Making the decision to stay home with your kids is a selfless choice that many women and their families make. While some women dream of this opportunity their whole life, others struggle to understand how they will go from working out of the house to being a homemaker.
Likewise, when a mom has spent a period of time devoting herself to her family exclusively it can be tricky to transition back into the working world.
Regardless of where you are at in your journey with this, know that you are not alone and added that there are ways to make this transition easier on not only yourself but your entire family.
One smart way that some moms are making this work is to start a business themselves. This allows you a certain amount of freedom to be able to float between your two roles as your own life demands.
Develop Your Plan
The first key step is to develop your plan. You need to bring your idea full circle. Some things you are going to need to consider will be your niche, target audience, funding, marketing, and operations.
If you hope to start a business that is fully online and digital that is going to lead you down one path whereas developing a company that will have multiple employees and deals with heavier loads of scheduling and projects will be totally different. Think about your passions and try to find a business that aligns with things you already know you like.
When you are adding work onto your already full plate it is going to be very important that you feel joy from this business and not an obligation or resentment. When those times pop up when your business needs pull you away from your family this passion will be what encourages you to keep going.
Figure Out Funding
Assumably you are starting this business to bring in some additional income for your household. If that is the case it might seem counterintuitive to take on more debt in the form of a small business loan to get started, but that is not necessarily true.
When you examine your financial situation and determine how much money you need to get your business up and running, taking that money out of your existing savings might be too high a risk.
Enter a small business loan. Taking out a business loan provides you with some great benefits. One of which is establishing a credit history for your company.
Down the line, you are going to need formal evidence of your business’s good financial habits and on-time loan payments can provide you with just that. Developing a good relationship with your lender will help build your reputation with any future investors that you may seek out as well.
Prepare Your Family
When your spouse and kids have been accustomed to everything that you do as a stay-at-home mom, you cannot just pull the rug out from underneath that family dynamic. Instead, spend a few months preparing your family for this transition by talking to them about exactly what may change once you go live.
This can be an excellent learning experience for your kids as you teach them to be more independent and learn self-sufficient ways to manage their own needs. Not to mention you are now an excellent role model for them as they watch you develop and pursue a dream of your own.
Conversations with your spouse should be transparent and frequent. If your existing dynamic has you handling most of the household needs, they might not even be aware of what needs to be done on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Map out what a day in your life looks like and highlight areas where you would like to collaborate together, or even offload a task completely onto them. Having these conversations frequently will help eliminate opportunities for resentment to build on either side.
Prepare Yourself
Although you might think that you will be able to balance career and family life effortlessly and without planning, it is more likely that winging it in that manner will cause you to feel frustrated and like you are not doing a good enough job in either sector.
Think about some of your existing stress triggers and how you are going to combat them. Be sure they continue to schedule in time for yourself where you are doing things that have nothing to do with your family or your business and exist simply to create joy and rejuvenation in your life.
While this transition is not without its sacrifices that does not mean that you must burn the candle at both ends constantly.