Every day you stay home only raising your children, your professional value lessens. Every day you stay home raising your children, your professional experience gap grows. This is truth.
Stop choosing the fairy tale that your professional value as a Stay at Home Parent is equal to what someone else is doing in the professional work world. Unless you are earning a salary, getting a promotion, or receiving a bonus – your professional value is diminishing every.single.day!
We can help you turn this around, and connect you to your value in this tough world of perceived and real worth. At PeopleGetters, our team is made up of Stay at Home Parents who are deeply re-connected to their professional value – while still prioritizing raising their families. It is no fairy tale here.
Y’all do know the divorce rate continuously hovers around 50%? So flip a coin and you have your odds. Divorce is a wrecking ball on the fairy tale of the content Stay at Home parent. That parent is quickly and mercilessly painted into a very tight corner of financial weakness and dependence. It happens fast, and I should know because it happened to me.
Let me tell y’all just how dumb I was! I started a successful recruiting business in 2004 when I was 7 months pregnant with kiddo #1. Crazy awesome 50% profit margins. That business kept chugging along, making good money, until my husband convinced me that selling it would be a great decision. Fast forward to January 2011 – the ink is dry on the sale. And I decide to coast. I decide to tinker around with some business ideas. My husband did his tinkering around too. And for all the reasons that 50% of marriages end, so did ours. We were divorced in 60 days (that’s the bare minimum in Texas, y’all), and my financial life was precarious and the daily stress was nearly overwhelming.
I never realized in 11 years of marriage that I did not have a credit card in my name! What?!? That was a hard lesson to learn at the age of 38. I had to rebuild my credit, I had to reignite my career, and I had to get my head on straight. No more fairy tales. And I had to continue raising two kids.
If you are like I was back then – you are playing a value strategy called Hope for the Best. For 50% of you, that is not going to work out as you would imagine. For 50% of you who want to reconnect to your value, for the 50% of you that want to narrow that professional experience gap – I want to leave you with one piece of advice that you can take action on immediately:
Start an LLC today, even if in name only and put it on your LinkedIn profile page and have it start the same year you left the traditional workforce. Take your last professional role, and create new bullet points that describe consulting you’ve done over these last Stay at Home years that look and sound a whole lot like what you used to do back in the traditional work world. Make it clear how you’ve closed that experience gap in your career. Connect with us, too – we’d love to hear from you!