Entrepreneurial Women Unlock Secrets to Success in an Uberized Economy

I’ve been studying work and family for three decades and lately I’ve seen the emergence of a new, now burgeoning, industry addressing the needs of those who’ve off-ramped – taken time off for to start a family – and of those who want to maintain professional careers but not full-time.  In the past few months on Work and Life, the show I host on SiriusXM’s Business Radio Powered by Wharton, I’ve spoken with (in alphabetical order) Marci Alboher, VP at Encore.org, Carol Fishman Cohen, CEO and Co-Founder of iRelaunch; Sara Sutton Fell, Founder and CEO of FlexJobs; Debbie Epstein Henry, Founder of Flex-Time Lawyers; Jody Miller, Founder and CEO of Business Talent Group; and  Allison Karl O’Kelly, Founder and CEO of MomCorps. And there are many others, such as Sally Thornton, Founder of Forshay, which applies design thinking to people practices, and Katharine Zaleski and Milena Berry, Founders of PowerToFly, which seeks to match (primarily) female tech employees who want to work from home with employers embracing a remote workforce.

Based on their own experiences in high-powered careers, and their attempts at off-and-on-ramping and in seeking greater flexibility and control, these leaders are helping others find their niche in the labor market for executives and other professionals.   In no particular order, I’ve compiled some of the highlights of these conversations here, focusing on what players in this market need to know.  

These ideas are part of the movement toward more varied forms of employment, options that are built on the concept that both employee and employer derive value from customized conditions for their relationship in which both have choice in defining its terms.   This variation is an important asset for the increasing numbers of people – men and (for now, at least) mostly women – interested in pursuing non-standard tracks as well as for those that hire them. 

Carol Fishman Cohen, a graduate of Harvard Business School, returned to work at Bain Capital after an  11-year maternity leave. Her own re-entry experience led to her subsequent successful career founding iRelaunch.  Some of Carol’s tips:

• Do a career assessment before you try to ramp up. It may turn out that you don’t want to return to being a lawyer or a banker or an accountant.
• Build up your confidence by reconnecting with your network. Fishman Cohen recommends LinkedIn as a “low key and an easy way to connect.” She notes that these old contacts “have a ‘frozen-in-time’ image of you. Even if you have a diminished sense of self from being away, they don’t, so can be a great confidence booster.
• Use your network for information gathering. “You’re not asking for a job, just time to talk about changes in the field or their own career path. Inevitably, they will bring up more people to talk to.”
• Get comfortable telling the story of your time out of the workforce by rehearsing with friends and family.

And when you finally get to that interview, says Fishman Cohen:

It’s important not to make assumptions about your audience. You don’t know if the person interviewing you has been a parent who hasn’t taken a career break and may not think it’s a huge accomplishment at all, or they might be resentful. You don’t want to talk about your ‘mom skills’ as part of the interview – only the skills that pertain to the jobs you’re applying to. When the interviewer inevitably asks about the six year gap in the resume, you want to acknowledge it – don’t apologize – and move on to why you’re the best person for the job. Draw attention to meaningful volunteer work and freelance work you’ve done in your time off if it is relevant, and treat it on your resume the same as paid work. Regardless of whether you had experiences during your career break relevant to your career goals, reference anecdotes from your pre-career break work experience that are pertinent to the job opportunity.

Allison Karl O’Kelly, Founder and CEO of MomCorps, and also a graduate of the Harvard Business School, worked at KPMG and then launched the BabiesRUs.com website and ran an $11M ToysRUs store. After the birth of her first child her boss was supportive of her ramping back up slowly while working part-time. But Allison found she needed even more flexibility; it was difficult for her to be on anyone else’s schedule. She founded MomCorps to help serve the needs of others like herself who wanted to continue in high-level careers but wanted more control over their own time. She works with organizations and with prospective flex-time employees helping both parties find ways to create mutual value by having honest conversations.  Karl O’Kelley told me:

We spend a lot of time doing is trying to get companies to understand the quality of candidates for a given role and to grasp why they can get a better candidate if they’re willing to provide some flexibility to him or her. Hopefully they can quickly understand that if they give up a little bit on the flexibility piece, they are going to get an amazing candidate that they otherwise might not be able to get.

We hear over and over again about folks who work on a part-time basis and how amazingly productive they are. I personally think that’s because when people are treated like adults and they’re given that level of flexibility they’re just so much more loyal to their employers. They really want to perform well and do a good job for them.

Sara Sutton Fell, Founder and CEO of FlexJobs, was pregnant with her first child and wanted to continue in the high-tech field at the high level she’d already attained (as a co-founder of JobDirect, which was sold to Korn Ferry) but with greater flexibility and tele-commuting.  At that time, this was a very frustrating search. Ultimately she created, in her own home, at first, the solution she sought for herself – an award-winning web site designed to provide job seekers with only the very highest quality telecommuting, part-time, flextime and freelance jobs. Their service is the pre-screening and the Webby award-winning site.

Jody Miller, Founder and CEO of the Business Talent Group, comes at this from a slightly different angle. She thinks that employers are the big winner, not necessarily the moms who are looking for flexibility or ways to get back into their prior careers.  She said:

We survey our talent pretty frequently, and they always say the same thing about why they’re doing this. Surprisingly, it’s not flexibility—that isn’t even in the top two. Most importantly, they want to choose what they work on and who they work for. They don’t want to be forced to work with people they don’t like.

It’s a different mindset if you know it’s only going to be for this project and then you’re out of there. That’s very different than if you’re in a permanent situation where you’re thinking I just can’t do this anymore. It frees you up in a way that I think is very liberating for people.

[For the business] the actual result was better because what they ended up having were people who had deep knowledge about whatever it was that they were doing. So for example, one of the first projects we did was on education, helping them with an online education company they’d invested in. We brought in someone that had actually led an online education company and paired them with a former consultant and that combination produced a really magical result for the client.

Jody’s top tips for those active in this labor market: have a stomach for uncertainty, present yourself if terms of the work that’s relevant to the task at hand, and stay current.

Then there’s Debbie Epstein Henry, Founder of Flex-Time Lawyers, who addresses the same issues, but specifically for lawyers and law firms, where the billable hour and face-time have reigned.  Epstein Henry told me:

Since 2008, general counsels of companies have a lot more leverage and are putting pressure on law firms to demonstrate value other than by number of hours logged. It’s driven by the client and global competition. The idea that value could be measured in some other way that hours is increasingly a compelling argument in the legal profession.

In Finding Bliss: Innovative Legal Models for Happy Clients & Happy Lawyers, we talk about the Value Measure, which has three components: the quality of the work, the efficiency, and the results achieved. A traditional law firm has about a third of their overhead going to real estate.  So if you can eliminate a third of the costs of the traditional law firm, you can be generous in terms of paying your employees or you can pass along significant savings to your clients.

There have been contract workers in the legal profession for years, but this brings in people who are very well-credentialed and trained who are making a choice about the way they want to integrate the practice of law with the rest of their life. This model works well for the person who wants to pick their engagement and have that kind of flexibility.

It’s a way for lawyers to add to their experience if they want to transition into companies. But there’s also the changing demographic of the people who are raising their hands for work-life engagement. Historically, it’s been the working mom. Now, we’re seeing senior lawyers, especially men. These are people at the other end of the arc of the careers now speaking about work-life engagement.

Marci Alboher is approaching this issue from yet another angle, as the Vice President of Encore.Org., a non-profit “spearheading the new movement of later-in-life work that combines social purpose with continued income and personal meaning.” Here’s some of what she told me about the motivations for new employment arrangements:

There’s this reinvention myth out there that you’re going to reinvent yourself anew out of whole cloth but so often, the strands of who we want to become are already there, and people are tying those strands together differently when they hit mid-life because they’re realizing that they are revisiting something, an earlier passion, or an earlier skill set, or a life experience that has helped shape them to where they’re going to go next. If you have a job and you’re involved [in] a cause you really care about, those things often enhance your profile at work. You can find ways to involve your company in a local children’s organization in which you’re involved, for example, and you can arrange donations or leverage your work connections for fundraising. You [Stew Friedman] talk about this with his idea of the “four-way-win” – how you can create synergy between the different domains of your life. A classic example could be someone who wants to raise money for an organization while getting in shape. They might organize a big bike ride for their company, and then suddenly they involve their kids in it so they have more family time. Throughout this, they’re raising money for their organization while at the same time raising their leadership profile at work. It’s feeding all parts of life.

Encore helps makes this happen for people in the later stages of life, often by exploring new models for the employment relationship built on temporary and flexible project-based work. 

Like other important issues in the field of work and life, creating opportunities for flexibility and control is not just for mothers anymore, though that’s been the focus traditionally.  Millennial Dads and people nearing retirement, but not quite ready to retire, are looking for new pathways, too. The prior generation of women, those who were first to enter the previously gated professional communities, felt they either had to act like the men or, if the going became too rough, take the exit ramp.  In our time, people are seeking and finding entirely new ways to navigate new paths on the journey to making meaningful contributions to organizations, opening up new choices for men and women in work and family.

Visit the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project to read more of my interviews with Marci Alboher, Carol Fishman Cohen, Debbie Epstein Henry, Jody Miller, and Allison O’Kelly.

Stew Friedman is the Practice Professor of Management at the Wharton School, founder of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, and the author of the international bestseller, Total Leadership, and, most recently, The Wall Street Journal bestseller, Leading The Life You Want: Skills for Integrating Work and Life. Tune in to his radio show, Work and Life, on Sirius XM 111, Business Radio Powered by Wharton. Find him on Twitter @StewFriedman.