The children follow that rule as well, or they don’t love it, but they follow

Larissa Feeney 51:59 it. So you’re actually living your own advice.

Erica Hargaden 52:02 I do live my own advice. Now, look at Larissa. I’m not perfect, like I did stand at the phone last night at a quarter to 10 dealing with something, and it actually wasn’t business related. It was in relation to my athletics club. But I would generally have the phone off by nine o’clock for a couple of reasons, to disconnect, but also to connect with my family, to connect with my husband, to what maybe watch something on Netflix together, to connect with the teenagers, to get the nine year old to bed without like the constant distraction I find I sleep much better. Give get yourself an eye mask. Eye masks are the bomb. They’re a game changer, game changer, game changer, game changer. And earplugs. Oh, my God, I only started using earplugs in the last 12 months. Amazing.

Larissa Feeney 52:54 Amazing, especially whenever you’ve got, in my case, and and probably in yours, teenagers who are up later than

Erica Hargaden 53:00 you are. Well, I don’t allow that. My teenagers are everybody in this house is in bed by 10 o’clock, no later 1010, 30, it is lights

Larissa Feeney 53:09 out, and oh my god, I am amazed. You get Yeah, yeah, but

Erica Hargaden 53:13 I don’t know. I think it’s just the way the house has always run, and they accept it, and they are all great sleepers. I’ve never had any challenges with the teenager Sleep Now, touch wood, you know, but I certainly hopefully will have the skills to approach it, should i i do have tech battles in the house Larissa, don’t get me wrong, I do, but I’m very we all have those. I have my boundaries, and I stick to my boundaries, and I don’t let my boundaries slip. I think also a key thing for adults in terms of their sleep is look if you are an exerciser, look at when your exercise is happening during the day. If it’s happening very late in the day, you actually could be creating some overheating in the body, which could delay your sleep onset. And look at when you’re getting your first dose of light. So if you are not getting outside in the morning, you’re not setting yourself up for sleep success. So when you get up in the morning, make a priority of getting yourself a cup of hot water and maybe put a bit of lemon and mint into it and sit out side, even if it’s just on your back doorstep, your front doorstep for 10 minutes. That flood of natural light exposure tells your body what time of the day it is, and then sets you up for success for the entire rest of the day and your sleep that night. So it’s actually what you do at the beginning of the day is going to really help you at the end of the day. So that’s what I do. I get I get up in the morning, and my exercise generally happens in the morning. So I get my flood of light, because I’m a runner, so I’m outside. But if I have a morning like this morning, which was a rest day from running, you know, I did my yoga, and then I went outside with a cup of hot water and I sat, I just sat for 10 minutes and listened. And and there’s load of building work going on outside my house, but listen to the builders on the road. There’s loads a lot of diggers. But listened and just took it in and 10 minutes, and I find when I let that slip, and I do let it slip, because I’m human, but when I keep going with it, I sleep much better. So beginning of the day and the end of the day,

Larissa Feeney 55:23 that is really great advice. That is really great advice. Thank you so much, Erica. Erica Harkin and founder and CEO of Babogue, thanks so much for joining me today.

Erica Hargaden 55:31 Thank you so much, Larissa,

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