By Angela R. Garber, Working Woman Magazine
November 2000
With a strong desire to control their own destinies, Maureen Clarry and Kelly Gilmore decided to branch out on their own and start a business. What they didn’t realize was just how in control they would have to be.
Ten months after opening Connect: The Knowledge Network, a Colorado-based information technology staffing company, in 1992, both women discovered they were pregnant. For many, the news would have signified a derailment of the self-employment plans, but not for these two. “We like to think of it as the part of the business plan that wasn’t planned,” says Clarry.
Instead of giving up, Clarry and Gilmore went on to create a successful, family-friendly business with 17 employees, a pool of 3,000 independent consultants, and $7 million in revenues.
Before starting Connect, both Clarry and Gilmore had worked together at General Electric, Clarry as a consulting services manager and Gilmore in sales and marketing. They brought with them experience and credibility, and a long list of contacts. Rather than being subjected to stereotyping, first as pregnant women and then as working moms, they garnered a lot of support.
Gilmore finds achieving “balance,” and empowering employees to do the same, a challenge. “Balance is really more of an hourly thing than anything else,” she says. “One hour the kids’ soccer game is more important than the phone call that needs to be returned, but the next hour a high-priority proposal may take precedence over the soccer game. As much as you try to create balance on a lifetime level, it really comes down to a daily and hourly challenge.”
“When we started in 1992, we were in the spare bedroom at Kelly’s house,” Clarry explains, “But when she had the baby, that became the baby’s room, and we moved into my basement.” It was at that time that Connect hired its first employee, a nanny.
“She would stay upstairs with my 3-year-old and the two babies,” says Clarry, noting that she and Gilmore had baby boys just two weeks apart. “That lasted about a year before it started feeling like Grand Central Station at my house, and we knew we had to look for a new space.”
But not just any space would do. The two were determined to hold on to the control they had built over the past two years and to keep their children close to them. “We didn’t even look at typical downtown high-rises,” Clarry states. Instead, they purchased a rundown Victorian home in a redevelopment section of Littleton, Colo. The building had been a private residence, a boarding house, and even a convent in its past lives.
“The thing that attracted us to the 115-year-old house was a detached building in the back that, in the ’50s, the nuns had built and used as a kindergarten,” Clarry says. “When we remodeled, it became on-site day care and the big house was our office space. We felt like we had the best of both worlds.”
They brought their computers, their files, the nanny, and the children, and opened up shop.