Meet Alexandra, a mompreneur who transformed her career from corporate marketing to entrepreneurship, finding better work-life balance and professional fulfillment along the way.
Could you present yourself, who you are, what you do in life?
Hi, I’m Alexandra. I live in Portugal, and I’m a mother of two children and that was my main motive to become an entrepreneur. I’ve worked in marketing and communication my whole life. I worked for companies for 14 years, and then I decided that I needed to be more present for my children. They are nine and five years old, so they’re still in need of me.
I was working from home in my last company, but I was taking on a lot of work and it was a toxic environment for me. I had a burnout and that was the tipping point that made me decide I don’t want to live this life so full of stress where I’m yelling at my children all the time to get them ready for school so I can work, work, work. That’s not the life I want. That’s not the example I want to give them.
I still work in marketing and communication. I teach digital marketing and I help other mompreneurs to get their businesses more simplified, more humanized. I help them with their processes and marketing strategy so they can have what I have – more time, more peace of mind and more success.
Wasn’t it too scary to jump into the entrepreneurial world and leave what we think of as the security of a corporate job and starting solo?
It’s still very scary, even after three years! But what I had before wasn’t healthy. It wasn’t good. So I needed to try something new. My advice is never try something new without a safety net. I had support from my husband, from my parents. They told me “go, go.”
Especially, I was being coached back then, I was in a coaching process and my coach helped me a lot, regain my self-confidence and my self-love. And there was something that grew inside me that was, if I’ve been able to do anything so far, I can do anything from now on and I will try this. And if this doesn’t work, I’ll try something different, but I will make it work.
One of my friends told me something that stuck with me: “Didn’t life provide you so far? Didn’t things work out so far? So what’s the fear? Why won’t they work out next?” And life has provided so far.
What would you say are the biggest challenges that you encountered during those three years as a mompreneur? And how did you overcome them?
Well, I had to learn a lot, almost everything because I think the main difficulty is that you have an idea, you have the will, you want to do something, but I knew nothing about businesses. I worked in marketing and communication. So yeah, I had that part, but still figuring it out for me, for my business, it’s totally different.
Sometimes it’s an idea that gets very spread – it’s easy to go digital. You just have to take your phone, take a few pictures, take a few films, and you will start selling your products and your knowledge. And it’s a lie. It’s not easy, it’s not fast. It’s a process that you have to take and you have to take a lot of knowledge.
The two main difficulties I found were that I knew nothing about businesses, so I had to learn a lot and quickly, and the boundaries that you have to make because suddenly you work for yourself. So you don’t have that nine to five job. And sometimes it feels like freedom and sometimes it feels like a prison because you are always thinking about the business.
Six months from my starting point, I was sending emails and preparing a full campaign at 3:00 AM in the middle of the night. And I was really tired. And I thought to myself, you are falling into the patterns that led you to a burnout when you were working for other people. You need boundaries. You need to make decisions about when you are going to work, when you are going to rest.
Would you say that the motherhood skills that you acquired through being a mother with your children are aligned with the professional skills that you need? What specific skills did you develop during motherhood that have been useful for your work?
We often talk about soft skills these days, companies are always looking for soft skills. Well, moms are full of soft skills – negotiating skills with our kids, organizational skills. We can make so much out of so little. And that is something that we can always take to our businesses.
I sometimes call my business my third baby. So I have two kids and I have a third baby – it’s my business. And we need to take care of it just like a baby. And we need to organize to make sure that it’s fair, that it’s clean, that it’s comfortable, and that we nurture it without it taking our whole life.
Those skills that we gain when we become moms, when we become responsible for another’s life, they are fundamental to our businesses. They’re not separate. Our businesses are parts of us. And once we realize that our inherent talents, our inherent skills are a big plus for our businesses, it becomes easier because sometimes we are too focused on what’s not working, what we lack. We should focus on our superpowers.
How do you balance both worlds – being a mom, an entrepreneur, and also taking care of your private life as a woman? Do you think that being an entrepreneur now allowed you to have more balance?
It always depends on the job you do as an employee, because the job I had was not something I could leave at work. But I believe that you have to define, you have to know yourself. Self-knowledge is very important when you are living life, and especially when you are leading a business.
You have to know what you’re capable of and what are your limits. And then you need to define success for yourself. And for me, success is not having lots of money or having a title. In my career, I had that and I gave that up so I could have more time with my kids.
My children know that sometimes I need to work and they need to hold on a little. And my clients know that sometimes they will have to hold on because I am a mom prior to anything else. I don’t take clients, I don’t do classes in the night period because after 6:00 PM I am a mother.
Another thing that’s very important for me to keep these scales balanced is self-care. You need to have your glass full so you can be the best at both sides. I wake up every day 30 minutes before my kids so I can shower, put my makeup on, have a nice slow morning. And then I will put my kids to bed early too, at 9:00 PM, so I can have my evening.
Let me tell you please, that it’s not always this balanced. It’s normal that sometimes work demands more of us. And then other times a child is sick and will take all of our attention. And other times there was no time for that 30 minutes or that evening in peace, it’s okay, it happens.
You talked about your husband and your tribe. How did they help you in this process, especially at the beginning? How did they support you to find the balance in your new life as an entrepreneur?
From the very first beginning, I was so scared to tell my husband I didn’t want to go to a company. He is not a person that believes much in coaching and mentoring and stuff like that. And I was like, “Oh, he doesn’t believe any of this, how am I gonna tell him?” And he told me something that was so freeing. He told me, “I don’t need to believe in that, I believe in you.”
I don’t have any entrepreneurs in my family. So their support was not in my business – I sometimes think they don’t know exactly what I do! But they believe in me and they support me. And that’s very helpful. But when you are trying to grow, when you are trying to talk about the difficulties you find in the business, they cannot help.
So I needed to meet other women, other entrepreneurs who were going through what I was and build my own community. I have a community I built with a friend and we invited other women to join and to share their problems, their difficulties, their challenges, their successes, and we help each other.
Every time I reached out to another entrepreneur, I always got excellent feedback. They were willing to help, willing to take their time to take a coffee with me just to talk. This is not for selling, this is not for doing business, this is for support. It’s a tribe. Eventually the business will come, but it’s just to have other people there for you.
What would you say is the greatest personal satisfaction that you gained from being an entrepreneur professionally, but also personally?
It gave me a sense of mission. Every time I get feedback from my clients and from my students saying that I helped them in any way, it fills my heart. So it gave me this sense that I’m doing something good and that grateful feeling that I have in me, that I’m doing the right things.
Having the ability to shift the paradigm and say to my kids that I love what I do, I simply love what I do. And I am so happy doing what I’m doing right now in comparison to what I was doing before. I think the greatest accomplishment that I made being an entrepreneur is doing exactly what I love, discovering this thing that I love so much, being able to put it in the world and being paid for it.
As a partner, what is the most important message you would give to a mom who wants to become an entrepreneur, especially in the virtual environment?
We’re always on time. You are always on time. And do it for yourself – yes, sometimes I say I do it for my children to be able to be with them, but eventually I do it for myself because I want to be there for them. Because I chose this life. I’m not doing it for anyone else. I’m doing it for myself because it makes me very happy.
When you do that, you’re bound to be successful because you are chasing something that sticks within you. Our businesses always grow from inside to outside. Look inside yourself and you’ll find the answers. And when you don’t have the answers, go find help to reach those answers.
There’s nothing we can do alone. We need to find help to reach out to the other person. And it’s always been about people because it’s always been the people that I meet at some circumstance that will lead me to my next step. And as mompreneurs, we need to bound together. We need to stick together because I do believe this with all my heart: A woman that knows herself and knows what she wants is capable of anything. When a lot of women join forces, we can change the world.Version 5 of 5
