303. How Kathy Built Five Centers (And Counting) Without Burning Out

What happens when you've done everything right, built the SOPs, color-coded the calendars, created the checklists, and your business still finds a way to make you sick?

That's exactly where this week's guest, Kathy Gray, found herself. Kathy is the owner of Creative Critters, a growing early childhood education company based in Virginia with five centers (and counting). She's been part of the Schools of Excellence community for years, and in this conversation, she gets real about what it actually looked like to lead “with empathy first” and what it cost her.

If you've ever felt like being a good leader means being endlessly available, endlessly understanding, and endlessly willing to make an exception for one more person, this episode is going to hit close to home.

Kathy and Chanie unpack the difference between leading by example and leading by self-sacrifice. They talk about what happens when a director is too afraid to protect the standards because she's afraid of losing staff (spoiler: you lose the right staff anyway). And they get into one of the most important distinctions in leadership: care is not the same thing as capacity.

This episode also digs into how Kathy started using data, specifically staff time-off data, to finally see what her culture was actually telling her. One number she found: at one center, they had a full staff only 35% of the time. That's not a staffing problem. That's a standards problem.

By the end of this conversation, you'll understand why the phrase “protecting the standards” matters so much more than “being consistent,” and why the goal isn't to stop caring. It's to stop absorbing everyone else's outcomes as your own.

What You'll Learn:

• Why leading “by example” can quietly turn into leading by self-sacrifice
• The critical difference between care and capacity, and why confusing them costs you your best staff
• How Kathy used time-off data to uncover what her culture was really telling her (and what she found)
• Why protecting the standards is different from being “a stickler” or being harsh
• What it means to let the company, not the leader, carry the weight of the standard
• Why healthy dependence on your team is not weakness, and what's lost when leaders try to do it all alone
• Kathy's honest reflection on what still isn't where she wants it to be, even after years of growth

Resources Mentioned:

• This Can't Be Normal by Chanie Wilschanski: https://thiscantbenormal.com
• Access Chapter One of This Can’t Be Normal for Free: https://thiscantbenormal.com/chapter-one

Connect With Us:

• Let's Chat on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chaniewilschanski/
• Join us on Substack: https://chaniewilschanski.substack.com/