We were lucky to catch up with Leslie Forde recently and have shared our conversation below.

Leslie, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I completely burned out after returning to work when my second child was born. I was trying to navigate an expanded role, while I was sleeping in one hour increments, caring for a newborn and a toddler. It was miserable and I felt like I was going to die. I just couldn’t figure out what other parents were doing to make it work. I knew that I didn’t want my career to stall or stop, I wanted to grow. But I also needed to be able to care for myself and my well-being to maintain my energy and creative problem solving skills.

At the time, I didn’t know that more than 40% of Mothers pause their careers for caregiving because it’s so hard. Later, when I was describing to a start-up founder the dilemma most Moms face trying to manage stress, I had an epiphany that led to the Mom’s Hierarchy of Needs framework. Because before we have kids, we usually allocate anything that we would do for our mental physical or emotional health, to our discretionary time. Which basically means after everything else is done.

The funny thing is, once you have kids, there is no ‘done.’ Neither our children’s well-being, like their health and milestones, or our household responsibilities are ever done. And when I realized this I became pretty ruthless about making space for my well-being, which is way up at the top of what is now, the Mom’s Hierarchy Needs framework.

Like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the foundational things that we prioritize for our survival, are at the base. But we rarely reach those aspirational categories at the top, like self-care, interests, and healthy adult relationships, because everything at the bottom is never done.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

During the pandemic I became a full time entrepreneur by accident and suddenly I had to turn this research, that I was so excited about, into a set of products that would generate revenue and income. At first, I took what I had been learning in my national study of the pandemic’s impact on work/life for parents and shared it with employers to help keep caregivers in the workforce.

The lack of childcare and access to on-site school, at the beginning of the pandemic, was particularly devastating to Mothers and pushed millions out of the workforce. And the extreme conditions, helped this concept, of creating and inclusive space that allowed parents to succeed take hold. So, I began to share my frameworks and research with organizations as a consultant and speaker.

I knew that I was having an impact on other Moms who were beyond burned out because I would get messages from people who attended one of my live sessions or read an article I’d written, asking for my help. Usually, they wanted my advice for specific situations they faced, dealing with a loss, managing stress or suffering through challenges in the workplace.

And this idea, which became the next stage of the business, to create an app to reach more Mothers, with exactly the right information that they needed based on what was happening in their lives began to take shape. I wanted to go beyond my writing and workshops and take them along a similar wellness journey that helped me emerge from burnout.

The idea of creating an app wouldn’t go away but I kept trying to talk myself out of it. I thought, ‘it’s going to be too expensive’ and ‘it’s going to require upfront capital’ or ‘it’s really a different thing to manage a software team as an entrepreneur versus when you were working in big companies.’

Then one day I was out running and just the idea, for what is now the TimeCheck wellness app, came rushing into my consciousness as a series of images. So, I stopped, took notes on my phone. Later, I drew it on a piece of paper and then started asking friends and family for some advice and how to find an engineer who could build it.

I knew that if I could get people into the habit of thinking about their wellbeing time. And turning that awareness into small, persistent new choices about how they spend their time, that I could change things.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

So, as I mentioned, I launched the business and it was unplanned, during the height of the pandemic. So, to generate revenue after 6 weeks of interviewing HR and DEI professionals, I dove in with skills I already had as a researcher, writer and consultant, to create services that employers would find valuable in support of working parents and caregivers. The idea for the Wellness app came later. And I really struggled with how to make that happen logistically and how to fund it. So, I kept talking myself out of it before diving into it.

I began to worry that a Wellness app by itself, even a really intuitive one, may not be enough to convince beleaguered moms to prioritize themselves. So as I was working on the app, I came up with the idea to pair the premium version of it, with a subscription. Then, I could surround Mothers with more support, like live events, a community and beautiful physical products that would act like a ‘positive trigger’ to encourage them to take moments for themselves.

I also started distilling the very specific strategies I’ve developed over the years to save time, into short resource guides. Everything from making dinner to making decisions about when to volunteer or how to push back on unreasonable demands at work. I started to think about how to replicate the hundreds of interviews, hundreds of books and thousands of research responses, that helped me learn how to do this for myself into a series of products.

And everyone tells you that it’s exhausting and exhilarating all at the same time and it is. And I was reluctant to create a subscription, with physical products or even to build out a software app, because of the costs involved. I knew that with two young children and a really demanding schedule, with my clients and my life, that fundraising for it was probably not my fastest path to launch.

So, I took the profits from my consulting and research work with employers to become my own investor. And I used the profits from the business to pour into the development for the app, a project that I thought would take a couple months but took more than a year. And there were so many plot twists along the way that were incredibly difficult to navigate but also gave me more information, to refine how I positioned the value of this approach and ultimately how to convince this exhausted audience why caring for their own mental, physical, and emotional health, needs to be among their top priorities.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

As I mentioned, there’s also a physical product component that’s part of the subscription. I thought I was going to curate and ship those products myself but after doing quite a bit of research, I had a small advisory group of moms who tested all of the products and responded to surveys about them for months prior to launch, I realized that I just didn’t have the expertise, bandwidth, or space living in a condo, to do that.

So, I found another small local business a gift shop within walking distance from my home to partner for the physical care packages. Although it meant taking less margin it allowed me to manage this launch and have expertise for the physical products piece and that was pretty critical to be able to pull it off.

So many things happened that I couldn’t predict in addition to realizing that I couldn’t curate and ship all of these packages by myself. For example, the first version of the ecommerce site broke because didn’t work with some custom code that was on my website. And I learned that people couldn’t place orders.

I also learned, on the night of my product launch, that the landing page software I licensed which also happened to be the way that I’m taking payments for the subscriptions was down for like 48 hours. My parents were in town caring for my kids because my husband was away during the launch, and long story short they were locked out of my place and I had to leave my own launch event early to pick them and my children up. Who were all tired, cranky and had to be fed when I got home.

As an entrepreneur you have to be able to take these challenges with some good humor and willingness to problem solve. So, there were several last-minute pivots to how I handled the ecommerce piece but it’s been a really interesting and gratifying part of what I’m doing on the consumer side of my business for Moms. It’s still new, the launch was in June but now, I’m also positioning this subscription and the beautiful care packages as gifts for Mothers, particularly Mothers returning to work, on the (B2B) employer side of my business.

Contact Info:

• Website: MomsHierarchyofNeeds.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/moms_hierarchy_of_needs/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MomsHierarchyOfNeeds
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/momshierarchyofneeds/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/momshierarchy
• Youtube: N/A
• Yelp: N/A
• Other: https://www.timecheck.momshierarchyofneeds.com/ (TimeCheck wellness app) https://momshierarchyofneeds.lpages.co/shop (Subscription purchase page)

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