Homestead Mamas - Amy

Amy, Owner of Homestead Mamas Magazine

By Kat McDaniel, Principal at MEDiAHEAD

We are printing a new magazine for Homestead Mamas. They’re an inspiring and encouraging community of growers, hunters, foragers, and explorers.

I really enjoyed the story by Nina Mullins – The farmers Who Don’t Know Anything! “Right now, we are still in the ‘Can we make this all work?’ stage of the game. We have had many failures and losses, but also many sweet victories. This has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, not necessarily because caring for a tiny farm is difficult (it has its difficulties, though!), but because we are in a season of life where we are getting up early to do all the morning farm chores.

Then we take kids to their homeschool co-op and various activist afterwards, all while trying to work our jobs in between it all to put food on the table. We started all this craziness in our 40’s! And our poor kids… they were living the easy life of school, play and sleep. Then their parents decide to start a farm, and suddenly, they are helping feed chickens, they’re milking cows and mucking stalls.”

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Homestead Mamas Recipes

Homestead Mamas MagazineThere are wonderful recipes from Homestead Mamas – Wild Mushroom Risotta, Pizza Dough, Chevre and Chive Quiche and Saturday Morning Pancakes, my favorite.
View the Recipes

I welcome this magazine as a place for women all over the world, in every stage of motherhood, homesteading, or providing for their families to gather.

Follow them on Instagram – they have over 75M followers!

By Kat McDaniel, Principal at MEDiAHEAD

AutumnIf you’ve never heard of the word hygge, it’s the Danish concept often translated as a sort of coziness.

For me, autumn means coziness. The colder weather makes me want to snuggle up with a good book or watch a movie under a blanket on the couch. As soon as we get home from work its pajama time!

It can be hard to slow down this time of the year with everything happening.

Our culture equates our value with our output.

We only let ourselves rest to have the energy to work harder or after we’ve checked everything off our to-do-list and completely exhausted ourselves.

A few years ago, my family decided no presents – just family time together, cooking, games, and snuggling. The amount of stress that this relieved for all of us was magical.

“Resting is generative. It’s not frivolous and it’s not a luxury. It’s something that allows us to tap into our creativity and imagination and heal our bodies.”

CozyThere are so many other ways to embrace your right to rest this fall season, whether it’s in the kitchen, living room or your favorite cozy nook in the house.

Create more free time – cozy up to a good book and take a break from the internet. Reading with a fire or a candle when it is freezing outside is just pure heaven.

Find ease and comfort in the kitchen – cut down your cooking and cleanup time. This time of the year we prepare lots of meals with just one pan. This helps me reduce the time cooking and cleaning – leaving me more time for lounging.

Make your home an oasis of calm – don’t let the mess get in the way of rest.

Engage in comfort decorating – destress your space and make your home your sanctuary to come home to. Candles, throw blankets, plants and a warm fire can keep me in my pjs all weekend this time of the year!

Customer Support Hold Times are NO FUNPeople really, really hate contacting customer support – so much so that they would rather spend a night in jail or shave their head. (Source: Gray News)

A recent  survey conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Twilio Flex asked 2,000 Americans what they would rather do than contact customer service. The poll found that 30% of people would rather do their taxes, 28% would rather go to the dentist, 25% would rather go to the DMV, 24% would rather shave their head, and 22% would rather spend a night in jail.

People are willing to go to those extremes to avoid contacting customer support because, on average, it takes three attempts and more than 1.5 hours on hold to solve just one issue with a customer service representative, the survey found.

Here are some things that a company can do to help their customers:

  1. Customer Support Hold Times are NO FUNMake sure the issue is resolved on the first call – customers hate having to call a company multiple times to resolve an issue.
  2. Don’t transfer the call so that they must repeat all the details again. Give the next person relevant information to their issue if you can’t resolve it.
  3. Have more than one option to reach customer service: we have a help line, local and 1-800, and a help@mymediahead.com email our clients can use.
  4. Make sure they can reach a live person quickly and not spend too much time listening to bad music.
  5. Have a good connection – nothing is more frustrating that getting disconnected or a hard time hearing the representative.
  6. Make sure you give your employees the power to resolve an issue so that the customer does not have to wait for an answer.

The survey found that because of these frustrations, the average person waits 16 days to contact customer support about an issue. There are always issues in any business, ultimately, your success depends on how you resolve them.