When Allison O’Kelly BBA ’94 had her first child, she was working at Toys “R” Us and struggling to balance the demands of motherhood and working full time. Aiming to reduce her stress while remaining professionally competitive, she started an accounting firm, offering part-time and freelance work to local clients.
“I was an A-type, go-getter person, and it really was not in my DNA to not work and not have a career,” she says. “I wanted to come up with a way that I could still keep my toe in the water without being stressed all the time.”
The demand for accountants was so high that within six months O’Kelly was running a small business with multiple employees. That small business continued to grow until it morphed into Corps Team, a recruiting and executive search company.
O’Kelly recalls adjusting from being an accountant to a salesperson, pitching the skills that mothers and people who wanted flexible work had to offer—even if they weren’t in the office full time.
“In 2003, there was no flexibility in the workplace. People would look at me like I was crazy,” O’Kelly says. “It was very forward-thinking at the time.”
In 2005, she rebranded her small business as Mom Corps, a company that offered flexible work for mothers (or anyone) who were looking for work that fit their schedules—not the other way around. The idea was so novel that O’Kelly was invited on the TODAY Show multiple times. She was also featured in The Wall Street Journal and Working Mother Magazine.
“I was very proud of the fact that I was changing not only lives but also changing perceptions and the way we think about women in the workplace,” O’Kelly says. “When you think about my generation, Generation X, we grew up with moms who told us you could be anything you want to be. We grew up thinking that was the case until we realized that when we had kids, you can’t.”
For O’Kelly, the only way to be both a mother and a working professional was to strike a balance, one that’s often hard to achieve by working full-time. One route requires child care, which can be a financial burden, while the other route of not working at all can also pose financial challenges.
In the late ’90s and early ’00s, O’Kelly recalls a divide between working mothers and stay-at-home moms, whereas today—and through the work her company helped achieve—both sides are beginning to understand the nuance.
“I wouldn’t say these two groups judged each other, but they didn’t get each other,” she says. “They were just two completely different ways of living. It doesn’t have to be so black and white.”
Corps Team has helped thousands of people and earned numerous awards over the years as a woman-run company focused on flexibility. Corps Team has also broadened its reach over the years to help place full-time positions and expanded the areas of service to include human resources, development, IT and engineering, marketing and creative, and executive searches.
“With entrepreneurship, you have to keep your eyes open,” O’Kelly says. “You’re not necessarily going to be doing what you started out to do, and that’s OK.”