“A better term for failure is feedback.”

      — Jesse Wilson

      Mothers are born entrepreneurs. As soon as we become aware of our ability to create something as perfect and stupendous as children, it becomes very easy to dream of our next magnum opus.

      I have owned a handful of businesses in my career — some great and some stinkers. What I find most extraordinary is how similar the themes of success are, whether you are running a babysitting business or a national magazine. What is even more extraordinary are the women who do it with small children underfoot. What I hope to accomplish with this book is to teach you about my mistakes and show you my successes, and introduce you to some other successful mothers in business so that you can learn from them as well. It takes a community to raise a child; the same goes for a new business.

      As women, we are born community builders. My intention in being an entrepreneur has always been to build a network of strong women who have aligned priorities. My intention as a mother is to be the primary caregiver to my children, and to be the great mother that my mom taught me to be. I think this has been one of my most successful strategies at driving whatever business I am working on; the fact that my network of women is continuously growing and our intention, as a whole, is to share with each other as well as share similar values as mothers.

      As the founding editor of The MOMpreneur Magazine, I had the opportunity to read almost every new small-business or women’s interest book that came on the Canadian market — a lot of reading. What I found most disappointing was the fact that most authors were uncomfortable discussing their flops as well as their successes. It is when we are truly challenged and life becomes really difficult that the most important lessons are learned.

      Did you know that you just bought a book on how to be successful as an entrepreneurial mom from a flop? Now before you run back to the store or try to figure out how to return this book to Amazon, let me reassure you that you will come away from this book with tools that will allow you to breathe easier and stand tall in times that test your resolve. The only way I know how to do that is to be truly honest about the challenges I have faced in my entrepreneurial career and to tell you how I have been successful while being the primary caregiver to my two children.

      As I mentioned earlier, I am a true serial entrepreneur. The business I am most proud of today, however, is the one that seriously flopped — and I mean flopped with a capital F. My real passion for being entrepreneurial began while I was in university earning money on the side by working with children with severe neurological disabilities. For the most part, I worked with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). By the time I graduated, I had earned some respect in the community as a woman who cared about these children and advocated for the families’ rights in attaining funding from the provincial government. That client care, I believe, is what allowed my small consulting company to grow into an intervention agency that was 100 percent government funded as a provincial charitable organization within four years.

      Unfortunately, being 100 percent government funded meant that I really only had one client; the government. There were no multiple streams of income to balance and stabilize my cash flow. Every decision made at the provincial level regarding these programs directly affected my business and yet was totally out of my control. Although it was some of the best work I have ever done, and some of the work that I am most proud of today, this business ended in a financial disaster that took years for me to recover from.

      Although that failure was one of the most difficult times in my career and personal life, the lessons I learned from it have been some of the most important. When I look back at this company, I can now see certain key attributes that led to its failure. I am hoping these failures help you to understand your business better and how you can sustain your success for the long term.

      Our first year of business was golden. We had cash in the bank, our incoming cash was flowing, clients were abundant, and my entire team and I were energized by the successes we were seeing in the treatment of our clients. We were able to see children learn everyday life skills such as communicating with others, playing with other children, and using the toilet — when other professionals had written them off as children who would never progress past the point of the developmental age of infancy. One of my most rewarding moments was seeing the mother of an eight-year-old child hear her son speak her name for the first time. As the population of newly diagnosed autistic children began to grow, the provincial agency that managed the funding for these programs began to restrict its spending in order to accommodate all children coming into that region.

      When I look back, I see how our failure was inevitable from the beginning, although I certainly didn’t see it then. Because I saw the tremendous growth opportunities available to the agency, I began to grow the charity aggressively. I signed a commercial lease for five years with a personal guarantee on the contract. I did not spend money at the strategic development level on consultation from a lawyer, an accountant, or professional fund-raisers — the equivalent of a professional sales team in the charitable sector. This would prove to be a terrible mistake.

      Because our funding came directly from the provincial government, I did not invest in fund-raising for our charity outside of that stream of income. This would prove fatal as it ensured our reliance on one client and one client alone — the government. I clearly remember having a payroll of more than $50,000 every two weeks but only a few thousand dollars in my bank account. Despite an enormous accounts receivable, our income was just not reliable as far as timing.

      As with most entrepreneurs, I scraped and clawed my way out of those situations, often personally supporting the payroll, always believing it would get better. What it ended up doing was driving me further and further into an untenable financial situation. As more and more children were diagnosed and came to the province for assistance, the provincial government had no choice but to start to take a look at how much funding was allotted per child in order to address the needs of all of the children pouring into the system. This is where the business really started to crumble. To compensate, I took more and more children on as clients in order to meet the needs of our miniscule budget.

      As our cash flow became more restricted, I began to borrow small amounts because I believed that the work we were doing was such high quality that our program would continue to sustain itself and grow to new levels of success. I never thought our funding would be eliminated. I believed the good work we were doing would be recognized. In fact, the opposite happened.

      As things became more stressful, it became more difficult to see outside my arena of hardship for a solution to break free of that sinking ship. When I look back, I think I was young and too naïve to believe it would ever completely sink, but sink it did and in a big way. Although I can now see its downward spiral over three years, I wasn’t able to admit it until the bitter end, up to my eyeballs in debt, having borrowed from the bank, my parents, and through my credit cards — if there was money available, I used it on the company. We finally closed our doors on September 24, 2004, eight weeks after my wedding — you can only imagine what my mother-in-law thought! I still find it hard to believe that a service that was so popular and had a waiting list was not able to sustain itself. I now realize