”You know, you want to do it all. You want to be the great mum. You want to be the great team member and to pick the best deals. But as the saying goes, while you can do anything, you can’t do everything! For me to thrive at home and at work I had to accept that we needed more help at home. My maternal instincts found this hard to accept, and it took me a while to get there but the minute I accepted it, everything ran more smoothly.”
From ‘Leaning In’ thanks to Sheryl Sandberg’s iconic self help manifesto for working women, to realising having a child means you no longer own your time, Jen McMahon, Partner at Seroba, shares her experience as a mother of three working in VC.
“It wasn’t a grand plan, but I always knew that I wanted kids. And you do kind of wonder when can you do that? When’s the best time? I mean, in hindsight I know now that there’s no good time, you just make it work. But I think I probably reflected on optimising timings that little bit too much in my early years in the industry.
“I read Lean In and I loved it and I kind of took that as my Bible. I was quite junior in my career when that book came out and the tips like, sit at the table, don’t leave before you leave, and make your partner a real partner really resonated with me. So instead of worrying about what might happen when I was ultimately taking 3 maternity leaves in the years to come, I remembered to show up each day and just go with it, work hard and seize opportunities as they present. Then when it’s time to leave for whatever kind of career break, take the time, enjoy it and then come back energised to start a new chapter. And so those kinds of tips, I think were helpful to stop me overthinking the impact a maternity leave might have on my future career.
“I joined Seroba in 2011 and I had my first child in 2017 so I had built up a good bit of kudos by the time I took my first maternity leave. But I was the first female on the investment team and no one had taken a mat leave before in my fund.
“There are obviously pros and cons with that, and the con was that there was no set policy that I could refer to and it makes it a little bit awkward when you have to tell your colleagues, and wondering how it will pan out?
“But of course, they were incredibly fair and understanding and they realised I wasn’t going to be gone for too long. And one of my colleagues reminded me that maternity leave is just a short period over an entirety of a career, which was very reassuring.
Jen has three children and took roughly 7 months mat leave with each of her kids.
“In Ireland in professional services, it’s commonplace now to take a year, and so most of my friends would take the full year. But I think in private equity, you need to consider firstly that the firms are comprised of small teams, you might be one of seven or eight people, and I’ve never been replaced on mat leave, it’s always been my colleagues picking up the slack from an investment team perspective.
“And secondly, from my own perspective, I knew I always wanted more than one child, so I didn’t want to have a baby, take a full year, have to get back into the swing of work, to then take more time off in quick succession to have more kids. I always felt that it was a lot easier to try and shorten it a bit, so that that worked well for me. I also am lucky to really enjoy my job and I get a great buzz from meeting entrepreneurs and working on investments, so it was a fun environment to return to.
Keeping in Touch (KIT days)
“I’d never heard the phrase ‘Keeping in Touch days’ before, but I was in touch with them a lot, by choice. We’re a really small team, we’re now 11 people and I think when I would have taken my first mat leave, we were probably a team of eight, all colleagues and friends. So I would have kept in touch and as my maternity leaves increased, I probably kept on more work.
“During my third, we were fundraising, so I was involved with that, pitching to LPs and the like and I kept some board responsibilities and maybe attended the odd conference locally. I certainly felt that staying in touch was the easiest for me because then it didn’t feel like this big task to come back.
“And firms have an important role to play, they have got to take the long view. Private equity is an apprenticeship model, with long-term investment in people. You train your deal team with a view to retaining and promoting your deal team and they’ll stay if they’re well supported.
When you’re coming back off mat leave, get into the office as much as you can. It’s really important to be present again, not for the company but for yourself.
Choose office over WFH
“One of my key recommendations to people when they’re coming back off mat leave is of course, seek flexibility, make it work for you as you find your new groove, but get into the office as much as you can. You need the visibility, and I think people can fall into the trap of saying, I now need to work from home two days a week, and actually that’s a real lost opportunity when you’re not back at the coal face. It’s really important to be present again, not for the company but for yourself.
“I think coaching can be really helpful here. I’ve never done it, but on reflection, as I progressed I probably would have benefited from doing coaching and I still might at some point in the future. At Level 20 there’s a really high demand for mentoring at mid career level. But there is also a high demand for mentoring when someone is promoted to Partner or has a big life-change such as having a baby and they think, oh my goodness, I now need to deliver and that’s when imposter syndrome commonly creeps in. I felt like that a little bit, I think, on my return from mat leave and probably more so after my second and third child as at this point, I thought I should have had it all figured out already!
“The reality is I can’t work from home when my kids are there, either they are insisting on being on my lap or I can hear them having fun in another room and I need to stop myself from going in to give them a cuddle! I think in in theory it’s lovely to have the comfort blanket of having some degree of flexibility around drop offs and the likes, but I am in the office five days a week and that’s what works best for me.
“Otherwise my kids are running riot at home and I’m trying to be a parent and I’m trying to do my job, and then the guilt sets in that I’m not doing anything right, and so for me, it’s not worth the stress. I’d rather just be in the office during the day. And then when I’m at home, at least I’m not a demon mother trying to keep them quiet when they don’t understand why I won’t play with them, or make them a snack every 10 minutes!
It takes a village
“My next recommendation is to get your childcare ducks in a row while you’re still pregnant. Someone gave me some very sage advice when I was pregnant with my first, they said, do you have a creche lined up? At this point I didn’t even know if I was having a boy or a girl and thought it was a crazy suggestion, but they were right. So, I thankfully got organised before my son was born and I learned thereafter how incredibly challenging it is to get childcare if you wait until after the baby arrives.
“We went from having a creche, to creche plus a part time childminder, to creche plus a full time childminder, and now we have a phenomenal minder who does our groceries and cooks the food, who is like another Mummy to the kids, so we’ve essentially got all of the help we can get, which is a huge privilege.
“My husband always wanted to be as supportive as possible in that he’d never wanted me to do everything. I was reluctant to ramp up the support and the childcare until I had three kids and it just became an absolute necessity to enable me to work, whereas he was thinking from a much earlier stage, we need more support, we’re both really busy, let’s make this work for us. This is one of the rare occasions where I will admit he was 100% right from the outset!
“And I also had to recognise, yes, I can do drop offs in the morning, but I can’t be there for all ad hoc sports days, for every little play and those things that I think working from home affords a lot of flexibility for. And once I accepted that it made things a lot easier as it allowed me to take the pressure off myself. Although my middle child is only five and she’ll say things like, ‘can you text Cara’s mom because Cara’s mom also works, but she still drops and collects her every day’, which of course makes you feel like the worst mum in the world. So, if she has a gymnastics showcase or something, I will drive out to see it and then I’ll drive back in to the office. And that is a huge advantage afforded to you when you are in a senior role, since you own your own calendar. Obviously, when you’re travelling or when there’s an IC scheduled, you can’t just dip out of it, but there are certainly times when you can leverage flexibility and that really helps.
I went into motherhood not realising that I would no longer ‘own’ my own time, so I’ve had to learn to tweak my own systems a little bit.
In sickness and in health
“My third tip is that I went into motherhood not realising that I would no longer ‘own’ my own time. When I had my first, one of the things I didn’t envisage was how sick they get when they start in creche. Honestly, I went in completely naive. I was thinking that I was all organised with creche five days a week and that everything would run smoothly. And every three weeks, for the best part of six months, my son was sick with something new – it was relentless and exhausting and it came at a challenging time when I was trying to settle back into life as a working mum.
“I’m the type of person who tended to leave things relatively to the last minute, so then it was a complete disaster because if I had a report that was due on Friday which I had blocked out Wednesday to do, but on Tuesday night, a kid got sick, my schedule was then thrown out the window! So, I’ve had to learn to tweak my own systems a little bit and to realise that you are at the mercy of the kids’ illnesses during the early years. That said, we do have incredibly supportive parents who have literally dropped everything to mind the kids for us at short notice over the years.
“But of course, Seroba has been incredibly flexible and supportive, and another partner in the fund has taken paternity leave in recent years which is great. He also took some additional parental leave, which is a relatively new initiative in Ireland, and our Fund demonstrated a flexibility and a commitment to making it work for him. I am a big believer that in order to level the playing field for women, men also need to be seen, and encouraged, to take leave. As a partner of our business, I am proud that we have created a supportive environment and it also lets other people know that it is acceptable to take this special time.
ENDS
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Jennifer McMahon is a Partner at Seroba. Having placed first in her Master’s degree in 2011, Jennifer then joined Seroba’s Investment Team as an Investment Analyst, progressing to Partner in 2022. She has a background in Pharmacology and investment interests in medical devices and therapeutics.
Aside from direct investing, Jennifer is involved in several diversity agendas. From 2019 -2023 Jennifer sat on the Advisory Board for the European healthcare Businesswomen’s Association (HBA). She was a founding member of the Irish Chapter of Level20 in 2019 and was appointed International Chair of the 13 European chapters in 2021 and subsequently appointed to the Level20 Board of Directors in 2022. She guest lectures on venture capitalism at University College Dublin, Trinity College Dublin and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. She is also in high demand as a speaker at Investor/Entrepreneur life science partnering conferences across Europe.