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The Dot-com Mom

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They run their businesses on everyone else’s schedules. Today’s “mompreneurs” do market research, line up publicity, and assemble purchase orders within little windows of time sandwiched between carpool, naptime, and grocery shopping.

“It is multi-tasking at its finest,” explains Gabrielle DeSantis, co-owner with fellow mom Monica Hillman, of Gigi Hill Bags, a California handbag company that grew out of conversations shared while watching their daughters’ soccer games.

It makes sense that the World Wide Web would create infinite opportunities for meaningful work given the 24/7 nature of motherhood itself. It seems to be a perfect fit. Moms are already used to finding a few minutes here or there to get stuff done for our families. But the Internet allows enterprising mamas to literally take care of business at any time of the day. My colleagues at Yahoo! recently surveyed women with CEO aspirations and found that 67 percent said they were confident they could be successful launching or maintaining a business on the ‘net.

Indeed, in my search to find a few women to share their stories through the networking group Ladies Who Launch (I’m a new member of the LA chapter), I encountered ambitious moms working round the clock. For Britt Menzies, owner of a philanthropic children’s T-shirt line, we talked via cell phone on the soccer field one afternoon. Ann Murphy let her daughter watch a video in the den while we stole a few minutes in the dining room to chat on the telephone about her chocolate venture. And DeSantis and Hillman answered questions by email over a weekend because none of us could make the time to schedule a phone date. This is the life of a Dot-com Mom.

“If you would have asked me nine years ago if I was going to be an entrepreneur, I would have said you were crazy,” says Menzies, who lives in Atlanta, Georgia and launched StinkyKids Tees after painting a whimsical picture of her daughter dressed as a ballerina. The experience (and the notice by friends and family of her talent) awakened her artistic aspirations and gave her an outlet to raise money for charity.

“I think that your children truly bring out all of the things you have ever have wanted to be,” the former accountant for Coca Cola explains of her business which donates 10 percent of its profits to Washington, DC-area nonprofit, Books, Bears and Bonnets. The organization supports children and adults fighting cancer.

All of these women told me that motherhood motivated them to go into business on their own. They say the web makes it possible for them to pursue their ventures while balancing everything else in their busy lives.