For as long as I can remember, my company was my baby. Of course, I now have little Aariv, my adorable two-and-a-half-year-old son.
To give you a little backstory – I was an ambitious 22-year-old when I started Social Kinnect, but as most business owners would agree, there was a time I went through a blue funk too.
In the fourth year of operations, the company wasn’t making a lot of money. But I wasn’t one to give up. Rohan and I made a vision board, and we manifested the hell out of a simple PPT slide with images from Google. Right from our revenue goals, expected team size, starting our own production house, winning certain awards, to getting the kind of clients we wanted on our roster, by 2018, we achieved it all! We called this exercise the ‘Power of Dreams’.
Just when it was all triumph, came the pandemic which toppled plans of announcing our acquisition by the FCB Group India. It was such a testing time, and we were clueless as to whether we’d have to reinforce everything we’d worked on, from scratch. There were massive cash flow issues and having several real estate and retail clients, it would be a financial fiasco, had they not paid us back. The financial pressure is real, especially when we have a responsibility towards our organisation and our many kinnectors.
When you’re a businessperson heading operations, you need to be in the thick of things. And as fate would have it, it hasn’t always stayed this way.
When my baby was only 20 days old, I got sick – to the extent that the doctors working on my case, gave up on me. I love what I do, but this was probably the only time I felt like I wanted nothing to do with work.
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Not being present as a COO caused a lot of things to break, and this was also a time when I was desperately needed in the office.
I had a small baby, was going through postpartum, and was ill. Although it took me a whole year to recover, I came back.
I pushed myself when it felt impossible, focused on my health, and managed to breastfeed my son for a year and a half. Even after struggling with doing basic movements, I managed to get healthier and bounce back.
This is all because I was consistent. Women need to dream big and be at it. So many girls today are just not aspiring for bigger things. I want to ask them to not give up. Read two pages of a book, watch an informative reel, or a video. There’s so much knowledge out there that you can imbibe. Start your day by learning something new.
Now that I think of it, if not for Kinnect, I probably wouldn’t have even made it back. My will to protect my first baby got me up and about. However, I’m still a mother. I love meeting like-minded women and discussing how they juggle work and spend time with their toddlers. It makes life so much easier to know that you don’t have to figure it out all alone. It gives you the strength to keep going.
And although I’m so grateful to have my mum-in-law who looks after my kid, I still feel like I’m constantly choosing between work and my baby. It’s so tough.
But I’ve learned to draw my boundaries. It’s a no-work zone when I’m spending time with my baby. I start my mornings with meditation, some form of a workout, and then playtime with Aariv.
Every time I leave the door, it breaks my heart to let him go. But I know that my decision today will be his inspiration for tomorrow. When I’m not thinking about work, I’m always thinking about my baby.
But I know that Aariv will grow up and learn how one can draw healthy boundaries and still love. He will look at women through the same lens and with the same respect, cos his mama set an example for him.
Chandni Shah is the founder and COO of FCB Kinnect.
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