Thanks to my cousin, Anthony and his business and Voyage Minnesota Magazine for recognizing How 2 Mom as one of Minnesota’s Hidden Gems.
Hi Stephanie, it's an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us - to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
My background is actually in the legal field. I was a paralegal for 10+ years and got accepted to Law School in 2011. It was during that time that my husband and I got married and wanted to start a family right away. Unfortunately, like many families, we struggled to get pregnant. After 3 months into our fertility journey, we finally got a positive pregnancy test, so Law School took a backseat. During my pregnancy, I started Prenatal Yoga and it was during those classes that I learned so much about birth, and all of the options I had in how I wanted to birth our baby. We hired a Birth Doula and after McKenzie’s arrival, I was forever changed. After she was placed on my chest, I remember looking around the room and feeling so empowered and loved by my team (husband, midwife, and doula), and thinking, every mom deserves to feel like this during and after her birth. However, like most postpartum moms I had to return to my 9-5 job even though my heart was now at home. My heart and mind was no longer in the legal field so when my daughter was 1.5, I took the leap of faith and left that job.
It was with the help of a Network Marketing company that I was able to make that transition and then eventually attend Birth Doula training in April of 2015. After training, I started serving families right away and had a very amateur and simple Wix website. Then, in 2017 Brian and I welcomed twins, another fertility journey and life-changing experience. While home with all three of my babies and unable to return back to birth, I switched platforms and enhanced my website. I also started blogging and created the How 2 Mom Agency, welcoming team members and growing our services and availability. Because of my love for women, especially moms, I founded How 2 Mom in 2015. How 2 Mom is a community and support group for all moms and also offers birth services for prenatal, birth and postpartum care. We also share tips, tricks, products and stories through How 2 Mom’s Blog. Today, we have a team of 3 Birth Doulas, 2 Placenta Encapsulators, 2 Lactation Specialists, a Photographer, and a Prenatal Dietitian Nutritionist! Our main vision and goal is to create one place where families can go since parenthood is already so overwhelming.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you've learned along the way. Looking back would you say it's been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Smooth…..what a lovely word. Entrepreneurship is anything but smooth! If it were, everyone would do it, right! It takes so much strength, courage and determination to own and run your own business.
And as if owning and running your own business isn’t crazy and busy enough, I have only had this business since becoming a mom and while being a full-time stay at home mom to three kids, including twins. Being a mom and home with my kids is my number one “job”, and the reason behind starting How 2 Mom.
As a sole-entrepreneur it is extremely difficult to keep up with all the things. You have to be willing to wear many different hats while managing all the marketing platforms, client work, continuing education, new trends, and all the other things. Your mission and vision has to be crystal clear and your why has to be HUGE in order to keep going when things get tough. The thing that keeps me going through the challenges is reminding myself that when one door closes, more will open. I also remind myself that obstacles usually happen for good reason, you just might not know the reason at the time, and there is usually a good lesson behind it. I have also learned that just when you are feeling like you want to give up, something big is about to happen, like a breakthrough or a win!
I just recently came across this post on Facebook and it explains owning your own business perfectly…
What they don’t tell you is that it can cause severe stress and anxiety, and drains you mentally to the point of depression in even the most laid back people. People will talk about you, compare you to others, use you, they will view you as a service and not a person anymore. You have to worry about if you forget to email/message someone back, are they going to think it was on purpose? Did you disappoint them? Will they hold that against you? When in reality you just can’t get to everyone’s messages and emails. Starting up and running a successful business puts incredible strain on personal lives and relationships, many of which fail because there is just often no work life balance. You need to be the director, the worker, the admin, the marketing team, the accountant, the cleaner….. All whilst being a parent, a husband or a wife, family support, friend… it’s one of the hardest things you will try and balance. There’s a reason you don’t see many people succeed in small businesses after 5 years. If they are successful they are overwhelmed. It takes a toll. It’s freaking exhausting. Especially the past couple of years when so much has been out of our control.
