Scaling a Team and Reaching 2 Million Monthly Pageviews with Isabel Orozco-Moore from Isabel Eats

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

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Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, we are welcoming back Isabel Orozco from Isabel Eats. Isabel first joined us on the podcast back in 2019 after she had narrowed her niche down to Mexican recipes. Since then, she’s grown her blog from 650,000 monthly page views, to over 2 million monthly page views and has grown her team to three full-time employees, including her husband and several contractors. In this interview, Isabel shares more about how she has built a sustainable business by focusing on slow and steady growth, smart hiring, and maintaining joy in her work. Bjork and Isabel chat about how she avoids the comparison trap, what it’s like to work with her husband and how she uses various tools to stay organized while managing her team. Isabel shares more about how she has found balance in her life between her work life and her personal life and the strategies that she’s used to keep her passionate, efficient, and motivated in her work. We really hope you’ll enjoy this episode. It is the third and final episode in our series with Raptive and it’s a great one. Without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Isabel, welcome back to the podcast.

Isabel Orozco: Hello. Thank you for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s been six years. 2019 was the last time. Not much has changed in the world of creating content online in your life, but despite that, we thought it would still be good to check in and have a conversation. No, actually a lot has changed, so much, and one of my favorite things to do now that we’ve been doing this podcast long enough to have multiple touch points with people is to have people back on, to have a conversation around, okay, you are still now today still creating, you have this business, you have employees and you’ve evolved through it. Part of the evolution is your life. Things have changed in your life and therefore change in your business. Part of the evolution is also what does it look like now today to be running a content-based business versus six years ago? So let’s dig into that a little bit. Maybe we can start by what did things look like in 2019 and then are there some things that you can point to as distinct changes that happened between that interview a long time ago and today?

Isabel Orozco: Yeah, so 2019, let me think back. I was a one woman show for the most part it was just me. And then I think I had maybe one or two contractors that I had hired out for small things like Pinterest management or who knows what else, Facebook management or something like that. And so I had just kind of pivoted a year or two before that to really focus just on Mexican recipes. So I was in the thick of just trying to get all of that situated and I actually pulled some numbers. Let me look at them. So in November, 2019 when we were chatting, I pulled up the info and I had around 650 page views a month, and now six

Bjork Ostrom: 50,000,

Isabel Orozco: 650,000 page views

Bjork Ostrom: Month to be clear.

Isabel Orozco: Yes. And then now this past month I had 2 million.

Bjork Ostrom: Amazing.

Isabel Orozco: So definitely some growth there, but I feel like you often hear interviews about a couple years later and people are like, I don’t know,

Bjork Ostrom: 20 million page views,

Isabel Orozco: 20 million page views, or at least for sure social media growth. Social media growth seems to be huge sometimes. So I want to show people that you can have steady growth

Bjork Ostrom: And

Isabel Orozco: It’s still really great.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s interesting too, for one of the fascinating things, if we really want to double click into the psychology of that is my guess is that there’s maybe like 95% of people who listen to the podcast hear you talking about that and are like, man, if I could build my site to 2 million pages views a month, that would be incredible. And yet we live in a world where we see the additional 5% of people who have 5 million or 10 million or 20 million or have 2 million followers on social. And it’s that classic the gap in the game where we see the gap between where we are and where other people are. And it’s harder to see the gain of like, wow, we’ve built this really incredible thing. We have this business. We employ multiple people, and in a lot of ways this would be true for myself. And I would be interested in your reflections on it.

If I were to roll the tape back 15 years ago and say, Hey, this is what it would look like for you in 15 years, it’d be really hard for me to even comprehend that. Not like we’re living this luxurious life or something. But in a lot of ways it is luxurious and have achieved things that so quickly get set aside in the pursuit of the next thing, which it’s almost like the psychology of entrepreneurship. But do you have any thoughts on that and how you manage that as a creator and a business owner knowing that there’s this reality of compare and despair potentially? Yeah,

Isabel Orozco: I mean for sure. You think about this growth that you’ve had and then you think about what your thoughts are now. Even now, I’m just like, what is the next thing? Why am I not larger than I am having been in, I started really doing this in 2015, about 10 years, I should be huge. Part of me feels like I’m still not. So it always is like you’re trying to get to the next thing, to the next thing. And then once you get there, you don’t pause, you just ask yourself, okay, now what?

Bjork Ostrom: I was literally just texting my friend before this. I sent him this video. We can actually link to it in the show notes if anybody wants to see it, but it’s this video of somebody reflecting on ai, and the basic premise is like, you can get anything you want now. You can have a movie made for you, you can have images made for you. And he was like, but I want to want,

His reflection was, I don’t want the thing to be made for me. I want to want to create the thing. Almost speaking to the, it’s less about the destination and it’s more about the journey. And what my friend said was he has this belief that you never want to get the carrot on the stick because then you realize it’s just a carrot. And I think about that within the context of what we are doing and as much as possible, how do I release the pursuit of the thing and just the thing being the destination and just pursue the pursuit almost like how do I show up and let my process and journey be the thing? And I think the key piece, and again, I was just thinking about this morning, the key piece that allows me to do is to release the need to grind in hopes that I get to a final destination and instead to optimize my day knowing that that is what is going to be what ultimately fulfills me as a creator is what does my day look like?

What am I doing? Am I having an interesting conversation? Great, that’s a huge part of a successful day for me. There are some things that I feel when you achieve a certain level or have a good day from a numbers and metrics perspective. It’s a little bit like nebulous, all of that. But I’m curious if you have any thoughts on that as we talk about this series of simultaneously how do you scale, but also how do you stay human? And I think part of staying human is releasing some of the pursuit of metrics and measures, but it’s really hard. It’s hard to do.

Isabel Orozco: And sometimes I feel like you can’t get there until you’ve experienced the grind and that part and then you realize, oh, this is not sustainable. And it’s really hard to mentally want to do all these things all the time. And so sometimes you can’t get there until you’ve experienced that, which is hard.

Bjork Ostrom: Talk more about that. What does that look like for you? Because it sounds like there was a season that was a grind. My guess is long days, weekends, sacrifices made, and then it sounds like maybe there’s a little bit of a shift that has come in this season of life. Talk about what those two seasons, if you can broadly separate those,

Isabel Orozco: What

Bjork Ostrom: That has looked like for you.

Isabel Orozco: Really. I think the factor that helped me decide, okay, I can’t be grinding like this anymore, was my second kid, my first kid I felt like, so my first kid, and then prior to that I felt like I could juggle things. If you don’t have any children, you kind of have the entire day to really work on what you love to do, which is for people who are creating, it’s like they love to do that, so it doesn’t feel like a job. You can do that at any time of day at night before bed, no big deal. And then I had a kid and I still felt like I could juggle that somewhat.

And then I had my second kid and I was like, okay, this kind of totally changes things. I really can’t stay up late because when one kid is asleep, the other kid is not and I just don’t have the energy. Maybe it’s because I’m older as well, I just don’t have the energy to do that. And it also, my mindset has shifted in so that what matters most? What are you prioritizing the most? Your job, is it in pursuit of money and just numbers on social media or on your website or is it family? And I think all of that again comes with just working through it.

Bjork Ostrom: For me, one of the things that I’ve found as we’ve had kids is there were very few things that would in a normal day rise above the importance bar of work in order to then prioritize those things. Examples would be maybe something with my parents, maybe getting together with friends, which was usually in the margins. It’s evenings, it’s weekends. Obviously Lindsay and I were married, and so it would be like if there’s something with us, but in a normal day, there’s very few things that would rise above that bar of like, Hey, I’m working and now suddenly there’s an Apple event on. Well, I’m still going to work. That’s not important enough for me to stop what I’m doing now. There’s almost always something in a day that is going to rise above the is this important bar for me. And it’s almost always having to do with our kids. And so can really relate to that. Even something as simple as drop off, pick up, performances. If your kid’s not feeling well, am I going to try and grind through and do work? But to click into that even further, I think one of the things that is amazing about that season of work that you did do was that it now allows you, well, maybe you can speak to this. It allows you, or I feel like this is true for me to say, okay, you know what? We have built up momentum. We have built this business to a point where we can say no to it. It’s just a decision. And I think important to acknowledge, there are a lot of situations where people, you just don’t have a choice. You got to grind through it because you have to pay the bills and you have to make ends meet. And even for some creators, it’s true as well. You don’t have the margin in order to make that decision. But it’s almost one of the hard realities of it is it just is a decision. You are saying either yes or no and time that financially you don’t have to do it and you decide to do it overspending time with your kids. That to me is where there’s a real strange mindset piece that comes into it. And I’m curious to hear how you’ve compartmentalized that and made decisions and maybe you can give a little bit of context of how old your kids are.

Isabel Orozco: So I have two kids. I have one who’s four and one who’s eight months. So I’m in the thick of it right now with the eight month old. We just sent her to, my husband took her to daycare today and she has a eye infection that she developed over the weekend.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s like the thick of it. That totally is the thick of it.

Isabel Orozco: And they’re both really snotty. It’s like that time of year. So we just know we’re just waiting this week. When is she going to get sent home because she’s going to

Bjork Ostrom: Be sick. When’s the call going to happen?

Isabel Orozco: So I’m just like, if it can happen after this call today, that’s great,

Bjork Ostrom: And if you need to cut the interview short, it’ll maybe fit well. It will fit well with the topic of the conversation.

Isabel Orozco: But how I make those decisions, I think I’ve just, especially now I prioritize like, okay, I know what the normal day-to-day work is, and so I know how much energy and time that can take up in my life. So if there’s one project that I want to work on, I’m going to have to either slow down my normal day-to-day to fit this project in or say no to something, not spend as much time with the family to try to get this done. So I’m working on a cookbook right now, which is great and

Bjork Ostrom: A lot of

Isabel Orozco: Work, but it’s a lot of work. And I’ve heard people talk about how much work it is and I’m like, yeah, yeah, I know. But these are all things that we normally do anyway, right? I’m developing recipes, I’m like writing stories for all the different things in the book. I can definitely get it done and I can get it done, and I am getting it done, but it is taking up a lot of time. And so I’ve definitely had to slow down the amount of things that I’m posting on the website, which is the bread and butter. That’s where most of the revenue of the business comes from. So it’s hard to do that, but I really want to get this project done, so just having to prioritize really. I recently listened to a podcast with, I’m sure you’ve read this book really into this sort of thing, slow productivity.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. I haven’t read it, but I’m familiar with it. Yeah.

Isabel Orozco: I listened to a podcast with Cal Newport who wrote the book and he was talking about scheduling your time and figuring out the things that you want to do. Usually it sounds like you can get them done in this amount of time, but until you really write down how long it took you or track how long it took you, it usually takes you way longer than you think it will take you. So I’ve recently started tracking my time using a program called Toggle Focus. It

Bjork Ostrom: Just sits in your menu bar, and then you can also have an iPhone app for it.

Isabel Orozco: Yes. That’s great.

Bjork Ostrom: You just use it on your computer?

Isabel Orozco: Actually. Yeah, I just use it on my desktop, but it allows you to categorize whatever you’re doing and then it will create a report for you automatically of this is what you spent your time on in the last month and it says 30% of your time was spent here, or how many hours were spent here. So I’ve been doing this for about six weeks. I was really starting to feel, especially with this cookbook, I was just having no time and I was like, where am I spending my time? I feel like I’m not getting anything done. So I sat down and have really been doing that. I have yet to go through the report to see where my

Bjork Ostrom: Time things you need to create a toggle option for reviewing the report and track time for that. My guess is though, probably just due to the nature of having it, selecting something that you’re going to focus on and pressing start, that in and of itself is probably educational and also focusing.

Isabel Orozco: Yes, for sure. And it is true. Going through my emails can take me an hour longer than I thought it would. I had 30 minutes schedule. And it’s like, actually no, you are taking an hour to answer emails because it’s not just looking at an email. It’s like going in finding what does this person need from me? Let me go get that. And sometimes that takes a really long time. So figuring out how long tasks actually take you and then just being honest and saying, okay, well if this is going to take me two hours, I can’t schedule all these other things that I want to do. So

Bjork Ostrom: Just

Isabel Orozco: Prioritizing.

Bjork Ostrom: I live in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction with how much I do in a day. And I think part of it has to do with that where it’s like I set these unreal realistic expectations. And it’s like today, one of the things I’ll almost always do is just kind of build a little list. I use an app called Things for Mac Os, and it’s, I don’t know, how many things do I have here? 18 today. Now, not all of ’em take an hour or even 10 minutes, but if I had to guess I’m not going to get through all of these today, and then I’ll get to the end of the day and be like, shoot. Didn’t do as much as I wanted to. Again for the little tip 10000th time,

Isabel Orozco: A little tip. And I have not actually read this book either. I listened to him speak about it on a podcast, and then I told my husband about it and he went ahead and read the book and gave me the clips.

Bjork Ostrom: Told about it. Yeah.

Isabel Orozco: But one of the things that he talks about in this book is that don’t work from a list. Have your list.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I saw somebody talking about this the other day.

Isabel Orozco: Actually put it in your schedule because if you’re working from a list, yeah, put it in your calendar, put it in whatever way you want, but write down from this time to this time is when I’m going to work on it, because

Bjork Ostrom: Then that’s great. Do you remember what that book was?

Isabel Orozco: I think it’s Flow Productivity.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay.

Isabel Orozco: Or he just chatted about it on the podcast. I think the podcast was him and Mel Robbins.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep.

Great fun fact. We did Jimmy Fallon standby when Lindsay and I were in New York and Mel was on, it was the episode where she was on talking about her book and deaf. So kind of fun. So that makes sense. I think to last point with that, the thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about is this idea of, and I think this is the answer, I remember having this conversation with a good friend of mine who’s a child psychologist. We’re driving back from Grand Ray, Minnesota, which is way up north, four and a half hour drive. You can kind of cover all the things you want to cover, and we’re talking about kids and what’s the right approach for kids given their unique situation and what’s the best school option. We talked about it round and round and round, and then we got to the end and we we’re like, it just depends on the kid.

And that is the answer. And I think that’s the thing that I keep coming back to within this conversation, which is now for the adults, for the parents, or not, even if you aren’t a parent, if you are just a creator and you’re trying to figure it out or business owner or whatever it might be, what is the answer? It depends on the person and there might be a certain type of person who is best, even as a parent, best suited to continue to grind and to figure out childcare solution to have coverage during the day or whenever it might be. And that’s how you know are going to be best as a person to show up. And I think one of the really hard things in what we do is there is advice that is given as universal advice. We need to spend more time with our kids or we need to show our kids what it looks like to work hard or we need to balance responsibilities with our significant others.

And all of those are true, and sometimes they’re not true depending on who you are and how you work. And so I think so much of it comes back to this idea of a little bit of turning, putting blinders on and saying, how do you want to show up in the world as a parent, as a business owner, as a friend, as a family member, as a neighbor, define what that ideal looks like and then work towards it. And it will change with the seasons, which needs to be acknowledged. When you have kids, it’s going to look very different than it did before. Probably when you get married or when you’re in a relationship, it’s going to different when you have a parent who’s having health issues, it’s going to look different. And so that’s what I’ve come back to. If you were to say what the game is that you are playing, would you be able to define that?

Isabel Orozco: No.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, alright. We got to have you back on.

Isabel Orozco: What do you mean define the game I’m playing?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So here’s an example. This is what helps me in situations where I’m looking at somebody, the compare and despair game, which is they’re playing a different game. Like acknowledging that the game, that person, the game that person is playing is not only different in terms of what their score is, but it’s also different in terms of what pieces they’re playing with. Both of those things are different. So it’s a completely different game. They’re playing with different pieces and they’re playing with a different score. And so for me, it’s coming back to defining what are the pieces that I’m playing with. And for me, I should actually write this down. It’s more of just a thought exercise that I go through, but we could do it live right now, the pieces that I’m playing with are my relationship with Lindsay. That’s a really important piece. If in service of my relationship with her, everything else crumbles, like the traffic, business metrics, revenue, anything that is always secondary to my relationship with her, my relationship with my kids, our parents. So those are pieces I would say more now than before, four or five years ago, it would be health. There will always be something that I could make an excuse to not have some to not move in the day

Or to make time to eat healthy. And so that would be a piece that I’m playing with. I would say another one would be, for me that isn’t true for other people is organizationally my spaces for those to be, that’s a piece that’s important to me. So when I have this 18 things that I go through, one of them is a launch checklist. On that list is five minutes of just organizing my space, my desk, it’s literally called, it’s called Desk Reset because I realized I’m unhappy if I have things chaotic around me, then so the score then for me looks different. It’s like, okay, am I at the end of a day? And it’s almost always defined within a day. At the end of the day, have I dedicated time to move? Did I feel like I made space to eat well? Did I have a chance for me within the context of presence? Was I present with Lindsay? Was I present with our girls and making changes based on that? So I’ve to, I have a reminder on my phone at 10:00 PM and I think I should probably bump this up to just turn off all devices at 10:00 PM I just turn off all my devices and I don’t turn them on until I’m sitting down to do work. So that’s just an example of the pieces that I’m playing with. And then the score. And what’s interesting is the things that normally would be easiest to track, how much money did the business make, how many followers, how many downloads did the podcast get? That suddenly becomes secondary in service of the other things that I’m trying to be present to keeping score for. Those are in service of then as opposed to the main thing. But it’s hard because it’s all internal. Nobody sees it.

There’s no external growth for that. Nobody acknowledges it or says how cool it is. So that’s what I mean. I’ve been talking for a long time, but any reflections on your end?

Isabel Orozco: Yeah, I would say my game is very similar and it’s interesting. Those things can change quickly as well. For example, we recently moved and so moving is like I hadn’t moved in a while and moving when you’re older, especially with kids, oh my gosh, there are a million things that need to get done. And then you’re in your house and you have to unpack. And so for about a month that came into play where it’s like, okay, I need to prioritize unpacking the girls’ rooms because if their rooms aren’t set, then nothing is set. So that is no longer in my game. That took about a month and now it’s not there anymore.

But now the cookbook is in to play. So knowing that so much time is getting spent there is part of the game. But other than that, just like you, I have two children. I have my husband. Interestingly, I feel like I hate admitting this out loud, not that my health is suffering at all, but health is not a priority right now because there are so many other things going on. And not that I’m eating junk food and all of this, but it’s just not top of mind. I’m probably not moving as much as I would normally because I’m really focused on getting all of this other stuff done and feeling like taking an hour away to exercise sometimes feels like I could spend that time better somewhere else, and it doesn’t feel good to say out loud. I realize

Bjork Ostrom: That I love that. And part of it is just acknowledging that and saying, okay, that’s just the reality of, again, the game that you’re playing. And at the end of the day, what feels best. It probably feels best to not have these impending book deadlines over your head, but to make progress against those,

Isabel Orozco: Knowing that there’s an end to those things, I feel like, okay, I can get through it. I can get all this stuff done, put that on the back burner. But yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Super helpful to talk through that. It’s one of those things that it’s not a tactic, it’s not like a tip, it’s not like a platform that’s working well right now, which we have those conversations. But I do think that what it does is it speaks to one of the most important variables, which is how do you show up over a long period of time and continue to do this, which you’ve done. We’ve done a lot of other people have done, but I think that is one of the most important things that we can do is figure out how to make it sustainable. Because if it’s not, then you will burn out. You get in weird relationship with your work. And so there is space for the tips and the tactics and the what’s working. But I think more important than that is the foundational piece of how do you continually show up every day, enjoy the work that you’re doing, feel good about it, because hard, and that’s so much of what we’re doing as creatives is needing to show up as our full person in order to create in the best way that we can.

So one of the things, I know that it’s been a transition for you within the last few years is your husband has come into the business. You talk a little bit about what your team looks like right now and how you are working with a team, and maybe you can speak to what it was like to start to work with your husband as well.

Isabel Orozco: Yeah, so right now I have including my husband, three full-time employees, and my husband’s the last employee that I’ve brought on, and that was about two years ago. And then I have a photographer who’s a contractor and an accountant, but I think those were the only two contractors. So yeah, so I brought my husband on about two years ago. He was working as an IT business analyst, and it’s something that since I’ve been doing this full time, it’s something that I’ve always teased like, Hey, come join me. And he’s never been super interested. And then over the years we just talk about everything that’s going on, and then it was just kind of, it just happened to be a good time with the company that he was with and whatnot. So finally convinced him, and he came on two years ago, and at first he started helping with just organizing because everything, even with two full-time employees, I felt like a lot of things were still in my head and I would assign my employees tasks, but things weren’t really written out they needed to be. And so he helped a

Bjork Ostrom: Process or an SOP? Yes.

Isabel Orozco: And I had a process, but it wasn’t the greatest process.

Bjork Ostrom: A process existed but maybe could have been optimized

Isabel Orozco: For sure. And so he helped me get all those processes and all the things that I do out of my head and onto paper. And what he did was really listened to my day to day. He would ask me, okay, what are you doing? Why are you doing it that way? Without really any pushback. He was just kind of gathering information about how I did things. And then maybe a couple weeks later we sat down and he’s like, okay, this is what I see you doing and this is how you’re doing it. This is how I think we could tweak it so it’s a little bit more efficient. And then we would go back and forth, maybe I’d push back like, no, I’m doing it this way because blah, blah, blah. And so we chatted for a while and then he helped me put everything into Airtable. I think at the time I was using Asana, but I just felt like I still had to go in and do a lot of things in order for the team to get their tasks. And so he put things into Airtable for me, created some automations.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you have an example? A few that you could point to that were especially helpful?

Isabel Orozco: I mean, for sure, just day-to-day tasks, right? When I say, I don’t know, get a draft of something done, I’ll click that it’s complete, and then Airtable will automatically assign the next thing to one of the team members. And then when they’re done, they click complete and then it goes back, then a new task is created for me or whatever. But it’s all connected to a recipe. I don’t know if you’ve ever, Airtable is basically a big spreadsheet and

Bjork Ostrom: It’s hard, hard. It’s like if spreadsheets were designed today, it’s better designed than it feels like the UI is maybe a little bit more powerful or just easier to use.

Isabel Orozco: At least for me, it was hard to

Bjork Ostrom: More powerful

Isabel Orozco: Open Airtable and figure out, okay, where do I even begin? What do I start with? So we started with our recipes as the database, and then everything we do is it to a recipe at least that’s our main Airtable. So yeah, so tasks like that or we have a tab in Airtable that is for lead magnets that we have on the website. So I’ll come up with an idea and give an example of things that I want it to be like want the lead magnet to have in it, and then I’ll assign it or then I’ll click complete that the idea is complete, and then it’ll get sent to one of my team members and then she’ll go in and complete the lead magnet. And then when that’s done, she’ll click complete and then it gets back to me and then I’ll go check it,

Bjork Ostrom: Review it and

Isabel Orozco: What not.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s great. It’s a great example of, I’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but Dan Martel has this idea, he wrote a book called Buy Back Your Time, this idea of 10 80 10 where you in that case are coming up with kind of the core idea what resonates with your audience, you know what the needs are. So it’s 10% of the ideation of, in this case, the lead magnet, 80% of the work is done by a team member, and then the last 10% is reviewed by you as the person who will ultimately endorse it or send it out. And so you’re kind of doing the tweaks and changes around it. And that concept has applied for so many things that I’ve thought about, whether it be within the context of business, I think that’s the easiest. But also home. Are there things that need to get done around our home that I can shape up 10% of the project and then pass it off to whoever it might be.

Like a DIY person that we work with who Brian is, great. He’ll come over once a month and hit through a bunch of projects and then you look at the last 10% and say like, okay, is this good? But the other piece I think that’s so important within that is it also removes the step of then you needing to go into Slack or send an email and draft an email and say, here’s what I’m thinking for this. It creates a process for it and it has reduced another step along the way, which is the step of communicating. And I think there are just hundreds of ways to do that. And speaking to the idea of scaling human first, scaling, I think those efficiencies are the easiest way for us as creators to think about scaling as opposed to, Hey, let’s have chat GBT, write this entire blog post.

It’s not that. It’s what are the little tasks and processes and recurring things that we are doing that wouldn’t matter if we were doing them or not, and how do we get somebody else to take care of those. So it sounds like the solution for you has been Airtable for that, which has been good setting up. I think it would technically be like a dependency. Okay, this can’t happen unless this next person does it. And then when this person does it, then the next dependency happens. And once you do that, my guess is for you as a creator, there’s probably some freedom in that to know that you can just brainstorm and you know where to go when you do come up with that idea.

Isabel Orozco: Yeah, and the nice thing too, not that this is about Airtable, but in that you can assign it to someone and then you can give them a due date, but it’d be a time window. I want this done within five days of me clicking complete. So having due date as well is very helpful to keep things moving and not just create a list of tasks that are not never ending.

Bjork Ostrom: When you have, what are the tools that you’re using then with your team? So you have Airtable, are you using obviously email to a certain degree? Slack.

Isabel Orozco: Slack, yeah, we have Slack and what else do we use? I think that’s it.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. So Airtable, email, slack, those are kind of the core three that you use for communication, project management, tasks, lists, things like that. And then talk more about each one of the roles within the company. So what does the day-to-day look like for your husband? And also maybe you can speak to after you talk about each one of the roles, advice that you’d have for people who are looking to work with a partner, because we do that. It sounds like you now do that. And I’ve had multiple people even within the last year reach out and be like, Hey, how does this work? Can you tell me how this works? Because there is

Isabel Orozco: No playbook.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah,

Isabel Orozco: It is very different depending on what your spouse was doing beforehand. Right. John? My husband was not involved in this space whatsoever, so him coming in was kind of like a gut punch to him because he stepped into a place he was managing a team where he was, and now he’s like, okay, what do I do? I don’t know anything.

Bjork Ostrom: Kind of beginner mindset. Yeah.

Isabel Orozco: Yeah. So it very different. He spent a lot of time doing the Airtable and helping me organize and structure things. And then that kind of felt like a project once that was done, there are things that we need to do to maintain all those Airtable things because every now and then something breaks or things change and I need to tweak the process, but that’s pretty much set now. And so we were like, what else should he do or what else can he do? So then he got into learning about SEO, and I think that was a little overwhelming because it’s just kind of like you are thrown in and you’re like, okay, where do I start?

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s changing so much and it’s like, what is relevant today versus three years ago and you’re trying to sort through all of it.

Isabel Orozco: So he went to an SEO conference and he took some course on in SEMrush or something just to learn, and he started helping on the backend about keywords and helping to track things and whatnot. And then when we had our baby about eight months ago, we took three months off and he stopped doing that, which is great. We wanted to not do anything for those three months. And then we came back and he’s like, I’m going to look to see data wise, did we do worse because I’m not doing this anymore. And things didn’t change. And so he’s like, okay, my time is not, I should not be spending my time doing this because what I’m doing is making no difference. And it is, it’s because things are so rapidly changing. Sometimes I feel like you hear one SEO tactic one week and then it’s like, actually no, let’s change. Totally different because of ai, and you just don’t know what search results are going to look like in a week.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I feel like so much of it I think comes down to technical best practice. Okay, is the site loading fast? Is it structured well? Is it easy to walk through the content to understand? And a lot of that comes down to best experience for a human.

Is it a good piece of content for an individual? There are definitely technical things that are deep technical considerations from a search perspective. And I do think that there’s also opportunities for keyword research and understanding opportunities, but also for an established site, if you publish a piece of content and there’s a decent amount of people that would potentially be searching for that, there’s probably, and you have the box checked for the technical components, there’s probably a good chance that you will in some way, shape or form, get some traction from that just due to the fact that you’re an established site in a niche and have some traction there. But it is one of those hard things where it’s not definitive. It’s not spending ad money on Facebook and you can say, okay, I spent a hundred dollars and I got a hundred email signups. It’s like I spent a hundred hours doing this. And I think that it helped, and there are

Isabel Orozco: So many tools that you can use now to analyze things about analyzing whatever top 10 things, and now you can use chat JPT to help you brainstorm random things. So it’s definitely been a journey of figuring out where he fits. And I feel like that’s important to point out because I hear about spouses joining teams and it’s going to be all daisies, and it’s actually not always, not that it’s been a bad experience, but it’s still even two years in, we feel like we’re still kind of figuring out his bet, where he best fits and what he can really do to provide value. Always been his thing is where can I provide value?

Bjork Ostrom: Totally. The other piece that’s interesting too is what does it look like to work together? Do you assign him a thing and then he does it? Does he assign you a thing? That’s always an interesting dynamic,

And I don’t know Lindsay’s approach necessarily, but I think the thing that was helpful for me within the context of Lindsay and I working together, first of all saying, Hey, this is Lindsay’s thing. Pinch of Yam is Lindsay and me, but it’s really Lindsay. She has done the content creation for it. She’s built the audience. People are connected with her. I’ve helped for sure, but she’s done the hard part of building the content over 15 years. And so what’s been helpful for me is to kind of release almost my ownership of it. We’re still technically partners. It’s like we have this parent company tiny bit, we each own 50 50 of that and that owns these other companies we have, but it’s the mindset of Tu thing. And if she wants to take a break for three months, then it’s her thing and that’s what she does.

Or if she wants to really get after it, it’s like, great, let’s talk about opportunities, what those are. And I almost view my role within the context of Pinch of Yum now is a consultant, and it’s like, here’s some ideas. I’ll have a conversation with somebody on the podcast and be like, Hey, this is a cool thing. Here’s what it looks like. If you’re interested in it, we can dig into it. Part of the reason that works is because we also have these other businesses where I’m kind of doing my own thing on the side, but I think important to acknowledge in that I think some people might look at it and be like, oh, are you and Lindsay collaborating all day long? And how do you do that when you’re working on a thing always. And I think we’re probably more departmental than people would realize We’re not actually working super close together, which I think is, for us at least one of the reasons why it works is because we’re never really stepping on each other’s toes or I would say we know how to do that dance now. And so we aren’t stepping on each other’s toes, but it’s like to some degree, we’ve been working together for 15 years,

And so you realize what that dance looks like. But it’s interesting to have conversations with people who are six months in three months in to working together. And I think the sentiment that I would want to pass along is like, oh, you’re just learning to dance and it takes a while until you both know what that dance looks like, and it’s probably years, not months. Sometimes you might be able to just fall into it, but I think oftentimes it takes a long time. What are the other roles within the company and what are those people doing?

Isabel Orozco: So I have one person who’s actually a family member who helps with recipe development and writing blog posts, which is actually, I wanted to point out that it’s been really helpful to have someone help in that role because especially a family member who knows, so many of the recipes on the site are family recipes, and so to have a family member know the types of food that we eat, we see each other every Sunday. So she’s around, she knows we all grew up in the same,

Bjork Ostrom: She literally knows what it tastes like and should taste like.

Isabel Orozco: Exactly. So she helps with that, and that’s her main role. She actually just had a baby yesterday, so she is now on maternity

Bjork Ostrom: Leave. So that role will look different for the next few months.

Isabel Orozco: And then my other team member is helps with, she does email and social media and just other little things that I have here and there that she can help with, but that takes up most of her time.

Bjork Ostrom: So when you look back at 10 years now of creating content, building a team, building a successful business, now working on it with your husband, being able to create a business that allows you to each take three months off from maternity leave, awesome to come back and be like, Hey, things are still going well here. All of these are really inspiring things, and I think for a lot of the people listening to this podcast would be really desirable things in your journey when you look back, what are the things that you could point to and say, these were the things that I did that were most important for the business and setting myself up for success at this point. You look back, there’s 10 years. Are there things that you can point to whether extremely tactical things or mindsets that you had or pivots you made that you could look back at and say, Hey, these were really important for scaling my business over the last 10 years.

Isabel Orozco: I feel like you hear this a lot, but it was hiring. It was taking things off my plate because I just felt like I couldn’t do it all anymore. I was taking my own photos and once I hired a photographer to do that, and I think that was probably the hardest thing to get off my plate because I want them to look a certain way. And especially with Mexican food, some people aren’t super knowledgeable about working with certain ingredients. So that kind of took some figuring out which photographer is going to be best for that. And even now, it still takes time because I give the photographer a list of this is what I want each photo to look like, so it’s very specific. So I still take time to write out here’s what I want these to be, but getting the photographer was a big game changer. That takes up so much time. So getting some of that time back was helpful. And then having a recipe developer help as well. It just again, takes so much time, especially now that video is such a big thing. My time spent now has to be a lot. I focus a lot on video and growing my social and whatnot,

Bjork Ostrom: Which is one of those changes when we talk about 2019 to today, a very significant change in terms of the presence of video and the importance of video, even what type of video, because 2019 you were still publishing video, but it looked very different.

Isabel Orozco: Very different.

Bjork Ostrom: The purpose of it was different. Now it’s largely vertical. It’s a lot of human focused. You are in it,

Isabel Orozco: You’ve got to be in it,

Bjork Ostrom: Which was also very different. It’s so interesting how those things change subtly, but then quickly, when you look back at a three to four year period and you’re like, oh, nobody’s doing hands and pans videos on Facebook anymore. Everybody’s showing up in real or short form video type content. Can you talk about the recipe developer? Is it a similar 10 80 10 where you come with a concept around, and I know this is a family member, so you probably have a similar idea of what these recipes would be, but hey, here’s this recipe. Hey, do you remember this recipe we had at Grandma’s during whatever holiday I want to do this. Here’s a few of the things I might want to change a little bit. 10%, they’ll take it 80%, and then do you do a 10% review of it before moving forward with it? Does that work kind of in a similar way?

Isabel Orozco: Yep. Pretty much. I will come up with the ideas and yeah, just like you said, if there’s something in there that I want specifically, it’s like, Hey, I want it to be sort of this recipe that we already have on the site, but tweaked a little bit or do this instead of this, or I’m really wanting to highlight the sauce in this, so make it super saucy and I don’t know, thinking out of nowhere, but, and then she takes it tests or gets it done, and she’ll take photos of what it looks like at the end as well, just like on her iPhone. And then I get it back and I can go from there. I can say, actually, this isn’t what I really wanted. Let’s maybe table it for a couple months from now and we can work on it then, or especially now, if I feel like it’s there and I trust her, she’s a family member, all of that, I’ll just move on to the next thing, and if not, I’ll go in and work on it and figure out what to do with it. But yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: It’s great. I think as much as possible, especially for the things that we don’t want to be doing or don’t want to be the majority of our time spending doing that thing, but we still want to have the majority of shaping what they are and final approval of it. That 10 80 10 is so important, and having somebody in between who can do the majority of the heavy lifting, but allow you as the creator to still be the one coming up with the idea of what the recipe is as well as the final review and tweak and change around it to put the polish on it. Such huge win can happen there for scaling up content or even making content. Maybe you’re not scaling it, but you’re just making it more sustainable. I think that’s such a huge takeaway for creators. Last piece that I was going to ask about, so partnering with Raptor for this huge appreciation for their partnership for the series recently reached luminary status within riv. Are there any services that you’re using kind of to augment parts of your day-to-day within the business within rap, knowing that that’s a service that they offer, almost like not necessarily team member, but a resource for your day-to-day? Yeah,

Isabel Orozco: Their SEO team

Bjork Ostrom: Is

Isabel Orozco: Super helpful and nice and just will get in the nitty gritty. If you have any questions, I can just ask them and they’ll get in there and they’re more than happy. They like to geek out and be like, oh, yeah, let’s try this, or let’s try that. Used their, I know they’ve worked with Matt Mullen or Matt Mullen works with Rafta sometimes

Bjork Ostrom: Who’s been on the podcast email expert.

Isabel Orozco: And so I’ve done a couple of his, I think they’re called Mass. I don’t know if he calls him masterminds or whatnot, but six week span of working with him, and that’s been great. And now in the luminary status, they have email help, which it’s on my to-do list of reaching out or trying to get that going. But it will be interesting to see because I do have a team member who helps with email, and so it’ll be interesting to see

Bjork Ostrom: What does that integration look like, and

Isabel Orozco: Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. It’s one of the things I’ve thought a lot, and this is just a quick note. This is a change wrapped I’ve had recently for anybody listening, they’ve recently shifted some of their Patri requirements, so their first level now is 25,000. So if you are in the early stages or growing your site, you can check that out, and that’s kind of a cool new thing that they’ve done as much as possible. I think if we as creators can think about how do we become, what I’ve borrowed a term from another podcast that I listened to this week in startups, the guy’s name is Jason k Canni. He talked about this idea called super routers, meaning you have something that comes in, you are likely a touchpoint for that, but how do you figure out where you’re going to get help with that thing as opposed to doing the actual thing yourself for everything that you don’t want to be doing the thing for?

And so an example in my world would be, we just had this happen recently where it was an email thing and we’re trying to go through the process of figuring out how we want to do opt-ins for Pinch of Yum emails and a default option versus a double opt-in. Okay, what does it look like? I could go research, I could look into it, or in this case, it’s like, what does it look like to route it to tive email team and say, Hey, do you have opinions on this? Can you give some feedback? What are your thoughts on it? Another example would be, we use Google Workspace, and so that’s what we do for emails. We have a consultant who’s a workspace expert. And so previously it would’ve been me going into Google Workspace and trying to figure out how do I spin up a group or how do I spin down an email account? And now it’s like routing that to that person made especially helpful now that this would be, I don’t know if you’d be into this or not, but I have a voice to text tool that I use previously. There’s one called Superhuman, and now it’s called Whisper Flow. Have you seen these or heard of these?

Isabel Orozco: No.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, if you end up downloading it, I would love to hear if you like using it or not.

Isabel Orozco: Whisper

Bjork Ostrom: Flow. Yeah, whisper flow. And so essentially you just speak into your computer. In my case, I have this podcast, Mike, so I’m speaking into that. And so when I process emails, now 90% of the time, I pull up the email, do a quick review of it, and then in my case I do shift command S and it pulls up whisper flow, and then I just talk and it knows contextually that I’m within email. So when I say, Hey, Isabelle, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Super fun to chat with you. Hope it works to have you back gone again, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And then I press command. In my case, shift command asks, I think the default is usually the function key. Then it stops and it drops it in, but it’s different. It’s like we would maybe know it within the context of Siri, which is kind of cool, but it’s not very good in this case. It’s so smart and understands within the context of adding quotes, and it’s kind of grammarly within the context of speaking. And so it cleans it up, it drops it in. It makes it super helpful to take care of that. So if you download it, let me know what you think.

Isabel Orozco: I’ll try it.

Bjork Ostrom: But I think the takeaway and what I love about some of the things that you’ve said is this idea of, okay, where does that idea go? Like, okay, in your case, it goes into the spreadsheet, it gets assigned to the person. That’s where that goes. It’s like always knowing when something comes in, who’s doing it, where do you send it? Because I think one of the snags that can so often happen as creators is you get something that comes in and it’s like, shoot, do I have to go figure this out? Do a bunch of research around it. Who’s the expert, who’s the consultant, who’s the person on the team that’s going to help you do all of the things that need to get done, but you don’t want to do in order for you to do the things that are really important. In your case, working on the cookbook or doing their videos, which I think is hard to set up that system similar to the spreadsheet that you built. But once you have it, I would imagine it’s super helpful to have anything else that you would say, departing wisdom for other people who are in the throes of building their business, trying to figure out how to make it work. Advice that you’d have coming from the place that you are, which is like, man, you have a team, you have a successful business.

Isabel Orozco: Yeah. I actually recently got some advice from someone else, from a different blogger, Lauren from Taste Better from Scratch, and her sister, we were at a RAF of conference recently, and they were there and we were chatting and I was talking to them about feeling like I’m the bottleneck for so many things and how when that starts to happen I’m like, okay, there’s too much on my plate. Something needs to get taken off of my plate or what that looks like, whether we just table something or maybe it’s time to hire someone else, and I’m really reluctant to hire another person because

Bjork Ostrom: Why is that

Isabel Orozco: Even because it’s hard to manage people,

Bjork Ostrom: And

Isabel Orozco: That’s not why I did this. I’m not in this business to manage people. Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s one of the questions that I wanted to ask you, and maybe I will just if you have time, how do you balance the maker to, maybe this is what you’re getting at, but you are a maker and you are now also a little bit of a manager, and what happens when you come up against the opportunity to do more, to scale, to increase whatever it is, but it requires hiring a person, which then means potentially you become more manager. How have you navigated that?

Isabel Orozco: It’s been difficult. Yeah. I would say really getting clear about just honestly communicating, being a better communicator to the people on my team and maybe me also just not expecting perfection because if I were to do something, I know exactly how I want it done, and this is, and maybe it doesn’t get done that way. I didn’t communicate it correctly, right? Sure. So I think it just takes some time, some back and forth, some learning from me on how to talk to certain team members and them knowing what I want. So sometimes I think that just takes a little time. But yeah, just communicating and just being honest and not if something is wrong, in the beginning, if something wasn’t exactly what I wanted, I would just accept it and then change it myself. But my husband’s like, no, you need to tell them what is going on. Then why do you have a team member if they’re not going to be helping you do this? So I think just communicating is the hardest part. But the advice

Bjork Ostrom: To get back to the advice, yeah,

Isabel Orozco: The advice that I was given, because I’m starting to feel that way again, I’m the bottleneck and I don’t want to hire another team member just because I know all of the work that will be involved in that. The two sisters were saying sometimes you just have to accept that you will be the bottleneck. It is your business. It is, especially my site, it’s kind of very personal. All these recipes from family, it’s like sometimes you just are the bottleneck and you have to be okay with that, and your team has to know that sometimes Isabel is not going to get things done, and that’s what it is. You’re just going to have to wait until tomorrow and you just have to learn to be okay with just having people wait on you,

Bjork Ostrom: Which is great. And I think it ties out really well with the earlier conversation we had, which is defining the game that you’re playing. And in this case it’s saying, Hey, you know what? The game isn’t. How do you get as much stuff done as possible and scale a team and have 10 people working for you? The game is, my guess a little bit of it is how do you continue to do what you’re doing to love what you’re doing, to not get sucked down a whole of managing a bunch of people knowing that there are going to be limitations on what you do. And we’ve come to a similar place where it’s like we know there’s endless opportunity. It’s one of the great things about doing what we’re doing. It’s also one of the hard things about doing what we’re doing is there’s endless opportunity and you could work on it forever, all day, every day, and there could be 10 other people working on it all day every day. And so to just accept that great advice from Lauren and say, there’s going to be times where you are the bottleneck, and just because that exists doesn’t mean that it’s a bad thing. I think is a great mindset to have

In service of continuing to love the work that you do, which it seems like you do. Last thing that I want to hear a little bit about, you can talk about the cookbook. When is it going to come out and can people, is it at the point where you can pre-order it?

Isabel Orozco: No. I actually haven’t even talked about it anywhere

Bjork Ostrom: Because breaking news,

Isabel Orozco: Because you’re breaking news, breaking news, I’m writing a cookbook. The current plan, if don’t all the timeline is nothing gets pushed back is spring of 2027. So still a while away

Bjork Ostrom: You’ve got some time. It’s early stages. Yeah. That’s great. Well, we will keep an eye out for it. Maybe we can have you back on when it comes out. But Isabel, thanks so much for coming on the podcast again, giving us an update on where you’re at. Hugely inspiring and continued success.

Isabel Orozco: Thank you so much.

Emily Walker: Hey, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the podcast. As always, if you enjoyed the episode, we would really appreciate it if you could share it with your community. You can also leave a rating or a review of the podcast wherever you listen to your podcast episodes. Next week we will be back with another blogging news round table episode. Bjork and I will be chatting about the latest news and everything you need to know to stay up to date in the bogging world. That’s it for this week. Thanks so much for listening, and we will see you next week.