There are many challenges that come along with entrepreneurship. Mix that with five children, and you get a whole new set of obstacles thrown in your way. You’re focused on making your new business thrive, and stressed about how you’re going to support your family. Client meetings pop up everyday, and with the high prices of childcare, you often have a little one dragging grudgingly behind you. Welcome to the life of a Mompreneur!
The reality is... we’re exhausted! Taking the kids with us is a nightmare because they get bored and destroy everything. Our kids yell at us for attention and our clients yell even louder about deadlines. As a mother, it’s unbelievably hard to run a career, let alone a business, but it’s not impossible. Here are a few survival tips to make life easier for yourself:
Working on the Go
It feels like there is never enough time to sit and focus on work, so you have to learn how to do more on the go. Your phone is a great asset where you can handle much more than just emails. For all of your social media accounts, you can use planning apps like Buffer, Planoly, Latergram, and many endless options. For project management, you can try Trello, Asana, and Evernote. These tools are collaborative and allow you to give your clients updates in real-time.
Don’t underestimate the power of simple note taking. Mommy brain, unfortunately, does not go away, and in some cases it gets worse. Every idea I have and meeting I need to set up gets jotted down in my notes so I can review and plan them out later. Create events for your meetings and deadlines for your projects. If you have a smartphone, your email, messages, and calendar all sync together creating a mini personal assistant.
At the We Will Women’s conference in Chicago I learned 2 great methods from the founder of Mission Propel. The first is to do backwards planning; similar to what most teachers use. Start off by creating your goals, then figure out who you need to accomplish those goals, and finally the steps it takes to get there. By keeping a spreadsheet (or using one of the programs I mentioned), you can track all of the milestones you reach and their deadlines. The second is to use your voice recorder. It’ll look weird, but if you use it like you’re chatting on the phone and walk quickly past people then it’s not as awkward.
Automating Tasks
No matter how bad we want to be, we’re not Supermom. You need a plan for automation so, when you’re not available, you don’t lose any potential business leads. Emails can be your main source of contact which is why I prefer MailChimp, Constant Contact, and SendinBlue. When you get new visitors on your website it’s helpful to set up chatbots to guide the traffic. By creating templates for your proposals and statements of work it’ll be much easier to rush them out whenever needed.
Making Your Meetings Effective
Virtual vs. In-Person Meetings
In-person meetings are better for business but video meetings are better for your sanity. Conferencing services such as Skype, Fuse, Google Hangouts, Zoom, and many more, have made meeting virtually a reality.
If you absolutely have to meet in-person, I find it best to use the Mama Fresh Chi 1-hour rule. One time I met with Mama Fresh Chi, my friend and Chicago-based mom lifestyle blogger, to discuss revamping her website. Unfortunately, I had to bring my 3-year old. Life was good during the first hour, but by the time the second hour came, there were board game pieces all over the café. That’s when she told me about her rule. If she’s coordinating a meeting with anyone they have to be okay with her bringing her son and the meeting cannot exceed one hour. Why? No one has control over what a toddler can do after they get bored of snacks and toys. She enforces her rule each time to ensure her meetings are productive and end with reasonable action items.
Location. Location. Location.
We often take the location of our meetings for granted, rather than using them to our advantage. We’re all used to the interactive coworking spaces and cafés with coffee within arms reach, but we need to take a step outside the box.
A few months ago I met with the founder of Women Belong, and completely forgot everything except the fact that I needed to be at the café by 10am. I grabbed my son and bolted out the door without prepping snacks or entertainment. Big Mistake. Huge! He was bored within minutes. We decided to finish up our meeting in the park and it was perfect.
Another hot spot you can’t forget about is the O.G. of coworking spaces, the library. They’re not as dreary as they used to be. Most have play sections for the kids, meeting rooms, and WiFi. Just no coffee (so bring your own)! The best part is that it’s FREE.
So many places get nervous about kids, and I definitely understand why, they’re a liability issue. There’s a lot I have to do on my part to make sure my kids can control themselves in public places. I’ve been lectured on “you should teach your kids some respect” and, trust me, I’ve heard it all. We’ve been learning through experience and improving along the way. Sometimes kids need to see where the money comes from and the time it takes to get the work done.
We can push for more places to be kid friendly. Build the childcare enabled coworking space with a million dollar insurance bill for our fellow Mompreneurs. But until then, we have to make it work and use what we’ve got to its fullest advantage. Take your workload off of you and place it onto the technology. Once you find the right environment and schedule for you and your little one, you’ll be all set!
I wish you godspeed and nothing but greatness in your journey, Sis.
-Ehi.
Written by Ehi Aimiuwu
Edited by Brittany AJ Miriki
Ehi Aimiuwu
Ehi is the CEO of Geek Empowered and a mother of 5. After dropping out of college, she spent many years learning from the best and brightest in digital transformation. Her non-traditional career gave her the inspiration to build a tech company that places the needs of the people first. Her passion for tech and community drives her to change the narrative on how we can get more people of color, especially women, into STEM fields.
