AgeTech Blog

Editor’s note: This week on the AgeTech Collaborative™ blog, we are pleased to welcome a guest post by Sheri Atwood, founder and CEO of SupportPay, an AgeTech Collaborative™ startup participant. As an innovative fintech solution, SupportPay aims to simplify and streamline the stressful and time-consuming process of managing finances within families.

In this post, Atwood shares how difficulties in her personal life led to the founding of SupportPay, and she outlines how anyone can use the lessons learned from personal challenges to fuel their business and professional life. Let’s dig in!

Startup founders and business leaders know personal struggle all too well. From my time in Silicon Valley to today, I’ve encountered many challenges taking care of my family while also setting my business up for success. It’s a constant battle that affects productivity, drains energy, and impacts individual and family wellness.

This goes beyond just finding work-life balance though. Challenge is a constant in the business world, and identifying creative solutions is what sets leaders apart. We all face challenges in our personal lives, too: Poor health, unexpected life changes, navigating child care,  financial stress — the list goes on and on. But founders can’t let these experiences stop us. In fact, a complicated personal life presents many opportunities that can actually improve our approach to work, because those challenges can eventually be used as fuel for better business outcomes.

Build the Right Mindset

Going through a divorce and managing my mother’s finances before and after her death upended certain aspects of my daily life. They also showed me the kind of determination necessary to overcome immense personal and financial struggles.

Running a business requires an incredible amount of time, energy and effort, as does family financial management. When things in life take a turn in either domain, we’re pulled from our larger missions.

It’s critical to take the time necessary to address issues outside the office, but these two spheres of life are interconnected. The skill sets we build, from time management to interpersonal communication, can and should change how we work.

Building the right mindset to fuel business growth begins with making the connections between work and home. When we’re so often told how and when to separate the two, it’s equally important to identify how and when to move them closer together.

Set a Standard for Personal and Professional Balance

After my divorce was final, financial communication with my ex became an increasing strain across my life. I spent a lot of time on the road, had a young child to care for, and just didn’t have the time to argue over the cost of a pair of shoes or a doctor’s visit.

I knew on some level that I needed to talk to my employer at the time about what was going on. At the same time, I felt like speaking up would jeopardize my position. I found the words, and realized the support I was hoping to find was not something they could provide. This ultimately inspired me to build the solution I needed in SupportPay, and our current work in the employee benefits space.

As leaders, we might think we need to keep things close to the vest, or maintain rigid separation between what’s personal and professional. Recognize that if an employee raises a personal problem, they’re doing so because they care about their work and want to help solve it.

I strive to build a workplace that values empathy, not only because it provides employees with a more positive work experience, but also because it allows me to better understand challenges. Empathy makes us better at supporting our employees, and it actually improves business outcomes because it helps us reach different solutions and ideas that we couldn’t come up otherwise.

Delegate and Automate

Often in family units, one person is relegated to handle a bulk of responsibilities, or left with no other choice but to do so. In our case, that person was me.

But I couldn’t do it all, all the time. Fortunately, I learned that I didn’t have to. Over the years, delegation and automation have become critical tools both in my personal life and in the work I do each day. Some founders struggle to let go of certain tasks, but that mindset can hold us back or contribute to feeling like you need to do a million things at once.

Instead, challenge yourself to name the areas where you need help. Strides in automation have enabled newfound efficiency, so it’s critical to look at those types of tools as an additional support available to you.

I know firsthand how personal stress impacts our work, health and relationships. These types of issues are typically looked at like they weigh a business down, whether it’s the newest hire or CEO experiencing them.

However, when you connect the dots between these two areas of life, you become a more capable coworker and business leader. The next time someone comes to you with a personal experience, don’t push them to separate it from their work. Instead, guide them to using the lessons learned to drive how they work.

Sheri Atwood is the founder and CEO of SupportPay, a pioneering modern family finance platform. On a mission to end family fights over money, SupportPay simplifies how families manage shared expenses, payments and schedules across households.