Being a mom and an entrepreneur is a hard work, as we all know it. This is why it makes it really hard to take a decision for women to quit a full time work and engage in entrepreneurship. The only thing that can really help is to look through some really inspirational stories of other women in business, who successfully juggle their family life and business projects. And here you have a portion of such inspiration!
MELISSA LANZ
Founder and CEO of The Fresh 20
Have you ever faced a problem of “What’s for dinner today?” when you just got back from work and have no enthusiasm to generate dinner ideas? Well, Melissa Lanz, a mother of two from Los Angeles. She ran into this problem one too many times and decided to quit her job in the fall of 2009 to start own small business – The Fresh 20. The Fresh 20 is an affordable meal planning service that centers around 20 ingredients each week to create five balanced dinners. The meal plans are different every week, take an average of 30 minutes to make, and focus on whole foods and in-season produce to provide the freshest meals possible. Melissa was dedicated to the idea of merging her two areas of expertise: online content and cooking and that brought her to success.
She started with a list of 400 friends and family. The website was launched in April 2010 and at the moment there are over 50 000 subscribers.
AMANDA STEINBERG
Founder and CEO of DailyWorth (dailyworth.com)
DailyWorth is a daily e-mail newsletter with advice on personal finance for women. The idea of starting this business appeared back in 2008. As a mother of two and de-facto CFO of her family, Amanda Steinberg from Philadelphia had wrestled with budgeting, saving, and investment challenges. She was quite successful in her own family economy so she decided to share experience with other women facing same daily challenges. The format was inspired by another success woman business – DailyCandy project.
She bootstrapped until she had a few thousand subscribers and felt comfortable that she was on the right track. Armed with that early progress, she raised a round of financing from “friends and family” and used it until she had a solid base of advertisers and a formula for acquiring customers. Later Amanda raised $850,000 from a group including Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt’s TomorrowVentures which sounds like a true success!
SHEILA LIRIO MARCELO
Founder and CEO of Care.com
Crae.com is the one-stop shop for all different kinds of care, whether for nannies, tutoring, housekeeping, pet walking, and more caregiving services. As a working mom, Marcelo started the online caregiver marketplace when she needed help caring for her two sons and dogs. Marcelo, 42, has grown the Waltham company in seven years to the largest online care destination in the world, with 7 million members. She jokes that her proudest accomplishments of last year were that her son turned 21 — and also that Care.com expanded globally to more than 15 countries, beefed up online security and safety filters, and added payroll services. Marcelo also led the company through a $50 million venture funding round last year, one of the five largest investments in a digital business in 2012, according to Rock Health, a start-up incubator.
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