How did this happen? Well, I have to thank Marta Frey, the Director of the Small Business Development Center at the Collin County Community College District. When Moms Out Loud was but a speck of an idea (and I was still employed, which must not have conveyed into the article), I met with Marta and “pitched it” to her for her reaction. She very politely told me that it sounded like a great idea, but that I may be a tad too aggressive in my assumptions on how fast it could launch and take hold. (Me? Expectations too high? Strange, I’ve never heard that before.) Anyway, she, and the SBDC, have remained a great resource as I’ve gotten my business going. On her recommendation, Kim called me for an interview.

So, I met with Kim Nguyen over a Starbuck’s blended lemonade last week (a great reason to go to Starbuck’s…like I need another reason to go to Starbuck’s) and had a wonderful discussion. She wove it into a nice article profiling the trend of Moms (like so many I now know) opting out of corporate life and into something they are passionate about that provides them more flexibility to balance their family and career. Overall, I think she nailed it, even though there was some appropriate “poetic license” used (on my part, at least). And now I feel like I have four more comrades on this entrpreneurial ride I’m on, which is great. (Check out the Teacher Depot in Frisco, Dawn Michelle Photography, Homemaker CEO, and The Executive Organizer.)

There is only one place I feel like I really have to correct the article, which says MOL is targeted to Moms who stay at home. In fact, Moms Out Loud is targeted to all Moms, not just those who stay home. One of the great things about the way we’ve scoped Moms Out Loud is that any Mom can find something useful in it, whether it be the reviews of local businesses, the local events calendar, the Mom/parenting content, or the social networking. And every mom as an individual will probably use it differently than other Moms. So, I hope every Mom from every walk of life will use it and find it helps solve some of the hassles in her life.

And thanks again, Kim, for a great discussion and for spotlighting some of the great Mom-owned businesses here locally.

Today is the first day we go out to officially “sell” MomsOutLoud.com. What that means is I have a meeting with a potential advertiser, and instead of only getting feedback on my media kit (I did tell you all that I really like feedback, right?!), I am taking a contract and am going to attempt to close the sale. I am going to try to refrain from begging, but my fragile ego may not let me walk out of there without a signature, so I can’t be totally responsible for my actions.

I have been repeating this phrase – “Believe in Abundance” – over and over to myself all weekend in anticipation of this week.

“Believe in Abundance” has actually been a fairly constant refrain in my head and my heart since I decided to leave corporate America in January of this year. Around then, I told a contact, who is now a friend, that I was considering leaving to start my own business, and she told me: “Sometimes you just have to close your eyes and believe in abundance.” She still doesn’t know (until now – because hopefully she’s reading this blog!) how much those words resonated with me and how central they have been to keeping my faith in what I’m trying to achieve.

The refrain has helped me get through some overwhelming points on this entrepreneurial journey. It sits in my head, kind of like white noise, a soft buzz that surrounds everything I do daily, coming forward at unexpected times to give me a nudge when I don’t even know I need it. It became pretty loud when I was considering taking an attractive-in-all-other-situations, part-time job working for a wonderful person and friend at a former employer whom I still hold in the highest regard, and helped me make the decision to focus on MomsOutLoud.com fulltime. It hit rock-concert decibel levels when, two months after I became a full-fledged entrepreneur, my husband resigned his own corporate job for various reasons, leaving us with no steady income in the family.

The remarkable thing about me recently living my life following this principle is that it is not my normal tendency. I am a worrier by genetics initially, and by years of practice now. When Jim first met me, I remember asking him when we were faced with any decision: “What happens if everything goes wrong?” To this, my wonderfully understanding husband would always reply:

“What happens if everything goes right?”

So as I am now pursuing something I want so much I can taste it, I am choosing to believe that everything IS going to go right, that there WILL be abundance. I don’t know how much this belief will sustain me on the road ahead; I don’t know how much I will need it to sustain me. But, I choose to believe that, like the water on the flowers above, if I keep my faith in what I’m trying to achieve, MomsOutLoud will blossom abundantly.

Being a true pragmatist, I figured officing at Mom’s was my best option.

As I packed my briefcase the evening before I was going to become an office squatter in her guest bedroom, I gathered a few essential items.

And then, I took a picture, because the items seemed to me to be just what any Mom would take to her office.

Some of the items are not unusual – quite unisex, in fact: laptop, power cord, notebook, pen, business cards and coffee mug, a couple of reminder stickies, and a newspaper article I saw in my hometown weekly paper that sparked a thought for a blog entry (to come later).

But most are purely “Mom”:

• Pictures of my boys
• Good-smelling hand soap (current favorite: Bath & Body Works Sensual Amber. Yummy yummy.)
• Big bottle of hand lotion (current favorite: Aveeno Naturals. Just the right richness, not greasy.)
• A lint roller and refill (did I mention there are two office kitties?)
• Hair scrunchies – on the very slight chance I find myself at the office without a ponytail
• A basket to put the lotion and lint roller, plus whatever else I decide I forgot, into to keep the guest bath from getting cluttered

I know these are purely Mom items for several reasons:

• It took my husband 6 months after the birth of our second son to take a picture of our new boy into his office at work, and then only after one of the women in his office (thanks, Naomi!) confiscated a picture of us as a family of three and drew in an additional baby. And I consider him a great, involved, and loving Dad!
• Would any man you know be caught red-handed with special hand soap or lotion? Or scrunchies?
• My husband’s answer to bathroom organization is shoving everything under the sink. Of course, when all you do is jump in and out of the shower, using an all purpose shampoo/bath wash combo, beyond which the personal grooming routine is brushing teeth and shaving….well, there’s just not that many things to keep track of.

So….before I put all of these items into my bag to take over to my new office, I took a picture, thinking others might appreciate laughing at what makes us uniquely women! I sure did.

There is an old parable I’ve heard many times about the importance of perspective. It describes how three stonecutters, doing the same exact task, viewed their job completely differently and how their perspective made a huge difference in their personal happiness and motivation. It goes something like this….

One day in the 14th century, a man asked three stonecutters to describe their job.

• The first stonecutter replied with great bitterness, “I am cutting this stone into blocks.

• The second stonecutter replied with no emotion, “I am building an arch.

• The third stonecutter replied with great pride, “I am building a cathedral.”

Entrepreneurship, I have found from even my short experience, is not for stone cutters. I compare many of the tasks I am doing myself now to what I did as a corporate Vice President and laugh. Order my own office supplies? Track my own expenses? Make my own copies? If I took a lot of the work I do daily on a literal basis, I could get bogged down and lose the meaning of the work. These tasks are necessary, and when you’re a 1 person show with limited budget, you do them – all of them.

But that’s not what I’m really doing. I am creating something. Something big. Something I believe Moms need. Something I believe Moms want. They may not even know they want it (though every Mom I’ve talked to about MomsOutLoud.com has gotten “it” immediately), but once they have it, they won’t be able to live without it. That’s what I believe.

I am now trying to staff a small team to help me build Moms Out Loud. For the most part, I am finding people who believe the vision, who believe what we are building is going to be huge and will create a tighter community of Moms in North Texas than existed before – or could exist without something like MomsOutLoud.com.

And these are the people Moms Out Loud needs. The people who will jump in and do whatever task is needed to build the cathedral. The people who will look at a pile of papers that need to be consolidated into a media kit, or a contact log that needs to be managed, and tackle it – all while keeping the perspective of the bigger picture of what we’re building. Here’s to my cathedral builders who’ve signed up so far: Leanne, Donna, Jennifer, Monica, Adonia, Heather, Stephanie, and Missy.

But you know what else Moms Out Loud needs – and in fact, won’t succeed without? Our beta-Moms. Moms who believe that they have something important to share with other Moms: their experience. Moms who want to make the path through motherhood easier for other Moms by sharing their lessons. Moms who want to meet each other because they know this journey is a lot more fun when you’ve got some good friends beside you who can entertain you with a funny story, listen when you need to vent, or maybe even watch your kids when you need a night out with your husband.

So, to all you beta-Moms out there – remember, we’re building a cathedral! There might be some tedious block-cutting along the way (writing your xth review for your kids’ last birthday party place, trying to remember your favorite goodnight book for your pre-schooler), but in the end, we will have something beautiful that will help others. I hope you share the vision!