start a family friendly business

I was working as a trainer when my first baby was born. When she was a few months old I realised I didn’t want to put her in a nursery full-time and that my job didn’t suit part time hours. My job also involved travelling around the UK, so it just wasn’t going to fit my life with a baby. Looking back, it would have been much easier if I’d worked this out before she was born!

I’d been a freelance trainer a few years earlier, so I knew self-employment could be an option. However, freelance training was just as inflexible as employed training. I needed to know which businesses would work around a baby, and how on earth was I going to find the time to fit everything in?

I researched some business ideas, but I couldn’t find a list of family-friendly businesses anywhere. So I spent hours trawling the internet to find out what other business mums were doing. I tried a party plan, but selling another company’s products just didn’t grab me. I was thinking about running children’s cooking parties but then I found out, to my surprise, that I was expecting our second baby – due just fifteen months after the first. With two babies, I would need a business that was very flexible indeed. One that I could fit into a spare half-hour here and there, preferably without leaving the house!

I knew I wasn’t the only mum who didn’t want to go back to work after maternity leave and I wanted to help, so I started my website, BusinessPlusBaby.com. By then I’d seriously considered at least six business ideas and none were right for me, but I thought that they might help someone else. So I wrote a series of articles called ‘Business Ideas For Mums’, giving the pros and cons of each idea.

By coincidence, Antonia Chitty (author of a series of parenting and business books) had been thinking of writing a book of business ideas just like mine. We got to know each other online and together we wrote ‘Start a Family Friendly Business: 129 Business Ideas for Mums’ which was published last year.

So having two babies has taken me from trainer to website owner and now to becoming a published author! In many ways my two little ones have made my working life more complicated, but they have also sent me in a direction I simply wouldn’t have thought about in my child-free days.

For more information, email Helen@businessplusbaby.com