Leslie Forde — From burning out, to building up moms

Leslie Forde left a corporate marketing career to start her own company, Mom’s Hierarchy of Needs. We talk about Leslie’s life as a full time entrepreneur, the pressure of being the primary family salary, and why having it all is a false narrative.

Q&A

Let’s hear about your story! You went from a corporate marketing career to starting your own company, Mom’s Hierarchy of Needs. Tell me about the transition.

It was kind of iterative. And it was not intentional. 

I'll step back. After my second child was born, when I went back to work I found that I had just hit a wall. I had taken on a new role in the company when I was pregnant and I was nervous about it to be honest with you. Normally I would have been really excited to get a promotion and to expand my team. But, I had the opportunity when I was eight months pregnant. I was going to be out on maternity leave and not have the opportunity to gel with my new team. Long story short, when I returned to work, I was just thrown in at full speed. My team was changing, the needs of the business were changing. And I had an expanded role. I had several people for different reasons go out on FMLA all at the same time. I found myself trying to work every night. I was in the wee hours of the night trying to shield my baby's co-sleeper with a pillow, holding it up vertically so the glow of my computer wouldn’t wake her up. 

And I was exhausted. I was working all the time. There were so many days where I didn't even remember driving to the office. There were days when I would get into the office and run up to the nursing room and realize, Oh I must have left the charger for my breast pump at home. It was just a really raw and emotionally punishing time. My career had been my happy place, and although certainly there was an adjustment with my first child when I went back to work, it was really different with two kids. I think part of it was the ramp from one to two kids, but it was also that I had taken on this new role right before I went on maternity leave. 

So after a while, it didn't happen right away, but the seeds of – why is this going so wrong? I feel like I’m gonna die. How are women doing this? – was percolating for me. I got a little bit of distance from that job when I took on a different role. I left and went into a four-day-a-week position with the hope that I would have a little bit more balance. I'd gone from managing a really large team to having just a very small team. For lots of reasons it seemed like it would be a better fit for where I was in my life. And when I had some space to think, I realized wow, I don’t feel like I’m doing this well. Am I the only one who feels his way?

I worked my way through high school and college for market research firms so that was kind of in my DNA. I had a burning interest in how other women were solving the problem. How could I emerge from this experience of motherhood with some type of growth and the developments that I wanted for myself or for my career? 

I started a conversation with a company that I was doing some advisory work for. One of the founders asked about moms and stress, because this particular product area was focused on managing anxiety and managing stress. I was very tongue in cheek and I just said, well look, there’s a Mom’s hierarchy of needs. And something just clicked inside. I was obsessed with the idea for the rest of the day. 

I started drawing on a piece of paper. What would my and other moms’ pyramids look like? I got curious and I put it on a piece of paper and then turned it into a PowerPoint. Then I thought, well, let me create a survey. I put one together pretty easily on SurveyMonkey and shared it with a few friends and asked people to share it. And 150 moms later, I had all of this rich, amazing insight and dialogue around prioritization – why we prioritize what we do, why it's so hard to make room for self care and professional growth and personal growth. I got really excited about the results. And I wanted to communicate with people about the results. I started sending people emails from my personal account and then I thought, you know what, I should put this on a website. So I bought the domain Mom’s Hierarchy of Needs and I put it there. And I thought wow it's kind of silly to have a website with just one thing on it, I should write some more about this.  

I think in the backdrop, over the weeks and months this was taking place, I was healing from the burnout. I was recovering from the traumatic experience of the job. I was sleeping more. And at that point, I just felt like I had been in a fairly safe zone in my career and my life – and although there were certain rewards to it, I didn't feel like it was serving me. I felt like I was learning all these incredible things about motherhood, women, and stress. And I wanted to write more personally. I wanted to be more vulnerable and more creative again. 

How did it feel to be starting something new?

It was kind of terrifying, the idea of writing about myself versus writing marketing copy for companies. I just was really uncomfortable. So at first, I shared just results from that first survey. Then I had a friend who’s part of my professional mom's group ask me, You cook everyday. How do you make time to do that? That was a common stress for people of every background. So I wrote a long post about saving time cooking dinner. And then I started digging in more on the topics around the Hierarchy. It got me into this really positive, creative, generative place as a writer. Every time I posted something I was wildly uncomfortable about it. Something about this kind of writing, focused on my beliefs and what’s going on in society, how women are treated or mistreated depending on your perspective, it just felt very risky. I had really stayed inside the line throughout my career so this was stretching. 

Last year I decided to turn the blog into a business. I set up an LLC, registered trademarks, the whole thing with the intention of taking these research studies that I do and turning them into bigger studies. It was on the sideline, in addition to my full time work – an opportunity to generate some additional income. And then the small company where I was working decided to push back their product launch by a year. It pushed back all of the work that I’d been doing. And I was a pretty expensive hire for a pre-revenue startup. So they had to change direction. 

And all of a sudden, I became full time on Mom’s Hierarchy of Needs. It was not intended to be this way. I landed here without planning in advance. But I think I became more excited about what I was doing and, either because of my actions or faith intervening, I’m now full time on this. I alternate between wanting to throw up and being really excited about it.

How did you feel diving into full time, instead of building up your company as a side gig?

I expected that maybe in two or three or four years, as the revenue grows from the business, that I would have a moment where I could decide, do I want to ramp up the business more and put more time into? Do I want to depart from my full time job? 

But it was never the plan to not have my full time job. Although my husband also works  full-time I've always held the primary salary. So not having my salary suddenly, and with a major global recession tipping off in the backdrop, is really scary. I would have never done this. I’m responsibility girl. I would never have said oh let me place a bet, just put some cards down and see what happens. So that's the part that makes me want to throw up! I'm a child of immigrants, I was raised with a mindset of responsibility first. It's kind of terrifying to not have that steady income, especially when it's the primary income. 

But I know that there are some people who do really incredible things when their back is up against the wall and when they're under pressure, like this. And so I think about that, and I want to be that person who rises to the occasion. 

So I'm really in between those two feelings.

And – this feels meaningful. I know that I help people with what I write. I know that I help people with the research I do. I know that I help mothers in general, and specifically mothers who are ambitious women, who have careers, who are trying to “have it all.” We were all falsely given the “have it all” narrative. For those of us who’ve been trying to do that, we often feel not heard and not seen. We’re toiling away in service to our families and in service to our careers. But maybe not in service to ourselves. I get so many amazing messages and notes from people who say Wow, you see me, you got me and how I’m feeling. And that makes me feel amazing, changing the way just one woman looks at her life, or career options, how she evaluates the way she prioritizes her times, or how she gets out there and does whatever she does for self care in a new way. She decides to go to the doctor, instead of putting off an appointment so she has time to schedule everybody else's. 

All of those things I think cumulatively matter. So I feel good about it. I won’t feel that I’ve lost time. The way I'm spending my time right now is very fruitful to me. I'm very committed to this. I've been doing it without it making revenue for over four years, I'm fully in, and I'm fully committed to it. It's something that I love. 

What’s different is that this is the first time where monetizing it has the weight of really being my income. Versus before, when I didn't have a lot of pressure on how to monetize it, if I ever monetized it, because I had a full time job. 

Burnout was a motivator to start Mom’s Hierarchy of Needs. When you shifted to a reduced schedule role with a smaller team, did you reach a point of equilibrium where you had balance?

That's a great question. It became much less raw. But I don't think you ever reach a point of equilibrium. And I say that, not just for myself, but for the thousands of people who have shared their stories for my research.

You’ve got the “mom job.” The responsibilities of that role, regardless of how you define it, it’s a huge amount of work. Especially because modern work in the United States is not structured to support working parents, let alone working mothers. There's very little structural support. Most people feel like they're doing everything badly. They're doing everything in a fragmented, somewhat fractionalized way. 

Also, I realized through this process that I want to live a full life. I want to live a big life. I love my career. I love working. I love making a contribution in that way, as much as I love being a mom. I know that I'm ambitious and I keep upping the ante for myself. Anytime I do something, then I'm going to want to do the next thing. There’s a certain restlessness to ambition. But understanding that about myself has helped. It’s helped me reconcile the discomfort with stretching myself as much as I do. 

Leslie, thank you for sharing your story! I am excited to see how you channel that restlessness into the next chapter for Moms Hierarchy of Needs.

*Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.