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Marketing in Progress is a spinoff of Work in Progress that digs into what’s moving the needle in B2B. We feature marketing leaders, sales leaders, and agency owners sharing real stories, smart ideas, and no-filter perspectives—so you walk away with practical guidance to help you do your job better.
Tiffany Sauder (00:00):
Without that marriage check-in, I never would've known, we never would've had those conversations and we never would've gotten deep enough to really change our understanding of one another. I mean, think about the people who report to you at work, Gayle. You have performance plans for them, you have clear KPIs. You're doing weekly, monthly, quarterly check-ins on how are you doing it? We are not doing that in our marriages. We're assuming it's going to be up and to the right and when it's not, we panic.
Gayle Kalvert (00:23):
This is Work in Progress. I'm your host, Gayle Kalvert, and yes, I'm a work in progress. Today I'm joined by Tiffany Sauder, founder of Element Three, host of the Life of And podcast, mom of four, and someone who's refreshingly honest about what it takes to make marriage work when everything else is moving fast. We talk about the check-ins she and her husband do, what they've learned through therapy and why she believes marriage deserves just as much strategy and intention as building a business. This one is full of honesty, practical tools, and a reminder that none of us have it all figured out. So let's get into it. Hi Tiffany. Thanks for being here.
Tiffany Sauder (01:06):
Yeah, sure thing.
Gayle Kalvert (01:06):
I have to start out by just saying that I've of course listened to your series on marriage and for any listeners out there who are taking in our conversation, they may think like me. Wow. I never knew that there were couples that actually were this intentional about their marriage and working really proactively on it. I was one, impressed and also two, I'll not lie, a little bit overwhelmed, like wow, how do you do all this when you also own a business, have four children?
Tiffany Sauder (01:37):
Yeah. Well, maybe I want to make sure that I preface for your listeners that I am not a marriage expert. I just happen to be in a marriage and I have done that for 20 years, been married for 20 years. So this is not something that I'm not like a family therapist or anything like that. It's really this intersection of expecting excellence of every area of my life and believing if you want uncommon outcomes in any area of your life, that it's going to take an uncommon effort. And so we can't become uncommon in every area of our lives at the exact same time, but over years of a lot of intention really coming from a place of a lot of brokenness and fear that I was going to lose it all, that I was going to lose my marriage, that I was going to lose my business, that I was going to lose my version of the fairytale of having a nuclear family and kids that had a mom and dad, that my husband and I were on autopilot and there were a lot of demands on our lives, on our time.
Tiffany Sauder (02:36):
There were a lot of external things that were pulling us in a lot of directions that was not towards one another in the striving. We lost one another and had to work really hard to come back together. So I've been on a lot of stages and received a lot of awards. I don't say that in a way to self-glorify, but none of them have been for being married for a long time. My ego was chasing a lot of performative things because I love to achieve. I'm a firstborn. I'm a three on the Enneagram. I love to be in the foreground. I love to have impact. I love my days to feel busy. I love all of those things. And those things are not inherently bad, but they can become the parts of you that take away the thing you most want in life. And so when I say that the things I've learned, the practices that my husband and I have in our relationship and the striving for excellence that I have in this area of my life came from rebuilding it from a place of intense brokenness. So I offer that as a backdrop. I'm not an expert, but here we are.
Gayle Kalvert (03:36):
I so appreciate that and I relate to everything you're saying except the point where you have then you've taken that step to be intentional. But everything that you just described describes me as well. You went through obviously some really hard times. When did you decide, or when did you realize that you needed to be more intentional and not just my friends and I roll our eyes like, oh, go to couples counseling and they say, when was the last time you had a date night? Well, date nights don't fix marriage problems.
Tiffany Sauder (04:05):
One of the first things that we need to do is normalize the honesty of saying, my marriage is in a really hard place. When we were going through a really hard time, I did not have, I didn't know who I could say that to. And so we have in our shiny suburban country club, well-dressed, well-heeled lives. There's kind of only a place for that in the gossip circles, not in the real life like, hey, this is actually super hurtful and really deep and I'm trying to work through this. So I think one of the first things is having the courage to say it out loud before it's at, Hey, we're getting divorced because that kind of is the nuclear bomb that gets launched. And everybody's like, where? I had no idea. It's like that is terrible that that's culturally the way that we've sort of plumbed our two career households that we're all living in.
Tiffany Sauder (04:53):
But for us it was literally, there was some things that happened where we both realized that we had some real work to do to move forward, and I really did not know what moving forward looked like. I knew that we had to get clarity. It was either we were moving forward together and we had a way to repair and make whole again this marriage or we were going to need to learn how to move forward without one another. But we both knew we were at a crossroads. I remember saying to him in the kitchen kind of this idea of we're both firstborns actually. He went to Princeton, he played college football. He's incredibly smart, he's incredibly talented, he's been decorated his entire life. I'm like, we both deserve more than the mediocrity that is our relationship. Nowhere else would we settle for this. We would fire this employee, move away from this group of people.
Tiffany Sauder (05:46):
We would not continue to subsist inside of this. And kind of seeing that outside of yourself was helpful to kind of come above and say, this is not okay. It's not okay for me, let alone, yeah, I'm hurt and I'm mad and all the things, but neither one of us deserve this mediocrity. We have worked too hard at life for this to be what this is about. We needed, let's call it just professional help. And so we started off going to counseling, like you were saying, it was like one day a week and it was always on Tuesday at 1:45 in the afternoon in the middle of rest of my life, and you have to drive there. And it was like 20 minutes was spent scheduling the next one and paying for the session. I was just like, I am dying. I can't do this. This is not working for me.
Gayle Kalvert (06:31):
We did that and it's like look into each other's eyes, say this, repeat back to the other what the person said. I was like, this is just not getting us where we need to be.
Tiffany Sauder (06:41):
It was just too slow. We went to it's like marriage boot camp called Hope Restored. It has a Christian backdrop to it though I don't believe that's a prerequisite to attending it. And we were there I think four nights and five days, and it's the two of us, two on two with therapists and they say it's the equivalent of six to nine months of therapy and maybe even a year. I mean, you work through a lot of stuff. So that was kind of the reboot that we needed. When we pulled up, my husband was like, I feel like we're in like pulling up to juvie. And it did feel like that it's leave your phone in the car, outside world be damned. But there was this sense of both of us acknowledging where we really were. That I think was the beginning of the healing process for both of us to say, this is really where we are. We are both proud people because we're who we are, we're leaders. We're in charge with all this kind of stuff. We don't need help. I'm just like, and so that was kind of how we started our journey. But we don't go to back to therapy every year, but I can kind of explain what we do now.
Gayle Kalvert (07:43):
So for our listeners who are thinking maybe they can't do this four-day thing, because I know like I said, you have a series on marriage that our listeners should definitely go check out for more details on all of this that you and your husband, you even have your husband on the series talking through issues was really, really interesting to listen to. But we'll give an abridged version here today. So if we kind of fast forward then to after that session, you've shared with me some of the steps you take and how do you do this on a regular basis and stay intentional and have these kinds of conversations to make sure that this is going to continue. It's sort of helping all the time.
Tiffany Sauder (08:23):
In my business life, what I've learned is when things are in crisis, there's always a triage moment of some kind. You need to let employees go. You need to go land a big client, you need to overhaul your culture, bring in new leaders. There's this triage thing that kind of stops the bleeding, and that's what marriage counseling was for us. It was triage. But what I started to just observe is in any healthy environment where things can grow, there's a clear vision of the future. There's aligned resources and there's constant communication. And in our growing and evolving, my husband and I and our careers taking us in interesting directions and our social networks taking us to interesting places, we had lost an understanding of the shared vision of the future. We had lost the ability to align our resources behind that, and we had lost the art of communicating in the act of executing against those things.
Tiffany Sauder (09:17):
And so in a way that sounds remarkably nerdy, I started to say the things that I'm doing in my business, we have to do that in our home because when you're excited about what's next and you feel compelled to make that happen faster with somebody you love and you both understand your role in making that happen, and you get to figure out what's the adventure to get there, that's such a more beautiful picture of what our lives can feel like than fighting over who's going to unload the dishwasher. Can you please fold the socks I told you to? I asked you to fill my car up with gas. Are you serious? There's still mud in the garage. And our relationships kind of move to this sustaining ordinary interactions and we lose all sense of intimacy and adventure and connection and all these kinds of things. So I literally just started taking those tools into our relationship and into our home.
Tiffany Sauder (10:08):
So there's a few things that we do. There's kind of three categories. One of the episodes we did is we did a marriage check-in. So literally once a year on our anniversary in April, I have these, I believe it's eight questions that my husband and I both fill these out separately. And then for us on the microphone, we both share our answers. On a scale of one to 10, where would you rate our relationship right now? What have you most learned about yourself in the last year? What have you most learned about your spouse in the last year? Where would you like me to show up better for you in the coming year? Where do I feel like I want to show up? And we just learn, we actually take the time to sit down and say, how do we make us better going forward? So not this one in 2025, but the one before, we had totally, you kind of made the joke of go out and have a date night and it's going to repair everything that had just disappeared from our calendar.
Tiffany Sauder (10:57):
We've got early teenage kids. Your weekends start to be absorbed with their activities, which is super cool, but you've got to figure out how to do it differently. And so one of the new agreements that we made coming out of that marriage check-in, because we both said we are not spending enough time together, was that we were going to have a monthly date night on the first Friday of every month. So we made it very explicit and whoever cannot make it, it's their job to reschedule it. So if he's out of town for a conference or if it's my mom's birthday and we're going to go, it's not a sacred day, but the person who can't come, it's their job to reschedule it that month. And I am planning all of them except for two: our anniversary and he and I's trip away. So there's no war.
Tiffany Sauder (11:42):
It's very explicit. It's on the calendar first. We have a very clear agreement about if you need to miss what's going to happen and we know who's going to plan it so there's no war over it. And then it's just an agreement to manage. This is exactly how this is going to happen. Because in the past it was like, yeah, we should go out. We should have time together and the month would pass and we never got around to it. So that's an example of how that check-in brought to light something that we both agreed was a concern in our relationship and we came up with a very explicit way to address it that now is a system. We can manage it. He would say the exact same words I would about what is happening and there's just no more conflict. We get to do the thing.
Gayle Kalvert (12:20):
Was there ever a time in your marriage where you didn't want to have a date night?
Tiffany Sauder (12:23):
Yeah, it's the most important time to do it.
Gayle Kalvert (12:25):
When you don't want to hang out with your husband because he's annoying the crap out of you or whatever it is you're saying, go do the date night.
Tiffany Sauder (12:31):
I think what we do in our marriages is we pretend. We don't use the date night to talk about the real thing. Yes, there's times he annoys me. It is so painfully hard because we don't want to be hard for each other, but we are getting, I think he would say this too, so much better at saying the real truth and he is even better at it than I am. Out of this last one, he had given our relationship a six for the second year in a row, and that was alarming to me, really alarming to me. And I took a few days, maybe a week to talk to him about it off the microphone, and I was like, a decade of six on a 10 scale is not where you want your marriage to be. And I'm like, two is a trend line, one is a data point.
Tiffany Sauder (13:14):
And so I was able to really ask him, what does a six mean and kind of work through am I, I'm first experiencing that, that I'm a six, so that feels hurtful. I know that's not what you mean to say. And when I asked the question, I need you to feel safe to give me an honest answer, and if I react like a crazy person when you say a six, then you no longer have the safety to give me an honest answer. So we spent the better part of two weeks working through that question, and that was not every interaction over the course of two weeks, but there were some things that I needed to really understand. I think there were some questions that I asked him that made him think, and without that marriage check-in, I never would've known, we never would've had those conversations and we never would've gotten deep enough to really change our understanding of one another, our expectations of one another, our definition of what good looks like right now. It's like, I mean, think about the people who report to you at work, Gayle. You have performance plans for them, you have clear KPIs. You're doing weekly, monthly, quarterly check-ins on how are you doing it? We are not doing that in our marriages. We're assuming it's going to be up and to the right and when it's not, we panic.
Gayle Kalvert (14:26):
What strikes me is that what really you've done through this process is enable yourselves to take the emotion out of these conversations. Because everything you're saying, we do all these things at work because typically, not always, but typically those conversations tend to be less emotional at work. Of course they're outliers, right?
Tiffany Sauder (14:44):
Well, yeah, we bring our rational selves to it.
Gayle Kalvert (14:44):
But like you said, when you heard that your husband thought your relationship was a six, you had to deal with how that felt to you and it felt hurtful because, of course, our ego reacts immediately, what do you mean? I'm a 10! How am I not a 10? You're so lucky to get married to me. What's the matter? I mean, I'll speak for myself. I don't care.
Tiffany Sauder (15:02):
Totally. That was my first reaction. I was like, but I don't want to give you that response. But I have to be honest, I had that response and I could say that and I was kind of crying. I was like, this is the way I experienced that answer. I need you to help me understand. So you're exactly right, Gayle.
Gayle Kalvert (15:17):
That's obviously not an overnight process and I'm thinking that listeners might think, well, I don't know that I can get there. How do you go from being in a relationship or do you have any advice for people who are listening and thinking, this sounds really great, but I don't know how I could get myself or my husband there to that place mentally to have these conversations?
Tiffany Sauder (15:37):
We'll link in the show notes this marriage check-in tool that I'm talking about. So if you want to download and see it, you can do that and we'll also link those episodes that Gayle's talking about. But I will say I think there was a season in our marriage that these tools would've kept us away from the triage moment. So it kind of depends on where you are on that continuum. We needed to go to counseling and we needed to forgive one another and we needed to commit to the next version of us. But what I knew was that our old patterns were not going to get us to a new version of our marriage. So the tools that we learned in counseling certainly taught us, listening certainly taught us some communication, but I needed an infrastructure to be able to put our communication on so that I could manage that.
Tiffany Sauder (16:19):
I do everything else in our family. So my husband and I, when we go out on our date nights, we have a shared note on our phones and we have business topics and we have relationship topics. So business topics are things like we have a 16 and a 13-year-old, we need to start teaching financial literacy. I need to get his perspective on what's important to him as we're training our girls in this season of life on that topic. I had my own experience as a kid. I have my own sort of framing for how I want to do that, but that's a business meeting that he and I need to have on because he travels a ton. Our days are busy. We're not going to talk about this on the sidelines at a volleyball game. This is real talk. And then me saying like, okay, do I have permission, not permission from him, but does this make sense?
Tiffany Sauder (17:02):
If I would go set this up, this is kind of how I'm thinking of framing this. And so we can get really aligned on some of these things like the business of our family and these core things that we want to do, or we're in travel volleyball right now. It's a huge commitment for our family. They had a tournament on Easter weekend. We are Christians. I was like, we need to talk about are those things we're going to say yes to. We need to talk about that showing up as a teammate with the teaching and training that we want to do as a family when those things are opposed to one another, how are we going to make decisions about that? That's what I mean by business meeting stuff because in the heat of the moment is not the time to have that conversation. It's like structurally, how are we going to do this? And then there's all kinds of fun things that we do too, but it keeps us accountable to the real conversations along the way so that you don't have all of this technical debt essentially that you have in your relationship where we haven't talked about the real stuff in so long.
Gayle Kalvert (17:55):
Hey there, quick pause. If you're enjoying this episode, drop a comment right here on YouTube or Spotify. It could be a moment that stuck with you, something you related to or maybe you have a question that you'd like us to answer. When you do, you'll be entered to win some Work in Progress swag. We're talking super cozy hoodies. It's free, it's cute. And who doesn't love a good hoodie? Alright, let's get back to it.
Gayle Kalvert (18:20):
One thing that comes to mind for me is I know you've spoken about you need more adventure in your life and you need more time for the fun stuff. And so if I'm listening, I'm thinking actually, well, this sounds like a lot of work. Where's the fun in the relationship? So has this helped you have more fun ironically, even though you're putting more business intention into your marriage, how does that work for you?
Tiffany Sauder (18:42):
Totally. Think about all of the units of energy you spend on being hurt, on being mad, on not talking to them, on being disconnected from them, all of those units of energy, when you can replace half of those with this intentionality, we have all kinds of fun for, I mean when we go out and on our date nights, we spend about 25% of it on this business stuff, maybe half sometimes because we kind of like it. But yes, we're going to Europe for almost two weeks this summer for our 20th. We have a lot of fun things in our lives. We have four kids who are very involved. And so we are not in a season of life where it's like, oh my word, yes, we play pickleball on Tuesday nights and on Thursday mornings we go on long runs in the park. We're not in that season of our life.
Tiffany Sauder (19:25):
But staying connected gives I think both of us so much energy that yeah, we're putting a lot of units of energy into that and it starts to feel, I dunno, do you guys run on EOS or any of those things in your business?
Gayle Kalvert (19:39):
No.
Tiffany Sauder (19:39):
You familiar with that? Okay. So there's all kinds of, there's Strategic Coach has one, there's different frameworks that you start to put your business to run on and at the beginning it feels very acute, like, oh my word, I'm doing all these things. But then it's just, it just starts to be part of the way that you operate together. So I don't want it to feel like the Von Trapp family, but we spent so much, so many years ignoring the hard real conversations that I think that if he was sitting on the microphone, he would be like, do you always get energy from those Tiffany? I'm like, no. Sometimes I have to cry and then I understand it. But on the whole it's so much better.
Gayle Kalvert (20:17):
I think too, even if you're listening thinking this sounds like a lot and I don't know, you can take pieces of it. And so just even starting earlier in your relationship, even just having that thought in your mind that marriage isn't going to be something that you just do and it works out, which is something that I thought really. I mean it sounds naive, but I really thought like, okay, sure, of course there are going to be hard times, but overall we love each other and we want to be together so it will work out. And now I also have teenagers. I have three children, 16, 14, 11. It's busy, but we also have a lot more time back than we did when you're in the toddler phase where we had zero time. So I've found it's like we're getting to know each other again X years later and being able to maybe talk about what is maybe not feeling so great for me or for him in a way that isn't personal is really helpful. Even if you're not doing every single step that you've laid out, I think that can really help couples, they don't have to be married either, just couples in general to start having conversations like this. It's okay to not feel great about everything all the time.
Tiffany Sauder (21:22):
Yeah, and I think there's really only two main things that we do. One is that annual check-in and the second is that monthly date night where we both bring, some of them are just fun, but we both bring really intentional topics of like, Hey, how do we work through this? The other thing I would say, I was listening to a podcast episode by Esther Perel. Do you know her? She's like a therapist and I love her stuff. And she was just talking about how there's kind of three types of connection. And I have found at different seasons in our marriage, we have been better at different versions of that, the physical, the intellectual, and the emotional. And that was a just quick reminder for me of taking stock of where in the season are we more naturally connecting and what is harder and putting some real intentional effort into the area that feels harder right now.
Tiffany Sauder (22:10):
So the physical, the intellectual, and the emotional. So that was a good reminder for me in that same episode. She just talked about reintroducing the element of surprise in your relationship because that can be hard to do when you've patterned your lives together for 20 some years. So having heard that, this is just a silly example in my own world, my husband left for a week-long trip today and I had a three by five card and I just put, I love you babe, and put it in a suitcase. It's very silly, but I haven't done that in 15 years. And so just these little things that take almost no units of energy and just help him know, I see you, we're going to miss you. And I think we get lazy in those areas of our relationship as we get married longer, and it takes kind of work to just be like, “Hey.”
Tiffany Sauder (22:59):
And we were out to dinner last night and I told him, I was like, I felt really special to you tonight. You opened the door, you had your hand on my back as we were walking down the street. And I was like, I felt different than just a person on the planet walking beside you to dinner. And that made me feel really seen. And he was like, thanks for saying that. And it's just me coaching him on, I need this from you right now. His work takes him in a million different places. We have have to learn how to connect quickly because we're not together all the time. And so just some tips I guess that I've picked up along the way of how to try to stay close.
Gayle Kalvert (23:35):
I know there's so much more on this topic, so we will link to your series on this in the show notes so anyone can listen. One thing that I love that you and I have in common I think is also key to helping your relationship, but so many other things is outsourcing your laundry. Just to bring us to another more fun topic, I mean, one of the things, obviously this plays into marriage, but just in general, right? We're just juggling so many things, and I, no joke Tiffany, until I literally heard you say this on your podcast, had been feeling guilty about sending out my laundry, and I was like, oh, thank God. Tiffany said, everybody should send out their laundry.
Tiffany Sauder (24:14):
Nobody should do their own laundry.
Gayle Kalvert (24:16):
I was like, yeah. So can we just tell everyone who's listening to outsource their laundry and what else are you taking off your plate with zero guilt? Let's encourage people to let go of the guilt because I am a huge proponent of if you can delegate or you can outsource, do that because the most important thing you can do is spend time with the people that you love.
Tiffany Sauder (24:39):
Outsourcing laundry. So almost always when you talk about that, people think like, yeah, the Fresh Prince of Bel Air doesn't do his laundry, but I live in a normal house on a normal street and I can't afford that. It's people's first assumption. It's incredibly affordable. The service that I really love and have a relationship with is called Poplin. It's a nationwide service. You literally put your laundry in a garbage bag and put it out your back door and in 24 hours it comes back washed and folded for $1 a pound. So a white kitchen trash bag stuffed to the brim is like 20 bucks. And if you use the code Tiffany15, you get $15 off of that first order. So I'm a huge fan of that. You're exactly right, Gayle. For a family of four, you're going to get about four hours of time back. For my family of six, super active, lots of beds, all the things that need to be washed, I estimate six to eight hours, six to eight hours a week back.
Tiffany Sauder (25:27):
Plus I don't have the visual clutter. I'm not managing my kids. I'm not folding laundry after 9:00 PM. Literally don't touch it. And I think everyone should try it for six weeks. You don't have to do it for the rest of your life, but going into summer or into the holiday season where you just need a little more capacity, even if you don't do it every week, use it as a relief valve. My husband and I haven't intentionally taken, not every year in your adult life, do you make more money, but as it's kind of up into the right and the general trend. And so we have decided to take a portion of the money that we earn more of next year, and we take some percentage of that and put it towards outsourcing something as a way as the complexity of our life scales that we are able to get rid of some version of that.
Gayle Kalvert (26:11):
I am so surprised, Tiffany, how hesitant my friends or any women I talk to are to even give people, I don't know if you want to say the word outsource, but give up control of certain things, but then you're just bogged down with everything. So yeah. What else are you taking off your plate?
Tiffany Sauder (26:30):
Oh, I outsource a lot of things. I talk about what I outsource because I want to normalize it. I think at least our generation feels a little more comfortable having a housekeeper than my grandma did. The idea of outsourcing your laundry and somebody else folding your underwear still feels pretty foreign to people. And it's like great. I'm going to have so much time for other things I want to do, be with my kids, explore other business opportunities, take care of myself, work out, be with my friends, and life is not perfect, but I have time for a lot of other things. The other tip I give is have a handyman come to your house every 90 days and make it their job to call you every 90 days. Keep a note on your phone that just is like the curtain rod is broken. The knob went through the bathroom wall again. The light bulb is out in our stairway where I can't reach. Just the stuff. And that way, nothing is ever broken for more than 90 days. And if you have people living in your house, I do, things just get wear and tear and it keeps you from having to set 10,000 little appointments. They clean our filters, they refill my water softener, they check my gutters. They just have a checklist of things that they do for us and it's super helpful.
Gayle Kalvert (27:36):
Okay, I have a question about that because, Tiffany, I have been looking for a handyman for probably 15 years. We've had people come over to do certain things, but we always find contractors are either "We got to get your house, we're cutting the whole thing". Or big projects. How are you, and I'm sure other people finding somebody that will come and do that kind of work?
Tiffany Sauder (27:58):
I think I'm a heck of a networker. My yard guy is amazing. And so I'm like, Hey, who you know does other people who are doing great service for you? I do tend to be… people who have locally owned businesses, I tend to really glob onto them and share them very well. Your hairdresser's a great person to ask, who have you heard that has a great handyman? So I think I'm a really good networker in that way. And I dunno. Or if somebody comes to service your house, and just does a great job. Be like, can you do all of this? Maybe they're an HVAC person, but what I'm asking them to do is not rocket science. I just need it done.
Gayle Kalvert (28:31):
One thing I have to ask you, four kids. So what related to the kids do you outsource? Do you have people help plan birthday parties? And I've hired, I hired an empty nester mom locally who was just so excited to have something to do and she used to come over for a bunch of hours a week and help me with go to Party City to do this, that or the other. I'm dating myself. This is before DoorDash and Uber and all that where now you can get anything delivered. What about that with kids?
Tiffany Sauder (29:00):
Well, I still have a 4-year-old, so I have a nanny still, and she's pretty full-time with us, and she actually drives my volleyball kid who is in travel volleyball. If you have a kid in travel sports, when I say those words, you're like, oh, it's a huge commitment. She takes her to her practices, which are five to 7:30 PM two nights a week for six months. My husband and I did the math. And the number of hours it would take for us to do that is just insane. So she's our nanny during the day and she's our driver at night and we flex her schedule, so that works for her. We have a house manager eight to 10 hours a week. So she's not even really totally part-time. And she does a lot of the things that you're saying, take stuff to Goodwill. She picks up the house and just kind of keeps things going. She manages some of our other subs. So when I say we have an army of people helping us, and we've literally over the course of 15 years, just what else can we outsource so that we can spend our time raising our kids and living our lives and running our businesses. And I'm super grateful that my husband is supportive of that worldview that, hey, we can have bigger impact in our lives in other areas.
Gayle Kalvert (30:06):
Because once even maybe your skeptical partner sees how much less stressed you are, how much more time there is, those things, it starts to make a lot more sense. And even for people who might be listening, you don't have kids, but you have aging parents, you have, we all have a million things. I am thinking of ways that this could help me even just helping my older parents.
Tiffany Sauder (30:25):
Yeah, I think one of the push pieces of pushback I get a lot is like, well, your kids, they're going to be on their own someday and they won't be able to afford all of these things. It's like, I hope my daughters are outsourcing their laundry to Poplin at college. Literally, it's so affordable. If they're graduating in their first job out of school, it's completely financially accessible to them. And my kids don't have to do every load of laundry from their childhood to know how to do laundry. They know how to do it. I've made sure that that skill is trained, but they don't have to do every single one. And they're doing really cool things in other areas of their life, and I just don't want to manage it.
Gayle Kalvert (31:00):
No, I love that. Okay. I have to ask you some super fun questions.
Tiffany Sauder (31:03):
Sure.
Gayle Kalvert (31:04):
These are a surprise.
Tiffany Sauder (31:06):
Okay, let's do it.
Gayle Kalvert (31:08):
What is your one guilty pleasure? What is the thing that you have to have no matter what?
Tiffany Sauder (31:13):
My skin is probably, my husband would say I overspend on my skin probably. I don't know if that's a guilty pleasure, but I'm pretty consistent with my facials. I'm pretty consistent with the things that just sort of, I want to look my age, but I'm also fine assisting it a little bit. So I don't know. I feel like that's probably the area where I just like, I don't get my nails done. I don't get massages.
Gayle Kalvert (31:38):
But see, now you're validating you're guilty.
Tiffany Sauder (31:41):
No, I'm just saying I don't really have things. I feel like my face, my skin is probably the place where I just spend. And I love clothes. That's probably the two things.
Gayle Kalvert (31:52):
Me too. I love shopping. Okay. Do you like music? What's your hype song?
Tiffany Sauder (31:57):
I have terrible taste in music.
Gayle Kalvert (31:59):
You don't need to have good taste. What is the song that you put on when you need to get pumped up or happy or play with dance with your kids? What's your go-to?
Tiffany Sauder (32:08):
Well, Pat Benatar “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” is my karaoke song. So I feel like that's kind of in this vein. I feel like that's kind of an anthem. Go ahead.
Gayle Kalvert (32:18):
This is amazing. So if you're at karaoke, we know you're getting up there and you're singing, Hit Me with Your Best Shot.
Tiffany Sauder (32:23):
Yes.
Gayle Kalvert (32:24):
Nobody can keep you down.
Tiffany Sauder (32:26):
No. And if I can get ahead of the queue with a hundred bucks, I'll do that too. So I would say I'm most likely to karaoke from my group of friends, for sure.
Gayle Kalvert (32:35):
Okay. I love it. All right. Coffee or tea?
Tiffany Sauder (32:38):
Coffee.
Gayle Kalvert (32:40):
Iced or hot?
Tiffany Sauder (32:41):
Hot.
Gayle Kalvert (32:42):
No matter what the temperature outside?
Tiffany Sauder (32:44):
Yeah. I don't like iced coffee. I don't get it. I don't get it. I don't get it. And I'm a chugger, so the whole thing is done in three seconds if it's cold. I think the hot just slows me down.
Gayle Kalvert (32:55):
All right. Well, now you just led me to the next question, which I wasn't going to ask you, but you brought up chugging beer, wine, tequila. Are you a cocktail drinker or mocktail?
Tiffany Sauder (33:05):
Well, I'm getting old, so you can't drink hardly anything anymore and feel good, but tequila, high-end tequila is my jam.
Gayle Kalvert (33:13):
Me too. Also getting old. We feel worse the next day, but it doesn't stop me.
Tiffany Sauder (33:18):
Yeah. Yeah. Tequilas, I like a good French wine too.
Gayle Kalvert (33:21):
I love it. Thank you so much, Tiffany, for all your advice and sharing so much of your life. I think we're going to have more of these conversations, I hope, in the future. So for anybody who obviously, like we said, we're going to link you in the show notes, but where can our listeners find you?
Tiffany Sauder (33:38):
Yeah, go to tiffanysauder.com. I'm sure it'll be in show notes. And I'm really in this season of my career, helping women move from a life or from a life of have to a life of want to and taking agency over your time, over the outcomes in your life, over your resources, and putting together a life that you are excited about.
Gayle Kalvert (33:57):
You 100% made me feel less stressed today and less alone, and I'm not the only one, which is the goal of this show. So it worked with me. I'm sure other listeners are feeling the same way. So I really can't thank you enough. So if anybody out there is listening and thinking about questions that they would like us either to talk about with Tiffany or things that you're wondering, just shoot us a note and let us know and we will get to that conversation soon. I hope that was helpful. If you know someone that you go to for this topic, send them my way. After all, we're just figuring this out together. See you next time.