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Navigating the Messy Middle of Entrepreneurship

Nobody talks about the messy muddle of building a business, especially when you’re doing it while raising kids.

You start something of your own because you want more flexibility, more money, or maybe even more purpose.

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And in the beginning, it’s exciting.

You got ideas, momentum, and maybe even your first few sales.

But then something shifts.

The growth slows down.

The plan you are so sure about stops working and suddenly you stuck in this uncomfortable in between space where you’re not a beginner anymore, but you’re not where you want to be either.

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And figuring this out while raising kids makes that messy metal feel even messier.

You’re tired, you’re second guessing everything and honestly, sometimes you wish someone would just tell you what to do next.

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So how do you know when you should keep going or change direction or even go back to our office job?

What does success actually look like in the season?

And is it selfish to build something big while your kids are still small?

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If you’ve ever felt stuck, overwhelmed, or unsure about your next moving business, this conversation is for you.

I’m joined by coach Amanda Kanichi, who’s joining us to guide us through the messy middle.

Welcome a monthly.

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Speaker 2

Thank you so much, Marge.

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Realities of Motherhood and Business

For mom’s building a business or a side hustle, it looks completely different than for many other entrepreneurs who are in full control of their time and their energy.

In a previous episode, my guest Faith Meza, she was talking about networking and how men can play golf for hours on a Saturday and build connections.

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And that kind of reality looks way different for moms.

So what are realistic expectations or even harsh realities moms need to understand when they start a business?

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Speaker 2

Well, um, I think the reality is that things are going to look different for you as you’re building comes with a lot of sacrifices.

It comes with a lot of time that you would need to fragment and a lot of trade-offs.

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So a lot of the times we think that starting, you know, a business is like going into a nine to five job.

Here’s your day is good.

This is what you’re expected to do.

This is how this thing is going to move going forward.

But when it comes to, you know, starting a business for moms, your time is fragmented.

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You want to get disrupted along the way.

You’re going to get discouraged.

You’re going to doubt yourself in the process, you might lose out in a bit of money.

And there’s also that guilt of am I letting everybody around me who is building with me?

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This could be, you know, your family, your husband, the support structure that you’ve got in place.

Am I disappointing people if this business does not work out?

So some of those harsh realities are really the sacrifices, the self doubt that it comes with and also the unexpected turns that you spoke about, which is, you know, the messy middle or trying to navigate harvesting is going to look going forward.

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So it looks totally different.

I’d say for for months that are starting to um, to build a business or a side hustle.

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Speaker 1

Yes, absolutely.

So is running a business harder than staying employed?

Like the predictability and the fixed paycheck?

How do?

How does it compare?

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Speaker 2

Sure.

Um, I wish, you know, somebody could have warned me to say it is actually quite harder because when it comes to a nine to five, you kind of know what to expect as much as the environment is slightly different perhaps from your previous jobs.

So it’s harder in different ways because as you had briefly mentioned, you know what improvements there comes a bit of structure, there’s predictability.

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You kind of know what your mornings are going to look like, what your day looks like, what the year looks like.

And also financially, there is some sort of stability like when it comes to business and there’s the self-discipline that it requires these the emotional resilience that it requires, this decision making, you know, under uncertainty because at times you were hit with, you know, unexpected realities of the economy.

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You are hit by the unexpected turns of your day or the year or even what the families experiencing as you go along.

So the biggest difference is that, you know, the in business, you carry the weight of your own decisions.

But when it comes to, you know, corporate, you carry the weight of what the job requires of you.

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But it also gives you, you know, something that I feel employment does not give to us, which is control over your own growth, control over your own time at times because you know when to pause or when you can afford the pauses.

And also, it gives you a totally different earning potential with a nine to five, you know that this is what I’m earning this month.

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And that’s where we tap it.

But with entrepreneurship, your earnings could be greater in a different month, but they could also be slightly lower on a on The Batman.

So I don’t think it’s about which one is harder, which one it’s simpler, but it’s more about you as an individual, as a mum, which one gives you the kind of life that you are looking.

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Speaker 1

For yes, and also what your appetite for risk is and what you can handle.

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Speaker 2

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely, yeah.

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The Challenge of Balancing Time and Ambition

So many moms start their own thing to have more time and to be more present, but when they get into it like you just said, it gets hard and it’s so time consuming.

And some naysayers might say that it’s a little bit selfish to start such a big endeavour while the kids are small, and I just wanted to know what your thoughts are about that.

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Speaker 2

I feel like it’s, um, it’s a question that’s not asked for women that are in the 9:00 to 5:00.

It’s only asked to for or, or the, the question is posed to women that choose the entrepreneurship and a nine to five.

And I, and I always say that also big is relative because in a nine to five, even just returning to work after maternity leave to go into a nine to five, there’s, you know, the boob weeks that we don’t talk about.

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There’s the discomfort during the day.

There’s so many things that you face just going back to work.

Um, and nobody actually talks about these things.

And when you get to work, it’s a thing of you feel like you’re catching up with the rest of, you know, the, the team that has been there in your absence.

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And it means that you need to, you know, put out a lot more extra than you would have in the 1st place if you hadn’t lived for maternity weeks.

So no one ever asked women that go into a nine to five as to, is this not a bit selfish for you to be returning to work?

I recall when we were looking for a pre school for a little girl and we would get into the pre school and we’d be told there’s a baby products to walk into the baby class and that this three month old babies that don’t know what’s going on.

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And the reality is that mum had to eat them on that day to go to work and they need to carry on with the day and they don’t know what’s happening.

So could we say that is selfish?

We can’t miss certainly say that.

And the same as I feel for women that are in entrepreneurship or they choose this route, it can’t be, you know, seen as selfish.

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If anything, I feel like it’s an exercise that builds towards our kids and also towards our families in the sense that you are giving your kids the permission to dream and build bigger in future.

Because kids don’t necessarily just listen to what we say, they listen to what they seem.

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So if mom is pursuing this beautiful podcast, it takes time.

It takes, you know, post production, it takes you looking for the gifts.

Is it selfish?

Probably not.

And does it, you know, give your kids a view of I can build something from scratch totally with my name and new ideas, gives them the permission to dream bigger.

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So I don’t think it is selfish.

If anything, I think it builds towards creating a bigger worldview for for our kids moving forward.

I mean, I take it even from the women that I surround myself.

But I’ve got a friend of mine who speaks on stages and, you know, across the globe, et cetera.

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And she’s raising boys and the kids there’s, you know, one of them is still in primary school.

Is it selfish of her?

I don’t think so because they can see how far mum can push.

And on other days when we catching up on a poll, she’s supervising homework.

So it gives her the freedom of being in both spaces.

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Or, you know, allowing the kids to see that I can be a prison mum at times and, you know, give you my full attention because my job allows me to do so.

But also in a different day, mum is going to be required to speak in a different continent and I need to be out of here so that I can show you that the world is actually much bigger.

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So I don’t think it’s selfish.

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Speaker 1

I love that perspective and it makes so much sense, and it just comes back to the fact that moms don’t have to lose themselves and their own identity and dreams just because she’s raising a family.

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Speaker 2

Absolutely.

And I mean your, your identity shifts and changes as you know you are raising a family.

So can I also have the space and the freedom to move a little bit and and do what you know, mom, what fulfills a mum, because also I kids needs need fulfill commitments or happy mummies at home and a happy mummies, one that is chasing their dream and Tracy that there’s much more to life.

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Speaker 1

Than that.

So let’s move back to the Macy model.

In your experience, what are the biggest challenges in the first year of starting a business?

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Overcoming Internal and External Challenges

Sure, there’s a lot.

I don’t know how much time we’ve got to go through that.

So firstly, I feel like in the missing all these internal and external challenges that you are going to face as an entrepreneur.

So firstly, externally, you’re going to face the challenge of finding the right customers, finding people that actually want to pay a price for your business, differentiating when it comes to what it is that you’re putting out in the world.

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Because you’re going to put out your first idea or the first hit of your idea and you realise that maybe I’m not, there’s nothing, you know, that gives me the edge in the market that I’m participating in.

So I need to, you know, punish that a little bit.

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And there’s also getting visibility in the first year.

There’s building teams and you know, at times we need to let people go.

At times people give you 1 love building and it’s OK for that kind of flow to happen.

Then internally you will struggle with a lot of self doubt.

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Why did I start this thing in the 1st place or is it actually the right idea for me to start?

There will be inconsistencies, yet at times inconsistency financially, at times in terms of just ideas, at times your business is just going through this rollercoaster ride and you don’t know what is happening.

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And there’s also a lack of clarity that you might face along the way.

So all of these things happen in the first year of your business and maybe for some businesses, others are just ideas that were not registered.

Others are were registered too quickly before the the the idea was even tested to see if it could bring in an income.

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So you’re asking yourself, do I go through the registration of this business, actually registered this business?

Am I going to change names?

Am I going to change identity?

So the first year, I feel like it’s more about mastering yourself more than the business because you need to deal with the internal conflict first so that you can have the drive to deal with the external challenges that we spoke of earlier on.

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So that’s where you learned this.

Then you learn resilience, you learn consistency, you learn to make decisions.

And you know, that’s why at the end, I feel like two people can have the same ideas out in the market.

But in terms of execution, how these two turn out, you could have completely different results because of all of these things that I’ve just painted that happen in the first year of establishing your business.

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Speaker 1

Yeah, that’s so true.

The second guessing and the self doubt and how you set in the middle of the night and rewrite your Instagram bio or your home page because you think, ohh, if Google searches my website and find this keyword, that’s gonna be the big breakthrough.

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And yeah, like you said, you just need to bold resilience and consistency and focus on your product and, you know, become used to the idea of running the business yourself like the the the points you made about your inner struggles that sometimes overshadows the other challenges because your mindset isn’t ready.

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Speaker 2

That’s true.

The number of times.

I like how you made reference to the number of times that you change your bio or anything that you write about your business because I believe that we all go through that even when we talk about the internal struggles.

The number of podcasts to wish to say, well, this one actually gave me, you know, the piece that I need to understand how to navigate the next path.

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Or the number of times that you pull away from even watching content online and say, I need to sit with myself and actually figure this thing out from where I birthed the idea in the 1st place.

So yeah, there’s a lot of struggles that can go through in the missing middle.

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Defining Success in the Messy Middle

Absolutely.

So what does success really look like in the Mercy medal?

So before you making a ton of money or before you have 100 or 1000 clients, how does it differ the success in the mercy medal?

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How does it differ from the actual long term success?

How can we navigate this and stay positive before it actually takes off?

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Speaker 2

I watched a podcast a few days ago and somebody said I want to, I want, I want to hurt them.

But basically what they were saying is that there is no business without a sale.

And I think in the messy middle, as long as there’s no movement in that regard in terms of making a bit of income or seeing that, you know, your sales are moving, then you probably have to, you know, really pause and see with the, the the problem is, I love reflection.

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I think I’m in the messy middle.

That’s where you’ll spend a lot of her time.

Passion can push you forward, but also data is important for you to sit with and say, why does this part or what does this phase of the business telling me in terms of the numbers that I’m generating, in terms of exposure that I’m getting, and also in terms of just refining the idea in itself.

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So a successful mean, the missing middle is sitting with the data and, you know, picking up what the insights are to move for business forward.

Whether it could be insights regarding how you change your packaging or how people are responding to maybe a new variant or anything that you just, you know, recently introduced how the market is shifting.

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Who are the new players?

So that data, playing around with that data and trying to figure out how can I use this creatively to appeal to the market that I’m trying to, you know, sell to consistently.

So for me, that’s what it looks like and the missing middle and at times in the mercy like all its way, you even realise that ohh, I could be charging slightly higher prices and you know, having to put in less.

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I wouldn’t say less effort, but the amount of time and the push that I would normally give probably is less is required for these kind of plans that are moving forward with.

So I’d say more data, understanding of data and also using that to come up with insights that can push forward.

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For me, that’s what success and then mix in the missing middle looks like.

So a lot of reflection, a lot of working with the data so that you can come up with the insights that you need to move your business forward.

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Speaker 1

Yes, I can relate with that so, so well because I keep saying since I stopped working full time and doing different things, I’ve never ever, not in school, not in university.

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I’ve never learned so much in one year that I did in the last year.

So it’s literally been everyday.

It’s just like learning, analysing, figuring stuff out.

And the experience and skills that I’ve gained in a short period of time has been phenomenal.

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Speaker 2

I, I love hearing that much and I’m glad that you sit with, with, with, with that kind of reflection because at times in the messy middle, it can get tricky where you know, a lot of stops and pauses and twists and turns feel like failure.

So if you don’t have what you have, we say, I sit down and have reflected and I realise that there is more learning or there’s more that I’ve learned in the past year than I’ve done, you know, over a period of time.

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Then it could make you fall apart where you feel like, what am I doing?

Why does this feel like failure all the time?

Why do I always feel like I’m starting all over again?

But then when you sit down, you’re like, I didn’t know half of the things that I know this yet in the past couple of years.

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So I’m glad you actually sit and reflect and and see where this is taking.

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Facing Fears and Self-Doubt

You.

Yeah, I definitely do have the moments where I want to fall apart.

Don’t don’t get me wrong.

So talking about falling apart and scary emotions, what are the biggest fears moms have before they start their own business?

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Speaker 2

Ohh, I think the biggest one is, and I saw it with myself, where I tested an idea recently and trying to compare the feeling that I had and how, you know, the experience unfolded compared to a couple of years ago when I was in a mom chalk and cheese years ago.

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I was not scared.

I mean whatever we wanna start, I’ll run this doggy pilot and you know we’ll take over Pretoria Eastern record.

And right now, even testing the smallest idea, you know feels like am I still going to have enough time with baby?

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Am I taking away the few hundreds of rents that I could have used for something else in the family?

What if this idea fails completely?

What are my it’s going to think of meat, you know, what is the family gonna think?

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But mum, you are so excited about this whole thing and now it’s falling flat on its face.

But it’s not necessarily falling flat.

It’s me having to learn and see how best I can reshape the idea going forward.

So I think the biggest fear is failing the entire family that mums have.

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It’s that mom guilt to say I need to be responsible, I need to have it together.

I need to make sure that this thing works, even though I’ve never navigated that part.

So I think the financial fear of it and also just letting down everybody who’s supporting you and saying you can go for this idea is the biggest fear that moms have before starting something new.

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Speaker 1

Yes, that’s that’s very true.

20:16

Speaker 2

Yeah.

20:17

Speaker 1

So what if it turns out the business is not getting the momentum you initially thought it would?

How do you know when it’s time to persevere and keep pushing, or when to call it quits and deregister your business?

20:33

Knowing When to Persevere or Pivot

Yeah, I think it’s important to have your little, I’d say markers or timelines as you are launching.

Something to say I’m going to give this idea a good six months or a would, you know, three months.

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And all of this depends on what you can afford financially and also in terms of time, because what you can afford is not necessarily what I can afford.

I need to also understand that maybe if your kids are a little wrong than mine, my pauses will probably be longer as compared to you, you know, being able to tell your kids that you guys need to pause a little bit.

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Money’s busy with this and this is what you’re trialling for the next couple of months.

So giving yourself time and also being honest with that time to say, is it something that we as a family or myself as a, as a mum can afford in that time?

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And then taking time to review and see how we going around.

Because also testing ideas can be very expensive, emotionally expensive financially, expensive mentally, physically and always you are stretched as an entrepreneur.

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So ask your yourself, are people actually buying this thing that I’m putting about it when it comes to the timeline that I’ve set aside for myself, are people buying?

Have I had in sales?

Are people actually coming back if they are buying?

Because at times you can have a person that buys for the first time, but they’re not necessarily coming back to you and saying we still need more of your assistance or need more of the products or need to restock.

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And also, am I solving a real problem?

Because you need to understand that there are businesses that are not necessarily, you know, they are candy businesses.

They’re not healing anything or solving any particular problem.

They are nice to have in people’s lives.

So ask yourself, am I solving a real problem?

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Are people coming back and am I getting sales?

And also has the timeline that I’ve put or set aside for myself actually working as they’ve been?

Any progress or movement over that period of time?

And then you will know whether it’s time to pause, said the idea aside for now.

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Or even leave it completely and pursue something.

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Speaker 1

Different.

Yeah, that’s the hard what start.

So what is the one piece of advice you would give a mom listening and wondering if she should go back to an office 9 to 5 or carry on with her business?

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Advice for Moms: 9 to 5 vs. Entrepreneurship

Sure.

Um, I think firstly, you know, when we started the conversation, I did say that big is relative because you could be a mom that is in a nine to five job.

You could be a mum that’s been an entrepreneur and probably you looking now and saying it could be better to go into a nine to five job because this idea is not working.

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Or it could be the opposite where you feel like my 9:00 to 5:00 job is not where I’m meant to be.

I have, there’s a, there’s a lady that I think we spoke briefly about the lady when we were still, you know, communicates and regard from the podcast.

And I see there’s a lady by the name of Haka Hayward.

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And I love her story in the sense that I, I remember I met her at an event years ago and she was one of the speakers in Cape Town and it was a female event.

And she said, you know, she, she has this huge business, it’s a flower installation business and she does amazing work.

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And she said how she fell into the businesses that when she fell pregnant and she was contemplating whether to go back to her IT job or not, she then, you know, started helping around at events.

And that’s how she ran into this passion.

And she never went back to her nine to five in 80.

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And for me that showed me that, you know, they, we are called for different things at different seasons.

And it’s important for you as a mum to evening into understanding where your path is going.

And also, you know, I think making that decision from an honest face to say, am I meant to go in this direction or not?

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And also making the hush calculations of can he actually afford to have me go into a nine to five or to have me pursue a business?

So I think sit with the idea, understand whether or not your environment or your structure can support your idea.

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And also, is it something that you just, you know, being curious about or do you think you can actually make money from this thing?

So at times, it’s also important to even test out the idea or your minimal viable experiment.

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Just test it out on a part time basis and see if it starts generating money before you let everything go.

Because I feel like as a mum, you already have so many responsibilities that hand.

It’s not like when you were young and carefree and you could just start this thing and then you’ll find a job another day.

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So yeah, try and navigated with a lot of responsibility, with a lot of heart and also with that realistic mindset to say, am I making money from this thing or is it just a passion project that I could still pursue?

25:58

Should I be in a nine to?

26:00

Speaker 1

Five that is such good advice.

Thank you so much A monthly.

I really appreciate you taking time to share all your experience and your knowledge that you’ve gained over the years coaching other people through their own Macy Medals and starting their own businesses.

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Thanks for joining us today.

26:20

Speaker 2

Thank you so much.

Margolis has been such a beautiful conversation.

I appreciate your time.

And also just having me on board as a guest.

It’s been amazing sharing the platform with you, so thank you.

26:33

Speaker 1

The Mercy medal of building a business is hard.

The second guessing, the uncertainty, it can all feel very overwhelming.

But this is the part where growth is happening, even when it doesn’t feel like it.

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Take a monthly’s advice, lean into the practical steps, and give yourself grace and trust that your business can exceed even your own expectations.

If you have a friend who’s building something right now, check in on her and share this episode with her because no one should have to navigate this journey alone.

27:10

And if you haven’t already, make sure to heat follow or subscribe wherever you’re listening so you never miss an episode of the Moments podcast.

If you enjoyed this episode, I’d be so grateful if you took a minute to rate and review the show.

It helps more moms find these conversations and grow alongside us.

27:30

Thank you for being here and for doing the brave Macy work of becoming.

I’ll see you in the next episode.