No matter how many times people tell you to “Lean In,” what truly got us through the toughest moments when building our businesses were our Villages – amazing partners, families, and most importantly, an incredible set of girlfriend taking the last-minute call to get someone from school, drive practice carpool, or be there to pick up when you need to scream into it.
Studies show that women who have a close-knit group of women to lean on make more money, gain access to coveted opportunities, and overall experience greater success in their careers. We were living breathing examples of this.
Everyone’s village looks a little different (Beth’s was filled with little old Italian ladies in skirts whisking kids around in Lincoln Town cars while mine was laced together with friends from high school, college and the neighborhood driving Minivans.) It does not matter one bit what they look like, it matters that they exist. So if you are in it, and you know what we mean by in it. Here are the other things we did to leverage the Village so we could keep kicking ass – or at least pretend like we were.
- Identify your biggest stressors – personally and professionally – and figure out the trigger points. Invoicing still haunts my nightmares. It was time-consuming, tedious and honestly, it felt like it never ended. In my personal life, the quarterly schedule change in kids’ activities broke me four times a year. I learned to take a concentrated half day to get this all done at once instead of doing a few minutes a day. It’s the hardest thing you will do that week to be sure, but it minimizes future headaches.
- Channel your inner Hermione Granger and start scheduling your days in half hour increments. If you know you are going to be driving kids from 2:40 pm to 6:00 pm to 800 activities, make sure your daily routine takes that into account. Get up a little earlier or jump back on post dinner, the beauty (and curse) of entrepreneurship is that you make your own schedule. Now, full disclosure, once you start to scale, you have less flexibility, but if you are growing a solid team, they will be happy to take on some of your time-consuming activities while you speed to pick-up.
- Ask for help. We realize this is coming from two women who had amazing mothers that provided a ton of surge protection in the early days of our businesses, but “help” comes in many forms. It could be finding carpools, leveraging likeminded neighbors who are in the same boat, or hiring local high schoolers to help with after school care. The point is, for all those rah rah cheerleaders out there that say you can do this alone – they are just flat out wrong. You absolutely cannot.
The good news? There are jillions of women out there just like you. They are scratching their heads on how to quickly put together a network of people to help them get two kids to different activities across town at the same time. Invite a few over, grab a bottle of wine, and start brainstorming. And, let us finish this with a shout out to our Villages – you absolutely know who you are and we absolutely know you are reading this since we can feel the support in everything we do – THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU, LOVE YOU!
