Wendy Doyle and Kelsey Lents at Two Birds in Washington, DC
Kelsey Lents is the CEO & Co-Founder of Two Birds, a Reggio-inspired childcare and school serving children, infants through Pre-K, that is located in DC and Virginia and opening in Maryland next year. In addition to its childcare, it also features on-site coworking space for parents and family programming on the weekends. Kelsey recently joined United WE for a webinar to discuss the findings of our latest research report on childcare and women entrepreneurs. In this Q&A, she dives deeper into her entrepreneurial journey, the challenges of balancing childcare with business ownership, and her insights for aspiring female entrepreneurs.
Q&A:
Q: Let's start with your background. Can you tell us about your professional journey and what led you to opening Two Birds?
A: I am a poster child for viewing your career as a journey, rather than a single destination. After graduating from college, I spent a couple of years in Germany on a Fulbright, both teaching in an elementary school and marketing for an architecture firm. I had always been passionate about design, so when I moved back to the U.S., I worked for an interior architecture firm, ultimately returning to school to get a Masters in Architecture and then to practice architecture for a decade. While doing so, I realized that the business side of the firm and of projects was as interesting to me as the design side, so I again went back to school for my MBA. While at school, I became pregnant with our first child, which thrust me into the world of childcare and trying to understand how care integrates with careers, particularly when you’re trying to build a new professional trajectory for yourself. At the time, I was taking business, finance, and entrepreneurship classes, so I started thinking about how the care solutions I was finding didn’t fit my needs and what it would look like if there was one that did. And from that, Two Birds was born. My mission was to establish a care and education solution that recognized there is a spectrum of need, of family engagement, and of work-life orientation - and then to create a community for those families who sit on that spectrum.
Q: Our recent survey surfaced the challenges women entrepreneurs face with childcare. Can you share your experience with balancing childcare and running your business?
A: Three things come to mind here that can make finding a sustainable balance difficult: economics; time and engagement. When you have children, the ebbs and flows that can come with new businesses, such as income and time, no longer only affect you. They affect family resources, again time and money. When I was starting out, I found it critically important to establish milestones and metrics along the path of building the business to determine whether this was financially feasible for my family to determine if I could continue to pursue this path, or whether I’d need to pivot to something more traditional. Those are hard internal conversations, but I found them necessary. Additionally, in the U.S., culturally we find that the responsibility of care falls more heavily on women - whether that’s providing the care or finding the external solution for care. I’ve seen time and again that with entrepreneurial mothers, this intensifies. There is an assumption that entrepreneurship implies a flexible work schedule; so there is an assumption that entrepreneurial women should own the entirety of childcare. What that means is that the entrepreneurial journey for a female owned company can take much longer than with male counterparts because we may have to work fewer hours, take on fewer clients, etc. As a result, it can take longer to build up the finances necessary to afford full time external care, creating a catch-22. Lastly, I think many women want to be engaged with their child’s community, care and education, particularly when they have infants and toddlers. That’s why at Two Birds we prioritize community, engagement, and tethering professional workspace to our schools. We wanted to create the village without placing the burden on our families, particularly moms, to run it.
Q: The report also suggests solutions for supporting women entrepreneurs with childcare needs. What kind of childcare support systems do you think would be most helpful for women entrepreneurs?
A: This speaks directly to what I call the spectrum of care. Historically, we think of care as a binary solution: traditional drop off or at home. There are so many other potential frameworks for childcare solutions, that would recognize that not everyone sits at either end of the spectrum. Many sit somewhere in the middle. For women starting businesses, I imagine that the most relevant might be part time care, co-located work and care, or evening care. I think it’s important we support the creation of these alternative solutions to broaden the range of offerings and to allow providers to really focus on what aspect of non-traditional care they specialize in. For example, while in some instances we provide part time care, we specifically orient around co-located care. It’s a similar concept to large corporations who have on-site care, but most people do not work for large corporations with this benefit. So we brought the benefit to everyone to give them the ability to nurse throughout the day, to meet other parents, to eliminate commutes; time is a precious resource, so this shouldn’t be overlooked.
Q: Beyond the childcare aspect, what other challenges have you faced as a woman entrepreneur, and how have you overcome them?
A: Entrepreneurship can be a lonely road. I face challenges that are unique to building a business and I have to be a jack of all trades at work. Most of my friends have more traditional careers and metrics for success. You frequently hear about how important it is to create a network of fellow entrepreneurs, both to mitigate that loneliness but also to help expand your professional contacts and build the business. I am a mother of three, though, and I want to spend my free time with my family and being present with my kids as they grow up. I’ve been fortunate to have a co-founder on this journey. He is a parent, in a similar phase of life. We often say if one of us is having a difficult day, the other one can’t be: i.e. one of us is always “up” to allow space for the other to be “down”. Not everyone has a co-founder, but if it’s possible to find a person who can serve this role for you, whether that’s professionally or personally, it’s invaluable. Entrepreneurship can also affect the entire family, so if you have a partner at home, it’s important they truly recognize the value of what you’re doing. I have an extraordinarily supportive spouse who wholeheartedly believes in what we’re building.
Q: Looking ahead, what are your hopes and dreams for Two Birds?
A: I want Two Birds to be a solution that is available and accessible for many more families and in many other cities. The quality and sustainability of what we provide is critically important to me, so we spent the last several years building a foundation that prioritized the quality of care and education, family experience, and our internal culture. As we were creating that, we kept an eye on how that could scale to many more sites without losing what makes it unique and while retaining the local neighborhood and community feel of each of our schools. We’ve participated in public-private partnerships to help with the affordability and accessibility component. I’d love to be a part of more of those partnerships, to help pilot them in other cities, and to drive policy forward. As these conversations and surveys show, this is a universal topic and issue across the U.S., so we’d love to be a part of the solution across the U.S.
Q: What advice do you have for aspiring female entrepreneurs with children?
A: Give yourself some grace. Some days you’ll prioritize work and some days you’ll prioritize your family, and that’s ok. What matters is the net effect; your children know you love them and that you are an integral part of their lives in a way that works for you and them. To that end, what works for your family may not be what others see as the solution. Try to ignore that noise. It’s your solution, not theirs. And remember you are as important in your life as your children are. I am a firm believer that my children will be happier, that I will be a better mom, if I feel fulfilled and that I am living for myself as well as for them. Again, that means something different for everyone, but for me it means carving out space for my own career goals alongside my children’s dreams.
Thank you to Kelsey for sharing her inspiring story and valuable insights! This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. For more information watch the webinar and read our 2024 research report Care for the Economy: Womens’ Entrepreneurs Experiences with Childcare.