“Hi, I’m Stephanie Lee <handshake>. I have a 15 month old hurricane-of-a-child, Oscar, and I run an Admin Services company called Scratchpad Secretaries dot com. I’m just about to launch a program to help moms start their own businesses so they can stay at home with their babies, called Moms Who Mean Business, and I have a neat little ezine of the same name for Mompreneurs. It’s full of marketing tips & tricks and advice on how to juggle it all!”

Easy enough, right? That about sums up where I’m at right now in both life (he just started to climb! Everywhere and Everything! I put a stop to it when I found him sitting on the box of wine bottles…. after all, I may need to get in there in an emergency!), and business. And I’m so proud and so excited for the Moms Who Mean Business program and the work I’m still doing on it to make it even more helpful and full of even more information, and yet last night I totally balked during my “elevator pitch”.

I went out for (what I thought was) cocktails (but turned out to be dinner) with some local moms to meet up with Erica Ehm of the Yummy Mummy Club (@yummymummyclub). I had made plans to drop something off to a friend afterwards (and have a glass of wine), so I couldn’t stay for the full evening – and hey, when you have a sitter, you cram everything you can into those few precious hours!  I had chatted with some great new moms I met, and some closer friends, met Erica briefly and was ready to go when she said, “Hey, before you go, we haven’t gotten to chat!”  And then the,

“Tell me about yourself.”

Do I tell her about my mom life? I mean, it was a mom meet up, not an official Mompreneur meet up. It was a night out for moms, not a “moms who started businesses” networking event.

Only it was that too. I mean, it always is. We’re mompreneurs. It’s who we are, it’s what we do, it’s all part of our life as moms. And as entrepreneurs, it’s just the way we are.

Granted, in a busy restaurant you can’t hear the person next to you, let alone the person across the table from you. And it’s nearly impossible to have one line of conversation going with 10 people all excited to be out for the evening, lol! She asked about my mom life so I chatted about that for a moment. Nothing that would really make her remember me.

I mean, whose kid hasn’t climbed or started to talk?

The voice in my head (just one of them!) was telling me to talk about the new program I’m creating, I mean, I’m SO EXCITED about it! So passionate about it! So happy to have found a way to help and support other moms!

“How am I going to get this across to her in a loud restaurant with 10 other people wanting her time and attention? How am I going to do this justice? How am I going to impart the passion I have for helping moms?”

By the exact paragraph I opened this post with, that’s how.

Instead?

“Well, really nice to meet you, it’s great to put a face to the name of people we tweet with. And to get out and meet up in person!”.

I was hesitant to talk about Moms Who Mean Business because I didn’t want to come across as pushy.

Ei Yi Yi!

So ladies, write a quick paragraph about what you’re doing right now. Where you’re at in your life right now. What kind of business you’re into, where you are in that business, what new product you’re launching…and practice it! Practice Practice Practice. And don’t think it’s pushy or out of context (unless it is!).  I’m so excited about the Moms Who Mean Business program that I totally went in circles around it. Duh.

Don’t do what I did. Learn from this colossal mistake!

Filed under: networking