Quietly Building Empires Between School Drop Off and Bedtime
A love letter to the women doing it all in the margins of their lives
There is a particular kind of woman I think about a lot:
She is answering a client email while the kettle boils.
She is drafting a proposal in the school car park.
She is doing her bookkeeping after everyone else is in bed, one eye on the screen and one ear on the monitor.
She is not doing this because she has to, she is doing this because she is building something, something that is entirely hers, that she started from nothing and that she shows up for every single day even when it is hard and even when nobody is watching.
She is you, she is me, she is probably half the women in your phone contacts right now.
And I think it is about time we talked about her
The invisible work of women in business
There is a version of entrepreneurship that gets a lot of airtime. The big launch, the viral moment, the overnight success. Those things are wonderful when they happen but they are not the whole story and for most of us they are not even most of the story.
Most of the story is showing up quietly, doing the unglamorous work, figuring things out without a roadmap, managing a business and a household and relationships and your own mental health all at the same time and somehow, somehow, still moving forward.
Women in business carry a particular kind of weigh because we so often do it with less recognition, less resource and less room to get things wrong and yet, we do it anyway.
With warmth and creativity and a level of resilience that genuinely takes my breath away when I stop to look at it properly.
Why I believe in celebrating each other loudly
I have been lucky enough to find my people in the women in business community. The ones who share opportunities they could have kept to themselves, who leave reviews without being asked, who send a voice message that just says 'I saw your post and I think you're doing brilliantly' on a day when you really needed to hear it and the ones who mention my name in a room full of opportunities.
This kind of community is not accidental, it is built by women who have decided that there is enough room for everyone and that someone else's success does not diminish their own. It is one of the things I love most about what I do and the world I get to operate in.
We do better when we are loud about the things that deserve to be celebrated: Each other's wins, each other's courage and each other's quietly built empires.
A moment I want to share
Recently I was named a finalist in the AusMumpreneur Awards and I am still sitting with what that means.
I started Zelix Virtual in one of the hardest seasons of my life. I had no guarantee it would work and two young children watching me figure it out in real time, yet I backed myself and kept going.
To be recognised by an organisation that exists specifically to celebrate women who are building businesses alongside their families feels deeply meaningful to me. AusMumpreneur champions the women who are doing exactly what I described at the start of this blog, the ones building in the margins, showing up in the gaps and creating something real from very little.
If you want to know more about them and the incredible community they have created you can find them at www.ausmumprenuer.com.
This post is for you, Mum.
If you are reading this and you are in the thick of it right now, building something between all the other things life is asking of you, I want you to know that what you are doing is remarkable.
You do not need an award to validate it, or a viral moment, a six figure month or anyone else's permission to feel proud of what you have built.
But if you are ever having a day where it all feels like too much and you are wondering whether it is worth it, come back to this. Find your people. Let them celebrate you a little. And then get back to building.
You know who you are.
Shontelle Prout is the founder of Zelix Virtual, a Brisbane-based copywriting and web design business for small and medium businesses. She writes with warmth, without the corporate speak and always with heart.
Comments