Episode 28: Overlapping circles of career and parenting with Kim Lindauer

This week we welcome Kim Lindauer. Kim is the owner of Kim’s Gym and founder of My Venn Life, her new endeavor built to help and support moms who are entrepreneurs.

After 18 years of owning her own gym, Kim started My Venn Life to support other moms who own businesses. She saw a lot of support for male business owners, and wanted to support business people who are also moms in a space that was tuned to them. It's a community of like-minded women to support each other in building their businesses.

Moms can’t turn off "momming'… They have different expectations around what it means to be a primary parent and the pressure to be involved. Mom entrepreneurs have real-world external pressures as well as others that they impose on themselves.

How does Kim parent 3 boys and run 2 businesses? Sometimes it’s messy, and sometimes it’s graceful. After reading Dropping the Ball by Tiffany Dufu, Kim practices "dropping the ball" herself, and she realizes that all emails asking for help aren’t talking to her directly.

One of Kim’s greatest pieces of advice for entrepreneurs is to give yourself space to think about the problems you are trying to solve. Think out steps and give yourself time to have ideas. You have to have time to have ideas, to think through and process them, and to envision the steps involved in executing.

We talk about the importance of boundaries and delegation. Without her staff, Kim wouldn’t have been able to build out her business, and she learned that the business did BETTER when she delegated and took a step back.

In hiring, Kim would rather be short-staffed vs poorly-staffed and she'd rather lose money rather than hire poorly. This is because she wants to ensure a high-value experience for everyone at her gym. She handed over hiring when she knew that her staff understood the exact profile of the role that the business needs. Kim hires for the long term and wants to grow her people over that time.

The community part of My Venn Life is organized in circles. The founding circle of women joined for 3 months to test the program. Now Kim is involved in a year's commitment to connecting, sharing and being vulnerable. It started on a snow day, and the Earth kept on spinning….

Part of Kim's self care is therapy to help her with the loss of identity that comes from not being at Kim’s Gym daily. She has mentors who help her get out of her own way.

How to find Kim:

• My Venn Life
• Email
• @myvennlife on Instagram