Flexperience (Making Mother + Professional Work)

This vignette is used in the seminar “Entrepreneurship from the Perspective of Women” that is led by Professor Garth Saloner. The class that uses this vignette hopes to touch on five generic questions regarding women who pursue entrepreneurial ventures and who decide to have partners: 1). How does the entrepreneur think of the pro’s and con’s of a partnership? 2). How does the entrepreneur find a partner(s)? 3). How does the entrepreneur figure out if her choice of partner was a good one? 4). How does the entrepreneur set the structure of the partnership? 5). How does the entrepreneur deal with issues that come up during the partnership? This vignette chronicles Sally Thornton’s launch of Flexperience Consulting. It starts with the factors that drove Sally to consider an entrepreneurial route and how she searched for the right start-up idea. Once she decided to focus on the concept of creating a “talent” agency that placed “A-player” moms on temporary assignments, the vignette chronicles how Sally chose her partners, how she and her partners validated the opportunity, how they came up with the structure of their partnership agreement, and how they launched the company. Finally, the vignette chronicles the first eighteen months of Flexperience’s life and ends with an important and potentially contentious partnership issue.