With their baby-blanket company humming along, Amy Ballon and Danielle Botterell have teamed up for another co-production: a business manual for women itching to follow in their footsteps. Specifically, women who are, or plan to be, mothers.
With five children and two MBAs between them, Ms. Ballon and Ms. Botterell proudly wear the “mompreneur” mantle. While they gave birth to their business before their babies – and before the advent of that label – motherhood was indelibly imprinted on their business plan. Mom Inc.: How to Raise Your Family and Your Business Without Losing Your Mind or Your Shirt offers business and family advice tailored to a demographic hoping to gracefully juggle sippy cups and spreadsheets.
We spoke to the pair from their Toronto offices.
Mom Inc. opens with the case of Robeez, the Canadian baby-shoe company, which sold for $30-million. But there aren’t a lot of hard figures in the book about what mompreneurs can expect to make. Do you talk about how the company you founded in 2002, Admiral Road, is doing financially?
Amy Ballon: We don’t, on account of we’re a private company. Danielle and I walked away from Bay Street jobs and corporate salaries. Because we had other interests in terms of our non-working lives, we were willing to forgo some of that financial gain in order to control our schedules and our futures and the rest of our lives. Admiral Road has been profitable since out first year in business. We continue to experience double-digit growth year after year. Although I’m not comfortable revealing my salary, we know what it’s worth for us not to work for the man.
What’s your definition of mompreneur? For some, it means earning a salary that seriously contributes to a family’s bottom line. Other businesses look more like hobbies.
Danielle Botterell: Different women come to it with different expectations. One of the things is that when you start a business, there’s a lot of uncertainty. But when you start a business with children, you can’t have that much uncertainty. You have to feed somebody. When mompreneurs start, they have some kind of backup plan for the money. Some women start while they’re working full time. Some women save up. Many women work out a deal with their spouse.
So, mompreneur isn’t just a female entrepreneur who happens to have children.
A.B.: We distinguish in Mom Inc. between a mompreneur and a prototypical big-E entrepreneur who is primarily motivated by their business.
And some women start these businesses before they have kids.
D.B.:We think the trend of mompreneurship, particularly in this country, really took off when the government extended maternity leave to a year.
What percentage of them create baby-related products?
A.B: Mom Inc. might have reflected more of the businesses in the baby sphere because those are the circles we travel in. A lot of these businesses are born of a realization of a hole in the market: I really wish I had X. We also talked to actors, writers, personal trainers – all of whom chose those paths because they were a good fit for their family.
What is the biggest reality check you give to potential mompreneurs?
D.B.: The first one is that it’s hard. There’s an endless learning curve. Those are universal experiences for entrepreneurs, but mompreneurs, by definition, are layering on the other side of their life. So there’s what we call it the paradox of mompreneurship: We start our businesses in order to be available to our children and, of course, the more successful those businesses become, the less time we have to be with our children.
What’s the secret?
