Meet Take 12 | Episode 11

Women make up fifty percent of the workforce and give birth to one hundred percent of our citizens.  

This is the Lunar Startups Podcast and I'm your host, Twila Dang.

Lunar Startups launched its first cohort in the fall of 2018, a startup accelerator determined to create better opportunities for women entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs of color. But at the heart of this work were six companies—a group of entrepreneurs representing a variety of fields coming together with the support of Lunar Startups to take their businesses to the next level. 

We'd like you to meet them. We asked the cohort founders to share the origin stories of their businesses. 

Scott: My name is Margi Scott and I am the Founder and CEO of Take 12.  So I named it Take 12 because in my situation, I had access to 12 weeks of leave but I couldn't afford to take it. And so Take 12 was my way of saying, like “We should at least take the time that were entitled to by law.” You know, I think every situation is totally different. Some women truly do want to go back to work and feel ready to go back to work within two weeks.  

I had three totally different experiences with paid leave. With my twins, I probably could have used a solid six months to a year to feel like myself again. And with my first I was, you know, cleaning the whole house within ten days—not recommended.  

I've always been an entrepreneur. I've always loved the idea of creating something and making a business out of it. Going the whole way back to my childhood, I always point to the bag business that I had in middle school. I'm really quite proud of that. I, one day, showed up at school with a handbag that I had sewn myself and one of the girls in my—I don't even know what class it was—I remember Kelly coming up to me and saying “Oh my gosh, I love your bag...where did you get it?” And that could have been a mean girl compliment for all I know. But I was like, “Oh yeah, I made it. Do you want one?” And she was like, “Sure” and I was like, “Okay, I can make one for you” and I went to the fabric store and bought a bunch of different cool fabrics and created a little swatch book and came back to school the next day with her finished bag. She was, you know, one of the popular girls in school so everyone wanted to know where she got her bag and I was ready for them and I sold all of these handbags. So anyway, I think that translated later in life to me knowing very clearly that I wanted to be the CEO of my own company.  

So I went to school in New York. I studied Communication Arts. Even going back, my first love of life was acting and so I started acting when I was—I think my first dance recital was three-years-old. I was never good at dance but I danced my whole life. So I've always loved like kind of being on stage. My first big play was in sixth grade. And from then on I did, you know, singing and dancing and acting all through high school and truly, truly loved it. I went to New York to with that in mind but ended up studying Communication Arts and really just kind of fell in love with business. My business class was my favorite class and like, you know, learning “How do you take something from point A to point B?”

When I found out I was pregnant with my first son, I had been living in New York after graduating from college and was acting and working in restaurants. I immediately had a different relationship with the city. I had never felt unsafe in New York in any way. I love New York. I loved my time there and for whatever reason the second I got pregnant, I didn't recognize my relationship with the city.  

But my husband was from Minnesota. We moved to Minnesota. That's how we started our family. We were young and broke and we had her two rescue dogs from Bark Shelter and we had Charlie and my whole life changed it was like, “Oh wow...okay.”  

I stayed home with Charlie for three months because I didn't know anyone or have any friends and I had left everything that I had been working toward in New York, but I realized very quickly that staying at home was really difficult for me.  

You know, I loved being there with Charlie. I was also very young and I just felt like I needed to get out into the world and again, I didn't have a lot of friends or like, you know, the same type of support system. I did have support from from Chris' family, but I didn't have the same type of, you know, I couldn't just like call up my girlfriend and go out for coffee. So I felt like maybe going back to work would be a way for me to just meet people and make friends.  

So it was very apparent to me early on that I wanted to go to work and my sister-in-law was working at a nearby mall in the cosmetics department as a counter manager and she knew of an opening.  So I went and interviewed and I had no retail experience and I was interviewing for a counter manager position, which I didn't really think about it. Which is kind of how I am as an entrepreneur too [I] was like “Well, we're just doing this. We're going to make this happen.” And in that moment, I sold myself. But I think they also didn't have any other applicants for the job. And so they were willing to take a chance on me. So I kind of started this journey through cosmetics and ended up going to work for another cosmetics company based out of San Francisco.  

While I was working at that job, I got pregnant with my second son. Looking back on my first pregnancy, again, young and broke. And so I just figured that was part of the journey. Like you have a kid, you get more broke. So it was my second son—it was my second pregnancy, I was further along and in a career and worked for a woman-owned company and had access to Short Term Disability Policy, which was basically a percentage of my pay for five weeks. And then I also had access to FMLA—Family Medical Leave Act, which was a law that passed in 1993 that says that if you qualify that you have the right to basically take 12 weeks of unpaid leave. So, you know, your company can't fire you for having a baby. And I did the math and realized very quickly that I was not going to be able to afford the 12 weeks that I was entitled to by law. And I had, you know, my other son to take care of who was two and a half at the time. And I was also trying to just make my way in the work world, you know. I had big aspirations for where I wanted to go.  

So I didn't want to raise my hand and complain. I didn't know who to complain to. So I just figured out “Okay, well we've just got to handle this ourselves.” Every woman goes through this. Every family goes through this so we just need to the math and save money on groceries and spend all of our savings and have this kid. When I was preparing to go on maternity leave with my second son with, Gus, someone who had been a friend of ours for a long time basically was like “Go on maternity leave and when you come back, I want you to work for me.”  

So I switched worlds as far as the work world is concerned. So women-owned cosmetics company, and then the wine and spirits wholesale industry, which not much has changed since prohibition certainly about, you know, regarding the vibe. Definitely predominantly male industry. And I learned so much right off the bat, like it was just a total 180. I came back to this new job also as like a fresh mom. So I started going to their Friday afternoon meetings while I was still on maternity leave because I wanted to not come back and have no idea what I was doing.  

So I was like pumping in people's meeting rooms and I kind of felt like I either needed to be a working woman or a working mother—there wasn't really space for me to do both at that time. And so I felt like “Okay, well we'll just wean off of this breastfeeding thing because I need to make an impact and do well at this new job.” So anyway, fast forward and I always say that because it feels like I really don't know what happened in that time period. My kids were growing and I was working and, you know, and it feels like time just like disappears in that space. But we found out that we were pregnant with our third child.  And this was one that we had kind of planned for—my other two sons happened along the journey. It wasn't necessarily something that we had taken the time and planned on a timeline.  But this one we were like, “Okay, we're ready for our third.”  

Still with the company that I was at, I had access to short-term disability and FMLA. I had done this two times before so I figured, you know, “Okay, I know the drill.” But this time we're prepared and we're going to be able to make this happen because that's what you have to do. That's just the only that's what everyone does so 20 weeks into the pregnancy, we found out we're having twins. A couple weeks later, my husband got laid off from his job when I was like 30 weeks pregnant and then a couple weeks after that, I was really not feeling well.  

It turned out that the doctor had been trying to get ahold of me because she got my blood tests back and found that my liver was in failure and my kidneys were in failure.  

We'll be right back after the break.  

Welcome back to the Lunar Startups Podcast.  

Scott: So within like 20 minutes of the diagnosis, they had me prepping for surgery and ended up having the babies right then and there. So, I was in the hospital for a week recovering and the babies were in the NICU for two weeks and it was driving back and forth from the NICU though...and still not really walking well on my own. But realizing that my leave clock was ticking. So I was two weeks into my leave and my babies weren't home yet and I felt like a fraction of a human being. When you put it all into perspective, work seems so trivial but it is also incredibly important and it's incredibly important to a person who identifies with work as a part of who they are. So it was not like I didn't want to not work and I didn't want to not, you know, be a great mom.  

And so I wanted to create a gift registry where parents could go on and say “Hey, we're expecting a kid and we're super excited about it and we don't need anything but we do need dollars to be able to spend time at home with our baby. You can take that 15 bucks that you were going to spend on a blanket and just give it to me directly and I will use it to bond with my child.” I really was returning gifts and using gift cards to pay for things like diapers to help, you know, supplement the pay. So it was like “Why don't we just call this what it is and help empower people, you know, to actually be able to take that step instead of victimizing them and turning them into patients.”  

You know, I went online and found that there were crowdfunding sites. At the time there were over 2,000 women in 2016 crowdfunding their own maternity leave. And they were on sites that allowed total strangers to comment on how they shouldn't be procreating if they couldn't afford it. As a nation, we think it's that simple to just, you know, if you can't afford to have a child then you shouldn't get pregnant. That's not a solution because ‘oh by the way, we need people to have babies to support our population’.  

I always say women make up fifty percent of the workforce and give birth to one hundred percent of our citizens. That's it. So if we want to pretend like it's not a national issue that everyone should care about, then we're really fooling ourselves.  

I really understood then and—then since creating Take 12—have seen more of what this need looks like because it really is a cultural issue, both nationally and in the workplace. We really do not value are working parents.  

Take 12 will continue to be the solution that helps to provide those resources and that place to go to actually get things and the time and the information to help enhance the entire experience around having kids. But it's just been really cool to see how we have been able to impact and really help real families spend more time at home with their kids. In the past two years, we've helped parents raise over a $107,000 across the platform and that's all just through truly organic marketing. So we haven't really done a lot to attract a ton of people and that's going to change quickly. So we're excited to help a lot more people.  

Music plays.

Thank you for listening to this podcast. 

If you'd like to learn more about Lunar Startups or apply for an upcoming cohort, check out the website at lunarstartups.org. 

We'd like to extend a special thank you to the Glen Nelson Center at American Public Media, Knight Foundation, and Osborn370 for their continued support of Lunar Startups.

This podcast is a Matriarch Digital Media production. Executive Producers: Twila Dang, Brittany Arneson, and Josette Elieff.