‘Batch everything’: how to crack productivity and confidence, with The Batch Lady

Was it inevitable that Suzanne Mulholland would one day make the transformation into lauded cookery entrepreneur The Batch Lady? “I’ve always been interested in starting my own business,” she says. “When I was 13, I had a car-washing business. I had a business where I made jewellery when I was 15.” 

But 10 years after leaving her job as a time management trainer for large businesses to raise her children, she was taken by surprise when opportunity sprung up in an unlikely place. From her home on a farm in the Scottish Borders, she began making videos teaching people how to batch - streamlining daily chores, especially cooking everyday meals for her family. Now, she’s seen on screens around the world thanks to her Channel 4 TV show, Batch from Scratch: Cooking for Less, and best-selling books.

As an entrepreneur and working mum, she’s full of advice and inspiration for anyone looking to do more in less time. We were delighted to meet her at an egg’s Women on Top event earlier this month. These are her tips for setting up a business, harnessing the power of social media (without letting it take over your life) and how batching unlocks even greater levels of productivity.

Can batching really make me more efficient?

Perhaps surprisingly for someone whose business is all about food, Suzanne thinks of it as another chore. “I do not write batch cooking books for the love of cooking. I had kids and, night after night, I’d be asked what was for dinner. I thought, ‘I’m not doing this every single night, I’m going to time manage the hell out of it’,” she says.

“I did a small course in time management at uni and I just loved the efficiency of it. If you can do the boring stuff in an organised and succinct way, then you’ve got much more time for the fun stuff - and that’s what I’m all about!”

Batching isn’t just for meals, she insists - it’s an efficient way to get any repetitive task done. Because it takes your brain time and energy to switch between different tasks, you’ll save time and brainpower by completing similar tasks together. 

“My social media is batched in advance - it’s the way I work. You can do it way quicker. We work two months in advance: we decide what’s going on, we spend one day a week filming, we make a series of it,” says Suzanne. 

“If I do all my filming once a week, I only have to do my hair and makeup one morning. They’re all organised in advance, I know exactly what I’m going to do.” 

You can batch lots of business-critical tasks: answering emails, recording expenses, sending out invoices… the list goes on, and the productivity savings add up.

Advice for starting out

Before she launched The Batch Lady videos on YouTube, Suzanne looked to her own network for advice. “I had a few friends in business and one of them told me to make it look a lot bigger than it is before you actually start.” What did that mean for her? “I recorded a lot.” That way, she had a backlog of content to establish a regular posting schedule from the very start.

“The other thing I was told was to focus on different revenues,” Suzanne adds. She calls it a “spider web” and it includes her YouTube channel and website, her books, her TV show on Channel 4, sponsorship deals and her own Amazon shop. “What’s good about trying a little bit of everything is that if one of the revenue streams dies, I still have others.”

Maybe the most important bit of advice that she has for anyone starting out is: “don’t listen to everyone”. 

“Just stick to a few people who have made a successful business,” she explains. It was clear to her that some of her friends didn’t think her new enterprise was a great idea, but she persisted. “In the end, you prove it.”

Building a social media empire

With nearly half a million followers on Facebook, 370k+ on Instagram, 70k+ on TikTok and almost 40,000 on YouTube, Suzanne is an expert in building an engaging presence on social media without crashing her productivity. “It’s all about consistency: how many posts you put out. You cannot post too much.”

To create that consistency, “we reuse content all the time,“ she says. “A video is a lot to put out, but then you can do a voiceover on that video footage and make it about something else.” 

It’s another way to improve efficiency, so she doesn’t have to film or take high-quality photos every day. “All my content goes on Google Docs and we just reuse it over and over again.”

If you’re wondering whether you have to bother with social media, Suzanne makes a compelling case. “I was at a business conference a few weeks ago and someone said you don’t need to use social media for business. I think that’s absolute rubbish. I wouldn’t be where I am without Instagram and Facebook. It’s free. It’s marketing. You can get out in the world. I live in a farm in the middle of nowhere and I have a huge following from Canada, Australia, America - I wouldn’t have that without social media.

“People buy from other people. As human beings, we want to feel like we know someone.” 

Finding the confidence to grow her business

“When you’re trying to grow your business, it’s all about consistency and confidence. I’m not actually confident,” says Suzanne. “The biggest thing I did wrong was calling my business The Batch Lady. I am The Batch Lady and I have to front the business at all times.” 

That meant when she pitched the Batch from Scratch TV programme to Lidl and then to Channel 4, she knew she’d have to present it - even though the thought filled her with nerves. “It’s hard work, but I needed to do it for the brand,” she says.

While Suzanne still struggles with presenting nerves, she wouldn’t have it any other way. “Getting out of your comfort zone is an amazing thing to do. It’s horrible when you do it, but I love the feeling it gives you after.” 

Ultimately, being a business owner means trusting yourself. “Only you know what you want to do in the way that you want to do it,” Suzanne says. “You have to forge ahead, put some blinkers on and just keep going.”

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