Now having been practicing in child life for 20+ years, I make a decent living, but I’m also a single mom who doesn’t have a savings account (except for a few months after I get a tax refund!) Like most of America, I live paycheck to paycheck. The whole idea of coming up with money to create a “product” was extremely overwhelming. I mean, $200 might not be a lot to some people, but to me…um…yeah…my teenage son likes to have food on the table….he’s actually quite fond of it. Once I decided to just jump in feet first, I had that whole worry, “What if no one wants to buy it?!” Gulp.
The first order of business was getting a logo. The logo was actually kind of the easy part. An old high school friend and former roommate from Iowa State, Beth Morrison Rogers, was a graphic design major. All it took was for me to ask if she’d be interested in designing something. Since I’d known her for years, I’d seen her work and knew her capabilities. I said I kind of wanted the letters of “one voice” to make a face somehow…so if you looked at it, it would be a face but you wouldn’t necessarily know that it spelled “one voice.” Her idea was much better than mine. It took a few back and forth exchanges via email and what she came up with is what you see today as the logo. How much did I have to pay her? Well, the bill is actually still unpaid….I owe her a beer. Now that’s MY kind of budget!
The website was my first big undertaking. I wanted…well…really NEEDED to be able to do it myself to save money, and also to be able to be in control of the content. I had no idea what I should include on the website, pricing of the products etc., so I needed to be able to make changes whenever I needed to. I knew it would be a process and a learning experience. I knew absolutely nothing about website design, but God was nice enough to have a commercial playing one night about Intuit.com. Websites started at $4.99 per month…hmm….I could scrape that up, so I signed up. Of course, adding the ability to have online shopping etc., raised the cost a little, but it’s been very easy to navigate and they’ve been good about customer service. It took several hours of planning, but voilá…it was done. (In case you’re wondering….all the cute kids on my website? Some of them are my son at various stages in his life, and others are children of some of my friends…I said, “If you want your kid on my website, send me some cute pics”, and there are a couple from the Intuit clip art collection. You know, just in case you’re wondering.)
The posters were really easy to have made…once the decision was made as to what kind of paper to use. I had NO idea there were so many choices!!? The number of paper choices probably equal the number of shoes in many women’s closets…just sayin’. I wanted to make sure I got something sturdy enough so that people wouldn’t feel like they were being ripped off on the cost. Ever pay money for something and think, “Who’s the jerk that thinks it worth THAT much money??!” Yeah…not on my list of wants….to be thought of as a rip-off artist.
By far, the most difficult project was the PowerPoint. In all my years of teaching about ONE VOICE, I’ve used a variety of presentations. Mostly it has been a pretty basic presentation. I would just fill it in with all the knowledge floating around in my little pea brain from all the scenarios I’ve encountered in all my years of practice. What I’ve learned in all these years is that I apparently speak with a lot of passion. This is the same passion that prompted me to come up with ONE VOICE all those years ago. The passion that wanted to help make a difference for all those scared little kids and their families. Well, one thing I never learned, was how to bottle that passion…and better yet…how do I pass it along? Tried Googling it. Hmmm….nothing. What I needed to create was a PowerPoint that child life specialists could use to teach new child life specialists, or child life practicum and internship students. But…these people will already kind of think like me. I didn’t want to be seen as “preaching to the choir”. Most beginning child life specialists will know the basics; parental presence, prepare the patient, tell them they’re doing a good job, have distraction nearby. Most will know about comfort positions, but might not be very polished in its practice. I would guarantee that everyone has been bothered by having lots of voices talking at the same time, and having so many people in the room that aren’t really there for an exact purpose. I wanted to be able to teach those up and coming child life specialists an easy way to remember how to create a less threatening environment…we’re at the forefront. But at the heart of it all, it was really about teaching others how to make a friendlier environment. ONE VOICE isn’t rocket science. It’s an easy way to remember how to look at the environment.
Creating the PowerPoint was going to be tricky. When I originally started to put it together (FYI…it took 4 months), it was with child life specialists in mind. I needed to create a PowerPoint for “the choir” so that they could go out and teach other healthcare personnel. Knowing that there are a lot of personality types (and medical professionals) that need to have research to back up what they were hearing, I had to include some of that information as well. It couldn’t be just “because child life says it makes a difference.” I didn’t need to show ONE VOICE research necessarily, but research that backed up the components of ONE VOICE. As I was putting together the presentation, I actually had a few emails from non-child life specialists inquiring about ONE VOICE. I realized that it needed to be bigger than what I was thinking. It needed to be designed not JUST for child life professionals, but for any healthcare professional that wants to implement it. Now I no longer had the comfort of my “choir.” The presentation had to make sense to people that didn’t necessarily think like a child life specialist. This is when my head really started to hurt. (Note to self, “Buy stock in Advil”)
And then there was the fear of having a grammatical or spelling errors out there for the whole world to see??!! I’m usually pretty hip to all the grammar stuff. Although I’m known as the grammar Nazi at work, I’m usually just smart enough to know that if I have any doubt in my mind, change the sentence around to use different wording, or Google it. It nearly sent me into a panic attack thinking I might not catch a little boo boo and would forever be known as “the ONE VOICE lady who used the wrong form of a verb on a presentation that she charged too much money for.” (I’m the kind of person that can’t even have a spelling error on a note I leave to MYSELF on my desk…I mean…what if something happened to me on the way home from work and when they cleaned my desk off, they saw the error and thought, “She didn’t even know how to spell esophagogastroduodenoscopy?”) So not only did I worry about the content and whether it was easy to follow, I decided to add grammar and spelling to my worry list. I mean, what good are lists if there are only a couple of things on them, right?
After COUNTLESS hours of work and revisions, I sent off my presentation to several of my child life colleagues for review, a physician, two nursing colleagues (one with her PhD), and a grammar Nazi friend who has absolutely NO medical background whatsoever. This was pretty ingenious asking a non-medical person for input. As a child life specialist, I pride myself on not being too….medical….or too…technical…I believe in “keeping it real” for folks. What I learned was that I was actually using a lot of developmental mumbo jumbo. It would make sense to a child lifer, but not necessarily to other medical personnel. I also had to look at some of my medical phrasing. If it didn’t make sense to my non-medical friend, it just might not make sense to everyone. Granted, medical staff are familiar with medical jargon, but I needed to make sure it wasn’t jargon that was too specific to my area of practice. With everyone’s input, the presentation was complete.
The ID badge cards….well….I’ll just skip talking about those…they were a pain in my patootie…but they’re cool. I also needed to become an LLC (limited liability company), open a business account and apply for a tax ID number….but don’t worry…that stuff was all in the manual I read about starting a business. Oh wait…I didn’t have a manual. It just came from asking LOTS of questions from LOTS of people whom I thought just might know the answers. Thankfully, I found some people who did know the answers.
So with all of that being said, that’s a small snippet into the past year of “production” at ONE VOICE, LLC. It’s been a wild ride…a really….wild ride.
ACCOMPLISHMENTS:
· 26 hospitals have purchased the ONE VOICE package (PowerPoint, posters and ID badge cards), and a handful of hospitals who have purchased just posters and badge cards
· Was asked permission to have ONE VOICE listed in the AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics) policy statement on Child Life Services
· Was included in an article written for “Connections”, a magazine of the Emergency Nurses Association, published in December 2011
· Featured in “The Week”, which is the employee newsletter for The Nebraska Medical Center where I work. I try really hard to keep “my worlds” separate since ONE VOICE is a side business, but hey, it was cool….I got front page!!
What a year…I have been very blessed…makes me wonder what might be in store for next year? Bring it on….
