Parenting has been around since the dawn of humanity and entrepreneurship for nearly as long. So why is it that so often aspiring entrepreneurs are given the advice to start their businesses before they have a family? Sure, we might say that it’s easier to be financially nimble when you’re only responsible for yourself and are willing to subsist on ramen, and it’s certainly easier to code for days on end without those pesky babies around, but being a parent and a new entrepreneur are not mutually exclusive.
So what’s the upside of starting a business as a parent (or finding a co-founder who has kids)?
- Parents are better able to deal with difficult clients, because nobody can enrage you like your own kid. Nobody. Once you pass through this gate of fire, crazy clients are a piece of cake – and you start to get a glimpse of these “boundaries” therapists like to talk about.
- Parents meet a wide variety of people through their kids and have a guaranteed topic to get the conversation rolling. Watching how someone treats their child and others is an illuminating experience.
- They are willing to dea with the dirtiest aspects of a job but at the same time…
- They can delegate and step back to preserve their sanity.
- They delegate even though this other person, no matter how wonderful they sound or how good they look on paper, will never understand their business, I mean, kid the way they do.
- There is lots of advice on both parenting and entrepreneurship, most of it diametrically opposed to advice that came out just a week ago. Parents have to learn to filter out what doesn’t fit their vision or go completely insane, and so do entrepreneurs.
- Parents manage feature creep: no matter how envious they may be of all the activities some other child is excelling in, they know that adding extra features / piling on more activities is a sure path to burnout.
- Parents compartmentalize: even if having a child, as Elizabeth Stone says, is like “decid[ing] forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body,” parents still have to drop off their screaming child at preschool, trust that the tears will dry soon, and turn their full attention to the task at hand.
Like having a child, starting a new venture is a completely new plunge for each person. Both may have been done successfully for thousands of years, but knowing that is not always a comfort. Still, the final goal is the same for both your fledglings: to ensure that they become able to stand on their own. Both parents and entrepreneurs have to immediately start planning for their own obsolescence.
[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]http://www.penultimategeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/moi.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Marina Braverman is an Austin-based writer, editor, and designer. [/author_info] [/author]