Is becoming a mompreneur part of your life’s vision but you’re feeling a little overwhelmed about where to start?
There’s a lot of amazing information about the best ways to create a side hustle as a stay at home mom out there. But if you want to explore the tried-and-true methods of launching your own business so you can make consistent, significant income, control the hours you work, and be present with your family without compromise, you’re in the right place.
In this article, we’ll cover what the term mompreneur means, talk about the best ways to plan for and grow your own business as a stay at home mom, and then explore whether mompreneurship is the right fit for you.
What Is A Mompreneur?
The term mompreneur is a mashup of the words mom and entrepreneur and, essentially, it is just that – a mom who is also an entrepreneur.
Some entrepreneurial purists will claim that network marketing doesn’t count under the header of entrepreneurship. Frankly, I don’t agree. If your income is based solely on how you perform and do not have to ask permission to stay home with your sick kiddo or to work independently and asynchronously then, to me, you’re an entrepreneur.
So, yes, Beachbody mompreneurs – I see you and believe that you are part of the mompreneur tribe too.
Getting Started As A Mompreneur
If you’re new to entrepreneurship, a great place to begin is to begin with the end in mind. You don’t want to simply build yourself another job. You get to control the playing field and create a lifestyle freedom.
So begin there.
Once you’ve solidified your vision about what you want for your life, then build in your business aspirations to serve that more expansive vision.
To explore business ideas that fulfill your vision, begin by exploring the answers that lie at the intersection of these 3 questions…
- What do you love to do?
- What skills do you already have that people will pay for?
- What’s the service or product that you can bring to market most quickly?
Running A Profitable Mompreneur Business
When getting started as a solopreneur, your business will always be more lucrative more quickly if you can zero in on the kinds of services you can provide one-on-one or products you can create relatively quickly and sell with a fairly high profit margin.
One-to-one services like becoming a virtual assistant or taking on bookkeeping or providing nanny services in your own home will earn you significant revenue fastest.
Product-based businesses, such as an Etsy store or a homemade cookies company, require a lot of setup time and inventory before you make a dime. And, unless you set it up strategically from the jump, it can take a lot of time for those dimes to become dollars.
Passive income offerings, like asynchronous online courses, take a long time and a whole lot of know-how to create and then make profitable.
Online courses are my personal favorite way to make money online. Case in point, I have an online course about naming your life’s purpose and another online course about SEO for solopreneurs and an idea every 3 minutes or so about what the next course I create should be.
Even though I love them, online courses are undeniably a huge investment of time on the front-end and the learning curve is steep.
Despite the fact that I knew the ins and outs of online course creation and organic marketing, having built and sold my first online course company for six-figures in 2021, I *still* chose to launch my latest venture teaching SEO as a one-on-one content strategy consulting offer before expanding to include a course.
While the concept of passive income can be alluring and might even be your ultimate goal, I’d encourage you to cut your teeth in business by making more revenue from fewer clients with service-based endeavors first.
And if you’re curious about how you’ll be able to run a business and mom at full capacity, this article will give you tips about how to schedule your time as a work at home mom.
Once you’ve really honed your one-to-one service skills, you can figure out how to package what you do into a product or teach in a way that can scale up and serve folks in a one-to-many online mastermind group or membership model – or even as that penultimate passive income offering, via an asynchronous course.
What About Network Marketing Mompreneurs?
I believe the above advice applies for those who want to get started in the network marketing world too.
To build up a really profitable network marketing business, you need to have considerable reach. After an initial hooray and support of those you know, there will be a point of diminishing returns from pinging your friends on Facebook.
Consider the path my friend and client Julie Voris has taken. She’s an amazing BODi coach, but her talents and ambition reach far beyond the scope of Beachbody into success coaching and even motivational keynote speaking.
If the goal is quick revenue, I recommend creating a one-to-one service to cash flow your network marketing side hustle.
It will provide you more financial flexibility to build the network marketing side of your business strategically.
What Do You Need To Get Started?
You know that saying in poker that all you need is a chip and chair?
Point being: it doesn’t take much to win big if you know how to play the game.
In mompreneurship, as in poker, success comes down to two simple things…
- Are you good at fulfilling the promise you made to your clients?
- Can people find you when they need what you offer?
That’s really it.
If you do what you say you’ll do (and do it well) and if people who want what you’ve got can find you when they need you, you have a viable business.
1. Do you deliver what you promise to your clients?
This is usually a slam dunk.
I have zero doubt that you (YES! YOU!) are amazing at whatever it is that you do now or would like to do in your shiny new entrepreneurial venture. When given the opportunity to show up and do your thing, I bet you are spectacular.
2. Can people find you when they need what you offer?
This is where I see so many entrepreneurs go sideways.
They’re so good at what they do. But nobody can seem to find them when they’re in need of their services.
Or they’ve committed to building their businesses on social media and feel chained to their phones or get queasy every time they hear a story about a hacked account or an impending algorithm change.
How To Solve The Prospect Problem
I’m here to share with you the simplest way to solve the prospect problem.
Google.
Here’s why…
- With your business, you provide a solution to a problem.
- When people have a problem that they’re ready to solve, they use Google to search for information and solutions to their problem.
- If you position your website to meet your ideal prospects’ questions, the people who need your solution will be sent directly to your digital doorstep by Google.
Your ideal prospects are seeking you out via Google searches all day long. And you can find the terms they are searching for – the exact language they’re using – via free keyword research tools.
If your website is sitting there answering the questions they’re asking in the exact language they’re using, Google will serve up your website as the answer to their queries.
It’s as straightforward and simple as that.
And – best of all – Google does this for free.
Once Google sees how good you are at what you do via Google reviews and quality content written to meet the search queries your prospects are typing into the search bar, he will connect you with your ideal prospect right at the moment they need you for a long, long time without an ad spend.
It is bootstrapping scrappiness at its best.
SEO vs Social
If SEO seems like a lot of work, compare it to the alternative.
On social platforms, not only do you have to keep feeding the content beast, you have 24 hours to get it in front of people before it falls out the bottom of the bottomless algorithm bucket.
You also have no data ahead of time that can guide your content creation or ensure that you get in front of people precisely when they need you.
When building your organic marketing ecosystem and courting Google with quality content, you have precise data about how many people are searching for the terms you want to be found for each and every month, as well as how hard it will be to rank on Google for those terms.
You can create precise posts that connect with your target audience exactly when they’re seeking out the information that you’re sharing.
While it is true that it is initially harder to get into Google’s good graces, the benefit of that is that it is also harder to fall out of those good graces.
I received that average of 16,000 new users from Google for 3 full years. And I stopped creating new content halfway through the second year when my daughter was born.
Essentially, Google fed me heaps of new prospects while I did zero work on the content creation front for about 18 months before he started dialing it back.
For mompreneurs seeking a way to make money that allows them to actually look into the eyes of the beautiful family they’re doing it for without wondering if they should be making an Insta reel or TikTok instead, SEO is my very favorite tool to use as you begin to build towards that dream.
Is Becoming A Mompreneur Worth It?
Done with clarity of purpose and with the backing of solid business strategy, becoming a mompreneur is enriching personally and rewarding financially.
As you can see from Angela’s entrepreneurial income report that’s tracked her income for over 20 years, starting a new business does require some lead time for it to become a sole source of income, but it absolutely can be done in a way that drives significant revenue and leave time for a fully lived life.
But also consider the non-financial benefits.
How amazing is it to model for our kids the opportunities for creativity and employment that lie in our own hands?
In our household, my husband holds the traditional 9-5 gig and I am a digital entrepreneur.
Now that my kiddos are 6 and 4, they notice the differences.
They hear me talk about my clients and their progress with pride. And I have the flexibility to homeschool them each morning, knock off early to take them to soccer, and take their birthdays off each year even if it falls on a random Tuesday. And sometimes I take business calls with East Coast clients super early in the morning, record interviews with Australian podcasters late in the evening, or teach on the weekends.
My husband’s job makes getting the medical insurance we need to cover their doctors’ visits so much easier and his paycheck is steady whether he’s in a busy season or is using paid time off on vacation. He has to go into an office for a set amount of time each weekday and is accountable to higher ups in his organization. Then again, he’s generally 100% footloose and fancy free on the weekends.
We get to have awesome conversations about what’s available in the world and you better believe their little wheels are already turning.
To me, that’s the best part. By showing them what’s available, they’re inspired to think about what they want for their own lives down the line.
And I love having the time to have those conversations with them.
Right now, I have 3 weeks blocked off in my calendar for the holidays. I have 3 whole weeks without a single dang meeting or business commitment planned.
We’re going to have campouts under the Christmas tree, bake cookies and drink hot chocolate, and engage in general holiday merriment without calendar constraint.
I have zero doubt I’ll work on my business a bit during that time, but that’s only because I genuinely love what I do. Give my brain a little white space and she’ll come up with some great ideas.
That said, I have the freedom and flexibility to slot that work in whenever I want to. Or not, if I’m not feeling it this year.
Make no mistake, it’s hard work to be a mompreneur. This isn’t an “easy” path. But, for me, it’s hard in all the right ways.
Because no matter how you choose to work, there are always sacrifices.
I will take the early mornings and late nights to never have to wonder who will watch my son or daughter when they’re sick or feel like my allegiance to a company might be questioned because I choose to prioritize a recital over a meeting.
If this sense of agency and vision resonates with you, then you just might be a mompreneur too.
If so, welcome to the club, friend. I’m really glad you’re here.
—
by: Lauren Gaggioli
Lauren Gaggioli is an digital entrepreneur who loves building online businesses and supporting her fellow solopreneurs as they share their gifts with the world.
A big believer in intentional living, Lauren created her online course about purpose – Big Why Life – to help folks from all walks of life create their personal mission statement and support healthy habits to support living a life of purpose.
Lauren is an organic SEO consultant, having leveraged organic marketing to grow and sell her first business, an online ACT & SAT prep course provider. She now supports her fellow digital entrepreneurs with organic content strategy consulting services, the Organic Marketing Ecosystem course, and through her online mastermind for entrepreneurs.
When she’s not working, you can find her training for her next runDisney half marathon or channeling serious Molly Weasley vibes knitting up a new sweater, puttering in her garden, homebrewing beer with her husband, or making a delicious mess of the kitchen with her kids in their home just outside Seattle.
