About two years ago, Lauren Southern's husband passed away and she had to put her youngest in
full-time daycare. It made an idea she'd been turning over for about ten years personal: why do
parents still have to choose between going back to work and being there for their baby?
This one's with Lauren Southern, founder of The Company Nanny. Her idea is a trained nanny on site
at the workplace, in a room the company sets aside, so parents can bring their babies to work. She
walks through how it works and who pays for it, the MBA class pitch where classmates asked her to
please start the business, and the more than a hundred people she says applied to her first job posting.
We also talk about her eight kids, the Marine Corps moves from 29 Palms to Washington State, then
Oklahoma City and Grand Rapids before coming home to Springfield, her time at Leadership Springfield,
the people who carried her through the hard stretch, and why, in her words, this is less about the
entrepreneurial dream and more about fixing a problem.
Recorded at Valiant Group. Thanks to Lauren for sitting down with us.