EP. 38 / Fundraising While Female: How 2 Lawyers Are Transforming The Legal Services Industry | Priori Legal’s Mirra Levitt + Basha Rubin
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Want to know some tips for fundraising and growing your business from two lawyers who have been there? Just 2% of VC-backed startups are women-founded, so find out what it’s really like.
Mirra Levitt & Basha Rubin met at Yale Law, and after Mirra left her big law firm job, they founded Priori Legal. Its global legal marketplace helps hundreds of in-house teams find the right legal provider for their next project. They’ve raised over $21 million dollars in three rounds of funding and pull back the curtain on fundraising.
They also discuss how as women and minority founders they were not taken seriously and how they had to play offense to get ahead.
Plus Alex Rutkay, a cancer survivor and founder of citymouse shares a recent professional win that she’s extremely proud of.
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In this episode you will learn:
-What fundraising is really like - especially as a female founder
-Tips if you’re interested in fundraising
-How their company is changing the legal services industry
Quotes:
There's no fun in fundraising. I think we were turned down more times than Mirra and I have ever been turned down for anything in our entire lives. - Basha Rubin
Trying to fit yourself into a box while also looking a certain way was something that was really challenging for us and for many women and minority founders. - Mirra Levitt
We realized we had this incredible product market fit. With in-house teams, everything from very small companies, startups all the way up through the fortune 500. - Mirra Levitt
1 thing that was said to us which stuck with me during that process which was ‘You know this is a nice lifestyle business for 2 moms’ which basically made me want to blow a gasket. Just because we're moms doesn't mean we wanted to have a lifestyle business. - Basha Rubin
Advice on Fundraising
Sequence the pitches that you're doing ah to do sort of ones that you think are low likelihood to close early in the process so you can see how VC’s are reacting. - Basha Rubin
The power of a warm intro here is extraordinary. - Basha Rubin
Have founders who have fundraised before look at your deck. -Mirra Levitt
Practice your pitch for a lot of different audiences. -Mirra Levitt
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Kim Rittberg (00:05):
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Basha Rubin (01:10):
There's no fun in fundraising. I think we're turned down more times than Mira and I have ever been turned down for anything in our entire lives.
Kim Rittberg (01:20):
This is mom's exit interview, the show for moms who want to craft the career and life they want. Each episode you'll meet inspirational moms across various industries and levels who are working and living life on their own terms and they'll bring you actionable tips from finance to business development to happiness to crushing that imposter syndrome. I'm Kim RIT Bird. I was a burnt out media executive at Netflix, US Weekly and in TV news. I wanted a career where I was fulfilled at work but present at home with my kids. So I started working for myself and I love it, but not every day was easy or is easy. I wanted to explore with all of you how other moms were creating careers on their own terms. They're carving out flex jobs, starting their own businesses, they're taking back control. Join me and make work work for you instead of the other way around.
(02:23):
Super quick but important favor. If you can, please tell two people that you know to listen to the show that helps it grow. And if you can hit the follow button and drop a review. And for my business owners and professionals out there, if you are looking to grow your business with video without burnout, grab my 10 tips to make great video, which also has a bonus on how to be confident on camera that's linked out in the show notes and@kimrit.com. And a quick moment of pride for me. I am finally doing some of the backend work on my business. Better late than ever. <laugh>. I signed up for QuickBooks and the whole nine. And of course as I'm teaching my video course and prepping for some speaking engagements and just busy, pretty busy right now, of course that's when Camp Signup is and the sort of craziness of Camp Signup reminds me for anyone who lives near a SoulCycle.
(03:10):
They might remember years ago, every Monday at 12 if you wanted to get a class, you had to be on your computer at exactly 12 and you hit refresh on your computer until you got your spot. This is basically what I did for kids camp. It opened at 10:00 AM so you have to be logged in and ready to go at 9 57 with your credit card. Even though this is not a particularly competitive camp, it's just like so many people wanted spots. So I did it and I don't know, we mostly were wait listed, but we got a couple weeks anyway. I hope your work-life balancing is going well. Mine's been a mixed bag. Now you are going to meet two women transforming the legal services industry. Mira Levitt and Bosha Ruben were classmates at Yale Law School. Together they founded Priority Legal, a global legal marketplace that helps hundreds of in-house teams find the right legal provider for their next project.
(04:03):
Their company uses a marketplace model that uses data instead of firm affiliation to help in-house legal teams find and hire the right outside council for any project. Globally they work with everything from Fortune 10 to fast growing technology companies to financial firms and they're in 50 states and 70 countries. They'll talk about leaving big law and dive deep into fundraising. As female founders, I feel like I've talked to a lot of lawyers and having gone to the University of Pennsylvania during a certain era, so many of my friends went into law <laugh> and a lot of women that I know have law degrees or were lawyers or are lawyers and many of them are looking to shift out or have shifted out. Talk to me about Mira. I understand you were a lawyer before starting this company. Talk to me about big law and how you got into it, what you were doing and what made you leave.
Mirra Levitt (04:49):
Yeah, absolutely. I will admit to being somebody who I think like many people was very drawn to big law. I liked practicing law. I went to Yale expecting to become a lawyer. I went to Covington and I practiced venture law and as well as sort of just general corporate. I loved my colleagues, I liked the work a lot and I think Covington is an exceptional place to practice law. But I think I found myself like many people, not sure whether it was my forever job and talking to Basia about the company as well as looking at some other people who had made other choices that were really about the subject matter that they wanted to focus on. I started thinking more broadly and thinking about whether it was going to be a choice that worked for the rest of my life or whether it was something that I should just do for a little bit. So I actually sort of dipped my toe out. I didn't run screaming away saying I'm never doing this again. But I did say I'm really focused on this business idea with Basia. I want to give it a try and see if this way of practicing law and building a company is a better fit for me in my life.
Kim Rittberg (05:54):
And you had alluded to that big law, you weren't sure if it was fitting with your life. I mean I think it's no secret that when you're a lawyer, especially in the beginning years, you're working a lot. Was that one of the reasons that appealed to you to start your own business? Not that starting your own business is like a vacation, but was that one of the thoughts?
Mirra Levitt (06:11):
So for me, I was always pretty sure that I was going to have a job that required a lot of thought and a lot of hours. And so it wasn't so much about hours as it was about feeling like I was using my brain and my skills in a way that felt meaningful given that I was going to be devoting so much time to it. We work a ton. Building a company has taken over lots of different parts of our lives, but I do have a lot of control over when I work typically. Really at the time it was saying, okay, work is going to be a big part of my life. I want it to be something that feels like I'm using my brain in the best way. And for me there was just a building aspect that I really wanted to be focused on. I wanted to focus on one project that I wanted to exist in the world rather than moving from thing to thing. And that was more of a building a company pattern than a big law pattern.
Kim Rittberg (07:02):
Awesome. Then so talk to me about how you all decided to launch the business where the idea come from and people say, what's the problem it's solved. How did you come up with it?
Basha Rubin (07:13):
So Mira and I met as classmates at Yale Law School. Mira, as she said, went into big law. I realized even earlier perhaps that the practice of law was not going to be for me in the long term, which is not to say I loved law school, I loved my classmates and was fascinated by a lot of the challenges, but I didn't see a career path that really excited me but had come from a family of entrepreneurs and always had the idea that I would start some kind of company. And so I passed the bar and then decided to take the first stab at the first version of Preor eons ago, which bears little resemblance to the company that exists today except the initial problem statement that led to the germ of the idea that has evolved to the marketplace, which is that Mira and I in different contexts, but for me in the criminal justice context in law school, which is where I spent a lot of time, noticed that at the time mostly people didn't know how to identify good lawyers, didn't know how to find them, didn't know how to evaluate their quality and didn't know what a fair price was.
(08:20):
And so I would for example, see people scraping together every last cent of their and their family's savings for a $5,000 retainer for a defense attorney who was certainly almost always worse than the services the public defender could provide. For example. That was the initial kernel of what we wanted to solve with. We originally launched in the small business and individual context trying to create a marketplace of excellent attorneys that could make it simpler, faster, more transparent for individuals and small businesses who had a range of legal needs. And it was sort of the same moment of the rise of the consumer marketplaces and now all of which are household names, the Ubers Airbnbs of the world that we thought could be applied to law in a highly industry specific way and drive better, more equitable outcomes across the board.
Kim Rittberg (09:17):
What year are you talking about? What year did you start?
Basha Rubin (09:19):
We launched the original the OG Preor in 2013.
Kim Rittberg (09:23):
And you were saying it shifted, I'm sorry, Mira, you were saying it shifted what it was originally. What does it look like today And then mi whatever you were going to say before I started talking Kim, it
Mirra Levitt (09:32):
Was actually the perfect pivot, Kim. So one of the things as we were working on OG PEI and I was still at Covington and it became clearer to us based on that experience that finding function need was much bigger than sort of a consumer side of the market but actually extended to sort of a B2B marketplace motion. And indeed some of the biggest buyers of legal services are big corporations and that there was a need for finding that funding function there. And as we started to explore that, we started getting initial customers who were startup in-house council and we suddenly realized that this, we had built the perfect thing for people who wanted to optimize. So often consumers are looking to say, do I need a lawyer? Do I not need a lawyer? And perhaps that's not so much what a marketplace can do. What a marketplace allows you to do is optimize and find the perfect thing that you want once you've decided that you need to buy it. And so we realized we did have this incredible product market fit with in-house teams. Everything from very small companies, startups who are just starting all the way up through the Fortune 500.
Basha Rubin (10:45):
Fundamentally there's a whole range of different kinds of legal work that in-house teams have that they outsource externally. Everything from the high risk, high complexity work you're being investigated for an antitrust violation, which should go to a big law firm most likely, but to much more rote work. And so we think that all that sort of low to medium risk and low to medium complexity work should come to a place pre-war where you can get access to professionals who trained at big law firms and worked there and left for any number of reasons because they wanted to start their own practice because they wanted more flexibility in their careers and the like. And then we do a lot of overflow support.
Kim Rittberg (11:29):
And I know Miri, you and I spoke about this before, so for some of the lawyers coming on, I know our listeners are moms and some of law degrees, some don't. But regardless, you're inspirational as founders, some of these roles are flexible, some of these lawyers, it's not necessarily it's project by project. So is that something that is a part of ri
Mirra Levitt (11:51):
A hundred percent mean? This is and so much a part of priori that it's actually part of our product. So when companies come to us and they say what they're looking for, we collect a bunch of different data points about what they need. Some of those data points are about how much time they need. Similarly, when we onboard lawyers and law firms, we are also asking what they do really well, very granular practice information, but we are also collecting information about when they're available and what they want. And so that part of the matchmaking algorithm is really important. We're trying to match up the right client and the right lawyer and part of that equation is how much time you have to devote and that's an absolutely flexible criteria. So we get information if the client is asking for something and it seems like we have the perfect lawyer but the time term doesn't quite match up, we can have the information to have that conversation so that people are going into the engagement a hundred percent on the right page.
Kim Rittberg (12:40):
What's the range of how many hours the lawyer might be working on a project per week
Basha Rubin (12:45):
One to 50?
Kim Rittberg (12:48):
Yeah, so really people can work like five hours a week or 10 hours a week. There are projects that require support but in lower amounts
Mirra Levitt (12:55):
A hundred percent. Again, this is one of the fun parts of out marketplace buyers need of a whole range of things. Sellers are selling a whole range of things and when you can match it up people can generally get what they want.
Kim Rittberg (13:09):
Talk to me about fundraising and how you're funded. I understand that you've gone through rounds of fundraising. Tell me about the fundraising process.
Basha Rubin (13:16):
There's no fun in fundraising. So you and I when we first started the company, which turned out to be one of the best decisions we made, we only did friends and family financing and that meant that we were moving a little bit slower than some other competitors on the market at the time. But as it happened, that really gave us the space to find product market fit before we hit the the supercharged scale button. And that meant that we have built a business with strong fundamentals and there are a lot of companies that were around, particularly in the earliest stages of preor, that 2013 timeline. There were weren't the only ones who had the idea that a marketplace solution could be imported into legal and a lot of those companies raised faster, burned faster and aren't around today. But at the time we may, that sort of alternate path I think has meant that we're able to both survive and scale as a leader.
(14:27):
Now we've raised three rounds of external VC financing, one in 20 17, 1 in 2020 and then finally our latest 15 million round in the summer of 2022 and we did it. It was never one of those overnight show up and all of a sudden you have five term sheets processes that people like to tell you instead. We met hundreds of investors throughout the process and I think we're turned down more times than Mira and I have ever been turned down for anything in our entire lives. We wound up with groups of investors who have deep experience in legal and really have conviction behind our business and are extraordinarily supportive. Anyone who tells you fundraising isn't hard work either got really, really lucky or they're lying, but it has turned out to, we've been hashtag blessed with an incredible set of investors and partners and are absolutely the 15 million round, particularly this summer just feeling was extraordinarily lucky given the timing of the market and that we are in a position to really scale during this moment.
Mirra Levitt (15:46):
I was just going to say I think one thing we learned along the way is that a lot of successful companies take a while to fundraise for. So you feel like you hear only the wins and it's so much easier to talk about the wins, but the more we talk to successful founders, the clearer it was that a lot of their companies had hard rounds or that they push through or rough market timing. There's so much that goes into fundraising that is out of your control, particularly right now with the markets and various feels like black swans or swimming all around you, but everyone's dealing with that and I think it's just important to focus on not the uber win narratives but the really normal thing and you can get across the line. The other thing I would say is that just a huge plug here for Hers lab. I know a lot of your listeners are moms and the lab has been just a game changer for us. I Burton runs it and she's brilliant and has a brilliant staff, but it is just an incredible supportive environment for female founded companies and we are so lucky to have been part of it since 2017.
Kim Rittberg (16:56):
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Mirra Levitt (18:00):
So Hearst Lab is an accelerator run out of Hearst Corporation. I would have to look for at the current criteria, but I think there needs to be one female founder or one female decision maker. But what is really special about it is that you get to spend time at Hearst Corporation, you get space for a time within the tower and they work really hard to connect companies up with Hearst businesses as sort of initial clients, initial product testers, and basically you get to be part of the Hearst infrastructure as you get your company from zero to one. Hearst is an incredible corporation. It's much more varied than just media. And so for a lot of different companies in different sectors, it's your first client, it's consulting, it's really all the things that are really difficult to obtain if you're just sort of one person working in a WeWork.
Kim Rittberg (18:51):
Talk to me about fundraising as two women founders.
Basha Rubin (18:55):
It's always sort of a tricky question, right? Because we've never been anything other than two women founders and so it all feels hypothetical. I will say that when we went out to raise our seed round in 2017, we started the process when we were both not visibly pregnant and we ended the process right after the births of our daughters in August slash September of 2017. And so not only were we two women fundraising, we were two pregnant women fundraising and I think that I would be lying if I didn't think it had any impact on the process, but it's also hard to measure what the impact is. I think there was an H B R article sort of around that time that listen to the questions that female founders were asked versus the kinds of questions that male founders were asked about similar businesses and they found that they were really different.
(19:58):
And when we read through the list of the questions that female founders were asked, which often were much more combative and asked for highly granular detail about things that most founders of a seed stage company couldn't know the answer to that, that really resonated with our experience. I'll just give you an example of one thing that was said to us which has stuck with me during that process, which was this is a nice lifestyle business for two moms, which basically made me want to blow a gasket. First of all, I <laugh> being, just because we're moms doesn't mean we wanted to have a lifestyle business. I certainly wouldn't. The opportunity cost of doing preor for both of us were significant. We're extremely ambitious people. That's why we're doing it. Not because we wanted to have a lifestyle business and I can't imagine a male founder being told that.
(20:53):
And so there are, they're insidious things like that. I will say that I think the further along you get, the more numbers matter and the less that ineffable can I see this person really being the founders of a billion dollar business, which is where I think a lot, it's in the early rounds that bias is the hardest and that, but that's the hardest to get off the ground. You don't have that much revenue coming in when you're raising those kinds of rounds. And so I think a lot of women struggle and that was certainly our experience too in the early rounds. And I will also say, yeah, there's a lot of attention to the fact that women only raise 2.3% of venture capital dollars, but what's talked about less is women are also forced into lower valuations and we've talked to a couple of VCs who've done reviews of their own portfolios and have seen consistently that on the same revenue women wind up with lower valuations, whether by what they suggest, I think less common versus what they are told that their company should be valued at.
(22:16):
And there are compounding effects to that. This is just my own, this really bugs me because I have so many female founder friends. This has happened too. It's one thing to talk about the fact that there aren't that many venture capital dollars, but then to see how it, and this is true for minority founders as well I should say, and then it makes it harder and harder to raise those additional small in between rounds of financing that people need to keep going because there's so much more table pressure. We've been extremely fortunate, but the topic of fundraising while female is one of particular passion for me
Kim Rittberg (23:00):
Can bash, when you said the word lifestyle business, can you explain to our listeners what does that mean when someone's saying, oh, it's a good lifestyle business, what does that mean?
Basha Rubin (23:09):
I think they were trying to imply that this was not a venture backable business, so it was not a business that was going to be able to get to that the golden standard, a hundred million in revenue on a billion dollar valuation, which I may or may not exist anymore given the current public market multiples.
Kim Rittberg (23:29):
Definitely an insult.
Basha Rubin (23:31):
Yes.
Mirra Levitt (23:32):
Yeah, I mean I think that one of the hard parts that hard things we ran up against, which is just part of having such low numbers of women and minorities raising is that obviously you want to be an individual, you want to tell your own story people back individuals, but part of the way people analyze businesses and people is by pattern matching. And when there are fewer people in that pattern, it's just harder. Trying to fit yourself into a box while also looking a certain way was something that was really challenging for us and for many women and minority founders
Kim Rittberg (24:08):
Like meaning because you're not a white man of a certain age, you'll never be that, so then you're trying to fit yourself in other ways by dressing differently what? By lowering your voice? What is that? How does it play in? I
Mirra Levitt (24:22):
Think it's more about how you tell your story and the cadences you use. And some of it's around slide decks. Some of it's around metrics, some of some, but some of it's also around what Baha was talking in terms of getting, turning defensive questions into offensive questions and understanding that you should be playing offense and shooting for the sky which of course we're trying to do, but when you don't do that, you get pushed into a lifestyle business kind of question.
Kim Rittberg (24:50):
You have to come out really strong and really powerful instead of a normal presentation where we would come in positive and But you mean feel like there's a pressure to be super assertive slash aggressive or you're in a crouch position defending what you've built?
Basha Rubin (25:06):
Yeah, I've reflected on this a lot because so Mira and I are trained as lawyers and part of being a lawyer is to probe everything and have a backup position for everything and that's the way we think.
Kim Rittberg (25:23):
And in terms of the business, what are your next batch of goals for the business? Where are you looking to take it next?
Basha Rubin (25:29):
We're in a sort of big scale moment. We started 2022 with about 20 employees. We ended with over 40. We are planning to add another, maybe not double, but come close to double again this year. The business of law is ripe for not to sound too trite, but ripe for disruption or a reinvention where legal services are accessible via platform that can help you get to the right kind of solution for your need. It doesn't have to be all big law all the time. Big law has a, plays a very important role, but we are I think at the intersection of being able to help better allocate legal work in depending on estimates of 400 to 800 billion market.
Mirra Levitt (26:21):
And I think part of the exciting part of that scaling is also on the lawyer side of the house. So we now have law firms, some of the biggest firms coming onto our scout product, which is our newest SaaS product. But we're continuing to expand the breadth of lawyers working on our marketplace product as well. Everything from solo practitioners, people working part-time all the way up through lawyers at AmLaw, 200 firms who are just looking to build their business. And we're really leaning into that expansion on the marketplace side as well during this next year.
Kim Rittberg (26:56):
And I work in marketing. So I'd love to know from your perspective has or hasn't worked or what have been the struggles in terms of marketing for the company?
Basha Rubin (27:06):
I think that one of the struggles is that we have kind of invented a new thing. And so it's always been a challenge to say we're this but not quite. We were really a market leader in building a marketplace for legal services. It wasn't a nomenclature that companies or lawyers were familiar with. And so we're not a staffing firm though sometimes we do staffing style work. We're not an A L S P that's an alternative legal service provider in that we're not providing services, but companies are often looking at us in that context. So having to spend a lot of time defining ourselves as a negative rather than a positive I think has been an ongoing messaging challenge for the company.
Kim Rittberg (27:50):
What are the biggest lessons you've learned?
Mirra Levitt (27:52):
I think the thing that makes this fun and the reason that we come back every day, even after hard days is that it is awesome to work with a great team. It has been, I think particularly for people who are founding doing this with Basia and building our partnership has been just both hugely rewarding but also really important for the company's success. But more broadly, we love our team, we love the people we work with and focusing on building the team, getting the right people in, but also people who have some grit and can keep rowing when it's windy has been a huge lesson learned from the past couple years.
Kim Rittberg (28:33):
What's the advice you would give to another founder
Basha Rubin (28:36):
To find support networks? I think that being a founder is an extraordinarily lonely job. Mira and I have been very lucky to have each other, but for many founders, particularly solo founders and even founders who have a strong co-founder, a strong co-founder relationship, your team can't be, they can provide all sorts of support, but you can't disclose your fears to your team. You have to be the inspiration and you have to be leading the charge and to find networks of other founders where you can talk about the common problems that you're encountering, whether it be with hiring or employee management or product market fit or fundraising those relationships or help you do better at your job because you're talking to through common problems with people, you're finding support and also you're me, you're helping to many of the founders that we build strong relationships with introdu to key investors. We've introed other founders to key, but to not do it in a vacuum, I think that's really, that is a very lonely place to be.
Kim Rittberg (29:49):
I asked them how much money they've raised so far.
Basha Rubin (29:52):
We've raised over 21 million over the last three rounds, a little more than that but we don't typically talk publicly about our revenue.
Kim Rittberg (30:02):
As two women founders running a business that's growing and doing well, what are your tips for fundraising for people going through that?
Mirra Levitt (30:09):
Have people look at your deck, have founders who have raised look at your deck. Our deck has improved so much because we started showing it to people early. I think the other tip would be that you need to mo your pitch for lots of different audiences many times because it is very different to do it by yourself in a room than it is when you're trying to communicate potentially very complicated ideas and connections to somebody who really hasn't never thought about them before.
Kim Rittberg (30:38):
You're saying practice it for different types of audiences and live not just in your room to your mirror.
Mirra Levitt (30:43):
Exactly.
Basha Rubin (30:44):
Yeah. I think also to try and sequence the pitches that you're doing to do sort of ones that you think are low likelihood to close early in the process so you can see how VCs are reacting, what kinds of questions you're getting and get live practice before you're going after your top picks. I would definitely recommend. I would also recommend the power of a warm intro here is extraordinary, which goes back to my sort of other networks point, the difference between going in, we had no trouble getting pitches cold, but we did have trouble closing those. It was much, much easier to close VCs where we had someone saying, Bosch and Mur an incredible founders, I'm a legal entrepreneur myself, and I think this idea is going to be transformative. It's sort of basic common sense in some way, but when you're doing it, you're like, oh, I really want to pitch whoever it is, and then you can get the pitch. But without some stronger nexus, it can be hard to close. And the other thing which I had no idea about at the beginning is that if you go in through, because you emailed someone out of the blue and they happen to respond, you are going to have a harder time pitching someone else at that same fund in the future. And so you should be really thoughtful about who your initial contact is,
Kim Rittberg (32:17):
Meaning use your warm intros first.
Basha Rubin (32:20):
Not even necessarily that could use your warm intro, might intro you to someone who is focused on consumer and is happy to take the intro because they love so-and-so. But then you're in that consumer silo, which isn't quite right and unless elect to bring in they're the right person, you could get blocked there. I think it's all about being strategic about how you are getting in touch with people and who you're getting in touch with. And how is your work life balance?
Mirra Levitt (32:53):
I do work a lot, but I have a huge amount of control over when I work. So I get the kids ready. I have breakfast with the kids and often do a school run and then I work and I definitely do work after they go to bed most nights, but I also have dinner with them or obviously sometimes we're out. I get to pick when I'm there for them and can be there when they need me. And also because if I want to go to a winter sing concert or I'm going to do pickup and that is in my control and that really means a lot to me. It means a lot to the kids, although I think they sort of assume it at this point. I'm like, you have no idea how lucky you are. But I, it's been great because it means that I have more energy and it feels for work when I'm ready to do it. And it keeps that sort of meaningful balance right on both sides
Basha Rubin (33:47):
For me. I mean it wasn't about work-life balance, it was about building something in incredible. But I do agree with Mira that you have that it is a job relatively, that you have more control over your schedule than other peers and similar in who are working in larger institutions. I'll just give an example. So I was talking to a friend who is in big law and I was talking after both of my babies. I went right back to work because the company need me. I was the founder, I was the founder of a company. Can't not, I mean there's a myth to imagine that you can sort of disappear and everything will be exactly as it was when you laugh. And she said to me, oh, I never could imagine. I don't know how you could possibly do that. What about bonding with your baby?
(34:38):
And said some things about that choice. And she was talking about how she had six months off and I was like, that's fine, you get six months off, that's great. I'm glad you get that. But then when you have a client who emails you at 6:00 PM and wants to do a call at seven and needs a deliverable by midnight, you're not going to be home and I can be home. And so it's not about which is better, it's about a different set of trade offs. And for me that flexibility really mattered. And the reason I could go back more easily, quickly is because it wasn't that I had to go back and it was 12 hours a day in the office. I could go back for five hours a day in person and come home and breastfeed and then be online in a different kind of context. So I think it's, again, it's not about a different work-life balance. I think any job like this is going to be intense. It's just about what set of trade offs make sense for you and for your family and for me, this makes all the difference in the world to have to be able to say, this is my choice as opposed to this is a client's choice, this is my boss's choice. That is tremendously empowering for me.
Kim Rittberg (36:01):
Awesome. Well, this is such a great chat. I hope you had fun. I had a lot of fun learning about your business. You can learn more about them@prioritylegal.com. Here is when we feature a real mom life in its happiest, sweetest, or funniest moments.
Alex Rutkay (36:20):
Hi, my name is Alex. I'm a mom of a three-year-old boy. I live in New York City and I'm an entrepreneur. I own a company called City Mouse. And I want to share a recent professional win that I had that I am so proud of. So less than a week ago, I found out that my product that I just recently launched that I developed over the last few months has been featured on forbes.com. And that was a huge moment for me a big recognition of the work that I am doing and the product that I have designed is being recognized by top publications across the country, around the world. And that was such an inspiring moment for me as somebody who has never had any formal business training or any, I have no degrees in business at all. So I feel very proud and I hope that I can inspire other women out there. Other moms, especially if you're a mom, like you're already a superhero, you can do anything. So if you have an idea and your brain, go for it. You never know what could happen.
Kim Rittberg (37:17):
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(37:33):
Thank you for listening. Please follow the show in Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen. And if you could please drop a five star rating. And I love getting feedback. This is not like at work when everybody hates feedback. I actually love getting letters from you. Tell me what you loved hearing about any ideas for shows in the future. You can find me@kimrichberg.com or mom's exit interview.com and you just hit that contact button. And if you run a business and need to level up your content and social media, if you're thinking I really want to get more leads and more clients through video and podcasts, drop me a line. That is exactly what I do for businesses and professionals. My newsletter sign up and more info is@kimrit.com or you can find me on social at kim rit, R I T T B E R G. This is Mom's Exit interview. I'm your host and executive producer Kim Rit Bird. The show is produced by Henry Street Media. Jillian Grover edited the show. I'll see you next time.
(38:38):
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