Saturday, May 16, 2015

WOMAN SPECIAL................... Meet the mompreneurs

Meet the mompreneurs


Motherhood sabbaticals are inspiring women to spot voids in the market and birth new business ventures to fill them

Six bowls come crashing to the floor, scattering shards of maternal terror. Almost instantly, the culprit finds himself being lifted by his armpits and set on a high chair.From the vantage point, the eightmonth-old watches the crime scene being cleared. Thank god, you were there, her in-laws concur but what if I hadn't been, Radhika Bhalerao wonders, coaxing the crockery cabinet and later, Google for answers. Soon, doorknobs in her 2BHK in Thane move up, cushions cover dangerous coffee table edges, locks imprison glassware and Bhalerao's definition of auditing changes. For this MBA in Finance, an audit now means crawling under strangers' sofas and inspecting their toilets.
“Accidents don't give you a prior notice,“ says 33-year-old Bhalerao, a research analyst at a management consultancy who, during her motherhood sabbatical, found a gap in child-proofing services in India though it was a 25-yearold industry in the US. “A UNICEF study pointed out that almost 20 lakh kids world over lose their lives every year due to injuries at home,“ adds Bhalerao. Soon after this breakthrough, she co-founded Blossom Child Proofing Solutions which offers safety services to hospitals and homes across the city by offering products like electrical sockets, latches and corner cushions (as a buffer for sharp edges). By this virtue, Bhalerao has unwittingly joined the growing tribe of mompreneurs -mothers who birth a business soon after they deliver a baby .Given the sheer number of new mothers cutting their corporate umbilical cords to launch daycare centres, invent childand-mom friendly apps, publish children's books or start personalized stationery brands, the womb, it would appear, is a pretty good startup incubator.
The mompreneur's strength to re-invent comes primarily from greed -to spend more time with the little one -but that's not all. Flexi-schedules and worklife balance are still anemic concepts in corporate India. “How many organizations that encourage women to come back to work have facilities to take care of young kids?“ asks Ruchita Dar Shah, administrator of the Facebook group, First Moms Club that has over 27,000 members. “Also flexi-hours can mean mind-numbing downgrades in quality of work,“ she says. This leads mothers to turn enterprise-hunters.
Watching their tots crawl, babble, fall, read and grow spark ideas. “I felt I had seen cooking shows, carpentry shows, all kinds of shows, but never an honest, maybe humorous and helpful show on cleaning a baby's potty , or giving them a bath, or taking them on a plane,“ says actor Tara Sharma of Khosla Ka Ghosla fame who started a multi-platform show called `The Tara Sharma Show' five years ago after her first son Zen was born.Sharma suffers no illusions of being a superstar but soon after her pregnancy , her acting offers started drying up. `Never stagnate... always reinvent yourself ', her late dad, playwright Partap Sharma would often tell her. “At 72, with 24-houroxygen support, as he had emphysema, dad was still always doing new things and it really resonated with me that I must create my own opportunities and my own content,“ says the ambitious actor, who pitched the idea of a parenting show-cumvlog to husband Roopak, who loved it.“He is now the co-producer of our kids and our show,“ says Sharma, a mother of two.
Multi-tasking, feels Sharma, makes mothers more efficient businesswomen but, as it turns out, that's just one of many assets that make moms better entrepreneurs. In her TED talk, Jill Salzman, author of Found It: A Field Guide for Mom Entrepreneurs, puts it down to innovating, multi-tasking and marketing.Her idea is that since motherhood doesn't come with a manual, women innovate as they go, learn to do several things at once and, of course, it helps that they like to talk and network. A mother's intuition and tenacity don't hurt either.
“I became quite the hustler after I became a mum,“ says Rina Nathani, who learnt to manage time by installing CCTVs at home to keep an eye on kids for instance -a skill that she suspects helps her quickly recognize employee strengths and weaknesses. Nathani, who worked as a director with KPMG for 12 years, now runs Findurclass.com, a ready reckoner for extra-curricular classes in Mumbai.The idea for the site came after struggling to find offbeat summer classes for her kids, then 8 and 2. Soon, the idea of an online directory dawned, her daughter learnt a year's worth of Spanish in a month in a language class and today, Nathani's workday is harder than the hardest day of her corporate career. “But it's stimulating since I am constantly creating,“ says this mompreneur, whose maternal sensibilities help her design category names such as `mom-approved'. She even runs these categories and icons by her 10-year-old daughter to ensure they are easy to navigate. Recent ly, in fact, her daughter even introduced her to Rubik's cube tutors -a breed she didn't know existed in Mumbai.
Quite often, mompreneurs get business advice from tots. “Don't put characters on my backpack label. People can't read what's written,“ two-year-old Rhea told her mother, Sheetal Goel, founder of personalized stationery brand Cupik Design who soon made it a policy . The name `Cupik' itself came from her daughter. “It was her first word. She meant `cupcake,“ says Goel, who was engrossed in growing her graphic design firm till the day she sketched a fairy and pasted it on Rhea's water bottle. Soon, Goel was sitting up till 3am fulfilling requests for more kid-friendly characters and designs from her classmates and their parents. Even her daughter's pre-primary teacher has placed orders for stationery .
Mompreneurs also have the unique privilege of watching both their kids and businesses grow simultaneously . Bhalerao, in fact, wishes she could take her boisterous three-year-old along on houseaudits for child-proofing. “He will probably find nooks that I may be missing,“ she laughs.
Sharmila Ganesan

TOI10MAY15

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