Helping Moms Juggle: Juggling Mother Sara Sutton Fell, CEO of Flexjobs (Part 4)

SM: I have noticed a trend where a lot of people are dropping out of their careers to become stay-at-home moms. What are your thoughts on that? What do you see happening?

SS: Boulder is a very work-life balanced place. People move there because they want to be able to play. Local employers have more work flexibility than many other places in the country, even compared to progressive areas like the Bay Area.

SM: The Bay Area is very progressive, but I see a lot of people not working in the Bay Area.

SS: It is really hard. If you are in a high-powered, challenging role it is very difficult to do both. I know more women who do not work in the Bay Area than I do in Boulder. As a parent, you go through a realization that if you are working it should be worthwhile. It is taking time away from your family, and often you need to be making fairly good money to even make it financially viable due to child care costs.

A lot of women go through an important decision-making process as to whether they want to take that step back. If they cannot find opportunities which are in line with their careers and are flexible, then I think the decision becomes even more clear. I do think it is a challenge to find those opportunities unless you happen to be with an employer who has some great policies in place.

I have a fantastic friend here in the Bay Area who works and she is a mom. She is doing very well professionally, and she constantly feels the pressure that she is being compared to people who do not have kids who will work 80-hour weeks. She was not hired to do that and she is doing her job very well, but she feels pressured and almost guilty that she is not able to do more. There is a culture of comparison in most companies that women are penalized for wanting to draw their boundaries to enable them to spend time at home.

SM: When you were pregnant and you wanted to work flexible hours, where did that quest lead you?

SS: I started consulting for a couple of different companies. I did 15-20 hours a week. One of the companies was LoveToKnow and the other one was YourDictionary, which were run by the same person. The chairman of those companies, Howard Love, ran those companies virtually. LoveToKnow hires about 50 writers but they are stay-at-home moms who want flexibility in their work. Howard was having a hard time finding them.

We started talking about the challenges we were facing. I wanted flexible opportunities and could not find them. He wanted employees looking for flexible work and could not find them. There was no place that put them together. I was really amazed at the low quality in this niche. There are 56 scams to every real job in the work-from-home/telecommute niche. In this work-from-home idea, it has gotten to be so associated with scams and non-professional opportunities, as well as stigmas that employees working from home would not be doing anything, that employers look at it as a feel good perk as opposed to an economic benefit to the company, which it very much is.

Howard and I kept talking about this for a few months. About four months after my son was born, we decided that with my background in the job industry and his history of starting and investing in companies that we should start Flexjobs. He put in some seed money and I invested a bit as well. We decided to give it a go and see if we could create something in this niche.

SM: What year was this?

SS: This was in 2007. We worked on building a prototype in 2007 and we launched a beta in May of 2007. Our business model at that point was that it would be free for the job seekers and we would charge the employers. It was similar to what I had done at JobDirect. I soon found this was more challenging because there is no one sandbox you go and play in to find people who hire telecommuters.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Helping Moms Juggle: Juggling Mother Sara Sutton Fell, CEO of Flexjobs
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