Ian: Welcome to the Business Coach Podcast, an advice-oriented series that tackles the top issues and opportunities facing Canada’s small businesses. I’m your host, Ian Portsmouth, the Editor of PROFIT Magazine. And we’ve developed this podcast in cooperation with BMO Bank of Montreal. Hundreds of thousands of Canadian women are in business for themselves and the vast majority of them are mothers, thus the term mompreneur. According to stats published by the Calgary based mompreneur networking group, 70% of mompreneurs are under the age of 40. That means the average Canadian mompreneur is trying to manage their business while managing a young family. Amy Ballon and Danielle Botterell know just how tough this balancing act can be. In the past decade, they’ve given birth to five children between them plus Admiral Road Designs, their Toronto based producer of personalized blankets. To top it off, they’ve written Mom Inc. published in the spring of 2011 by Harper Collins. The book subtitle is this: “How to raise your family and your business without losing your mind or your shirt”. That’s precisely the subject of this episode of the Business Coach Podcast. And joining me to explore it are Amy Ballon and Danielle Botterell. Ladies, welcome to the Business Coach Podcast. Danielle: Thank you. Thank you. Ian: So Amy, can you give us just a brief timeline of your lives as mompreneurs, tell us when the business started and when the kids started to follow? Amy: Hmm, of course. We started our company Admiral Road Designs in 2002, so we are now in our 10th year business and different than a lot of women we’ve met along the way and in the course of our research for Mom Inc., we actually started our business in anticipation of having children. A lot of women come in mompreneurship after they become moms and want to look at structuring their lives in a different way. But there were two events that had happened the year before we started our business that lead us to self-employment. The first one was the economy tanked in 2001 and both the corporate jobs that Danielle and I were working in, we were laid off from. So we were automatically faced with a situation where we had to reevaluate our employment situation. And the second thing that happened is that my mother was in midst of a terminal illness. So actually before I got laid off from my job, I decided to take a leave of absence in order to spend time with my mother at home. Danielle is my long time closest friend and very close to my family as well and we spent a lot of time during that period of time sitting around and thinking about a) alternatives to our former corporate past and b) this was a catalyst for realizing that whatever our future families looked like, we wanted to be available then to our families in a way that our corporate jobs would not allow. Ian: So Danielle, what made you think that you could make this dual-leap I’ll call it into business and into having and raising young kids at the same time? Were you not worried that this would be a monumental challenge? Danielle: I was really worried about it. You know, it’s a funny thing, a lot of women we interviewed for Mom Inc. sort of shared this and said, you know you go through school and your early part of your career and you’re very successful and you know, you can see how you’re progressing. And we’d both come out of an MBA program and we were sort of on this success oriented path and I was concerned about experiencing failure. And I remember saying to my now husband, what if I am not successful at this? And he said, he said, Danielle, success is being happy. And that was just this light bulb moment and I think for me that’s been sort of key to my whole approach to the business and my life over the last decade. Ian: Now Danielle, you dedicate a chapter in the book to business partnerships thinking about those concerns that you had. Has it really helped to have Amy along for the ride? Danielle: It’s been invaluable. I don’t think I would still be in business have I not had a partner. We’re huge proponents of partnership and mompreneurs. You know, for any small business owner, we like partnership because not only does it give you someone to share the risk with but it’s also, it’s someone to help you and someone with whom you can bounce ideas around. But you know, especially for a mompreneur by definition, and you know, just as an aside, we define a mompreneur as a self-employed woman who set herself up so that she has some time available to her family, her work week. So by definition, if you are trying to juggle kids and work, things are going to come up, kids are going to get sick, you will have another baby maybe. So, you know, for a mompreneur having someone to spell you off is key. And besides that, I think we’ve really appreciated the emotional support of partnership. Anyone who has a small business, it’s a marathon and there are times when you can feel very discouraged. You know, for us, we’ve sort of taken turns cheering each other on. For us, I think it’s been having someone to lament the failures and also to celebrate the successes. And it’s been fun, it’s been really fun to have someone to work with. Ian: So Amy, I think one question that mompreneurs get asked a lot is how they manage pregnancy, especially in the later stages and whether or not they take any kind of mat leave. What did the two of you do? Amy: Among our five kids, our mat leaves have been from three months down to 45 minutes. So currently, in Canada, if you are self-employed you don’t receive mat leave benefits, you mitigate the time you take away from your business and you result losses of income you may be generating if you are back at work. So what we did when our kids were really young, we’ve always been proponents of business planning and we’ve always had longer term and shorter term plans in our business. So when our kids were really young, we set goals for the growth of Admiral Road that were reasonable for that time in our lives. We did not have the expectation that we were going to be guns blazing when our kids were one and two and three years old. Also to Danielle’s point, partnership made it possible for us to stay in business during that period of time. One year, it was during our busiest time of year, around the Christmas Season and Danielle gave birth to her second child. At the same time, as being our busiest time of the year, we received a huge corporate order. Danielle drove by the trade show that we were working at on her way home from the hospital, to replenish our inventory. So, I am not going to lie. It wasn’t pretty. But because we were in partnership, it was doable. And for us, it depends on your company and your brand and the kind of image you have out there. But because Admiral Road is a personal, cozy, baby related product, it’s been okay for us to have our babies along for the ride. You know, literally, we’ve had kids with us at trade shows, we brought our babies to our suppliers with us and that fit with the kind of business that we chose to develop. Ian: Now, Danielle, what role have your spouses played in supporting your entrepreneurial lives. You know, are they required to be more available at home than they would if you were in regular 9 to 5 careers for instance? Danielle: It’s a good question. It’s one of the things we talked about in Mom Inc., it’s that no matter what your spouse is getting into the business with you, make sure he is on board. I think it’s a question of division of labour. Every family has a system for having things done. And I know Amy and I, for example, make dinner every night. We are home in that time slot. We’re also the people who program the kids, we like to say that we’ve structured our business and our family so that we are CEO of the kids. There is always tension around division of labour. But we found a way to manage it, for one, having a very honest conversation and make a realistic plan at the outset. Having honest conversations. Are you going to pick up the kids at day care? You know, and just a regular communication about what’s working and what’s not. And you know, we like to say that we support the careers of our husbands and they support ours. And we, you know, have to sometimes ask them to maintain us and our work schedule to accommodate what’s happening at Admiral Road. And we try to be respectful about how often we ask them. You know, a bit of advice if we can offer on this program, is just try to outsource things at home if you can. Both of us have a cleaning lady and it just takes that whole issue off the table for discussion. Just find ways to outsource to make it easier. Ian: Amy, when people get into business they get into business with an initial set of expectations and in your instance, it was a set of expectations around both what it would be like to run a business and start a family. Did anything particularly surprise you about what the experience has been like? Amy: We honestly had no idea what to expect. I think that starting in business for yourself is something like parenthood. You really can’t anticipate what it’s going to be like until you get there. But because our kids were so young, we ran Admiral Road for about a year before the first of our combined five children were born. So because our business is young and our kids were young and at home, we simply decided to determine the pace of growth of our business. And that was sometimes dictated around our kids. They were early years in our business where Danielle and I divided our roles according to the needs or personalities of our children. For example, there was one supplier we worked with regularly who was on the other side of the city and my very young daughter at the time hated to be in the car. Every time I put her in the car, she screamed. So, that job went to Danielle. So we simply had to be flexible and accommodate around the kids sometimes and go with the flow that way. Ian: So finally Danielle, what advice would you give other mompreneurs on how to recharge their battery so that they can support both their business and their family? Danielle: I think the number one piece of advice that we give throughout Mom Inc. is to really know what you are getting into it for. You know, every entrepreneur goes into business because they want to make it successful and they want to make money. But mompreneurs also have other motivations as well. They want to have some balance, they want to have time with their families, they want to have other — to honor the other aspects of their lives. We think it’s really really important to know honestly and frankly what your motivations are. We don’t actually judge you know if it’s like, I just want to make a few extra dollars, you know, or I want to make a kajillion dollars. It’s fine. But it’s important to know because it’s going to give you a touch down to come back to. And I think you know taking time to evaluate along the way both how things are going both at work and at home. And sort of think, we are always talking about where are at, how everything is going and pulling up and looking at what’s going on rather than just getting bogged down. And finally I think you know, unlike when you are on a corporate career, there are no bonuses and they are no pats on the back in entrepreneurship. So we’ve always made a point of celebrating our successes and patting each other on the back and keeping it fun. Ian: Great advice for business owners of either gender. Amy and Danielle, thanks for joining the Business Coach Podcast. Danielle: Thanks for having us. Thank you very much. Amy Ballon and Danielle Botterell are the founders of Admiral Road Designs and the authors of Mom Inc., how to raise your family and your business without losing your mind or your shirt. That’s it for another episode of the Business Coach Podcast. Be sure to check out other episodes which you can download from BMO.com/coach, profitguide.com and iTunes. For other tools to help you build your business, visit the BMO Smart Steps for Business Community at BMO.com/smartbusinessowners. Until next time, I am Ian Portsmouth, the Editor of PROFIT Magazine, wishing you continued success.