Mom likes hard work: ‘Sometimes I encounter incomprehension’ | kek mama

Sanne Claassen (32) has her own employment agency, specialized in technology and logistics. She is the mother of two sons (8 and 4) and works about 45-50 hours a week.

“My children don’t know any better than that I work a lot. Even when I was still employed by a large employment agency, I worked more than full-time. Because in addition to the ‘normal’ work at the office, networking is just as important.

I still often go to football matches because of the associated business clubs where I meet a lot of customers, and I also prefer not to skip other network meetings. I am a quick decision maker. When I no longer liked my job – the employment agency kept getting bigger, at the expense of personal contacts with customers – I quit my job without hesitation. In the morning I got up with the idea of ​​starting my own business, that afternoon I wrote my business plan.

Shared experiences

Of course I thought about what this would mean for our family: I myself was raised by parents who worked sixty hours a week. I grew up surrounded by jeans: my mother had her own jeans business and my father was also an entrepreneur in the retail trade. As a child, I found the time that my parents spent with us extra precious. And when I’m at home I’m really there for my sons one hundred percent.

I am also active at their school. The advantage of being an entrepreneur is that I can organize my own agenda. If I have an hour off, I sit with clay and paint between the toddlers, and I don’t miss a single football match of my oldest son. I find such shared experiences very valuable. My children do not notice that as soon as they are in bed I immediately open my laptop to update my administration.

My husband gives me a lot of support, he understands that running your own business is hard work. He works as a quality controller at a printing company and is now cutting his work half a day from 40 to 36 hours to spend more time with the boys. Very nice, because it gives me more room to continue working.

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Hard work pays off

Sometimes I encounter misunderstanding. People who ask me how on earth I do all that work, in combination with my children. And then in a tone like I’m failing my sons. I don’t care about that. I tell my children that hard work pays off and that they can show themselves. My work revolves a lot around my own presentation, and I see that my children learn something from that too. Both do not look out of the window and the eldest offers to be the first in class to give his speech. They see that my company makes me happy and are proud that I am ‘the boss’.

My work is addictive. I am now almost finishing my first year as a self-employed person. I thought: if I can place twelve people at an employer, it would be great. Those twelve soon became twenty and now I have 35 people working full-time. I am so incredibly proud of that.

I rarely feel guilt, except when the school called that my oldest son was ill and I couldn’t pick him up myself. Then my aunt stepped in. When I came home in the evening and saw him lying so pale on the couch, I felt a stitch in my heart. Sick children prefer to be with their mother.”

This article was previously published in Kek Mama.

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