The key for the next wave of women wanting to walk both the entrepreneurial and motherhood paths, writer Hannah Cohen finds? More visibility.
In the 1960s, women in business typically needed a kind – and reasonably wealthy – family member to invest in their ventures. Iconic Italian-Australian fashion designer Carla Zampatti’s cousin, for example, loaned her $5000 to help her restart her business after neither banks nor suppliers would extend her credit.
Fast forward to 2024, and from greater options when it comes to raising capital to stronger social support and community, and arguably it’s never been a better time in Australia to be a female founder.
But despite progress, regardless of how far we’ve come with views on women in business, society still heralds motherhood as the apex of a woman’s achievement – a role that’s worth stopping time for. Pausing careers for. Changing plans for.
So many women are mothers, and so many of those mothers own and operate successful businesses. But how often do we hear about how these two experiences intersect? How often do we create the space for them to share what it’s like to both run a company and start a new family?
Here, Sense of Self founder Freya Berwick, Sunroom co-founder Michelle Battersby, and More Good Days founder Neala Fulia generously let me into how they balance the roles of founder and mother.
That’s business, baby
When Neala fell pregnant, she was in the middle of her first capital raising round for her start up More Good Days, an app developed to help people manage chronic pain.
“My first thought was like, ‘Oh, my god, I need to tell them [my investors],” she said.
“I think my immediate thoughts were, they have the right to know that I have this handicap.”
Only 8 weeks along into her pregnancy, it was after speaking to her best friend that she questioned the knee-jerk reaction, realising there was a double standard informing the instinct to share her pregnancy news with investors before her friends and family.
“She asked me, ‘If Pat (her husband) was raising and found out you were pregnant, would he feel the need to tell his investors that his wife is eight weeks pregnant?”
Internalising the notion that a pregnancy and subsequently building a family could be a ‘handicap’ for a female founder is all too familiar to Michelle Battersby.
Now a Mum to baby Alfie, Battersby had to work through a number of ideas that she’d internalised around how she needed to live while building Sunroom.
“I’d actually been living my life and making these decisions based on all these things I’d internalised that I’d then never really unpacked… I was living life feeling like as a founder, I should not fall pregnant, I should not start a family, this will be detrimental for my career,” she shared.
“I had proactively been delaying starting a family because of those fears. I felt like my investors might be disappointed that I had fallen pregnant, I worried about my company’s growth if I were to take time out of the company and that time if with time away, my company would really feel that.”
For Freya Berwick, the timing of her pregnancy was strategic to the best of her abilities; confident in her decision to start a family as a founder and pushing back on the notion that this might impact the success of her business.
“You don’t need to be apologetic for taking this time in your life, or for being a female founder,” she explains.
“I was mindful that Sense Of Self has some investors [but] I was like, I don’t need to explain to myself and justify myself.”
The reality of how the news of their pregnancy would impact these women’s businesses, was very different from their fear-led expectations.
Neala’s investors, Blackbird being one of them, “were better than supportive,” pushing her thinking on how much she should aim for in her first venture capital raise in order to aptly prepare. As a result, Neala ended up raising a million dollars more than she anticipated in her first round.
“At first I didn’t want to give more of my company than what I was comfortable with, but then I thought about it and came to the conclusion that it’s a smart decision,” she said.
During a typical negotiation between a founder and a venture capitalist, a founder exchanges equity in their business in return for cash investment. The terms of the deal can vary greatly, and what’s decided will also depend on the founder’s ambitions and investors’ mandate.
“Because I was starting a new family, it was my first child [and I was] jumping into a startup… just having that extra runway [cash] so that I didn’t have the pressure of needing to raise again and being able to still experiment while, at the same time, getting used to motherhood, was a really pivotal part of making it out on the other side,” she shared.
“It also gave me a bit of freedom to take some mat leave and transition into a new life, in which I had to reset my entire life around now having a child.”
For Michelle, debunking the hesitations holding her back from starting a family looked like coming back to the purpose and core ethos of her women-led app, Sunroom.
“I had a counter argument for basically every one of my fears,” she shared.
“If one of my investors is shitty that I’ve fallen pregnant, they never should have invested in Sunroom in the first place, [which is] a women founded business that’s all about bettering women’s lives.
“There were things I needed to unlearn.”
Freya spoke to the impact of the entrenched stereotypes around pregnant women, and how questioning and pushing back on these tropes has helped her keep a level head in navigating her journey as a new mother and a founder.
“My observation is that there is so much narrative around both of these things; about being a mother, just in general, irrespective of being a founder, as well as the established narrative about being a founder and a woman in business,”she explained.
“Particularly since becoming a mother, I’m super mindful not to take on the narrative without thinking about it.”
Things like forgetting a word and a colleague jumping into a quip about ‘baby brain,’ or someone asking how you are and defaulting to responding with an answer about how little sleep you’re getting, are the moments Freya links back to here.
“It’s not to say that there aren’t things that are untrue for me within all of those kinds of established narratives. I just question it before I default to it… I don’t feel it’s that helpful to me to just regurgitate that”
Time is of the essence
All three women spoke to how maximizing and carefully safeguarding their time has been essential in navigating motherhood and their roles as founders.
For Neala, efficiency has been key in how she allocates her tasks each day across business and family.
“It feels like I have a third of the time than I used to, and so a lot of what I have to do now is being really, really smart with that third of the time that I have,” she said.
“Previously when it came to work, if I needed to solve something, I could just spend all weekend doing it. But now I just physically don’t have the hours anymore, so it just it looks different, and I’ve had to do a lot of adjusting over the past year and a half”
“It took a lot of lessons and trial and error to get to… it’s needing to come up with a whole new way of living your daily life that’s based around how you optimize for your energy and time.”
For Michelle, the restriction on time shifted her into a new relationship with work. Instead of viewing having a baby as a step back from the business, Michelle’s new routines and restrictions on time led her to take on a more strategic role as a founder.
“Since having a baby, I ruthlessly prioritize. I only focus on what’s going to make Sunroom money and I work in a way I should have been working the last four years,” she told me.
“But it took me having a child to kind of get into the state of mind you need to be in to get shit done while also being a mum.
“I stopped doing so many things I probably shouldn’t have been doing, and I truly only work on things that drive immediate results for the business.”
Similarly for Freya, her 6-week maternity leave forced her “off the tools.” Her team of 38 staff keeping things running smoothly at Sense Of Self allowed her to step out of a functional, operational position and into a higher-level role as a founder.
“I already had really deep trust for the team, but [having a baby] accelerated that, which is super nice.”
For Freya, where the challenge lies in how boundaries around parenting and work can bleed into blurred lines as founder.
“I kind of do my light touch tasks on the go with [my daughter] and that’s where the boundaries bleed,” she said.
“It happens because you pick up your phone and then you’re on it. And I’m not talking about going on a doom scroll on Instagram. I’m talking about getting absorbed into work.
“That’s what I’m really trying to be mindful of at the minute, and concurrently, mindful of my expectations of myself in that sometimes, it’s just not that achievable.”
All three women agree that the first thing to go when you have a baby as a founder, is the diminished time for yourself.
“I haven’t found it hard working as a founder and a Mum, I have found it hard that there’s no time for anything else,” said Michelle.
“I don’t go to the gym, I’m the kind of person who likes to sit and reflect and journal, and I’m finding it very hard to do that… even finding time to take a shower is difficult.”
A huge part of trying to squeeze in a moment for yourself has a lot to do with delegation of tasks between new parents.
“A big thing is communication with your partner, so that’s like a whole additional workload… you have to basically negotiate everything in your separate lives together,” said Freya.
“If you want to go for a bike ride with your mates on a Saturday morning, you can’t just plan that and let the other person know it’s happening. It’s a negotiation, because the default is that the other person is looking after the baby”
Role models and representation
Michelle has used both her social media platforms and voice as a writer to carve out more discourse about the realities of juggling being founder-life with motherhood.
“It was a really meaningful experience after being so open online,” she shared.
“I just had so many people hitting me up – so many women DM’ing me about how they also are a founder with kids.
“If I had seen someone sharing the same kind of content I’m sharing now, that would have really, really helped me… that would have shown to me [so I could say] ‘oh my god, okay, she’s doing it.”
It’s this lack of representation of female founders that become mothers that Neala believes is hindering women from gaining access to the support and confidence they need to feel less nervous about venturing into both roles.
“There are a lack of, like, women archetypes around. So, you really have to go outside the mold to try something like this,” she explained.
More often than not in pop culture and various corners of the media, we see the single girlboss archetype who chooses career over starting a family and struggles with an emptiness that can only be filled by motherhood, or the the family woman whose chosen to dedicate their life to being a mum and longs for her ‘old life’ back.
It’s slim pickings when it comes to representations of the woman who dives head first into choosing both.
“Without other archetypes to know that it can be done and be reassured [with examples of] ‘oh look, she was pregnant, and she raised a family, and then she had a second baby and she’s fine,’ it just makes it harder to know what that could look like, and for you to take those leaps in the first place.”
Neala added that role models like this in a mentorship capacity are also crucial for women getting into start-ups.
“I’ve had, for example, coaching by men who are successful entrepreneurs, but I feel like the challenges that they’re experiencing are not the same,” she said.
“I feel like if I had someone that had been in my shoes to help me shortcut that first year and a half, I would have been able to get through it faster and easier.
“We need more acute awareness around what those challenges are specifically for women, and then thinking about how the ecosystem can help unlock those challenges. Because they’re saying that they’re getting the same amount of pitches [from women]. But not enough women are getting through.
In amongst the challenges and nerves of choosing to have a baby as a founder, the advantages that come with being a founder as a new mum can easily be glimpsed over too.
All three women agreed that the level of flexibility that their founder status grants them has made the transition into motherhood a lot smoother than they anticipated.
“I am genuinely, grateful to work for myself and have the flexibility to say I’m going to come back three days and then try four and then, maybe drop back to three, and not have a drop dead time in which I need to come back online,” said Freya.
“I’m also grateful for the mental entertainment. It’s a very different mode to parenting, and I’m happy to have both of them.
“There are days where it sometimes feels out of control, and I guess you start to feel guilty and I just want to be available to Florence (her daughter) and present with her, but I honestly think, presence is the key to doing both of them. When you’re working, you’re working, when you’re parenting, you’re parenting. And I just try and keep that front of mind.”
Neala only took two weeks off after she had her son, but she wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Even though the mental effort and commitment of a startup is really high, so you want to put in a lot, and you’re always thinking about it, there is still 100% flexibility and if you allow yourself, “ she said.
“So for me, what that means is that, when my son is in childcare and he falls sick, I can always pick him up. Like there’s nothing that I can’t say yes or no to.. it’s still up to me in that way.
“There’s just that 100% flexibility, which I appreciate, is being a founder and being a mom, and then being able to call my own shots along the way. I took two weeks off, but that was completely my choice. No one told me that I had to go back after that. And then when [my son] was, four or five months, I decided that I wanted to take off one day a week to spend more time with him, and I could do that .”
Neala’s poignant message to other founders who are nervous about the uncharted waters that come with starting a family as a founder? Be gentle on your expectations of yourself across both areas and know that you can absolutely make it work.
“Every month [after my son was born], I just had to adjust my expectations based on what I thought the business needed, and based on what I thought my baby and myself needed at this time,” she shared.
“It is possible to let your ambitions flourish and really pursue them, while at the same time being a mom – and being a good mom to your standard.”
