Top 50 Mompreneurs, 2011
They cook, they clean and, between naptimes, they run kickass companies. For those who run their own mom-centric firms, the responsibilities of motherhood are only half the battle. Babble is running our first ever salute to the top 50 mompreneurs who pull all-nighters, suffer enormous financial set-backs, and balance business and baby every day to make their entrepreneurial dreams come true. Here's how they did it.
- Christina Couch
38 / 50
38
Angelica Menefee | Trampoline, Inc.
Angelica’s Rankings
bright idea
Company: Trampoline, Inc.
Location: Towson, Maryland
Children: Two daughters, 8 and 14, son, 12 ⢠Age: 41
Inspiration: After having her firstborn, Menefee balanced motherhood and a full-time teaching job for about a year. Then her daughter suffered from a series of flus and had to be on IV fluids for three days. “I was driving, rushing 40 minutes to the hospital,” Menefee says. “I decided on that day that I was never going to be away from my children while they were little.” When her kids got older, Menefee landed a job teaching preschool Spanish. Then she crunched the salary numbers. “I realized that the babysitter I had hired was making more than me,” she says. “That’s when I got the idea to write a curriculum that would make the ‘floating teacher’ obsolete. I wrote curriculums for foreign language, art history, etiquette, and team sports that any teacher could use in elementary schools.”
Perspiration: Menefee says the toughest challenge was teaching her children to respect a home-based business. “It was very hard to go from mother to professional during that time,” she admits. “It’s very easy for kids to take advantage of a mom with a schedule where everything can be dropped for them. We went through some battles trying to teach the kids that when [my office] door closes, don’t open it unless you’re bleeding.”
Success: In 2005, Menefee wrote a Spanish-language curriculum and sold it to her employer. Then she sold the curriculum to more preschools, recorded an audio CD to go with it and sold the whole package to a local preschool franchise. Today, Trampoline is in more than 500 schools across the US. Forbes estimated the company’s total revenues for 2009 as landing somewhere between $700,000 and $800,000.
This post really does olnbeg at the NZWG forum. It’s just excellent to get real feedback like this about an event. It is always scary to explain your ideas to someone who actually does have the power to get a crew together and make them and yet, just like bungy jumping, it’s an amazing feeling of achivement afterwards.