The Imbalanced Life, an excerpt from Shoveling $H!T
The crap that comes with the pressures on your personal life
We are excited to present the below excerpt from the brand new book Shoveling $H!T: A Love Story About The Entrepreneur’s Messy Path to Success, by Kass and Mike Lazerow. Today’s excerpt is written from the perspective of Kass.
Kass and Mike Lazerow are serial entrepreneurs and investors best known as the cofounders of Golf.com and Buddy Media, the leading social media marketing platform that sold to Salesforce for $745 million.
It was April 4, 2004, and I (Kass) rested uncomfortably on a gurney at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, DC, following the birth of our second child.
The long day had begun the night before. Mike convinced me to stop unpacking and hanging pictures at our new home in Rockville, Maryland long enough to go to a movie. So, I brushed off the weird signals my body gave out and snacked on popcorn and Sno-Caps (my favorites) as we watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Later that night, unable to sleep and feeling nauseous, I wondered if I might be in labor. But I figured I just had a bigger-than-normal bout of indigestion. There had been no noticeable labor with our first son, Myles, back in 2001. Back then, we went to the hospital because my doctor suspected my water had broken a day earlier, and after thirty-eight hours of what my doctor called “unproductive” labor, I had a C-section.
This time, it was still about a week before the doctor had planned to induce labor for what I hoped would be an expected VBAC delivery. But, tired of watching television and unsure why the sickness was getting worse, not better, I called my doctor at 2:30 a.m.—a doctor I’d only met in person once because of our move a few weeks earlier.
“Get to the hospital ASAP,” he said.
Mike’s father and stepmother came over to stay with Myles, who, thankfully, was snoozing away. We were at Sibley by 3:15 a.m. and in a room about an hour later. I wasn’t in severe pain. I was nauseated, but I had work to do around the house and, of course, work to do for our business, which had gone from GolfServ Online to Golf.com after we purchased the domain name from NBC Sports. I soon began making a case to go home.
Nurse: “You’re definitely in labor. Look at these contractions here on the monitor. And how about this? It looks like this baby will be born on 04/04/04. How cool is that?”
Numerologists rejoice! I liked the sound of this, so I decided to stay. Little did I know.
When an on-call doctor came by and suggested an epidural to numb the pain from the contractions, I agreed, but it caused far more problems than it solved. Around six a.m., just after getting the injection, I lost all sense of feeling in my entire left side—the left side of my face drooped, and I couldn’t raise my left arm. My legs, meanwhile, were becoming numb from the epidural. Later, we learned that the epidural went to my brain and clotted, giving me symptoms of a stroke before it dissolved. When I said something nonsensical to Mike, he began to panic and screamed for help.
I remember thinking, This is weird. Why doesn’t he understand me?
A gaggle of hospital personnel rushed in and whisked me to an operating room. All I remember was repeatedly mumbling, “APGAR scores, APGAR scores,” but no one could understand my slurred request for the test results given to all babies at birth.
Cole soon arrived (seven pounds, five ounces) via an emergency C-section, and his APGAR scores were perfect. He was healthy. I was not.
Mike remained by my side as the doctors now turned their attention to stitching my abdomen back together.
Mike incessantly stroked my head and repeated, “Everything will be OK.”
Then, with a suddenly renewed speech capacity, I shouted, “Get the f*$k off me!”
“Yeah, OK,” Mike said. “She’s baaaack, everyone!”
Once he knew Cole and I were both OK, Mike’s mind quickly turned to other things, namely, Golf.com. As they wheeled me to the recovery room, exhausted and wondering if my face would permanently droop like a basset hound’s, Mike raised an issue no mother would ever expect to hear just minutes after giving birth.
“I hate to say this right now,” Mike said, “but Buick needs their ads up. And I know you know this, but we need to make sure no other auto ads are running at the same time because they have exclusivity.”
Mastering the Moment
Five hundred miles to the south, the world’s greatest golfers gathered at Augusta National in preparation for the 68th MastersTournament, which was scheduled to begin four days after 04/04/04, Cole’s (lucky) day of birth.
Professional golf tournaments, of course, played a huge role in the profitability of Golf.com, and the four major championships were particularly vital to our bottom line. Golf fans came to us for information, and advertisers paid us to access one of the most affluent demographics on the web. So, as Kass gave birth to Cole, the most important ads of our year were scheduled to go live for the week.
While Golf.com had survived four years since we regained ownership, it was still a fledgling enterprise. After 9/11, we scaled back our team to prepare for what we thought would be a deep recession of all things related to travel and luxury. Then, in 2004, with Kass thirty-six weeks pregnant with Cole, we sold the first house we bought together in Chicago to move closer to our extended families in the DC area.
We were running lean—personally and professionally. Unable to afford a home close to the district line, we bought in Rockville, Maryland—thirty minutes from downtown. As R.E.M. pointed out in the song “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville,” it was a place “full of filth” and “where nobody says hello.”
We actually liked Rockville. But with a new company, a toddler, a large dog, and a baby on the way, the friendliness of our neighbors was the least of our concerns.
Most of what we remember about our twenty-one-month stint in DC is being overworked and limping around like zombies half asleep with no backup resources to help shovel the daily crap. We worked long hours from the 150-square-foot basement office in our new home, and the highlight of our day was driving Myles to a Montessori school in Chevy Chase, Maryland in our manual-shift Mini Cooper. Buying groceries afforded one of us a few minutes to interact with other adult humans outside our nuclear family.
Our margin for error with Golf.com was nonexistent. If Mike didn’t sell ads, we would have no revenue. If Kass didn’t traffic those ads and manage the advertisers and agencies, again, no revenue. And if Caspar didn’t keep the site up so we could serve the ads, you guessed it, no revenue.
So, when Cole’s early arrival coincided with the 2004 Masters week, Mike tried his best to cover for me. He knew what needed to be done with the Buick ads but had no idea how to do it. This was before YouTube and other online videos, which today provide instant instruction on just about everything.
Careful not to interfere with the tubes and probes attached to me, Mike reached over the hospital bed’s side guardrails and placed a laptop gently on my recently stitched abdomen.
I logged into DoubleClick, a management platform used by advertisers and agencies, and turned on the ads to ensure we didn’t miss those vital revenues. I then returned my attention to our new bundle of joy and my recovery as Mike commented how lucky he was to have such a motivated, tough, and committed partner.
The Masters, meanwhile, went on as scheduled, clearly unaware of all that was going on in our personal and professional lives. Phil Mickelson, however, wasn’t the only one who cashed in that week. We couldn’t match his $1.17 million paycheck, but it was the most profitable week in our brief history.
The successful week helped us exceed $2 million in annual revenue in 2004 for the first time in Golf.com’s history, setting us on a path to sell the company. Thank you, Phil (and Tiger Woods), for capturing the world’s attention, and to Cole and Myles for providing us the motivation to get Golf.com over the goal line.
Sowing and Reaping
This might not be a universal law along the same lines as sowing and reaping, but we know from experience that there is never a good time for entrepreneurs to have children. Not for us and not for you. But don’t blame the children. They are reaped from what you’ve sown, so to speak.
Children were (and are!) important to us. You may not want kids. And that’s fine. But if you are running your own business, you need to know that you will pay a price for doing anything important to you, just as sure as we paid a price for chasing our startup dreams while starting a family.
An entrepreneur’s personal life inevitably conflicts with the endless stream of work. There is no off switch. No quiet quitting. No balance. There’s only an effort to manage the imbalance as effectively as you can.
Here’s the hard reality: you can’t have it all.
I (Kass) believe you can only do one thing at a time really well. If starting and growing a business is the one thing, other things (like your closest relationships) will suffer. And when other priorities are more important, the business will suffer. During these inevitable trade-offs, your friendships, family, and health inevitably get something less than your best.
If you aren’t willing to embrace and deal with these realities, that’s OK. But if that’s the case, we recommend you don’t become an entrepreneur. If you are willing, however, don’t let the imbalance cost you a dime more than you absolutely have to pay.
In many respects, we were intentional and strategic about the sacrifices that came with our career choices. We talked openly about sacrificing time with our kids during their early childhoods in hopes of getting time back with them when they were older. We were focused on financial success to provide our children (and others we could impact through philanthropy) with a better life.
There’s a risk in this because, as too many entrepreneurs can attest, you can easily get consumed by the work and wake up one day with grown kids (and grandkids) you hardly know; the window for reclaiming time with them already closed. That wasn’t the case for us, but hindsight confirms that we could have done better.
While we couldn’t avoid an imbalanced life, we could have suffered less and enjoyed the journey a little more.
You can continue with Kass’ story of juggling entrepreneurship and parenthood by reading Shoveling $H!T. The book is available for purchase on Amazon.
Kass Lazerow is a serial entrepreneur, investor, company builder and mentor, best known as the cofounder and Chief Operating Officer of Golf.com and Buddy Media. After selling Golf.com to Time Warner in 2006, Kass cofounded Buddy Media, the leading social media marketing platform that sold to Salesforce in 2012 for $745 million. Since then, she has focused on providing capital, advice and operations support to close to 100+ early-stage startups.
Kass has long shared her hard-learned lessons from trying to balance the demands as a serial entrepreneur, investor, philanthropist and mother of three. Kass’s insights into the sacrifices and triumphs of women in business resonate deeply and has inspired many women to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams with resilience and authenticity.
Kass lives in New York City with her husband (Mike) and three children (Myles, Cole, and Vivian), and two rescue dogs (Cece and Gizmo).
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