I recently welcomed a new baby into my family and am once again striving to find a new balance between my roles as mother and small business owner. Both jobs demand my time, energy, and mental capacity and it can feel overwhelming and hopeless to try to excel fully at both. My mental health struggled after my older son was born and I am trying to do things differently this time around.
Most of the other small business owners I know are also women and many are also mothers who each face this same struggle. If you are either a mother thinking of starting a business, a business owner planning to welcome a child, or a business owning mother who feels like she’s failing at both, I hope I can share some helpful advice and camaraderie in this post. As I would advise with anything related to parenthood, take the parts that are helpful to you and ignore the rest.
Identify Why You Are Running Your Business
Before making changes to your goals, schedules, and daily activities, I urge you to pause and ask yourself why you are starting or running your business. This will greatly impact the way you prioritize and manage all of the work involved in your business. Here are some reasons that might resonate with you:
- I want to start selling the things I’ve been making as a hobby to recoup some of the costs.
- I’ve been running my small shop on the side and want to scale it to replace my full time job.
- I want to start my own business so I can work for myself after my maternity leave ends and not have to go back to my old job.
- I am looking for supplemental income to support my family.
- My family doesn’t need the extra income but I’m looking for something that is my own outside of motherhood.
- I want the freedom and flexibility of working for myself so I can earn money while also caring for my children.
Choose which statement best applies to you or identify your own reason why.
Do Household Tasks while Your Child is Awake
When my older son was a baby and young toddler, I would typically spend his awake periods with him feeding, cuddling, playing, etc. Then while he napped or slept in the evening, I would try to get everything else done around the house and work on my business. This left me with no time for rest and a pressure to be extremely productive during those short times because I never knew how long my son would sleep. It also added a lot of stress to his naptimes because I needed him to sleep so I could work. This was not sustainable and contributed greatly to my mental health struggles. I needed more dedicated time to work that wasn’t only tied to my son’s unpredictable sleep schedule.
One change that I made was to start doing some of the household tasks while my son was awake. This was good for both of us as it allowed me to knock things off of my To-Do list while spending time with my son and he enjoyed helping me around the house. Toddlers love helping you if you’re willing to move slower and accept that things won’t go perfectly. Bonding with them doesn’t have to mean only playing; bring them into your world too. Get them a mini broom to help sweep the floors; let them match socks while folding laundry or load the washing machine; fill their toy sink with water and let them wash dishes beside you in the kitchen.
This same principal could also apply to business tasks if there are things you can do with them or near them while they play. Here are some tasks you could give them:
- weeding vinyl scraps
- applying candle wicks to your stickers
- adding business cards to gift bags
- stamping packaging
- walking to the post office together
Utilize a Baby Carrier
As a subset to the tip above, try using a baby carrier/wrap to wear baby while getting things done. If your child is too young to try helping with tasks but won’t let you set them down while trying to do chores or won’t nap unless you’re holding them, baby wearing can be almost a necessity. There are many types of baby carriers out there from sling wraps to structured carriers; find what works best for you. While it can be harder to do some tasks and unsafe to do others, this may help you be more productive while caring for your baby.
Ask for and Accept Help
If you try to work a full time job while caring for your child(ren), be responsible for all or most of the housework, get enough rest and exercise, visit with friends, and spend time on hobbies, you will fail at one or more things and get burnt out trying. It may seem like everyone else is excelling at life while you can’t keep everything afloat but trust me, that’s a lie. If your point of reference is social media – forget any point of comparison. You don’t see the whole picture behind that snapshot of others’ lives; what they struggle with, the help they have, and so on.
Most of us have people in our lives who would be willing to help if we asked them, or maybe they’ve already offered but you’ve declined. I encourage you to think of ways you could use help and reach out. Just because you chose to be self-employed, that doesn’t mean you can’t ask for help. Before my son was in daycare, I was really struggling to do everything. I am extremely fortunate to have parents nearby who love spending time with their grandkids. Even though I knew that they would semi-occasionally babysit my sister’s kids when she had to work a weekend shift, I felt less qualified to ask for that same help because I didn’t need to work on a specific day. I didn’t have a scheduled shift that I needed to work and couldn’t find childcare for. But this is my job just like my sister has hers, and if I wanted to have a longer work session, I needed someone to help watch my son. My bonus is just that I could reschedule that work session to a time when my parents were available to babysit.
So, where can you get help?
- Sit down with your partner and discuss reassigning household and parenting tasks to free up both time and energy for you to spend on your business.
- Get childcare in some form or another. Depending on your resources, that could mean asking grandparents to babysit, enrolling in daycare, hiring a nanny to watch your child at your house, paying a teenager to babysit, etc.
- Hire a cleaning service for your home.
- Swap services with a fellow mom. Offer to watch her children one afternoon so she has dedicated time to herself and have her take your kids another day to return the favour. Your children get to socialize and you get time to work without paying for childcare.
Offload or Eliminate Business Tasks
If you feel like you are failing to tackle all of the tasks that come with running your small business, it might be time to offload or eliminate some of those tasks.
Identify which parts of the business you enjoy spending time on and which you don’t. Can you hire someone to do the parts you dislike? For most handmade business owners, they enjoy the creative tasks of designing and making their products, but not the admin work. If that is the case for you, can you consider hiring someone for bookkeeping, website management, or social media? Maybe you’d like to join more local craft markets to increase sales but already work Monday to Friday and don’t want to spend every weekend trucking back and forth to events instead of spending time with your family. Can you hire someone to work part-time for you at markets?
Another helpful step is to simplify your business. Your time is valuable and you want to spend it wisely. Consider eliminating products from your line-up. Fewer products can mean less inventory and equipment to manage, more streamlined production, less time spent designing, etc. Depending on your why that you identified earlier, you may wish to scrap the products you least like making or that generate the least income. When I went back to working after my son was born I cut back on some of the customizations I was offering on certain products and eliminated ones that hadn’t been selling. In my new baby stage now with my daughter, I have temporarily stopped taking on custom orders as those require more time from me and my time is extremely limited in this stage. Once I feel ready, I may open that option back up.
Moms Helping Moms
One of my favourite parts about creating this blog is bringing together likeminded people and sharing resources, advices, and tips to help where I can. Now it’s your turn! What is something you’ve done to help juggle the roles of both mom & business owner? Let us all know in the comments. Or share something you’re struggling to juggle and let’s see if we can help offer specific advice for your situation.
If you found this article helpful in any way, share it with your community, whether that’s your friends on a crafter’s facebook group, your small business friends, or your sister-in-law who’s thinking of starting her own business. When one of us succeeds, we all do.
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