Lesley Pyle of HireMyMom.com on How To Successfully Navigate The Opportunities & Challenges Of Working Remotely Or From Home

Published in

Authority Magazine

9 min readMar 12, 2021

For motivation, I find podcasts a great resource for motivating me and encouraging me in my business and personal life. I also believe in setting daily, weekly and monthly goals. I have a goals sheet for each month for this purpose and it has sections for each so that I can check off daily weekly and monthly goals, you can also set rewards for achieving your goals or take it a step further and get an accountability partner and encourage one another I also love a good motivational playlist to get me energized and motivated.

As a part of our series about the things you need to successfully work remotely, I had the pleasure of interviewing Lesley Pyle of HireMymom.com

Lesley Pyle is the founder of HireMyMom.com, a boutique service connecting Small Businesses with Virtual Professionals across the country. She began her work-at-home career in 1996 with the launch of her first website: Home-Based Working Moms. Pyle has been working from home for over 25 years. She and her husband reside in Texas and have 4 kids ages 26 to 13.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. What is your “backstory”?

I consider myself sort of an accidental entrepreneur as I did not set out to start my own business but after having my first child, I could not bear to leave her every day in someone else’s care. I had recently finished my master’s degree in Marketing and PR and was working for a golf school promoting their golf clinics around the country. When they were not open to any type of flex or remote schedule, I decided to leave my job and my paycheck to start my freelancing business from home. It was scary but I was determined to make it work. It wasn’t an overnight success but with hard work, determination, and scaling back our budget in every possible way, we made it work! From there, I launched my first website: Home-Based Working Moms. I have been referred to as one of the pioneers of the work-at-home mom movement and have over 25 years’ experience in this area. I was named one of “50 Women Entrepreneurs Who Inspire Us” by Self-Made magazine and have been featured in numerous publications including Forbes, Entrepreneur, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and many others.

As both an entrepreneur and a mom of 4, I am passionate about helping entrepreneurs and small businesses take their business to the next level by hiring dependable, talented virtual professionals while also helping Mom Professionals find legitimate, flexible work from home jobs.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?

One of the most interesting stories is when a producer from the Oprah Winfrey show called and interviewed me for a possible guest spot on her show. It was a show on moms who were working from home. It was an exciting experience but I did not make the final cut to be on the show. I have been fortunate to be on morning TV talk shows and many news segments but haven’t made it to Oprah…yet!

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

One of the funny things that happened early in my work from home career was when I was being interviewed by a news reporter and my 2 year old son found his way into my office to loudly announce he had gone poopy on the potty. Needless to say, we both got a good laugh out of it but I was so embarrassed in the moment!

The lesson I learned was to make sure I have good supervision for my little ones when I am working or on a call. Thankfully I did most of the time but there were those few occasions when I had to wing it for one reason or another! Now my son is 24 so I don’t have to worry about him busting through the door anymore to announce such achievements.

What advice would you give to other business leaders to help their employees thrive and avoid burnout?

One of the things that works for me is good self-care and an established daily time for prayer and connecting with God. I commit the first hour of my day to prayer and Bible study so that I can set my heart and mind on God and His plans for me and my business. I work through hard stuff with Him, ask for wisdom, refreshment, compassion, understanding, favor, blessing, forgiveness and so much more. That to me is not optional. I also enjoy treating myself to a massage or facial once a month, going to lunch with friends, having a date night with my husband, and other things that energize and rejuvenate me!

When I have hard days, I allow myself space to process whatever made it hard and grieve, make changes, learn lessons, or whatever the case may be. I then remember my why for what I do and my passion for helping moms find amazing remote jobs and clients and helping small businesses find amazing remote talent!

Ok, let’s jump to the core of our interview. Working remotely can be very different than working with a team that is in front of you. This provides great opportunity but it can also create unique challenges. To begin, can you articulate for our readers a few of the main benefits and opportunities of working remotely?

One of the biggest opportunities and benefits for working remotely is the freedom and flexibility we have to make our own schedule and to work around our family’s needs. We also save on gas, clothing, eating out, and time in traveling to and from an office not to mention not having the stress of fighting traffic.

Can you articulate for our readers what the five main challenges are regarding working remotely?

I think some of the challenges of working remotely are or can be:

Isolation
Collaborating challenges
Lack of camaraderie
Hard to motivate yourself if you are used to having a team around you
Finding a balance between work and home and family

Based on your experience, what can one do to address or redress each of those challenges? Can you give a story or example for each?

For isolation, I think it’s important to build opportunities to connect with others throughout your week. You may have regular team meetings via Zoom, plan weekly coffee or lunch dates with friends or colleagues, find online groups to socialize in, and network in as well.

For collaboration, there are great tools online like Slack, Trello, Asana and so on that help you create opportunities to collaborate with others. Of course, a phone call or zoom meeting is always a possibility too.

For camaraderie, some of the same principles for collaboration apply. It’s important to be proactive to schedule both professional opportunities and personal opportunities to connect with others when you work remotely. You may find an online group or in-person group related to your hobbies, interests, fitness, and of course your work.

For motivation, I find podcasts a great resource for motivating me and encouraging me in my business and personal life. I also believe in setting daily, weekly and monthly goals. I have a goals sheet for each month for this purpose and it has sections for each so that I can check off daily weekly and monthly goals, you can also set rewards for achieving your goals or take it a step further and get an accountability partner and encourage one another I also love a good motivational playlist to get me energized and motivated.

For finding the balance between work and home life, I think it is important to keep a check on your work hours so that you don’t sacrifice family time for work. And on the other hand, it’s important to focus on work during your work hours and not allow too many distractions from family, friends, or chores to distract you from your work. For me, the most challenging part is when family comes to town to visit. I like to explain upfront when I need to work so they know when I am working and when I am free.

Do you have any suggestions specifically for people who work at home? What are a few ways to be most productive when you work at home?

Yes, some of the things that work well for me is to batch my work that takes real focus. For instance, I will set a time on my calendar for 1–2 hours if I need to write, create content, videos, etc. I block it out as if it is a meeting. I also try to do all of that in one session per week so that my focus is completely zoned in for that project.

Another tip that works for me, is to close out my email and silence my cell phone when I want to get a project or task accomplished. By not starting and stopping multiple times, I can focus and complete the projects so much quicker and easier.

I also mute group text messages and other non-work-related notifications when I’m working so I can completely focus. My family is not included in that so if they needed me for some reason, I am always accessible to them.

Can you share any suggestions for teams who are used to working together on location but are forced to work remotely due to the pandemic? Are there potential obstacles one should avoid with a team that is just getting used to working remotely?

Yes, create a plan that allows you to continue the same flow as when you were in person as much as possible. Check out some of the many tools for teams such as Slack, Trello, Asana, Monday, and others that create boards, threads, and sequences that help keep you and your team streamlined. Plan for daily or weekly checkpoint zoom meetings to check in and make sure nothing is being overlooked and everyone is tracking for the tasks they are responsible for. Allow all team members a turn to share what is working and what is not working for them and see what tools, processes, or changes can be made so that everyone is firing at 100%.

What do you suggest can be done to create an empowering work culture and team culture with a team that is remote and not physically together?

Look for opportunities to reward your team, cheer on your team and provide incentives for jobs well done. Everyone loves to be appreciated so when you are showing appreciation, you are empowering your team to achieve even more. A monthly Starbucks or dinner gift card, an online happy hour, a quarterly or yearly team retreat/vacation, fun gifts or subscription boxes, a new book or team t-shirts — anything to reward, encourage and create an environment of team and appreciation goes a long way!

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I would love to inspire a movement of loving, serving, and encouraging others, to see a switch from “me, me, me” to “us, us, us”. Uniting us to look for opportunities to give rather than receive and to pay it forward. We are living in a world with a lot of hurting people and I think the media is only further separating us. I would love to see people connect with one another more to hear their stories instead of believing everything they read or see on TV.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

My life lesson quote is from the Bible. It is Romans 8:28 which says, “In *all* things God works for the GOOD of those who love HIM and who are called according to His purpose.” You see not everything that happens to us is good. I lost my dad to suicide at 13. My first husband left me and our two kids. Those are not good things. But my God redeemed the pain, the heartache, the suffering and gave me a new future with hope! He restored me, blessed me and I have a beautiful family that I adore. God has blessed me with this business and with far more than I deserve. You see He is known for making beauty out of ashes and He certainly has for me!

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Thank you for these great insights! We wish you continued success

Lesley Pyle of HireMyMom.com on How To Successfully Navigate The Opportunities & Challenges Of Working Remotely Or From Home

Written by Jason Hartman