Interview with Sabrina Joan
on trauma-informed approaches to business
As we prepare to close up Quarter 3 of 2024, it’s a great time to reflect on your experience these last three months and set some short-term, actionable, and achievable goals for yourself. I invite you to check out my free reflection workbook here and hope that your shift into October is smooth!
Onto today’s interview.
Today I’m interviewing Sabrina Joan, an Online Business Manager who supports trauma-informed, well-being-oriented and social-change-focused small businesses to amplify their impact while experiencing more simplicity behind the scenes. After 5 years as a community educator and then program coordinator dedicated to preventing interpersonal violence, she decided to start this business to dedicate her labor to those making meaningful progress toward collective liberation. Today, Sabrina leverages her skills in project management and business operations to create behind-the-scenes processes, structures, and systems that feel easy on the nervous system.
Kate: One of the first things that drew me to your work in 2022 when I was looking for a Virtual Assistant was your trauma-informed approach to your work and your background in intimate partner violence and sexual assault prevention. I remember thinking, “This is someone whose values will align with mine!”
I’m intrigued by the way you position your current online business manager work at the intersection of systems thinking, online business operations, and trauma-informed care. We’re used to hearing the first two approaches in the world of business, but trauma-informed care is part of what makes your approach different and important. Could you tell us more about why this approach is meaningful to you and how it features in your current work with clients?
Sabrina: When I started as a virtual assistant and then eventually gained the skills and experience to become an online business manager, I didn’t imagine trauma-informed care would be part of my scope of practice. I was lucky enough to study these principles of consent, transparency, collaboration, cultural humility, inclusion, and accessibility deeply during my time dedicated to the anti-sexual violence movement. I knew that I wanted to work with folks who were trauma-informed, but because the online business space was so new to me, I didn’t realize at first that it was possible to have these concepts woven into the fabric of a business. I’m especially grateful for the work of Katie Kurtz, whose educational programs and the people within them have helped me bridge my understanding of trauma-informed care from the context of interpersonal violence to the context of online business. It feels very meaningful to still be connected to the anti-violence work I did for so many years, even if my day-to-day looks so different now. I enjoy working with people whose values align with mine and who want to do right by their customers and clients, even if it goes against “traditional” business advice.
I love to support my clients with making their business more trauma-informed both for their customers and for themselves. It can look very different from business to business—tweaking email newsletter copy to feel less urgent and more invitational, planning launches with more expansive timelines to lessen last-minute burdens on the internal team, carving out strategy meetings with CEOs to pause amidst the chaos for reflection and planning, intentionally gathering and implementing customer feedback, etc. I also do my best to bring a trauma-informed, co-creative approach to the way I work with the business owners themselves. It feels important to me to incorporate details like flexible payment options, sending meeting agendas ahead of time, and giving folks the option to complete their intake questionnaires in a written, audio, or video format.
Kate: I’ve been a client of yours for almost two years and I’m continually grateful for the attention, wisdom, and energy you bring to our work together. Not only has your support directly helped me to secure podcast appearances, improve my newsletters, and attract new clients, but I also have fun on our weekly calls. Could you share some of your favorite parts of the work you’ve done with your clients and what’s feeling most satisfying or intriguing to you right now?
Sabrina: Thank you so much for saying that, I absolutely love working with you! I always leave our calls with a pep in my step.
This year, I’ve really been enjoying working with business owners to streamline their client onboarding processes. I love thinking about a customer’s journey from inquiry to active service provision, and figuring out how to make all the steps along the way as easy on everyone’s nervous systems as possible. How can we introduce automations to make client onboarding a lighter lift on the team? How can we clarify for the client what to expect at each stage without sending them into overwhelm or information overload? How can business services be flexible and accommodating while still honoring staff capacity? I find it to be a really interesting puzzle that I’m having fun exploring with clients these days.
Kate: In my own experience, learning a new project management tool can become a form of “productive procrastination” and distract me from ever actually using the tool effectively. I’m grateful for the systems you’ve set up for me in Notion and GoogleSuite, which are 1) so helpful and 2) something I would never have known how to do myself–so thank you! In addition to hiring an online business management operations expert like yourself, do you have suggestions to help folks avoid going down a “rabbit hole” when learning how to use a new tool or deciding which tools might work best for their needs?
Sabrina: Even though my job is to become acquainted with different project management tools and online platforms, I can find them very intimidating and overwhelming. Many of these online tools, because they are trying to compete with each other, offer waayyyyy more features than you’ll likely ever need! My recommendation would be to start with assessing what you want a new tool for (ex: daily recurring tasks, creative project planning, taking a bird’s eye view of your upcoming sale) and compare that against the system(s) you’re currently working with. For example, if you’ve noticed you find your magnetic fridge calendar useful because it allows you to see the whole month at once, that might be an important feature for your digital project management tool to have. Perhaps right now, you log your entire to-do list on one piece of paper and it feels difficult to prioritize. Maybe that means you’d benefit from a project management tool that lets you subdivide tasks by project and rank them by priority. I find it helpful to conceptualize as much as possible in analog before opening my laptop to investigate a new platform on the endless sea of the Internet. From there, you might prevent a “rabbit hole” by setting up only the minimum of what you think you’ll need and committing to troubleshooting as you go, rather than sinking hours into configuring every feature on the platform to be “perfect” before you begin. I also love video tutorials! This may help provide a space for education with a fixed beginning and end time (the length of the video).
Kate: As someone who works from home and supports multiple clients who all have different deadlines and requests, I’m curious about your relationship with taking breaks, vacation, and time away from your work. Is that something that has ever felt like a challenge for you? What helps you to fit self-care, rest, and other non-work activities into your life?
Sabrina: I love to take time away from work, especially venturing into nature for camping and backpacking trips! One of my favorite things about owning a business is the ability to prioritize time in the outdoors and decide when I’ll be taking days off. I used to struggle with it when I first started working for myself because I feared that business owners would only want to hire me if I was “always available.” As I’ve grown more confident in the quality of my work and the relationships I’ve built with my clients, the more comfortable I’ve become with taking periods of rest. Communication is the biggest key, I’ve found — I try to give my clients at least 14 days notice whenever possible so we can strategize and prevent my absence from being negatively impactful. Beyond vacation days, I am trying to experiment with new daily routines to help me incorporate self-care and rest when I am in the throes of work as well.
Kate: As you know, I like to end my newsletters by asking folks to share something they’re feeling hopeful about, whether it’s in your field of work and/or your life more broadly.
Sabrina: As someone who is always flowing in and out of depression, I sometimes find hope difficult to hold onto. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson recently shared a letter about hope, especially in the face of the climate crisis and the geopolitical state of the world, on her Substack that I resonated with. Focusing on what I can do and what I see those around me doing to make their communities better in the present gives me the fuel to continue moving forward (even if sometimes my pace is slow and resistant). One of the reasons I enjoy working with small business owners is their radical imaginations! They are constantly inventing new solutions and new forms for their world-changing work to take, and I feel lucky to play a supporting role. The idea that so many people are putting their minds, bodies, determination, and limited time on this Earth into forging a liberatory future makes me feel hopeful.
Thank you to Sabrina for taking time to chat with me today! You can learn more about her offerings on her website here and sign up for her newsletter here.
Take care and talk soon,
Dr. Kate