Atelier Wealth co-owners Aaron and Bernadette Christie-David learnt the hard way about the difference between being business owners versus being business operators with the arrival of their first child, daughter Sienna.
Their story is one of many in our eBook Balancing work, life and everything else. The book was inspired by the results and respondent comments from the 2020 Opportunities for Women survey which highlighted that many of our members experience difficulty with time management, managing their work-life balance and generally remaining resilient in difficult times.
For Aaron and Bernadette, the way they were operating their family-run mortgage broking business did not allow Bernadette to take more than a few weeks of maternity leave when Sienna was born.
Bernadette says the sheer stress of that situation and the fact that she felt she missed much of her first daughter’s early months, made her realise that she needed to step out of the business when her second daughter Zara arrived barely 18 months later.
To do that, they needed to understand their strengths and where they were adding the most value to the business and building a skilled team to allow them to have high-quality touchpoints at every stage of the customer’s journey into home ownership.
That meant letting go of controlling certain aspects of the business, outsourcing work that wasn’t critical to the customer experience such as book-keeping and administration and growing the team from just three including Bernadette’s brother Damien Walker, to a team of 18 people, including twelve staff offshore.
Aaron says by focussing their time on where they could add the most value in the business, they’ve been able to take their mortgage broking business to the next level and they are both relishing the opportunity to lead an ever-growing team.
In the eBook, Aaron and Bernadette share the strategies they’ve deployed to be able to expand their business as their family also grew.
