by Ally Loprete
Lately, I’ve really been fascinated with numbers.
This fascination has grown recently, I imagine, from creating my own internet based company. The infinite numbers to be comprehended are literally incomprehensible…and fascinating at the same time. These numbers give me enormous amounts of optimism and frighten me at the same time.
In fact, this number game is what ultimately what led me to create the concept for my business, OurMilkMoney.com. It must have been about 7 months ago that I was laying awake one evening after my family had gone to bed. I imagined that there must be zillions of parents across the country who were thinking the same things that I was. Perhaps zillions had also left their corporate day jobs to discover that staying home was by far the better way to go.
Maybe zillions of new moms also took that leap of faith, spoke to a zillion husbands and said, “I am going to start my own company and work from home so that I can stay home with the kids,” which prompted a zillion panicked faces on a zillion different men. These zillions also were to soon learn that it would be twice as much work as they’d ever expected, but vowed to make it work for the sake of the family.
If there really were zillions that lay awake the same way I’d been, going through the numbers over and over again like it was some kind of riddle to be solved, then that was at least a zillion connections I wanted to make.
Were zillions of us really choosing to take but a fraction of our previous income for double the amount of work? Yes, this was THANKLESS work, with no sick pay, no paid vacation time, no group health benefits, and no company lunches paid for…and yet, we’d chosen this new role as if it was the greatest opportunity we’ve ever had for ourselves, and it made us feel a zillion more times at home.
Were we all just insane?
It was thoughts like these that made me realize the power in numbers. If there truly were large numbers of parents out there just like me, I could certainly use their friendship and their support. In exchange, I’d be happy to lend mine.
More than that, I wanted to make a pact with all of these parents… “I’ll buy your stuff if you buy mine.”
Easy enough. Now where would I find these parents? It shouldn’t have been difficult to find them with zillions of pages of information available at my internet fingertips, so I decided to begin looking each time I made a new online purchase. I searched.
And searched.
And searched.
Every time I made any purchase online, I put in an extra keyword “parent” to narrow my search and pull up a vendor who was working from home to afford the opportunity to stay home with their children.
I became more and more shocked at how difficult this was, and it frustrated me. I KNEW there were parents out there who would love to sell me their shampoo, just as much as I’d love to buy it from them! It shouldn’t be so hard to find them!
That is when it hit me like a ton of bricks. If there was no such search directory, I was going to create one. So that is what I did. I have created a way for a zillion parents to support one another, and I feel a zillion times better.
One day we’ll all be zillionaires! Or at least we’ll have made a zillion new friends in the process.
About the Author: Ally Loprete is the Owner and Operator of OurMilkMoney.com, a website designed to support self-employed parents across the country. Ally’s passion in helping others transition from full time working parent to successful entrepreneur, grew from her own experiences. She is determined to help other’s deal with the sometimes overwhelming prospect of starting a new business while successfully running a household. As a public speaker and motivator, she is resolute about creating a haven in which we can continue to thrive and encourages us to support one another in our personal journeys.
No comments:
Post a Comment