Two Moms Achieve Their Dreams: The Evolution of Simple Green Smoothies

If you follow my blog and newsletter, you know that I’m a big fan of case studies. As a business professor, I can’t help it, but the format is much newer in the blogosphere.

I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a regular series, like our Sticky Situations and Overcoming Mental Blocks series, on the evolution of a business owned by a self-employed woman. At this year’s World Domination Summit, a gathering of world changers of all stripes, the first case study came to me.

What Happens When Desperate Need Meets Decisive Drive?

Jadah Sellner has always seen herself more as a dreamer than a doer. She has long kept drawer after drawer of fleshed-out business plans for businesses that fell by the wayside when her next idea captured her imagination.

She affectionately thinks of herself as a master domain squatter for all the rockstar business names she buys and can’t let go of.

In some ways, she held fast to those dreams because they were so far from her reality. Several years ago, she and her husband, both generally laid-back, cheery people, found themselves fighting with each other and constantly in the face of money woes and fears about where their lives were headed.

So on New Year’s Eve, listening to an inspirational Tony Robbins talk, they started laughing because they were crying so hard. They were tired of insufficient funds. They wanted a car that wouldn’t break, health insurance, and not to have to borrow money for a rental deposit.

They created their first vision board and named their audacious goal: to make $30,000 a month.

While some entrepreneurial moms would look at that number and say, “Yeah, that’s definitely possible,” at the time, for Jadah, who was living with $41,000 in credit card debt, it couldn’t have looked farther away or less possible.

Just 18 Months Later, She Made it Happen

Jadah knew that she wanted to have a business that allowed her to spend time with her family while helping other families, so she first dove headfirst into running a brick-and-mortar business, a day care center.

She had to play boss to her husband, which took a toll on her physically and mentally. The business didn’t pan out because of the stress, and she found herself in almost the same place, but with an extra twenty pounds and no energy.

But that failure set her on the path to her eventual success.

Looking for ways to get herself back in order, she started drinking a green smoothie—basically any regular smoothie with the addition of leafy greens—every day. She wanted one small thing she could do to take control of her life.

She lost twenty pounds and gained back her energy and a healthy glow.

Through that journey, she become online friends with another mom, graphic designer Jen Hansard, who needed the same boost to her health and had the same big dreams of supporting her family in a healthy way. They decided to start a business together and launched a content-based website called Family Sponge with the goal of sharing parenting tips and making money through affiliate links.

“Everyone Who Starts a Blog Thinks They’ll Make Millions in Months”

That was why Jadah got into blogging, but she quickly realized that it was just as much hard work as a brick-and-mortar business, if not more, because it’s harder to know who and where your customers are.

Drowning in the deluge of online marketing tactics, she and Jen looked at what was out there and took a calculated risk, putting all their eggs in the Instagram basket for a time.

Amidst all the other content on their site that Jadah and her partner pushed to Instagram, it was Jadah’s daily green smoothies that took off on Instagram, so they quickly put together a website focusing on green smoothie recipes.

The first one-month green smoothie challenge, a free online event in which participants received tips, shopping lists, and recipes by email to help them have one simple green smoothie every day, received over 30,000 sign-ups.

Now, they’ve had over one million people complete the free challenge and sold 10,000 products in a little over two years. Beyond a paid version of the one-month challenge, Simple Green Smoothies also offers a cleanse program and recipe cards.

The best part? Not only did Jadah achieve her goal of making $30,000 a month, allow her and her business partner to create freedom for their families, but every time someone purchases one of their products, they are saying yes to their health.

How do Vision Boards and Spreadsheets Live Together?

Jadah likes to say that she throws spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks for a living, but there is an art to throwing spaghetti. You can’t throw it raw. It will bounce. And if it’s overcooked, it will just slide off. You have to take the time to figure out how to cook it right to even have a chance of sticking.

For other freelance moms looking to make the same leap of faith into the arms of success, Jadah has five key pieces of advice:

  1. Take consistent ninja-focused action
  2. Stay insanely curious
  3. Court your community
  4. Create hyper-engaged connection
  5. Choose love over metrics

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lisa Stein owns FreelanceMom.com, is a college business professor and a mom to Gabriela and Elle. Lisa is dedicated to playing a part in helping women and moms run a business they love, help support themselves and their family and create a flexible lifestyle. You can find her online on Facebook and Twitter or at home burning something in the kitchen.