Perspectives: Building a better workplace
The intersection of work, family, and balance.
This week’s Perspectives is an interview with Brooklin Nash and Rebecca Nash, co-founders of Beam Content, a marketing agency that creates expert-driven content for B2B SaaS companies. I wanted to talk with Brooklin and Becca for several reasons: they’ve been working as a husband-and-wife duo for a LONG time, they were previously freelancers, and they embrace a work-from-anywhere mentality.
Below is our conversation about their experiences and designing a workplace with a lot of intentionality. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Anna Burgess Yang: You've both been working independently and traveling for a long time. What inspired you to pursue that type of lifestyle?
Rebecca Nash: We were young and idealistic… maybe wanted to change the world. We got married right after college and immediately moved to Israel. Brooklin got his Master's degree there. Then we decided to volunteer for a year in Guatemala while he finished his thesis. One year turned into another year and another year and we just stayed. While we were volunteering, we needed an income so we started freelancing. We took on jobs that paid very little and were really random. But we got better at it.
And then we decided to adopt our daughter and our needs changed. We needed more financial stability. So we decided to shift away from volunteering and just freelance. We are people who say yes to opportunities, so we exceeded our income goal in our first year.
Brooklin Nash: Then I joined a startup with a full-time role. Plus I was freelancing 20 to 25 hours on top of that. It wasn't sustainable for the long term.
Now, we've been exploring what building something can look like without burning ourselves out. We don't want work to define our lives. But it's hard to wind that back in practice once the horse is out of the barn and we have these different opportunities.
ABY: What does burnout look like for you?
BN: I hear people describe the stress and sleepless nights and sixteen hour days. For me, I felt burned out by just not being excited about what I was doing. The type of work I was focused on was a small cog in a giant machine. I felt that on both fronts, with my full-time gig and the freelance work. So it was about shifting, not what the end result was, but what our work looked like so it was exciting again.
RN: Being married and managing a household together during that time when we were working six or seven days a week, we didn't have much time together. It felt like family burnout rather than just individual burnout. And during that time, I took on a lot of the unpaid labor. And that didn't feel good either. I haven't felt that since starting Beam, now that I'm thinking about it, because I like what I do now.
ABY: You wanted to roll things back... and yet you started a company! What was your thought behind that?
BN: It seems counterintuitive, huh? For me, I think it was two things. One, as a freelancer, your earning potential is limited by the actual hours you're available to work in a week. We got excited by this idea of building something that we believe in and can stand behind, but that is also self-perpetuating and self-growing. And two, we got excited about building a team not just for the purpose of production and profitability.
Neither of us had ever been a manager before. It was an opportunity to learn new things. That led to the decision to grow a business versus continuing our solopreneur path.
RN: And I think the idea of designing a workplace that is in line with our values was pretty intriguing. We had to learn how to do it, and that may be challenging, but we got to design it.
ABY: What does it look like to "roll things back" at Beam?
RN: Improving work and making a better culture in your workplace is really a process of constant experimentation and iteration. Once we launched Beam, we always had Flex Friday. That was a commitment to no Slack and no meetings on Friday. We weren't really at a point in our professional development where we could plan how to do that. We're at the point where we just say, "We're going to do it" and then we figure out the plan. And then we make sure our team takes those Fridays. We check in and say, "Have you taken your Fridays? How are you spending your time?" Not from a boss's perspective, but just, "Are you happy? Are you finding other things to do?"
This past summer we took a 100-day trip. We were working most of that time, but reduced hours. That was a radical experiment. We got some really great feedback from our employees. They felt empowered but didn't feel confident. So now we know where to improve it. We know what we need to do beforehand to prepare them now.
BN: Documentation has made a big difference, like literally taking the time to nail our processes down. Talk about what we do, how we do it, and why. That's enabled us to take what is in our brain and download it in a way that's digestible to the team so we don't have to have our hands on everything.
And we have to put guardrails in place. Like I could work 60 hours a week and maybe we'd get further and grow faster. But that's not really what I want. I'll block my calendar after 3:00 pm with the hopes that I'm done by 4:30 and taking my girls to an activity on a Wednesday. It's taking a step back and that's helped put some guardrails on myself, personally.
ABY: Talk to me about location flexibility. You still live in Guatemala and travel quite a bit.
BN: I think that's one of my favorite parts honestly: the impact on our girls (five and six years old) and their response to it. We want to show what's possible. You can make a living sitting behind a laptop screen from wherever you are. I think it's cool that they can see that. Even as we reduce time spent on work, we want to show them what work looks like as they grow up. And figuring out what a healthy balance looks like.
RN: One of my top values is recognizing that you have a choice. Modeling that to our girls is really important to me. Like the fact that we can live in a different country from where we came from -— they were both born here -— I can have these conversations with them. I remember as a child, I did "Bring Your Kid to Work Day" and it went into my parents' offices. But for us, work is at the kitchen table. We don't talk about it nonstop, but it is a family conversation.
BN: Travel is a big value for us. But it's about more than that. It's about the freedom to do more of what you value. Maybe that's camping trips in Colorado. Maybe it's going to every kid's activity... there are so many different ways of putting it into practice. Working from home might be a career goal because it supports everything else that you value.
ABY: Tell me about the dynamic of being married and also being business partners.
BN: Becca and I are very similar people in a lot of ways. And working together has highlighted the areas that we're not similar in and given us a chance to talk through them. And figure out what the other's perspective is, like gut instinct versus coming in with numbers and how we make decisions. We bring different strengths to the table. Like I could never do the operations and financial planning that Becca does.
RN: When it becomes difficult is maybe talking about business at 10:00 at night or at the dinner table. You have to be really disciplined about those boundaries and we slip on those. The kids are talking about whatever happened at school and I want to talk about whatever happened at work. But you have to wait and find a different time during the day.
And your communication and whatever's going on in your personal life, they're going to come out in business too. Our marriage isn't perfect and our business relationship isn't perfect either. But we've never experienced anything else. We've always worked together. We don't know what it's like to go to two different workplaces and then come back and share about our day.
ABY: What do you foresee as you grow Beam?
BN: Recruiting the right people is a huge piece of it. We tried four or five years ago to launch an agency model. But we were so ill-prepared for that. We didn't have the right rates, positioning, or clients. So that ended up flopping.
Walk it forward a few years and we got very specific about who we are, what we do, why we do it, and who we want to work with. That attracted a much different pool of creative people. Our writers, editors, and the rest of our team are fantastic. I've been able to take a step back and trust that they've got it.
RN: I'm growing into this realization that Beam is something separate from us, even if it's very intertwined with our personal lives. Even if we had to delegate every role to someone else in the future — which is not the plan — the processes are not built around a person. They're built around a role.
Being able to mature in our professional development and seeing Beam as something separate from us enables us to set up processes and systems in a way that supports growth outside of us.
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