mompreneur posts

We caught up recently with Amy Ballon and Danielle Botterell, authors of the book, Mom Inc. to talk about the good, bad and sticky parts that make up the "mompreneur" lifestyle.

They spoke about the importance of business planning (and where to get help), and about the challenges moms in business for themselves often face when they're starting out.

"It's great, but here's the thing: It is not going to be like one giant, enormous party where you make all kinds of money and play Candyland at the same time," says Botterell. "Success comes from not necessarily hitting it out of the park on day one or early on, but just from showing up every day and giving your best."

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?

Andrea Lekushoff has always had a passion for communications. She started her career at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., where she worked as a press assistant.

She eventually returned to her native Toronto, where she worked for a leading communications and PR agency, got her MBA, then joined Deloitte Consulting as a strategy consultant. In 2004, she decided it was time to turn her passion for communications into a business and founded Broad Reach Communications.

Her award-winning firm now has almost twenty associates who work remotely but collaboratively.

Why did you decide to start Broad Reach?

In 2004, I was in my early thirties. I didn't have a mortgage, I had paid off my student debts, and I thought it's now or never. So I left Deloitte to become a freelancer. Very quickly, I was working many more hours than I had been working with Deloitte, and I was turning down work. I thought, why should I do that? So I started building a practice. Broad Reach now has 17 associates, and they're all senior practitioners. These are people who are very experienced in their field. They've either worked in agencies or in the corporate world, but now want to have more work-life balance. Broad Reach is very different than a traditional agency, where the senior people go out and impress the clients and sell the business, then hand the files over to junior people who actually do the work. All of our work is done by senior practitioners. And we've heard time and again from our clients that the work we do stands head-and-shoulders above other work they've seen because of the senior talent that works on each project.