I’m Katie Malone. I am the CEO and founder of Katie Malone Marketing and I am the group leader for the San Diego MOB chapter.

Surprise, I'm a marketer. I have a background in graphic design and I have experience working in the digital marketing industry. Then I became a mom in 2017, and I decided I was going to do this thing on my own where I started cable, marketing, and I've been a freelance consultant for the past two years.

I've been working with a large variety of clients. So, I started to really narrow my view of expertise and work with mom-owned businesses, or MOBs. I really love working with other moms, helping them with their marketing struggles, and getting things off the ground.

My MOB Experience

MOB stands for mom-owned business. It's a National Alliance, and I am the group leader for the San Diego chapter. I just took over at the beginning of 2020. This alliance of moms is in place to support small business owners. Since 2012, It's been mainly local meetups. There's a Facebook group of 10,000 plus mom business owners, and there are multiple other resources I’ve benefitted from within this special alliance. My local chapter does monthly meetups and offers online support.

Recently we had a Zoom call meeting that we named our “California mob meetup.” It was our regular monthly meetup, but women from all over were able to join. We like to have someone come on and do a lesson or motivation. With Zoom, we’ll start off in small groups, or breakout rooms, and then we all get together on one big zoom call to listen to the speaker. That is how we would normally do our meetings, so it is convenient that Zoom has features to replicate that experience.

Being a Part of MOB Has Helped Me With:

Support For Parenthood & Business Ownership

We relaunched meetups for our San Diego chapter in February, and we had a group of about 35 moms get together. We held it at a co-working space for women in San Diego. There were some vendors and we had a sponsor. It’s just a really cool way to get together, meet some other moms who are doing interesting things, support each other, and learn some new things from each other. As I started to support the members of this group, I began to gain support from not only the other members of this group but also their personal groups. With this group as an outlet and resource, I have had ample support for both parenting tips and business opportunities.

Boundaries

Once you become a parent or start your own business, you find yourself with a little less time during the day, obviously. So, how in the world do you manage both and still have time to stay sane? The challenges are going to be different for everyone depending on the type of business or child care situations you have, but balancing time for spending with your kiddos and the time you're going to spend working on your business requires boundaries. It’s important to set a boundary between time with your child, time with work, and time for just yourself. Without clearly set boundaries, all areas of importance will suffer because they aren’t given the quality effort they all deserve. Being apart of a MOB group, I’ve found that I am not the only one who has struggled with setting boundaries. You have to set your appropriate boundaries.

Networking

A great advantage of being a part of a MOB chapter is that we have more opportunities to network. As a group, we support each other. So, if you own your own business, and I do marketing, then I will help you with marketing. I'm not an accountant, but if there's someone in the group that can help with accounting, they will. Someone else who's a graphic designer will help someone because we all have unique skills to bring to the table and we have that symbiotic relationship. It’s more efficient for all of us if we all work together and fill those gaps. We have our own areas of expertise, and by assisting each other we’re able to take some things off our own plate. We’re able to share the work and then also share parenting tips. Being a part of this group takes the solo out of the solopreneur because it’s more of a group effort. You feel like you're supported, you're not alone, and you have more resources.

If you would like to learn more about the MOB, Katie Malone Marketing, or just want to connect with me, you can find me @KatieMalone on all social platforms or visit https://www.kmalonemarketing.com/.