‘Mompreneurs’ focus of savvy mom’s PR biz

[attach]2215[/attach]Sure, North York resident and entrepreneur Alison Burke gave birth just eight days ago.

That hasn’t stopped her from conducting a conference call with a potential client while nursing her newborn.

It may fly in the face of more traditional workplace protocols, but in Burke’s mompreneur world, such practices are perfectly acceptable — even respected, according to Burke.

That’s because her clients have been there.

President of [url=http://www.impressionspr.ca/]Impressions Public Relations[/url], a PR agency catering specifically to the “mompreneur” market, Burke has just rounded off her second year in business and is gearing up for a busy season.

Let’s just say business is booming louder than baby with a wet diaper.

With clients like Erica Ehm’s [url=http://www.yummymummyclub.ca]Yummy Mummy Club[/url] online magazine and a roster of others that includes everything from Doula services to mom safe-snack bakers, Burke caters to what she calls an under-serviced market: local moms running businesses that are geared towards moms.

Though her niche wasn’t planned, it’s one that evolved naturally from networking with other moms.

Being a mom herself doesn’t hurt.

“I’m the target market of these businesses,” she says.

“I’m not a 25-year-old pretending to know what it’s like to be a mom.”

These aren’t just women who have started mom-related businesses for the heck of it.

Often, Burke says, women come up with business-savvy ideas while on maternity leave.

And they come by them honestly.

“You’re living the life,” she says. “You see what’s missing in the marketplace.”

Like many of Burke’s clients, being a mom led her to start her own business.

She had the opportunity to go back to work early while on maternity leave with her first child, now three, and says she wasn’t emotionally prepared to do so.

She thought of starting her own PR firm and picked up her first mom client, [url=http://www.sproutright.ca]Sprout Right[/url], while taking a cooking class there.

Business grew organically from there, through word-of-mouth and referrals in the mommy world.

Much of her growth has come from social networking activities and sites such as Twitter, where women users, including moms, number high.

But even with constant growth, the mompreneur market isn’t something you can make a million bucks at, Burke says.

Many women running small businesses work from the basement in their homes, and budgets are small.

But with a good 20 clients, Burke is living a decent, if not harried, existence.

Another challenge is learning to ignore the dishes and the cleaning and the laundry while working from a home office.

“It was very hard to leave the kitchen a mess,” she says. “I had to let it go.”

Many of her clients are caring for a couple kids while running their own businesses, she says, and really do juggle things.

“It’s amazing what some of these moms pull off.”

Though she’s technically on mat leave (one that in its entirety will last a mere six weeks), Burke is doing some juggling herself, looking after her newborn and still holding conference calls and staying in touch with clients.

“I’m committed to being both a mom and a business woman,” she says.

“If I was working in any other market … it wouldn’t work.”