These three mompreneurs do circles around the mommy track

There’s Karen McElaney of Centreville, a co-founder of four-year-old CleverWraps, which makes see-through covers to protect electronic devices such as cellphones, e-readers and iPads.

“I have to make all sorts of compromises,” said McElaney, 51, who is married and quit a marketing job in her mid-20s to take care of her newborn son.

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McElaney now has two boys, ages 21 and 18, and spends 12 hours a day on her business. She travels from two to five days, every few months.

She gave up greeting her sons as teenagers when they came home from school. She gave up attending sporting events such as basketball, football and lacrosse games. She couldn’t drive one son to the University of Georgia for a visit because work beckoned.

“After being a stay-at-home mom for so many years and having so much control over my time and dedicating myself to my kids,” she said, “it was a shock to me when the business began to take over my life.”

I asked Kathy Korman Frey, founder of the Hot Mommas Project and entrepreneur-in-residence at George Washington University’s School of Business, to make sense of this for me.

Frey, 39, married and the mother of two kids, has some business chops herself. She graduated from Harvard Business School and started a successful Washington consulting firm called Vision Forward. She eventually migrated to the academic sector, founding Hot Mommas as a way to promote dynamic women through online case studies. (Corah is one of Frey’s Hot Mommas.)

“These folks are pretty much the spitting image of most of the women who come to our Hot Mommas seminars,” Frey said. “They are overachievers who can do it all — and do.”

I’ll say. I have been in a dialogue of sorts with McElaney and Ratner for weeks, and both are very persistent, to say the least.

Frey commended Ratner and McElaney for their balancing acts. She also pointed out that Corah didn’t have a choice but to pursue her business because she was divorced.

“Having a life partner or spouse allows women to pursue a non-linear career path, which is the idea that you may have an offramp to your career at one time and an on-ramp at another time,” Frey said.

She said her life as a mom, wife, business owner and teacher “is much better than anything I imagined. I was dragged kicking and screaming to do it, but now, I feel quite victorious. I work faster, smarter, better, happier. What’s not to like?”

And now I have to go see about a Lab puppy.

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