Founders can discover it laborious to step away from work when their firm rests on their shoulders. The idea of getting “work-life balance” has sparked fierce debate amongst entrepreneurs, who query if it’s even doable to have the most effective of each worlds: scaling a multimillion-dollar enterprise, with sufficient downtime to recharge. Two-time founder Nicole Bernard Dawes is a robust advocate of unplugging from the job—however just for her workers.
“I think I probably am a little bit of a hypocrite, because I don’t unplug. I never do,” Dawes tells Fortune. “I never want to be the person that’s holding up a member of our team.”
The serial entrepreneur encourages her staffers to completely disconnect from work as soon as they’re off the clock, however doesn’t give herself the identical respiration room. Having scaled two corporations to success, she’s assumed the accountability of all the time being on for many years. Dawes first based natural, non-GMO tortilla chip model Late July in 2003, which presently strains the aisles of Targets, Entire Meals, Krogers, and Walmarts throughout the nation. Campbell’s acquired a majority stake of the enterprise in 2014, ultimately shopping for the remainder of the $100 million firm in 2017. In 2018, Dawes broke into one other client packaged items (CPG) market once more, this time with zero-sugar, sustainably packaged soda line Nixie. The model raised $27 million in new funding earlier this yr, with its merchandise being offered in over 11,000 main grocery shops.
With greater than twenty years of entrepreneurship underneath her belt at Late July, Dawes had pushed by financial downturns and plenty of sleepless nights. However the hardships didn’t cease her from returning to the startup scene as Nixie’s founder—having grown up within the enterprise world, Dawes is just not so simply deterred. Nonetheless, she doesn’t need work to overhaul her staffers’ lives.
“I signed up for this. I am the entrepreneur, I did this to myself—a self-inflicted situation. [My employees] didn’t sign up to be entrepreneurs,” Dawes says. “I am very comfortable taking downtime, but also making sure I’m available.”
Dawes says by no means unplugging is “my life”—and he or she grew up in it
Many leaders on the market, like Google cofounder Sergey Brin, count on their staffers to clock in additional than the standard nine-to-five job. However Dawes doesn’t maintain her her workers to have the relentless work-ethic of entrepreneurs who delight themselves on having no private lives.
“I think that where a lot of [leaders] differ, is extending that to their team. I feel very strongly that it should not extend to the team,” Dawes explains. “But I also feel like that is how I grew up. My father missed a lot of stuff because he felt like that was what you had to do. So I was determined I wasn’t gonna do that. I wanted to be present at things for my kids, and I wanted [it] to be okay for our team to be that way, too.”
Dawes witnessed the pitfalls of entrepreneurship as a child rising up in her mother and father’ meals companies. She spent her childhood years working the entrance counter of her mom’s health-food retailer, and roaming the flooring of her late father’s $4.87 billion snack empire: Cape Cod Chips. As a child in a household operating two companies, Dawes says it could possibly be troublesome for her mother and father to step away from the job. So when she determined to comply with of their footsteps as a two-time founding father of profitable CPG manufacturers, she knew precisely what to anticipate.
“When you decide to become an entrepreneur, there’s a lot of people [saying], ‘It’s stressful, it’s lonely, it’s all these things.’ And that’s true, but this is where I was really fortunate: I grew up in this business, so I entered eyes wide open,” Dawes says. “That’s why it’s really important to be passionate about your mission, passionate about your products. Because you do have to sacrifice a lot on the other side.”
Dawes nonetheless makes time for the essential issues
Whereas Dawes admits she has issue stepping away from the grind, she nonetheless makes time for the issues that preserve her sane.
“You have to choose what’s the most important thing in that moment. I don’t think as an entrepreneur—at least for me—I’ve never really, truly, been able to shut off completely,” Dawes says. “But I also make time to have family dinner almost every night. There were things that were priorities to me, and I still make them priorities, like going out for a walk every day or exercising.”
The entrepreneur additionally loves hitting the seashore, studying, and cooking—and regardless of it feeling like a chore to many, Dawes actually enjoys going to the grocery retailer. She calls it her “hobby”: observing what new merchandise are stocked on cabinets, and what objects consumers are gravitating in the direction of. It’s gratifying to witness individuals decide up a bag of Late July or a case of Nixie drinks to convey residence to their households, one thing she feels immensely grateful for. Whereas getting her manufacturers into these grocery aisles has been no straightforward feat, it’s all been price it ultimately. Dawes says ardour is what eases the load of her work-life steadiness.
“Sometimes when I wake up in the morning like, ‘I can’t even believe I’m this lucky that I get to do this job,’” Dawes says. “And because I feel that way, it doesn’t feel like working. I’m getting to do something fun all the time.”
