If you ask Shannon Brouillette what she's like—as a mom, as a wife, as a business owner—she'll answer you modestly. She'll tell you she feels guilty about not being there for every one of her 4- and 6-year-old sons' school events, when all the other moms seem to manage to find the time. She'll say that she has employees at her Orlando, FL-based company, CFO Strategic Partners, who are better and brighter than she is, though she's the one who built the business from a one-woman show in 1999 to a thriving enterprise with 30 employees and more than 400 clients. But if you ask anyone else about Shannon Brouillette, you'll hear a more effusive story. "I know I'm biased, but our sons, Wyatt and Hayden, are the most well-adjusted, happy kids, and that's because Shannon is doing such a tremendous job as a mom," says Shannon's husband of 11 years, Chris. "Mediocrity has never been part of her vocabulary," says Leigh Ann Horton, one of Shannon's two business partners and a longtime friend. "Shannon is focused and determined."

Shannon has needed that fortitude, not only to build CFO Strategic Partners, a small business that provides the services of chief financial officers on an as-needed basis to other small companies, but also to endure personal tragedies that could easily have derailed her. She began her career as an auditor at KPMG and then became a commercial lending officer at an Orlando bank. Shannon came up with the idea for her own company while at the bank, where she sometimes worked with CEOs who needed the financial services that a CFO provides but either couldn't afford one or didn't want to pay a full-time CFO's salary. One such CEO was John Elsea, head of Orlando-based Peninsula Engineering Inc., who today is one of Shannon's biggest champions. "The day-to-day accounting at John's company was a mess," says Shannon. "His banker would tell him that his checking account was overdrawn when there was lots of money coming in."

"The business was facing serious difficulties, and I asked Shannon for help," John reveals. "She told me that she was considering starting her own company and asked if I wanted to be her first client. I said yes without any hesitation." 

At the time, Shannon was four months pregnant with twins. "I wanted to have my company up and running so that once the babies came, I could keep working but have the flexibility to be with them," she says. So with a $1,500 deposit from John, she set up shop in her dining room. But just two days after she fired John's business manager and started getting Peninsula Engineering's finances in order, Shannon went into premature labor.

"I was in the hospital, basically upside down because they were trying to keep the babies in," says Shannon. "But toward the end of the week, I started getting infections and had to deliver the twins."

Shannon gave birth to Timothy and Rachel, who each weighed just over a pound—too small to live. They died about 15 minutes later. Heartbroken, Shannon needed time to start healing but knew that she couldn't abandon her client. "I walked into John's office, and he said, 'Oh, thank goodness you're here!'" she says. "I told him, 'I'm here for ten minutes to take care of a couple of things. I'm going away for a week, and when I get back, we'll talk.'"

Shannon and Chris went to the Bahamas to recoup. The loss of their babies was especially hard, as Shannon had miscarried a few times before finally becoming pregnant. Resigned to the fact that this was simply not her time to be a mother, Shannon threw herself into her work. "I had doctors telling me that I had an incompetent cervix and an irritable uterus—two things you don't want to be called, incompetent and irritable!" she says. "So I said, Clearly, I need to focus my attention on something I'm not incompetent at."

 "Focusing on her business helped her deal with grieving," says Chris. "It was an outlet. It helped fill a void."

Then, soon after what would have been the twins' due date, Shannon steeled herself to confront her grief outright. She'd kept the door to the babies' room closed after their death. "At first, I'd open the door, go in and cry for hours at a time," she says. "One day I got the courage to go in and pack everything up."

At that point, CFO Strategic Partners was flourishing, and Shannon and Chris decided to try to have another child. Again, Shannon had a high-risk pregnancy and worried about what would happen to her fledgling company if she went into preterm labor. But this time, she carried to term. Just one week after giving birth in February 2001, Shannon was back in the office with son Hayden in tow.

The couple's second son, Wyatt, was born 16 months later. He joined Hayden on frequent visits to the office, where Shannon could care for them and work while they napped. When they got older and started going to a babysitter, Shannon took advantage of the flexibility she'd built into her company when she launched it. "If I felt like being with my kids at two in the afternoon, I'd go get them from the babysitter," she says. Her employees enjoy similar flexibility. They can set their own hours—something that most CFOs don't get to do—and work from home.

When Amy Williams joined CFO Strategic Partners in 2005, after five years as a stay-at-home mom, she had a 3-month-old. She worked just five hours a week then but has increased her hours as her daughter has grown older. "Shannon understands the needs of working women who are trying to be both good mothers and good employees," says Amy. "I once was supposed to meet with a client but had some personal issues to deal with. I called Shannon and told her I was overwhelmed and my children needed me, and there was not a word of judgment, not even a sigh."

Shannon's other business partner, Stacey Haley, says Shannon has created an environment where parents don't have to hide their family lives. "Instead of saying they have a 'meeting outside the office,' parents can freely say that they're going to their kid's ballet recital," says Stacey. "Shannon herself leaves reminders on our Outlook calendar like 'Bring red M&Ms to school for Wyatt.'"Shannon has done an equally good job of keeping her clients happy, and her company has grown by way of referrals from people like John Elsea. "Shannon has no idea how many lives she's touched," he says. "I have about forty employees, and they in turn have more than a hundred dependents who rely on me to keep my doors open so that they can be fed, clothed and sheltered year after year. Shannon has helped make that possible. I call her my sleep insurance."

Despite her success at balancing her personal and work lives, Shannon still falls prey to that common working mother affliction: guilt. "There are weeks where I feel like a terrible mom," she says, "when the company demands more than usual and I go home late at night, after my boys have gone to bed." Once, Chris called Shannon after dropping Hayden off at school and asked, "Do you realize there's a fund-raiser at school and every single other mom in Hayden's class is there?" She flew out of the office and to the school, stopping in the company lobby to tell the client she was supposed to meet that she had an emergency.

It's been a gradual evolution, but Shannon has been getting closer to that place where she doesn't compare herself as much to other moms. "It's hard, because I'm surrounded by moms who are there for everything," she says. That's why she's learning to delegate more to others at work, so she can spend more quality time with her boys—and more casual time simply horsing around with them. Hayden has just taught her the proper way to throw a football. "I can now throw it the whole length of our backyard," she says proudly.

Shannon has stopped sweating the small stuff, and if you talk to her long enough, you might just be able to coax out a slight acknowledgment that as a mother, as a wife and as a businesswoman, she's doing something right. "In the beginning, I thought my business was taking too much time away from my children. Now I realize that though I can't be there for every event, the things I'm teaching them and the example I'm providing as an entrepreneur are valuable in their own right," she says. "Every day of every week is certainly not balanced, but if you look at the big picture, it all works out."