Business Planning for Moms

Brothers and sisters, starting and running a business is HARD WORK. Cash flow is unpredictable; you can find yourself sliding into debt hell, $30 at a time when clients don't pay up or when checks got lost in the mail. There is not a regularly replenished bank account to rely on.

Try, then, to move houses (and just watch as phone calls get missed and checks get lost in the mail!) all while trying to balance your family and work life. To keep things interesting and realistic, let's also add a sick pet to the mix. This isn't even the worst case scenario. The sick pet could be a sick family member.

Finally now, just for fun, go and have a baby. This is, after all, why you want to work at home, right? Did I mention that you need to do it all without an Employment Insurance (EI) safety net?This order of execution is not the way all moms or even most moms go about starting new businesses, it's just the way things happened to occur here in the McCaffery household. More typically, a lot of new moms I know are finding out they aren't interested in returning to the 9-to-5 grind. (Which, as most of us know, is really more of a 7-to-7 grind, if you're lucky, once you include time to commute and manage all the other good times that come with working in an office.)

During the year most moms have off with their new babies (we are incredibly fortunate to live in a place that provides this benefit) there is a lot of time to think – about big business ideas, about a new life at home close to the kids and about the flexibility that self-employment might offer.

A relatively new book (it came out earlier this year), entitled Mom Inc., examines this phenomenon and attempts to couple business school knowledge with the wisdom of "mompreneurs" who've gone before and distill it into a guide for anyone who finds themselves in this position.

Appropriately sub-titled How to raise your family and your business without losing your mind or your shirt, the book calls on the experience of over 250 moms (50 interviewed and more than 200 surveyed) to provide a lot of obvious and some not-so-obvious considerations for the would-be business owner.

It describes different scenarios and breaks these into sections that allow you to jump in at the spot most applicable to your situation. Early sections discuss different stages of family development. Later chapters provide advice, whether you have a business idea or not, experience (or not) or potential partners. Other sections discuss the cost and value of a customer – what it costs to get a customer and how you measure that – and how to assess the viability of a business idea. It also provides a high-level overview of what goes into business plans and business planning.

The book's take on ongoing business planning is good and it also neatly explains concepts like income and cash flow but you'll probably need to look for other resources if what you want is business plan advice. Fortunately, the authors link to such resources on their website, MomInc.ca.

Overall, the book tries to be light, and it is, but the facts are decidedly unvarnished too. All of it is good to consider, but I can imagine that the table of contents might cause a little bit of analysis paralysis for some. Just reading some of the chapters started to give me some serious anxiety: "How long can you go without a paycheck?" Or, how about this one? "A second baby can be like a bomb dropped on your business."

If a serious dose of reality is what you're looking for, though, this is definitely the place to get it. The authors are kind, but very realistic about just how much time it can take to make money, if you make money at all. "Starting a business is not necessarily a replacement salary for those thinking about not returning to the workforce," writes one mom who, three years into business, is struggling with whether she should keep going or cut her losses and throw in the towel.

On the flipside, authors Amy Ballon and Danielle Botterell are generous with their advice on how to suss out good business ideas, how to develop relationships with partners and suppliers, how to market yourself, network and hopefully grow in the future.


Kate McCaffery is a freelance writer in Toronto, Ontario. Visit mccaffery.ca/kate2.0/ for more information.