Ep. 82 – Lara Harrison – Balance & Boundaries

Interview with Lara Harrison

[00:06:48] Mich Bondesio:

So, hi Lara. Welcome to the Creating Cadence Podcast. It’s really nice to have you on the show.

[00:06:54] Lara Harrison:

Hi, Michelle. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to it.

[00:06:57] Mich Bondesio:

Me too. So you and I are both Entrepreneurs in Residence at the School of Business at the University of Lancashire, which was previously known as UCLan. And you joined the EIR team late last year, and we’ve had the chance to chat a few times at various events since then, and it’s been really lovely getting to know you.

And we’ll get into the nitty gritties of what you do with your business Superstar PAs in a minute. But first, I’m keen to find out more about you and where you find yourself in your life and work at the present moment.

[00:07:24] Lara Harrison:

So, my life has been a bit of a rollercoaster. But where I find myself at the moment, at the grand old age of 43 is, I live very happily in Penwortham in Preston with my blended family. So my partner Anthony my daughter Adeline, who is coming up to eight, and my stepdaughter Alexis, she’s 17. She lives with us full time as well.

So we have a very, very busy home life. Um, very chaotic and at times, but, um, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ve always wanted a happy family environment and yeah, I feel very grateful for my life right now. So that’s my personal life and. My background is, is financial services, and I started the virtual PA business, which is Superstar PAs, nearly 10 years ago.

We’ll be 10 years old next month. Thank you. But it was by accident. I didn’t plan to start out a VA business. I, I left banking because of cultural issues. And somebody said to me, well, why don’t you just freelance as a virtual assistant until you figure out what you really want to do? So I did, um, because I really organised and, uh, I just thought.

You know, I’ll give this a go until I, I find what it is I’m, where I’m gonna, you know, build the rest of my career. And then by accident, or not by accident, ’cause obviously I, I, I worked hard at it. I found myself with a full-time business after about six months.

It was just myself running the business. And then over time I’ve developed the associate model. So over the, kind of like the last, eight years, I would say the associate model’s grown. It started as with a team of one associate. There’s now 20 of us. And my role is very much changed in the business, whereas I don’t manage the clients myself anymore, but I’m responsible for going out, finding the new business, matching the clients to the VAs, all the back office stuff that comes with running a business.

And I’m also, as you say, an Entrepreneur in Residence at UCLan. So I do a lot of mentoring with students and I do a lot of networking and business development to continue to grow the business.

[00:09:26] Mich Bondesio:

Fantastic. Well, it sounds like you’re juggling quite a few different facets with your life.

[00:09:30] Lara Harrison: Yeah, very. Yeah.

[00:09:32] Mich Bondesio:

I know. Because I advocate for building more supportive foundational wellbeing practices as part of being more intentional with our productivity so that we can juggle all of these things, feasibly and manageably, I’m keen to know more about your personal practice, how you stay well and focused and productive.

Do you have any regular practices, routines, or rituals, and how do you deal any challenges?

[00:09:53] Lara Harrison:

Yeah, I do. And they have been developed over a number of years. When I started the business, I absolutely wasn’t on top of any of this whatsoever. This has kind of been developed as of I’ve learned the effects of burnout and, you know, how important managing boundaries are. But I do have some non-negotiables in my diary now and when I drop my daughter at school in the morning, I go straight to CrossFit and I have a CrossFit class that I do from half nine till half 10. Uh, I get home and then I start work at 10 45. I also do yoga one evening a week. And I read probably every single night for like two to three hours.

That’s like my meditation and like my switch off time. I also love going out walking, even if it’s just, you know, 10 minutes round the block before my CrossFit class starts. That’s really important to me. And recently because I’ve been feeling the effects of burnout again, from making myself too available, I suppose.

That’s something I’ve wanted to work on for a number years is, because I had my emails on my phone and also we are using an app called Voxer for my assistants to contact me, I felt like I was on call 24/7.

So clients and associates were able to contact me anytime during the day, and I would respond during the day, but I’ve actually removed them from my phone over the last couple of weeks so that I only deal with work, with clients, or my associates, when I actually sit down to work at my desk. And it’s really helped me to be able to switch off more. And I’ve been so much more productive as well. Because you waste so much time refreshing your emails to see what’s coming through.

And then a big one for me was I gave up alcohol three years ago.

Which has been an absolute life changer for me, and I’ve found that I’ve got back so much more time, because drinking takes up a lot of time, not just at the time, but the following day because it, it recovery. So I’m not as burnt out, but like I say, these practices are always evolving. But those are like the main things I do.

And I’m very, very strict with my boundaries.

So. If a client asks to speak to me at 9.30am, I will say no and offer some alternative times, because that’s my CrossFit time. And it’s the only hour in that day I get to do that. And if I say no, it, you know, that will play on my mind all day then that I’ve not been and done my exercise. And by the time I’ve got home and done all my work and picked up my daughter and taken her to all her different activities, I just physically wouldn’t have the time to fit that in at any other point during the day.

So it has to be done then. And at no point has a client turned around to me and said, well, I’m sorry Lara, that’s a big problem. And unless you can speak to me at 9.30, then I don’t wanna do business with you. No one’s ever said that. They say, oh yeah, sure, let’s do 11 o’clock instead. You know? So sometimes I think we worry about these things way, way too much.

A hundred percent.

Pushing back.

[00:12:43] Mich Bondesio:

Yes, I agree. I think it’s really great that you’ve really clear on your non-negotiables. You’ve been clear in communicating those boundaries. You are always offering an alternative solution to your clients. So it’s never an a full on ‘no’, you know, you’re providing an alternative.

So there’s, no reason why a client should have an issue with that. And you’re right, we need to be more comfortable with setting those boundaries. I love what you, I love everything that you’ve spoken about there. In particular though, this new experiment that you’ve had around removing or not using your phone as part of how you do your work.

I think it’s so critical in terms of reclaiming our attention and protecting our focus, because that phone is a little, like a little box of cigarettes. It’s full of little distractions and so you might go in there to check email, but you end up finding yourself in a million different places doing a million different things that aren’t necessarily about work.

[00:13:32] Lara Harrison: Very much.

[00:13:33] Mich Bondesio:

That’s so interesting to hear how you’ve, how you’ve implemented that. And also about certain things that you, you are, you’ve become aware of what supports you and what helps you, and you know that that exercise slot in your day, it’s actually part of your workflow. Because if you don’t do that, you’ll probably be more stressed as you say.

You’ll be, you, you’ll worry that you won’t be able to fit it in another part of the day. It’s an important part of what helps support you so that you can be better when you are working at the time that you need to work.

[00:14:02] Lara Harrison:

Yeah, and I actually thought with this, you know, um, checking the phone, you know, sometimes it was every five minutes. It was ridiculous that it would help me so that when I got back from my CrossFit class, I would have more time because I’d already checked those emails and dealt with those emails while I was there.

But actually I found since I haven’t been doing that and I’ve just sat down, I feel like I’ve got. So much more time, like, you know, not just a few minutes. I feel like I’ve got like an extra couple of hours worth of time in the day and more mental clarity, because I think that, you know, spending so much time on a mobile phone can drain you mentally.

[00:14:37] Mich Bondesio: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:38] Lara Harrison:

And I don’t feel as inclined to pick it up to check Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn since I’ve not been doing that, I just. If I have to pick it up, then I might just check Instagram at the same time, but I’ve not been going to it. It’s almost like I’ve broke that, that pattern of addiction with the phone. Um, which feels like a good place to get to ’cause it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a couple of years.

A bit like when I gave up alcohol, I’d wanted to do it for a couple of years and kept trying and failing and trying and failing. Then I wanted to give up sugar and I tried and I failed with that. And, you know, reading wanted to get into reading and tried and failed with that and then just eventually got there.

So you know, sometimes you just have to keep recommitting yourself to it. And, and that’s what I said. I was gonna do at the beginning of this year that was really gonna nail that phone addiction, and I’ve managed to do it over the last few weeks and it probably feels better than when I gave up alcohol because it was, I feel like it was a bigger problem.

[00:15:32] Mich Bondesio:

Yeah. Well I think, you know, , at the time our needs and wants change and there is, we reach a certain level of pain or discomfort where actually making the change becomes better for us than staying in the position that we’re in. And I think that once we’ve done one big thing, it makes it easier to make change in other areas.

So, I’ve been experimenting with being sober since January this year, so I’ve got a long way to go before I reach your milestones, but it’s definitely helping me be more focused and less stressed and more intentional in other parts of my life. And as a result of that, I’ve now picked up the habit of, I did a Vedic meditation training course recently, and I’m devoting 20 minutes twice a day to meditating, which for me is quite a lot of time in my day.

But, what I’m realising is that it’s actually helping me be more focused and productive in the time that I’m allocating to work. But implementing that habit change is, I’m feeling is becoming easier because I’ve done the thing that I initially thought was quite hard, and I think it’s the same for you.

You know, you’ve, you did a really big, hard thing by stopping alcohol completely, because of the social pressure that we feel.

[00:16:39] Lara Harrison:

Yeah, very much so. But I think when you know you’ve done something that big, it’s like, oh, well if I could do that, then surely I can, you know. And, but what I had said to myself there was, there was lots of things that I wanted to change, like alcohol, caffeine, sugar, my reading. I didn’t say to myself, I’m gonna change all these things at once, because I knew that would be absolutely impossible.

I said, I’m just gonna focus on the drinking. Once I feel like I’ve got my head around that, then I’ll look at caffeine and that’s what I did six months after giving up, drinking, and then I moved on to sugar. And just gradually, I keep thinking, right, okay, I’ve done that one. Now what do I wanna do next?

[00:17:17] Mich Bondesio:

Well then it becomes kind of a fun challenge ’cause you’re pushing yourself in an enjoyable way. Yeah. That’s excellent. Alright, so let’s talk a little bit more about your company Superstar PAs. As you said, you started almost 10 years ago now, that’s really fantastic.

You started on your own, you now have a team of 20 that’s really huge and you’ve worked I see with some really interesting clients, including the well-known poet and speaker, Lemn Sissay.

[00:17:39] Lara Harrison: Yep.

[00:17:40] Mich Bondesio:

You’ve mentioned a bit about why you started the business. How did you design it to fit around your life, and how have things transformed as it’s grown to include the team?

[00:17:50] Lara Harrison:

Okay. Well, when I, when I started the business, I was 34 at the time. And very much still in that mindset of. You know, very career driven, very ambitious, and wanting to do well. And you know, the first couple of years it was, it was just me and I was, I was happy with it just being me. I was working probably 50 hours a week supporting about 20 clients on my own and really, really enjoying it.

I had no plans to grow the business at all and would’ve carried on you know. Doing it that way for, you know, many, many, many years. I didn’t actually want any extra responsibility. I just enjoyed doing the work myself. But there was a couple of events that happened in my life, which changed things, as I should say.

So eight years ago when I was pregnant with my daughter, I, I found out that my husband had been having an affair. I was five months pregnant and he left. And I became responsible for, you know, practically and financially for, for raising my daughter alone for the first five years of her life.

And it was at that point I realised that I couldn’t continue to work 50 hours a week and raise a newborn baby on my own as well as move house, go through a divorce. And you know, I look, look back on that kind of period of my life and you know, how I didn’t have a nervous breakdown is, is quite a miracle really.

I, I think I was nearly there but didn’t quite have one. Um, and so there was those that happened. And that’s when the associate model developed. And then we had COVID. Okay. And again, that you know, kind of brought it to the forefront of my mind to continue developing the business. Because all of a sudden I had a 2-year-old at home with me full time, you know, because nurseries were closed.

So again, I remember having a, a conversation with a client of mine, she’s called Niyc Pidgeon. So she was one of my first clients and she was a business coach, and one of the things she teaches is you know, how businesses can create passive income? And I remember saying, let’s get on the phone and have a chat because I can see that you’re sinking and I think you really need to push on this, creating a passive income and the associate model because it’s going to, you know, really change your life.

And that’s what I’ve worked on over a number of years, to the point where, yeah, there is a team of 20. We support, you know, probably 60 clients, some on a regular basis, some on an ad hoc project basis, but it’s meant that, probably for the last four years since my daughter’s been at school, that I’ve only had to work really two or three hours a day.

If I didn’t do anything, the business would still pay me. But because things change all the time, I’m very mindful of constantly doing business development work, finding new clients, looking at ways that we can improve things. ‘Cause you know, industries change and people change. Training. How can I help train my associates so that they’re in a better position to do their jobs?

There’s always lots of different things I’m looking at. That’s meant that I’ve been able to drop my daughter at school. It’s meant I’ve been able to pick her up. She’s never never regularly been to a breakfast or an after school club, on, on the odd occasion when I was on my own, where if I had an early or a late meeting. It’s meant that I can’t take her to her activities that she wants to do after school.

So it’s just given me all this flexibility, which, if I’d have been in what I call like an office proper job, Monday to Friday, nine till five, it, it would’ve been impossible. My life would’ve been so much harder to manage at that point. You know, if I’d have been dropping her up before and after school clubs, she’d have been there from half past seven till six o’clock, I would never have had chance to go to the gym.

I wouldn’t have been able to spend any time with her. I get to take her to a swimming class every week. She just got her 25 meter badge this week while I was there to see that and see how happy she was. Fantastic. Whereas, if it was the other way around, then I probably would’ve been relying on grandparents to take her to there, you know?

[00:21:34] Lara Harrison:

So it doesn’t earn me millions, but it earns me enough. And, for me, that’s enough. I don’t need to earn anymore. I can pay the mortgage, I can pay the bills, my time with her and my time to do the things that I like are worth more to

You know, I don’t want a bigger house. I don’t want a better car.

I don’t want lots of fancy clothes and handbags and fancy holidays. We have a family holiday once a year. We do a couple of UK breaks a couple of times a year, and that, that’s enough. And I couldn’t ever imagine going back to that corporate environment where I wouldn’t have that control over my own life.

[00:22:13] Mich Bondesio:

Such a good point, how very often in those traditional working systems, it’s just so rigid, you know? It doesn’t allow us that flexibility and that freedom to be able to fit work around life and create more meaning for us, you know, because we’ll enjoy our work more when we are able to fit it around our life and to, be able to be there for the important milestones that you’ve spoken about. Because our identity isn’t just about what we do for work, it’s about all the facets of our life. So super important point that you’ve made there.

So creating cadence is about how we build better rhythm, pace, and flow in our life.

And we’ve touched on this a little bit. One way of creating cadence is this idea of flexible working practices, which is also the theme of the season. So I wanna dive a little bit deeper on this, now. Your business model is by nature about flexibility and flexible working styles, and what does that actually look like in practice for your team?

What does a typical day or week look like for them as an associate?

[00:23:10] Lara Harrison:

Yeah, so all of my team are all self-employed contractors. I haven’t employed, because one, it doesn’t work for them, because they have contracts with other clients and other things going on in their life. They, like me, they don’t want to be employed by somebody. They want the flexibility. And also, you know, at that, that time in my life where I was growing the business and I had so many other responsibilities, I didn’t want the responsibility of employing so many different people at any one time.

I felt it would’ve completely overwhelmed me and burnt me out. And, it’s worked really well for, for me and my associates. My associates work on a part-time basis for me, because they have clients and projects outside of Superstar PAs, either with other agencies or with, you know, they have their own direct clients and they support our clients from anything from like an hour a week to 10 hours a week.

And I don’t expect them to be online Monday to Friday, nine till five. I just say to them, as long as the work is the work that you’ve promised your client is done in the time that you’ve promised to do it in, I don’t care whether you are working at six o’clock in the morning or 10 o’clock at night, if that’s what you want to do to fit it around your life.

You know, I don’t need to know when you’re taking the dog to the vet. I don’t need to know when you’ve got a doctor’s appointment. As long as the work is getting done, the work’s getting done well, and the client is happy, that’s all I’m bothered about. And the associates are happy as well.

You know, I feel like if you, do you need anything from me? Could I support you better? Do you need training in anything? And if they ask for it, then I will always go to, you know, great lengths to try and support ’em with that.

We’ve just had a, a situation recently where an associate needed some training on Xero, so we’ve organised for that and it’s made her life so much easier. Because if she’s happier, she’ll do a better job and the client will be happier.

So the only thing I ask of them is if you’re gonna be on holiday for, you know, a week or a couple of weeks, let me know a month in advance so we can get you some cover for the client, so the client doesn’t have to manage without you in that time. And also so that they’re not coming back off their holiday to a load of work that’s built up in the last two weeks.

You know, they can take a break knowing that everything’s taken care of.

[00:25:21] Mich Bondesio: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:21] Lara Harrison:

I also say to them that because of the way that I work, I’ll sometimes send emails early in the morning or late at night. But I say, you are under no obligation to respond to those messages when I send them, you reply to them in your working hours.

Um, if it’s something urgent, I would call you, but it’s very, very rare that there’s an occasion like that. I mean, we’re not brain surgeons. There’s never anything that urgent. I think we’ve probably had two urgent issues in the last 10 years, and at that point I’ve just picked the phone up to them to ask them, you know, what’s happening?

Yeah. And that’s, that’s probably a very brief summary.

[00:25:55] Mich Bondesio:

What I love about what you’ve said there is that level of autonomy and trust that has been built with the team that you work with. You don’t need to be micromanaging them. You trust them to get the work done. You’re giving them the flexibility and the autonomy to work at a time that suits them.

So that obviously supports their wellbeing and their sense of satisfaction and in terms of the work that they’re doing as well. And this is very much an important part of more flexible working practices is… we do the work we do, we fulfill the role we are meant to fulfill, but we can do it at a time that suits us, that works for us.

As long as that work is getting done, is delivered to the caliber that is expected, it doesn’t have to happen in a place at a time. And this is an important part of that flexibility. You set the protocols, the guardrails. People know what they have to operate within, but they’ve got the freedom to be able to deliver that work in a way that suits them.

So thank you for explaining that.

[00:26:47] Lara Harrison: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:26:49] Mich Bondesio:

Now if we look at this from the customer side, how does that flexibility of service help your clients? I see that you have on your website, it mentions different business phases that might require different levels or types of support.

So what types of clients do your teams typically support, and how does that flexibility of service help them to keep moving forward in their business?

[00:27:10] Lara Harrison:

So typical clients of ours these days are kind of solopreneurs or SMEs, and they’re typically like individuals that have been in a corporate job and they’ve come away from that world because they’ve either been maybe redundant, they’ve had a family, or they’ve just, you know, there’s been circumstances in their life that they’ve thought, I just don’t wanna be in that environment anymore.

But they’re like, but you know what, I can do this on my own. I’m really good at this. So they go, right, I’m gonna give it a bash. But what they’re used to is obviously doing their job, but they’re also used to having an admin team when they’ve been working for a company. So they have somebody running the admin side of things and running the operational side of things.

So what we find is that we see these solopreneurs and SMEs very quickly burn out. Because they’re having to do so much more and not just doing so much more, but doing things because they’re not used to doing those things. They don’t understand it, they don’t enjoy it.

So we basically kind of take away all of that stuff that they don’t like doing to basically give them a lot more time. You know, reduce the stress levels and it gives them that time to focus on what they should be doing and that mental clarity, because you can very easily be bogged down with like admin and lists and things that you have to do, that you can look at a list and you kind of get, you know, find yourself in like freeze mode because you don’t know where to start, and you procrastinate so it never gets done.

Whereas all of that stuff on that list can be given to a VA so that you can focus on where you need to be in front of your clients. Business strategy, business growth you know, looking at any training issues that you might have in your company.

And in terms of the flexible way, so because these are small companies, they either don’t want to hire somebody full time, because they’re just starting out themselves. They might not want the responsibility. They don’t want the headaches that come with employing somebody, and plus they just don’t have 35 hours worth of work a week, they might not even have 10 hours of worth of work for somebody. So, if you can get a VA that will do five hours a week for you. And when we onboard clients, the client and the VA has what we call like a kickoff call, and there’s a couple of guides that we share on there about how to make the best of their working relationship and things are discussed before they get started on like boundaries and when will they check in together.

So it could be they decide that you know, these are the tasks that have to be done in that week. The client doesn’t care when they’re done, as long as they’re done at some point, or they want a certain task done on a Tuesday or a certain one done on a Friday. And the VA will plan that into their workload appropriately.

And they’ll say, and let’s just catch up for 10 minutes on a Monday to see where we are and see if the VA has any questions. So they agree between them what the working relationship is gonna be like. So one working relationship with one client and VA can be completely different to another.

So I have a VA, but I don’t check in with her every week. I don’t feel I need to. If I need her, I’ll just email her, I’ll send her a voice note, ’cause that works better for me. And if there’s a problem, she’ll voice note me back. So, it’s very different. It comes down to what that partnership, what they want out of that partnership, I suppose. But it’s very, very flexible.

[00:30:18] Mich Bondesio:

Hmm. It sounds like there’s, you know, the opportunity to work more asynchronously, as you said, you send voice notes back and forth, so that’s done in your own time, which is really helpful for focus and productivity as well. And how your associates can grow with the business owner in terms of how, when as their business grows, as their requirements change, they potentially can afford to, or have more requirements for that person to support them for more hours in a week.

And it sounds like, do they need to be multidisciplinary in terms of the types of skills that they bring? Or do you have quite specialist requirements with your VAs?

[00:30:54] Lara Harrison:

So probably 90% of my VAs have been recruited into the business, haven’t had VA experience, but what they’ve had is they’ve come from corporate or commercial backgrounds and they’ve worked in some very senior jobs, some of them, but they’ve got all the transferable skills and they’ve got all those personality attributes that make a really good VA.

So a lot of the time, like the systems that we use, they won’t be familiar with them, but they’re really easy to teach. But what you can’t teach is somebody to have those, those attributes, you know, that wanting to do a good job. Those communication skills, that sense of accountability and responsibility, you know.

An example would be if you say to the client, you’re gonna have it to them Tuesday, they get it by Monday, you know all those sorts of things, not going awol.

So those are the sort of attributes I look for. We do have a really thorough recruitment process, which again, has evolved over the years. And when I’m onboarding clients, I don’t think necessarily about the skills that a VA needs to have. I think about whether the personalities are gonna work well together because the skills and the systems can be trained and we’ll always do our best to make sure that they do have that experience in those systems.

But if you’ve got two different personalities and they’re not gonna work well together, it’s just gonna explode. So if I can get the personality matching right, then I know everything else will just fall very easily into place. We cover any training in-house here, so it’s not something the client needs to worry about, and the client’s not usually that bothered as, again, as long as the job’s getting done, the client is not bothered.

They don’t want to be taking on any more headaches of having to train people or show them how to do something. So we look after all that at this end. You know, our job here is to take away those hassles and not add to them.

[00:32:41] Mich Bondesio:

Yeah, that’s wonderful. Reducing the friction. So important. Alright, so we’re onto the final question now, which is all about lessons learned in both life and business. What words of wisdom or key insights can you share with my listeners based on your personal experience so far?

[00:32:56] Lara Harrison:

So, I’ve thought about this for a long time because there’s so much that I can share, but the biggest one, which I’ve come a cropper many, many times, not just in my personal life, but also on my business life, is when I’ve not listened to my gut feeling.

So if I’ve been speaking to a potential client and I get the feeling that something’s just not quite right, but then I think, oh, no, no, it’d be okay.

We’ll take it on. It’ll be okay. It could be that, you know, we, maybe we’d not had a great month, the month before, so I was just thinking, you know, purely for financial gain, let’s just bring this client on and, you know, get some cash flow into the business. And it’s always, always turned around to, to bite me in the ass.

Always.

So it’s been a big learning curve. One that I was even I came a cropper on last year. I ignored a feeling I had about a client and he didn’t pay his last invoice and still owes us about 3000 pound. But I’ve made peace with that because I should have listened to my gut. I should have googled him, which I didn’t.

And what I, what I did instead of putting all my energy into trying to recover this money from him. I just accepted that I’m never gonna see this money again. He doesn’t have any assets and he’s got unsatisfied CCJs. So the chances of me getting it back are very, very slim.

So what I did instead was put all my energy into business development. So the end of last year was an absolute car crash, but because I put so much energy into generating new business and all the growth this year have managed to get us back into a really good position.

So listen to your gut and don’t waste your time, you know, on, negative things. Just say you’re not gonna get involved in that and take a step back.

[00:34:37] Mich Bondesio:

Very sound advice and I think that, you know, on top of the being in tune with your intuition. How we feel about the client is as important as how they feel about us. It has to be a good fit. And you know, I’ve had to learn that lesson as well about saying no when I realise that actually this, this is not the right client for me and I can see that things are are not gonna end well if I continue.

So sometimes it is about being confident enough to say no, even though you’re not quite sure you know where the next client might be coming from.

[00:35:05] Lara Harrison: Yeah.

[00:35:06] Mich Bondesio:

So sound advice.

Thank you so much.And I have one more quick question for you. Do you service people specifically in the northwest or the whole of the UK or globally? What’s your market?

[00:35:16] Lara Harrison:

Globally. So we have clients in the UK mainly, but we have a lot of clients in the US and historically we’ve had clients in Spain and Australia as well. So we can help anybody anywhere in the world.

[00:35:28] Mich Bondesio:

Well, I have listeners in 30 countries, so who knows. You never know what might happen.

[00:35:33] Lara Harrison: Yeah.

[00:35:33] Mich Bondesio:

Alright, so where can people find you online Lara?

[00:35:36] Lara Harrison:

So you can find me on LinkedIn, uh, Lara Harrison. Or Instagram. Our Instagram is Superstar PAs and also our website is www.superstarpas.com, which is superstar PAS dot com.

[00:35:51] Mich Bondesio:

Lara, thank you so much. It’s been so lovely having this conversation with you.

[00:35:54] Lara Harrison: Yeah. Thanks Mich. Great to speak to you.

[00:35:57] Mich Bondesio:

There are so many valuable lessons around resilience in this conversation with Lara. From the importance of developing a robust personal practice to support your health, wellbeing, and productivity, to setting boundaries around your availability to avoid burnout, and lots of lovely good nuggets in between.

I love how Lara has intentionally made flexible working central to her business model, not only because it’s a necessity for her life commitments, but because it helps her to have a more meaningful life too.

So I’ll be back in a few weeks with the finale episode for this season, which is an interview with Abigail Best of Lemongrass Marketing and PR, where we talk about four-day working and the benefits of embedding sustainability into every part of your business, plus lots more.

Until then, keep moving forwards with courage, curiosity, and cadence.