Dear founder, entrepreneur parents: keep going.
Three things I wanted to share from founding a new business over the past 12 months. With three kids. And a dog.
Last week at breakfast, my wife asked our five-year-old, “What does mommy have to do that daddy doesn’t?”
She meant childbirth. He didn’t hesitate with his answer: “Work.”
Now, to be fair, my wife is a big law attorney who runs a masterclass in balancing career, marriage, and motherhood. I briefly considered walking my son through my LinkedIn and realized that (a) he wouldn’t care, and (b) he wouldn’t believe me. Tough crowd, these five-year-olds.
And that’s when it hit me: There’s the sexy cultural version of entrepreneurship and start-ups — hoodies, ramen, 100-hour weeks, sleeping under desks, emerging three years later either rich or ruined.
And then there’s the version where you’re 40, with three kids, trying to build something meaningful between school drop-off, bedtime, pediatricians appointments, and fixing the SNOO.
One makes for a Netflix series. The other makes for real life.
I’m in the middle of it myself — running my consulting practice, building our family business, raising three kids with my wife, and trying to do it all without losing myself in the process. I don’t have a perfect system, but I do have a perspective, and I wanted to share it with all the founder / entrepreneur parents out there.
If you are building something while little eyes are watching you tie your shoes at the door, here are three things that help keep me balanced, sane, and put everything in perspective. I hope they help you as they have helped me.
Lesson One: Reframe the Journey. It’s Not Romantic — It’s a Grind.
Design for Sustainability, Not Martyrdom
If no one has told you this, I will: you and I are probably not starring in a Netflix founder documentary.
The pop-culture myth of entrepreneurship — 100-hour weeks, ramen dinners, sleeping under a desk — was built around a very specific archetype: young, unattached, optimized for risk. That model doesn’t translate cleanly to a 40-year-old parent with three kids, a mortgage, and a spouse who would like to see your face occasionally.
A recent Harvard Business Review article shows that founders of high-growth companies are, on average, in their 40s — not 22. As I mentioned in my last article, the U.S. Small Business Administration reports that roughly half of new businesses don’t survive beyond five years, which suggests survival, not a spectacle, is the real game.
Headline: martyrdom is not a strategy.
If your system only works when you’re exhausted, it’s not a system, it’s a slow burn that will grind and wear you down until your venture, your dream, becomes an SBA statistic: another business idea that didn’t pan out.
Sustainable beats heroic. Every time.
Engineer a Patchwork of Work Blocks
One of the hardest transitions for founder-parents is accepting that time no longer comes in clean, cinematic blocks.
According to the American Time Use Survey from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, parents with children under six spend roughly 2–3 hours per day in primary childcare. Even parents with older children still log significant daily caregiving time — and that doesn’t count the constant background awareness that comes with parenting.
Layer on top of that the reality that Americans already average about 8+ hours per weekday working (also BLS data), and it becomes clear: the “disappear for 12 hours” model isn’t structurally compatible with family life.
Deep, focused work tends to happen in shorter, high-quality bursts. Think of the creative, the painter, or the writer, that is “inspired” and must get something down on paper, or in a song. We may not be award-winning authors or on the way to the Grammy’s, but the lesson is this: find your moments, block them, and lean into them hard knowing a “your child has a fever” text from school could be just around the corner.
My hack: An hour before anyone wakes up (~5:30-6:30AM) and an hour after everyone goes to bed (7-8PM). 10 New hours added to my week, allowing me to find the extra e-mail, thinking, and project time that I need to feel productive each week.
Find a way to be okay with the choppiness. It is normal.
Acknowledge and Check the Guilt of Leaving (Easier Said Than Done)
Before kids, leaving the house to work barely registers. You grab your keys. You chase the opportunity. The cost is abstract. After kids, leaving carries weight. A small voice asks where you’re going. A hand wraps around your leg. Someone is quietly measuring whether what’s pulling you away is more important than they are.
You are not alone in this struggle. Significant portions of parents consider reducing work hours to increase time at home (per CNBC). The pandemic accelerated this recalibration, with workforce participation patterns tracked by BLS showing shifts in how families prioritize flexibility.
Vague ambition isn’t enough anymore. The vision has to be specific. Grounded. Honest. This helps guide you through the moments when you ask yourself, “is this worth me leaving my home, and my family?”
Leave with intention and clarity. Come back with presence and commitment, to them.
Your kids don’t need you home every minute. They need to feel chosen when you are home. When the vision is strong enough, leaving the house becomes an act of commitment — not escape. And that’s a very different story to tell yourself. And someday, to them.
Lesson Two: You are not too old, seriously.
You are right on time
There’s a cultural myth that founders are 22-year-olds in hoodies living on caffeine and an algorithm. It makes for great television. It makes for terrible comparison if you are 40 with three kids and a mortgage.
Per the previously cited HBR article, older entrepreneurs are statistically more likely to succeed in their start-up ventures, perhaps due to a few gray hairs, some experience under their belt, and a network of the right people ready to back them and their vision. Separate analysis from the Kauffman Foundation has shown that entrepreneurial activity in the U.S. actually peaks around age 40. In other words, the statistically “prime” founder is far more likely to own orthopedic running shoes than a dorm room futon.
By 40, you have likely accumulated something that doesn’t show up in pitch decks: pattern recognition. You have seen bad ideas dressed up as good ones, hired wrong, misjudged timing — you may have even lost money and survived it.
Experience isn’t glamorous, but it compounds.
Data from the U.S. Small Business Administration reinforces a sobering reality: many businesses don’t make it past five years. Survival isn’t about bravado, rather judgment, discipline, and resilience — traits that often sharpen with age.
If you are starting something in your 40s, you are not behind. You have the experience, network, and self-awareness to make better better decisions, and you are right on time.
Don’t Build Alone
To go fast, go alone. To go far, go together.
This saying could not be more true when starting a business in your late thirties / early forties. Starting a business with a family amplifies everything — stress, risk, doubt. You need someone who can absorb the shock with you, offer a different perspective, see what you don’t, and keep you balanced.
For me, that person is my wife. She is different than me in many ways. A lawyer, risk-adverse, detail-oriented. While I am big picture, vision, what could go right, she is often here are the things you aren’t seeing and what could go off the rails. She is my sparring partner at times, and a calm nod of affirmation in others. She asks the hard questions while I romanticize an idea.
A global study by Ernst & Young found that a majority of high-growth entrepreneurs credited strong support systems — especially spouses or close partners — as a key factor in their success. Entrepreneurship may look individual from the outside, but it rarely is.
A partner does not have to be a spouse. It might be a co-founder, a friend, a mastermind group. But, you need someone who understands both the ambition and the cost; and not just financial cost, but the true cost of time, energy, and opportunity. Someone who will celebrate wins and challenge ego. Someone who keeps the business from quietly consuming the family.
Partner with someone who understands both the ambition and the cost.
Because if you’re building something meaningful, the people closest to you are already investors. They’re investing time, patience, emotional bandwidth. Protect them.
Business Becomes Part of the Family Story
There’s a version of “work-life balance” advice that frames work and family as permanent opponents — two forces pulling against each other in a zero-sum game.
I have found that framing very unhelpful. The goal isn’t perfect separation. Rather, it is integration with intention.
For us, something shifted when the business stopped being abstract. A few weeks ago, my 18-month-old daughter pointed at my Scoop shirt and said, “ice cream.” No joke. Our 3- and 5-year-old boys call the Scoop “our ice cream shop.” Our. There is a sense of ownership and pride that reverberates through the youngest and most important components of our family.
When kids can locate your work inside a story they can tell your absence feels different. Your work becomes a representation of collective effort and identity, not a continual disappearance into a vague place of mystery.
This doesn’t mean turning family life into a brand. It means letting your kids see the human side of building something meaningful: creative mock-ups and drawings, a bank statement, customer quotes from YELP, details of a challenge you are overcoming — it means bringing them into the narrative in age-appropriate ways that they can identify with and own alongside of you.
When the business becomes part of the family’s story — not a competitor to it — the tension softens. The work stops feeling like an intruder and starts feeling like contribution.
Your kids may not remember how many hours you worked. But, they’ll remember how the work felt in your household. They will remember if they could identify with it and tell the story alongside of you.
Welcome them into that narrative. See your effort and the business as part of the collective identity of the family and you will see interest, and forgiveness, from your kids in ways you never thought possible.
Lesson Three: Four things you can implement, immediately.
If you’re in the middle of parenting, founding, and entrepreneuring, here are four mini-shifts you can implement this week to save you time, and emotional bandwidth. No theories. Just implementable actions.
1. Think - and live - in thirds
There are 168 hours in a week.
Divide it into thirds (56 hours).
~56 hours working
~56 hours sleeping
~56 hours for everything else — family, fitness, friendships, sanity
Is it perfectly even every week? No.
Some weeks you sneak in a 14-hour day so Saturday morning is slower. Some seasons tilt heavier toward work, and some towards swim practice and lazy bike rides on a Sunday afternoon. But zoom out and look at the math.
I am not building a venture-backed AI startup (shout out to those that are). I do not work 100 hours a week.
I grind roughly a third of my time.
I sleep a third (8 hours a night).
I give the other third to everything and everyone that truly matters.
When you see it this way, the guilt softens. You are not “always working.” You are allocating.
Balance doesn’t mean equal days. It means proportional weeks.
Try it next week. And if it works, give it a month. It will change your life.
2. Sunday Night Reality Check
Every Sunday night, after the kids are down, the tea is steeped, and the dog isn’t dropping a ball at your feet, run a five-minute alignment check for the week. This is not a full strategic step back; it is a gut check for the week.
I ask myself every Sunday night: by Friday EOD, what will it take to win?
Ask:
What does a win look like this week?
What are the five big things that actually move the business?
What can be dropped without consequence?
Where are the pressure points going to be?
There will be 100 small tasks. There are always 100 small tasks. The e-mails will come in, chores will pile up, and kids will get sick. Yet, your business can grow because of five meaningful moves per week, not a hundred scattered, unaligned, micro-tasks.
Make a 15-min calendar invite to yourself. Set a reminder. Add your notes into each week’s calendar block. Throughout the week, and especially on Friday, check back to your goals and assess. Simple, but helpful Sunday night reality check for the week.
3. Bedtime Gut Check
Before you begin drafting another e-mail. Before you say yes to the late Zoom. Before you brush off the “one more hug and a drink of water.”
Run one filter: What will my five-year-old go to bed thinking of me tonight?
While dropping my kids off one morning, I heard a parent say, “Just go inside. Mommy has a Zoom.” The toddler stood there bewildered, wanting thirty extra seconds. One more hug. A tiny pep talk. Tears streaming, the kid walked into their 9-hour day of pre-school.
Most Zooms can wait thirty seconds. “Sorry I’m late, my last call with a client ran over.” This signals that your time is in demand, and your last client (your child) is just as important as this new client staring at you through a screen. They will survive.
Your kids won’t remember your quarterly targets. They will remember how it felt when you closed the laptop to play.
Fatherhood softened me a bit — in the best possible way. Consider the new identity you have as a dual entrepreneur and bedtime story reader.
4. Own Your Story Every, Single Day
For a while, I hesitated to say out loud that I was starting an ice cream and matcha business in our town. I thought people would laugh me off and not take me seriously.
Teach For America. Harvard. McKinsey. I had these LinkedIN markers that I wanted people to identify me with, and the words of my five-year-old (daddy doesn’t have to work) rang in my ears.
Here’s what happened instead:
Friends and family invested $100k in the Scoop;
Thousands of customers showed up (over 7,000 as of this article); and
New strategy consulting work emerged because people noticed my ability to roll my sleeves up and execute.
Credibility is about what you deliver and the impact you make on the people around you. Being respected in my small town, and in my home, is more than my work history or education. It is the authentic story that I live inside and outside of my home every, single day.
Own your story. Own the reinvention. The risk. When you live the vision and business you are building, people will see it as an extension of the most true, authentic extension of yourself.
One Final Thought
A few weeks ago it was unseasonably warm and I wore my Scoop shirt when I woke up. My three-year-old, upon seeing me at the breakfast table, promptly turned around to his room and emerged wearing an identical (*youth x-small) t-shirt.
“Just like you, daddy,” he said.
The moments I struggle, the moments I wonder if starting a new business at 40 with kids, car payments, and endless real-world adult responsibilities, I am brought back to what matters most.
My son doesn’t wear his shirt because he cares about revenue or inventory turnover. He wears it to identify with something, and someone, he cares about.
You likely have moments of these from your own life. No press release. No sales bump. But a small, little voice telling you, “keep going.”
If this article resonated with you, or you are looking to find more time and capacity to expand your small business without losing your sanity, please reach out to Alex Teece to explore opportunities to grow and scale.
