The Four-Minute Voice Note That Saved My Business
Riding a rickshaw in Delhi, India
I was just about to get into a rickshaw in Delhi, India when my phone buzzed. It was a voice note from Mea, a traveler-turned-good-friend, on WhatsApp.
The voice note was also four minutes long.
Nobody sends a four-minute voice note with good news.
Mea was weeks out from flying to Kenya to travel with me, and my brain immediately went to the worst scenario (what can I say — we travel planners are always preparing for something to be wrong). It didn't help that flights from the U.S. to Kenya had just been thrown into chaos by the escalating situation with Iran. I figured she was canceling, someone close to her was sick, or something had gone so sideways that she couldn't fit it into a text.
I stared at that little gray bar on WhatsApp for longer than I'd like to admit. I was already having the worst month of my professional life. I didn't have room for one more thing.
I waited until I was back in my hotel room in India, took a deep breath, and hit play.
This post is about what she actually said on that note, and about the company that carried me through the rest of the spring: Satiated Artists, a staffing firm that places people from the creative and performing arts into administrative roles.
If you've ever had your only employee resign while you were on the other side of the world with four back-to-back trips in front of you, you might need them, too.
First, the part you might have missed
Here's the short version: my only employee resigned on day one of a two-month international work trip.
I've written about this a few times. No Mud, No Lotus is the honest one, where I talk about running the business solo from India, Kenya, Egypt, and Morocco with no window to hire or onboard and in 100% survival mode. I still managed to have plenty of Type 2 fun throughout those two months — but there was still a fair amount of chaos, as I talk about here.
Here's the thing no one tells you about losing your only employee while you're abroad and leading consecutive trips: There's no such thing as, "I'll deal with it when I get back." For eight weeks, time doesn't just stop. Every week between you and home already has an agenda and a group of travelers in it.
There's just Tuesday, and then another Tuesday, and another one, in a different country, with more people counting on you (sometimes when you're wearing the same outfit for several days in a row because your luggage didn't show up in Delhi. Yeah, that happened.)
I was not just stressed — I was the full-on, nervous system in overdrive, trying to keep my shit together kind of distraught.
Back to the voice note
Mea didn't have bad news. She had an offer.
She told me she'd been thinking about me since she heard my recent podcast episode, where I shared how hard things had become running a travel business while simultaneously living out of a suitcase. She had reached out after that episode, and we briefly chatted, and I told her that since that episode aired, I had also lost my employee.
Mea could feel how hard I was struggling, and being the kind and generous person that she is, she wanted to do something about it. She had a friend also named Laura, who I'd actually just met about six weeks earlier when our Georgia group reunited in Chicago, and she runs a company called Satiated Artists (SA). They hire, train, and place artists, actors, and musicians into administrative roles — think executive assistants, communications coordinators, and project assistants.
Artists get to earn a real living while they continue to make their art — debunking that whole "starving artist" narrative.
Mea said she wanted to give me a three-month, part-time employee to get me through it, as a gift.
I stood there waiting for a rickshaw with my group, and I felt the tears well up in my eyes. I couldn't fight it. It was one of those emotional releases that you can't stop, and I actually remember putting on my sunglasses because there was no time for a meltdown in the middle of Delhi.
But they were the relieved kind of tears — the kind when you feel so hopeless and desperate, and then just when you're about to hit complete rock bottom, someone swoops in and says, "I'm here. I've got you."
I couldn't believe someone had thought about my situation from 7,500 miles away and decided to spend her own money to help me. No agenda or ulterior motives. She just did it to be kind.
I was beside myself.
Of course, I said yes. I might have screamed it into a voice note back to her. Yes. YES! When could we start?
It's also worth saying that Mea wasn't just helping me. She was putting money behind two friends' businesses at once — mine and Laura's. She's an incredible person, and I'm so fortunate that my travel business brought us together a few years ago.
Two Lauras and one very chaotic calendar
Mea connected us over email within a day.
There are two Lauras in this story, and the one who came to my rescue was Laura Gouin, founder and CEO of Satiated Artists. Laura's background is in theater and film casting, plus a Master's in education, which means she approaches hiring the way a casting director approaches a role.
Laura G was ready to go. This Laura (ahem, me) was a different story. I was the bottleneck, and I knew it. My calendar is a disaster in a normal month, and I was leading trips across four countries in wildly different time zones. Finding one clear hour was its own small logistical nightmare. If my schedule had been anything close to normal, I think we could have started within days.
Even so: by the time I landed in Kenya, with my group about to arrive, I'd already had my first meeting with Laura and my first Artful Admin.
They were kind and immediately useful. I was struck right away by how fast they took things off my plate without needing me to explain the whole business first. That's the other thing about hiring help for your business, especially in a situation like mine where I needed help yesterday — the learning curve is often a huge barrier to entry. When you're that strapped for time, it's near impossible to teach someone everything you know, especially when it all lives in your head. So, you wind up doing everything yourself because it feels easier at the time.
Full disclosure, I was lucky to have a good friend, Dawn, to help create SOPs in my employee’s final two weeks so that she could transition things over to my new Artful Admin. She was a godsend, and I wouldn’t have made it without her.
If you are a solo entrepreneur, this is my PSA for today: start documenting SOPs. Do it today. Do it before your business gets so big that the task is too overwhelming. Have any new employee do it on day one. Make it an expectation in your business.
My first match wasn't quite right
And here’s why that matters.
My first match with Satiated Artists was wonderful. A salt of the earth human, and someone I'd love to have a drink with someday or catch their Broadway show. I’m genuinely rooting for their success. But despite being a great person and hard working, they just weren't the right fit for this role. I felt it almost immediately.
Some of that was me. Giving clear direction, support, and training to a new person while you're literally stranded on the side of the road in the Maasai Mara during a flash flood is a special kind of skill, and I did not have capacity for it at that time.
But some of it was just fit, plain and simple. Marketing is its own beast, this job was a big one, and it's not something you can push someone into without proper training and experience. We were pushing a square peg into a round hole, and it wasn't feeling fair or good to anyone.
So I emailed Laura, and this is the part to me that sets her apart from other business owners:
There wasn't any defensiveness, or "let's give it more time." There was no blaming her employee…or me. Instead, it was, "I hear you, I see you, and I want to make this right." She told me that Satiated Artists usually runs a real matching process, but because I was in crisis and needed help immediately, she'd made the match herself to get me support fast.
We agreed that at this point it was better that we wait until I was home and run the hiring process properly. I'd get to interview candidates, choose my own person, and be able to provide the time and attention they need to be successful.
A few weeks later, I was home, and we moved fast. We built out the key qualities and duties of the role together. They brought me three candidates. I ran formal interviews with their support. By the end of that same week, an offer had gone out, it was accepted, and we started working together the following week.
One week from "here's what I need" to a person actually doing the work. I've hired many, many times before and that is not the standard timeline.
Mary: the MVP of my business this spring
Mary is my Artful Admin, and she was a completely different fit. Specifically, she came in with the skills I needed for the Type 2 Travel podcast, which was the piece of my business that I loved the most and was most likely to fall off the rails without support.
It stayed on the rails because of Mary's help. I'm not being dramatic when I say that I truly don't think the podcast would have survived this spring without Satiated Artists. When you're alone and underwater, things like a podcast are the first things that go, because in business, your passions are often considered niceties, not necessities.
And usually when you drop something like a podcast and tell yourself you'll pick it back up later, you don't. I knew how it went. There's a reason so many podcasts never make it to 10 episodes. They're a lot of work, and they generally don't bring in revenue for a long time, if at all.
Instead, we made it to 50 episodes. The Season One finale, "Welcome Home," exists because a woman I met through my own business three years ago became my friend and saw I needed help. And a woman I'd met once for two minutes at a party built the team that made that help possible.
If you're in your own version of this
Maybe your one person just gave notice. Or, maybe you're still a solo entrepreneur and you're staring down a season you already know you can't manage, telling yourself you'll sort it out when things calm down.
But they don't calm down. I know this, and you know it too.
Here's my actual recommendation: if your business is in transition or in a pinch and you need to cover at least six months of work, use Satiated Artists. Laura and her team are excellent. Their people come in with a wildly varied skill set — they're artists, and artists are used to walking into a new production and figuring out the whole thing on the spot. And every admin is actively supported and monitored by an executive team, so you're not handed a contractor and left alone with them.
You show up, and they handle a startling amount of the rest.
Now, the part where we all end up around a campfire
Here's my favorite thing about how this ends.
I get to hang out with both Mea and Laura at Camp Lola Whiskey this week. Both sponsored the weekend — Laura through Satiated Artists, and Mea through Sexletics, her own startup company.
Mea is a Type 2 Travel board member now, and she was a guest on Episode 25 of the podcast last year when we talked about wine and group travel in Georgia. She's been part of my story for a few years, and I am fortunate to have been able to travel with her multiple times since we first met.
But the entire relationship Laura and I have built has been over email and video calls, with me in six different countries over the past six months. To get to meet her in person — around a fire in the Northwoods of Wisconsin drinking Brandy Old Fashioneds — is going to be a pretty cool moment.
I love the fact that one of the most useful things that happened to my business this year arrived as a text from a friend I was afraid to open.
FAQs About Satiated Artists
How much does Satiated Artists cost? SA's Artful Admins are $45 per hour with a 10 hour a week minimum commitment.
Do Artful Admins work remotely? Artful Admins primarily support their clients from remote but occasionally do hybrid in office support when they have qualified candidates available in their client location. Often clients will include their Artful Admins in their annual retreats and to support on-site events, and they have a policy for travel when that type of support is needed.
Do you have to be an artist to hire one? Nope! The admins come from the creative and the performing arts, but the clients are entrepreneurs and executives from a wide range of for- and non-profit companies. Satiated Artists describe them as people who are "starved for time and tired of being stuck in their never ending to do list." I was, at that moment, the poster child.
How is this different from hiring a virtual assistant? The oversight, mostly. A VA marketplace hands you a person and a login. Satiated Artists hires, trains, coaches, and then keeps an executive team behind every placement. Laura describes the company as a staffing agency, recruitment firm, training program, artistic community, and consultancy at once. Practically, it meant that when my first match wasn't right, there was someone to call who owned the outcome.
