Lee Hersh is the blogger and business women behind Fit Foodie Finds. She is a healthy recipe creator, food photographer, risk-taker from Minnesota. She co-runs the Blogger Project which is dedicated to bloggers learning more about the ever changing industry. Lee has transformed her website from just a recipe blog to an entire wellness brand. She is always having fun creating the next best recipe, showing her infectious personality on snapchat and she makes getting a good sweat in fun!

How did you start Fit Foodie Finds?

I started 5 years ago, at that time I was a junior in college at the University of Minnesota and my sister and I loved to read healthy living blogs.  She just said why don’t you start a blog? The next day I just jumped right in and started a website called College Foodie Finds. It was more to chronicle my journey in college and live healthy. I was posting more educational stuff, I was not really creating content at that time.

Things morph, 6 months later I changed it to Fit Foodie Finds and then I really started focusing a lot more on food and sharing the recipes that I was eating in my own home. Today things are a lot different. I not only focus on healthy recipes but I’m really trying to incorporate more lifestyle into my website, more workouts, and travel and just like general life updates.

How do you sum up everything you do?

I say that I run a food and lifestyle website then I also mention that I run kind of like an educational consulting platform where Davida from the Healthy Maven and I kind of mentor other bloggers into how they can also run their blogs as businesses.

What has been your most proud moment out of everything?

I think every single day is a proud moment for me  being able to wake up kind of just have the realization that I plan my day and it’s completely different from the day before and that I run my life. I run the business and every single aspect of my day. It randomly hits me throughout the week, I can get really stressed and then I can just take a step back and say, Oh wait! This is awesome. This stress is awesome.

What is your biggest flop/disappointment?

My biggest flop is not realizing what Fit Foodie Finds was until 4 years in basically. I wish I’d gone into things with a different mindset. I think it took me quite some time to get the confidence to just tell people that this is what I do. If I had that confidence a little sooner I would have taken myself more seriously and just have the will power to be like, ‘this is a thing; we’re moving forward.’

Tell me more about The Blogger Project.

We really wanted to create a space where we just are very transparent about how we’re making money, how we’re pitching brands, what’s working and what’s not. That’s the whole goal of The Blogger Project. It’s really to create a community and to create conversation around blogging and business.

Biggest piece of advice who are just starting.

It’s just get started and roll with it.

Do you have a company/business owner/mentor that you looked up to?

I love Pinch of Yum. They’re based in the twin cities and I’ve met Lindsey in real life and they have become mentors to lots of different bloggers because of her transparency in business. Also Dana from The Minimalist Baker; her creativity and her work are sheer amazing. I always kind of looked up to her in micro photography and the food styling aspects of things. And any site with podcasts out there. I learn so much on podcasts, hearing other’s stories.

Even Martha Stewart, she just created this monstrosity of a brand and I’ve always liked her and I secretly wanted to be like her because she has kitchenware then she moved into bedding and it just shows how a brand can evolve overtime.

Where do you see yourself and your business in 5 years?

I wish I could predict the future because I have no idea what the internet is going to look like.  If I was doing exactly what I’m doing today in 5 years, I would be very happy.  I want to have kids, I want to raise them, I want to be at home with them and I also want to make 6 figures at the same time. Now, I like to take on a lot of projects so I could see myself kind of dipping my hands into some other businesses, not starting them but kind of joining a team of a business or two in the food space probably.

What is your secret online tool?

For blogging I love Coschedule it is a content calendar scheduling tool and I swear by that. I love it, it’s visual, it helps me categorize and stay on tract. Another tool that I just picked up over the past year is called Wunderlist and it’s pretty much just this app and syncs with your desktop and your phone but it allows you to create lists. It’s kinda like to-do list but it’s virtual instead of written.

How do you find a way to stay balanced?

It has been a work in progress. I think that it’s hard to, beyond vacation to completely disconnect from your business just because social media lives on and doesn’t just like stop at 10 pm and pick back up the next morning. There are little things that I try and incorporate in my everyday to stay balanced.

What has been a successful technique for your company?

In the summer of 2015 I partnered with Ambitious Kitchen. Monique is amazing. She is actually from Minneapolis but she lives in Chicago now. We met on a press trip and we came up with the idea to host something called the Summer Sweat series on both of our websites. There is something we call the summer slump where in the summer months traffic kind of dips, engagement is low. It was a food plan mixed with workouts and kind of a guidance of a nutrition plan. It was a big risk because it was so much work but we’re moving forward with 2016 and we’re really excited and we might implement it twice this year. It was a really cool thing where we stepped out of our comfort zone and a really good thing came from it.

How did you manage to build a team around you?

Last year I was swimming in work and I decided that I would love to have someone who can help me manage social media, be there to assist in my photo shoots and just have someone to bounce ideas off of. So I hired Linley who I went to college with and she is just amazing. I feel like she kind of keeps me afloat. She just brings great energy to the business which is invaluable to me. In October, I brought on Emily as a brand manager.

Where can we find Lee:

• FitFoodieFinds.com
• The Blogger Project
• Facebook: Fit Foodie Finds
• Instagram: @fitfoodiefinds
• Twitter: @fitfoodiefinds

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