What It Really Takes to Succeed in Entrepreneurship as a Mom

0:00as I want to talk about what it really takes to build a successful business as a mom, not the version that gets sold to us in the highlight reel, the real version. Welcome to this mother means business. The podcast where ambition meets motherhood and success has no limits. On your host, Laura St. Clairn, and if you're a mom who's passionate about building your own business, you're in the right place. Whether you're launching your first startup from your kitchen table, scaling your side hustle during nap time, or growing your established business while juggling family life, this show celebrates the incredible women who refuse to choose between being an amazing mother and a fierce entrepreneur. Each week we're diving into real stories, practical strategies, and yes, a little tough love when you need it most. I'm here to push you past the excuses and give you permission to build your business and live your life exactly on your terms, because here's what I know for sure. When a mother means business, extraordinary things happen. So let's dive in and get down to it. Welcome back to another episode of this mother means business. Today we're taking on a big

1:02one that has been on my heart and on my mind for a while, but I think we need to talk about it. It just feels like now's the time. And that is, what does it really take to be a successful mom entrepreneur? And to start, I want to ask you something, and I want you to actually sit with it for a second before we move on. What does success look like for you? Like actually for you, not the version you were told to want, not the revenue number you picked at random because it's sounded right, and certainly not the Instagram version. What does it actually look like? I ask this because I've been in business long enough now to notice a pattern. And the pattern is this, the women who come to me, smart, capable, already doing it women, they are often working incredibly hard toward a version of success that was never actually built for their life. It was built for someone else's life. Someone without a school pick up, someone who doesn't stop mid-sentence to handle a meltdown, someone who can take a week long retreat without first arranging

2:04approximately 17,000 moving parts. And so they hustle and they push and they hit goals, actual goals, and then they still feel behind. They still feel like they're not doing it right. They still wonder, is this ever going to feel like enough? If any of that sounds familiar, this conversation is for you because I want to talk about what it really takes to build a successful business as a mom, not the version that gets sold to us in the highlight reel, the real version, the one that accounts for the actual life you are living right now. And I think some of what I'm going to say is going to feel like relief, at least I hope it does, because here's what I know, you're not behind, you are certainly not feeling, and you might just be measuring yourself against the wrong thing. So let's get into it. I want to start by naming the thing that I think most of us have never actually said out loud. The playbook that we have for building a business, the one most of us were handed when we started it was written by people who weren't doing this at

3:06the same time as raising kids. Or if they were, they had a level of support that most of us just don't have access to. It says things like consistency is everything. Show up every day, protect your morning scale fast. If you're not growing, you're dying. And some of that advice is genuinely useful, but none of it was built for women who had a sick kid last week and lost their days of work. None of it accounts for the mental load, the invisible, constant management of an entire household and a family that runs underneath everything else you do. So we try to buy it. And then we wonder why we feel like we can't keep it. Can I just name some of the specific things? Because I think sometimes we need to say it plainly, there's the guilt split. You know this one, you're in a client call where you're professionally pleasant, you're there, you're talking to everybody, you're attentive. But then there's this part of your brain that's tracking what time it is, whether you need to leave to go get to pick up on time, whether you remember to put something out for dinner, and then you get to pick up and you're physically there. But the threat of that call is still

4:07running in the background. You're never fully anywhere. And then there's the comparison spiral. You see someone in your industry celebrating a launch hitting a milestone, posting about their team. And for a split second, before you can stop it, you feel behind. Even if rationally, you know your circumstances are different. Even if you're proud of them, this feeling still hits. And there's what I like to call the does this count loop. You're doing so much, but so little of it looks like what entrepreneurship is supposed to look like. You're building your business install in hours. You're responding to DMs during nap time. You're thinking through your pricing strategy while folding laundry. And somewhere along the way, you stop counting that as a real work because it doesn't look like hustle. It doesn't look like the version in the books. I want to say something directly. And if you're building a business while raising kids while being a present parent while managing a household while maybe also being a partner and a friend and a human being with your own needs, you're doing something incredibly hard. And the fact that it's hard doesn't mean you're

5:11doing it wrong. It means that the thing is hard. You're not behind because you're not working hard enough. In most cases, you're working harder than you think. You're behind on someone else's timeline maybe in someone else's version of this. And that version was never going to fit you anyway. So before we talk strategy or mindset or any of it, I just want that to land. You are not failing. The framework might be failing you. I want to share with you a couple of insights that I want to offer you that I have sort of learned in my certainly eight years of motherhood and entrepreneurship. And certainly in the conversations and relationships I've had with hundreds of women that are navigating this intersection of motherhood and entrepreneurship that I think might provide you some peace. So here's the first one. The traditional model of business success is a straight line, right? More input equals more output. If you work more, you earn more. If you show up consistently, you go consistently, right? The line goes up into the right.

6:16A lot of entrepreneurs here typically doesn't look like that. It looks like seasons. There are seasons where you are on fire. Your kids are in a good groove. You have capacity. Your creativity is flowing. And you are building momentum that feels almost effortless. And there are seasons where everything is harder. The kid is going through something. Your own health needs attention. Your family is in transition. The businesses still, they are still alive and still yours. But you are in maintenance mode. Not growth mode. And that's okay. The women I've watched build real lasting businesses. The ones who are still here five and 10, 15 years in with businesses, they actually love. They figured this out. They stopped measuring themselves against people whose lives didn't look like theirs. They started measuring against their own seasons. A strong quarter, which is a three month period, for you might look completely different from a strong quarter for someone else without kids or with a different kid's situation or with a different support system. And that's not really a disadvantage. That's just your reality. Building a business that works within your reality is the actual goal. I caught myself up in this so many times.

7:22So many times I tried to compare myself to other people and run at a space and a pace that works for them. But I am not a person who has a lot of built-in support. I've had to hire and pay for support both in my business and at home the majority of the time. My partner is incredible. He shows up and he helps 50%. Same as me. We are we both give our 100% really. But at the end of the day, there's still more that has to happen. And so for me, my measuring stick could only be myself. It could only be myself because when I started to try to compare myself to people without children, it was really difficult. And one of the things that has been really interesting for me is to sort of witness some of the women that I sort of work comparing myself to that have now had children. Ten years of entrepreneurship, this happens. And it's been interesting to watch them pivot their own businesses and shift accordingly when I was sitting here with two

8:26children trying to compare myself to them and then seeing them recognize that they have to step back has been a really interesting learning for me too. So the first thing I want you to try and I'm going to come back to this with a practical invitation at the end. I promise it's to define what success looks like in your current season. Not your aspirational season, this one right now. What does a genuinely good week look like in your real life? Not the fantasy version. The version that's actually achievable given everything on your plate. The first one I want you to take away, the first insight is that success for a mom entrepreneur is non-linear. And that's a feature. Okay, it's not an issue. It is what it is. The second one I want you to think about is that the real work is sustainability, not hustle. And hustle culture will never ever tell you this. I say that without judgment, because I bought in a hustle culture for a while myself. The thing that separates the women who are building, still energize, still in it from the ones who are burned out or checked out or quietly just scaled all the way back is that they built for sustainability

9:28and not sprints. So what does that actually mean? It means designing your business around your actual life, not the life you think you're supposed to have. It means making deliberate choices about what your offers look like, how you sell, what you take on with your real capacity in mind, not some imagined unlimited version of yourself. It means building revenue that doesn't require you to be constantly on. Productized offers, recurring systems that do most of the work for you, referral relationships that build clients in without you grinding for every single one. And this is the one that I think lands hardest. It means protecting your energy as a business asset, not a luxury. Not as something you'll get to eventually when things come down as a core part of your strategy. Rest is a business strategy. Protecting your marriage, your relationships is a business strategy. Being actually present with your kids instead of physically there, but mentally somewhere else, that's a business strategy because a depleted founder makes worse decisions,

10:29creates worse work and is not building something that lasts. I know how that sounds. It sounds soft. It sounds like the kind of thing people say when they want to feel good about not working hard. But I have watched too many brilliant women blow up successful businesses. They loved because they ran them on fumes for too long. Sustainability isn't slow, it's smart, okay? Third thing that I want you to think about is that you're working more than you think. This is the insight that I personally found the most freeing and also is the most overlooked. How many things do you do in a week that actually move your business forward? But then you don't count them as work, okay? The voice note that you sent a colleague while driving the kid somewhere, the DM conversation that turned into a referral three weeks later. The episode you listened to during school pickup that gave you the idea you've been building on ever since. The conversation at that birthday party where someone said, wait, you do that. My friend has been looking for that exactly. That is work. That is business development. That is a relationship building and marketing and professional development and networking. It doesn't always look like sitting at a desk with a to-do list.

11:34We have been trained to work in hours, right? To count work in hours, in output, in things we can point to. And a mom entrepreneur's work is so often invisible woven into the fabric of the day happening in the margins. So we discount it. We say, I barely worked this week. I didn't get anything done. And we missed the thing we actually did. I'm not saying you should stop trying to create focus work time. I am absolutely a proponent of protecting real work hours. But I am saying stop dismissing everything that happens outside of those hours is nothing because it's not nothing. It's part of how you build. Okay? So three shifts. Nonlinear seasons, sustainability over hustle, and more we're happening than you're counting. These are things that we need to consider. So I want to make, I want to give you a little invitation. So here's what I want to leave you with. It is simple. But I believe simple is what we actually get done. So we're going to roll with it. This week, I want you to rewrite your definition of a successful week. Not the aspirational version,

12:34not the version where you have three uninterrupted work days and your inbox is at zero and you launch something and worked out every morning. That version is beautiful, but it might not be your life right now, right? I want you to write out your real version. What does a week look like where you have genuinely moved the needle given the actual season you're in, the actual capacity you have, the actual life that is happening around you. Write that down. Okay? This is not a throw away exercise, make it specific, make it achievable. And then at the end of next week, measure yourself against that. Okay? Just yours, not someone else's, not against your best week from two years ago, not from what you were doing in 2016, against the standard you set for yourself in your real life, right now. Okay? So see what happens to how you feel about yourself and your business when you start doing that consistently. And my question for you, and the one I genuinely want to know the answer to is what's one thing you've been doing in the margins of your life that you haven't been counting as work, but maybe you should send me a DM. I want to hear what it is replied to this episode.

13:34I read every single DM. I love knowing what's actually landing for you out there. Okay? And if today's conversation started something, if you're realizing that the framework you've been grinding inside of wasn't actually built for your life, that is exactly the work we do together inside of the inner circle. We both try to do that fits your real life, not some idealized version of entrepreneurship yours with your kids, your time restraints and your actual goals. And if that sounds like something you need right now, links are always in the show notes or you can always just send me a DM. That works too. So I want to leave you with this before we wrap the most successful mom entrepreneurs I know. And I mean truly successful in the deepest sense of the word. They are not the ones who figured out how to outwork everyone else. They're the ones who figured out what they were actually building forward and why and they stopped letting someone else's definition of success run the show. They built something that worked in their real life, not perfectly, not without hard seasons, but sustainably and with intention in a way that didn't require them to sacrifice everything else they loved in order to get there. That is available to you. Not someday when the

14:36kids are older, not when you have more help or more time or more of whatever you think is missing. Now in the life you have right now with the constraints in the chaos and the love and the full, messy, complicated reality of it. You are building something real. Give yourself credit for that. Thanks for being here. I'll talk to you soon. Thanks for listening. If today's episode gave you the push you needed, share it with your friend and don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Ready to take this even further? Head over to www.thismothermeansbusiness.com and become a member. You'll get real business growth support and build your virtual village of entrepreneurial moms walking the same path as you. Until next time, keep showing up, keep pushing forward and remember, when this mother means business, anything is possible. This podcast is produced, mixed and edited by Cardinal Studio. For more information about how to start your own podcast, please visit www.cardmasstudio.co or email Mike at micactcardmasstudio.co. You can

15:37also find the details in the show notes.