This piece is part of our “Act II: Career changes after motherhood” series, where we dive into the personal stories of locals who shifted careers (and often reinvented themselves) after parenthood. Read the full feature here, including other stories of Seattleites who made a post-child career move, and tips from experts on how to make a successful post-parenthood career shift.
Brea Starmer is founder and CEO of Lions & Tigers, a consulting firm that pairs highly experienced marketing, communications, operations and other specialists with clients that need those high-level skills. Starmer success lies in her use of a flexible workforce model where part-time and full-time consultants and freelancers work mostly from home or other remote locations.
It’s an innovative model — one Starmer conceived as a way to balance her consulting passion with another leadership position she concurrently holds and lists under her LinkedIn work experience:
- Mother
- Starmer Family
- Jan 2016 to Present / 9 yrs
- Mother to three beautiful, wild, curious kids
Like Starmer, many of the people who work at Lions & Tigers are parents who want flexible hours to make work and work-life balance possible.
A big Aha!
Nine years ago, Starmer found herself jobless after a round of mass layoffs.
“I was on the phone that afternoon,” she says, assuming her next step would be a senior role somewhere else. After all, she had a long history as a high achiever in life and work. But there was a catch. Starmer was seven months pregnant and says she “grossly misunderstood what pregnancy discrimination would look like.”
After two dozen applications, Starmer wasn’t getting hired. With a baby on the way, her situation felt precarious. Starmer realized she had to shift her pitch: “Will you at least hire me on as freelance?” “I got three yeses,” she recalls.
During her third trimester, Starmer billed 60 hours a week in an effort to self-fund her own maternity leave, since Washington offered no family leave benefits at the time.
Then came Lions & Tigers
After giving birth to her son, Starmer wanted to work at a different pace even as she craved the challenging, high-level projects that had built her consulting career. So she hired a part-time nanny and signed a part-time consulting contract rather than return to full-time work. She remembers thinking, “This is awesome. I can be present in both. I felt this ideal state of work.”
The next lightbulb went off as she was posting on Facebook for baby sleep advice. When moms showed up en masse with suggestions for pacifiers and sleep schedules, Starmer says she had a revelation: “How much better would our workplaces be if we had that intrinsic caring, nurturing thoughtfulness that comes with motherhood applied to business strategy?”
“I was used to hiring consulting and staffing providers for very specific business needs,” Starmer says. “Everything was transactional, which felt unnatural and lacking for me. Because so many of us at Lions & Tigers are caregivers, we are used to ensuring people are cared for now and planning for what’s next.”
We want that too
Friends who were mothers started asking Starmer how she’d landed on a sweet spot by doing freelance work. Starmer says, “it just really hit me that if I could figure out this path, I could provide that to others. I knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I didn’t have a purpose until I was a mother,” Starmer adds. “It’s given me leadership values that are different from how businesses are traditionally run.”
By way of example, Starmer recalls being encouraged to hide her pregnancy by an old boss because they deemed showing a bump too early risky in the company’s culture. You won’t find that culture at Lions & Tigers.
“As a team of three mother executives,” says Starmer, “We knew that balancing business performance with the human experience was both the right thing to do and the right thing for the business.” She laid the foundation for her firm during her second pregnancy. Her mission, says Starmer, was to turn the table on traditional consulting, where fresh college graduates work long hours under the guidance of a senior leader.
Instead, Starmer built a team model where experienced industry leaders work part time to consult with and guide a client’s staff. The Lions & Tigers model has attracted professionals like Brenda Fisher, a former senior product manager at Amazon. Before working with Starmer, Fisher was on the verge of dropping out of the workforce in order to be more present for her adopted son.
“I found Brenda to be one of the smartest business strategists I’d met,” says Starmer. With Lions & Tigers, Fisher was able to scale back from full-time work. Fisher says the company’s model lets her show up as a parent: “I didn’t know I could have both my work and my family.” Starmer’s flexible work philosophy proved itself at both the competitive and personal levels in the months that followed the birth of her second child.
It was then that Lions & Tigers pitched against big agencies to win its first million dollar contract (with Microsoft). “We were more agile. We were faster,” says Starmer, who crafted the proposal with her team while nursing a newborn. “We came up with a better solution.
Read more
Act II: Dads make a career changes after parenthood, too | Fourteen years ago, Nick Nordberg’s circumstances would have been the makings of a mid-life crisis. Instead of letting his situation weigh him down, Nordberg, a Puyallup resident, turned his circumstances into a mid-life opportunity.
Act II: How a newspaper reporter became a birth worker | In walking away from daily news, reporter Cheryl Murfin walked right into an identity crisis. She needed a new work identity, one aligned with her newish motherform. Strangely, she found it in the birth experience itself.
Act II: From cosmetics to the classroom | Having a child with autism, changed Alexis White’s trajectory. She decided in 2022 that she needed to expand her teaching skills by making a career switch. Today she’s doing just that as an instructional assistant at Stevens Elementary in Seattle.
