For our first ever Working Mother Best Smalll Companies and
Entrepreneurial Mom Awards, we honor three working moms who not only
created their own ideal jobs
but also launched businesses that help other women succeed at work and
at home.

Gotta Have Art?
Nanette De Cillis, 50, mother of Julian, 14, and founder of ArtsCetera, Brooklyn, NY


Her idea
Nanette offers classes that introduce music and art to
children ages 4 months to 4 years, planting the seeds of creativity and
building a community resource for new moms.
Mom factor
This spring,
she's franchising her program to help others start family-friendly
businesses in their hometowns.
How she did it
She began as a music
teacher, offering mom-and-tot classes. After five years, she used
$23,000 from an American Express line of credit to rent and renovate a
studio space. Her office continues to be a spare bedroom in her
apartment.

Walk into ArtsCetera and you'll find dozens of little hands clapping or
painting or banging on drums. It's music to Nanette De Cillis's ears.
"I always wanted a salon that was a mecca for artists. I just didn't
picture my clientele arriving in strollers," says the former dancer,
who ran her own avant-garde company and worked in arts fund-raising
until her son, Julian, was born in 1991.
Nanette's transition from stay-at-home mom to arts entrepreneur came in
1993 when she trained to teach for Music Together, a pioneering program
for young children. She licensed Music Together's materials, offering
one class a week, then two, then three, growing her business as her son
moved from preschool to kindergarten. In 1998, on the strength of a
loyal following, she opened ArtsCetera in a 900-square-foot studio
space, and her husband quit his job as an arts administrator and took
over the finances. "He freed me up to focus on the creative," says
Nanette, who has developed such a successful brand of ArtsCetera music
and arts classes that she's franchising her CDs and curriculum. A
national business is on the horizon, yet her definition of success is
simply this: "I can't go to the store without running into someone who
shook jingle bells at ArtsCetera."

Matchmaker, Matchmaker
Allison Karl O'Kelly, 33, mother of Nolan, 21?2, and Ethan, 1, and founder of the Mom Corps, Atlanta, GA


Her idea
She matches skilled moms and dads with accounting, law, IT and
marketing firms, arranging project-based, part-time or at-home work.

Mom factor
In less than a year, Mom Corps has connected some 50
talented moms with blue-chip firms.
How she did it
Using family money
and a business loan secured by her 401(k), Allison launched Mom Corps
in July 2005. With a team of seven moms who market and manage the
company and a data bank of 500 resumes—most acquired through word of
mouth—she expects to turn a profit by year's end.

After her son Nolan was born in May 2003, Allison Karl O'Kelly ventured
out to the playground and found it populated by ex-lawyers, MBAs and
other top-level professionals. Why, in this age of corporate
flexibility initiatives, had these moms abandoned the workplace? "It's
actually pretty hard to find a job that meets your flexibility
requirements," says Allison, a CPA with an MBA from Harvard. She
herself felt constrained by her "dream" three-day-a-week job in Toys
"R" Us's Atlanta management program. "I didn't want to be away from
home if my child was sick," she says. "I wanted to pick the twenty-four
hours I worked." So as she pushed her stroller, Allison dreamed of a
business that matched playground talent with high-level, flexible jobs.

In December 2003, Allison quit Toys "R" Us to test-drive her concept.
She cold-called major accounting firms and turned up more assignments
than she—and her friends—could handle. So, in July 2005, she launched
Mom Corps. Her concept has proved so successful that she's increased
her staff to seven moms and hired another MBA to open a Mom Corps
office in Washington, DC. She hopes to expand to one or two major
cities each year.

Meanwhile, she holds team meetings in her basement while her full-time
caregiver supervises everyone's children upstairs. "My VP of HR turned
down a job-share at the Weather Channel to work for me," says Allison.
"It's very empowering to run a business that's making life better for
parents."

Designing Woman
Lucinda Yates, 50, mother of Sarah, 26, and creator of Designs by Lucinda, Portland, ME


Her idea
She relies on a cottage industry of local moms and makes 11
lines of themed pins that nonprofits can buy for $7.50 and resell for
$15.
Mom factor
Since 1989, some 300 moms have worked at home, earning
$75 to $300 per week and assembling a total of 4 million pins. Total
raised for charity: $24 million.
How she did it
Word of mouth turned
Lucinda into an instant success. Sales were $80,000 in 1989, $250,000
in 1990 and $1.4 million in 1991. Denied a bank loan, she poured her
profits back into the business, eventually purchasing laser cutters for
the pin components and an 8,000-square-foot factory space.

Lucinda Yates had no idea she was starting a multimillion-dollar
business when she cut a triangle and a square out of picture-frame mat
board. A house, she thought. Maybe I can make house-shaped pins that
stores can sell to support homeless programs.

Lucinda understood how easy it was to end up homeless—she'd lived on
the streets from 1980 to 1982, following the dissolution of her first
marriage. She also understood that if she could find a way to make
jewelry inexpensively, it would sell. After all, when she was homeless,
she'd hawked handmade jewelry for food. Later on she developed such a
following as a jewelry designer that she was able to stop waitressing.
Lucinda's mat-board experiment worked. One local real estate agent
loved her house pins so much that she took them to a huge convention.
"I sent her off with fliers," recalls Lucinda. "And my phone began to
ring." Orders came in for 400 pins at a clip. Quickly, Lucinda leapt
into manufacturing, die-cutting tiny mat-board parts—shutters, moons,
trees—that women glued together at home. "I controlled the colors, and
they created one-of-a-kind scenes," she says. "It was a way of making a
mass product unique."

As sales soared to $1.4 million in just three years, Lucinda began
talking about her own homelessness, something she'd kept secret even
from her mother. "I'm not proud of what I did, but I left Sarah, who
was two, with my ex-husband in California and ran away from
responsibility," she admits. "I was young and couldn't handle being a
mother." After being raped at gunpoint, she made a vow: She'd become
successful the same way she became homeless?one step at a time. With
her mother's help, Lucinda returned to Portland and regained custody of
Sarah at age 4. She was 10 when Lucinda made her first house pin. "If I
hadn't been homeless, would I have had this idea?" asks Lucinda.
"Probably not. The mistakes I've made are all part of my success."