Do you think starting a business makes life easier or harder? I think it depends.
I’ve started two real companies and a handful of side hustles over the years. The first, an ad agency called MATCH that I launched with my good friend BA Albert back in 1996, didn’t make life easier but it certainly made it better. It was one of the most fun and satisfying stretches of my career.
We subleased space in King Plow Arts Center, a renovated plow factory complex in west midtown Atlanta. Our studio was in a two-story building dating back to 1890, with old hardwood floors that sloped downhill, ancient brick walls, tremendously tall ceilings — and windows that opened with a metal handle that was stamped with the manufacturer’s name: Bliss. The train tracks ran so close to our windows that the racket of a passing train made conversation momentarily impossible and rattled the teeth in your head.
The romance of a startup
Those early years were heady times. During the workday, we drove all over town pitching business and meeting with clients and then went back to the office to do all the creative work after 5. BA and I would sit across from each other at the borrowed dining table we shared as a desk, with the setting sun glowing against the brick walls and our dogs settling down beside us for what was often a late night.
Did starting that business make life easier? Absolutely not. We routinely worked 60-hour weeks. But I would not trade those years for the world. It was the right chapter of life to throw myself into my career.
Then I had a baby
When Steve and I had our son Sam, everything changed. BA and I figured we’d always brought our dogs to the office, so how different could it be to bring a baby? (The bliss of ignorance.)
We had expanded from one studio to three, knocking down walls in between, but only had one room with a door. That became the nursery, with some soundproofing and a hand-me-down crib. Sam’s nanny Pete met us there every morning, which was a perfect set up, except when she left at 5. I never seemed to be finished with work by 5, so Sam would crawl around in my office while I wrapped things up.
BA and I kept dog crates in both our offices (the extra studios we leased meant we finally had our own desks again) in case a visiting client was nervous about dogs underfoot. We found Container Store desktops that fit the crates, so we used them as credenzas (or dog-enzas).
A turning point
One evening I was the only one left at MATCH, and I needed to run three rooms away to grab something from the printer. Sam had crawled into the dog crate and was happily playing with a stuffed dog toy. I gently pushed the crate door closed (does it make it any better that I didn’t lock it?) and raced to the printer. In the 20 seconds I was out of the room, Sam noticed the water bottle clamped to the inside of the dog crate and began slurping away at the nozzle. Something clearly had to change.
Starting a business to make life easier – this time around
When I founded Tribe in 2002, I was intentionally starting a business to make life easier. In fact, that’s pretty much what it says on the Tribe website about our purpose: To make life better — for our clients, their employees, our employees and the people around us.
For the first time in my career, I was putting my personal life first and fitting my career in around my life, instead of vice versa. That was a monumental shift.
The move to real office space
For the first several years, Tribe operated as a remote agency. Except there was no such thing as a remote agency then — we were what the ad business called a Rolodex agency. We were a few full-time people and a handful of freelancers.
Eventually, it became frustrating not to be able to work face-to-face. I wanted to be able to spread out our work on a big table and point to things. I wanted to be able to talk in person, instead of over email and phone.
Anywhere within a 3-mile radius
Part of starting a business to make life easier was the desire to avoid a long commute in Atlanta traffic. I told our commercial real estate broker that our office space could be anywhere in Atlanta, as long as it was five minutes from home and five minutes from Sam’s school. He found us a high-rise building at the edge of the Chattahoochee National Wilderness, right down the hill from our house.
You can panini anything
The new office was close enough to Sam’s school that I could easily serve as a volunteer lunch monitor. I’d stand by the salad bar snapping my metal tongs at kids as they went by, trying to entice them to eat some fresh vegetables.
It gave me a chance to get to know the kids and the teachers, and to overhear some hilarious conversations. Like one little boy wondering why the school never served sushi. Or, when the cafeteria added a panini maker, another boy rushing over with a peanut butter sandwich saying, “You know, you can panini anything.”
The desire for flexibility
Flexibility, for me, was one of the most fundamental elements of starting a business to make life easier — instead of starting a business that my life would have to accommodate. And many other women who own businesses seem to agree.
Years ago, I wrote a book on female entrepreneurs called Run Your Business Like a Girl. Like me, most of the women business owners started their companies partly to have more flexibility. A nearly universal comment was that they didn’t mind working hard. They just wanted to have the flexibility to decide when they would work.
Being in control of my own time was huge for me, especially being able to book meetings at times that worked best for my life and to plan travel around our family calendar. I won’t say I never felt torn between the responsibilities of parenting and business — but I had a lot more power over which demands I made priorities — and how I scheduled them around each other.
22 years later
I’ve been running Tribe for more than two decades now. (For more on how we built Tribe by saying no, try this post.) Steve and I are empty nesters, so theoretically, I could go back to working as hard as I did in the MATCH days. But that’s a young person’s game. In my 20s and 30s I thoroughly enjoyed throwing myself into my career. In my 60s, I’m more interested in building the careers of the people who work at Tribe. Of staying connected with our adult kids and our extended family. Of pursuing personal projects, like this blog, or writing fiction. In this decade, I’m most interested in just enjoying these precious days.
So, does starting a business make life easier? It certainly can, if you create your company with that in mind.
