What to do when people criticize your Business Choices

What to do when people criticize your Business Choices

Welcome to episode 4, The Determined Mom Show. Hello and welcome. We’ll be talking about employing moms. We choose here at The Determined Mom to employ moms in any way, shape, and form that we can, and for any open positions, we always try to find a mom to fill it, and it turns out this might be a controversial subject.

When we were hired, I had a little incident before I started this podcast. When I was looking for a podcast editor, I decided to post in a Facebook group for podcasters, and in that group, I requested that the podcast editor be a mom.

I posted that 100% because our mission as The Determined Mom is to support mom-owned businesses in any way, shape or form that we can. So not only does that mean empowering moms, helping them to get started in their business, and helping them with their marketing.

If I have an open position in my business, I would like to hire a mom. So there are so many moms right now that I would love to hire, but unfortunately, I don’t have enough open positions. I look forward to growing the business and eventually having an all-mom rockstar team.

Still, for this particular hiring, I was looking for someone to edit the audio on my podcasts. So I posted in a podcast group, of which I belong to two podcast editing groups. One is all female, and the other is men and women. So I ended up posting that particular request and the one that has men and women.

So men were generally not happy about it. They were all kind of grumpy about it, and I got a very sad message from a woman who reached out and said she was very offended by my post and that it affected her because she could not have children.

I want to ensure we’re not choosing to exclude anyone from hiring. I support all women, not just moms, but there’s a little element of keeping your business on brand here that I want to talk about. If you have a mission to support veterans, for example, and someone isn’t a veteran, you can still hire them.

That’s not a problem, but typically, people don’t get angry with you for supporting veterans. So I understand what’s going on, you know, the emotion behind trying to have children and not being able to have children.

I’m completely sensitive to that, and I would never want someone to think that we’re excluding them, but I want to support moms because I’m aware of that struggle, and I know how hard it is to be at home and need to make money, plus not wanting to put the kids in daycare, etc.

Putting the kids in daycare is more expensive than working full-time and from home. So either way, that message came through on an Easter Sunday couple of years ago, and it had me pretty bummed out for most of the day, but thankfully, I got encouragement from my husband.

Our decision to support moms is not excluding other people, and I am open to hiring any woman. That’s starting a business, but if there’s a mom who applies as well, and she’s super qualified, I’m going to hire her. The reason for that is that mom knows what other moms struggle with, and our brand is built around moms. So I don’t want to have anyone that may not understand what we’re going through or may not understand the marketing or anything like that.

I mean, I want everyone to reflect on the brand I’m building. I think it’s really important for moms and you in your business to ensure you stay true to your brand. You will come across criticisms, negative comments, and things from time to time. No matter how pure your intentions are, it will just happen. So develop that thick skin, know you are staying true to your brand, and keep your head up, momma!