Your Name: Tammy Kahn Fennell
Business Name: MarketMeSuite, a social media marketing platform for businesses
Type of Business: High Tech
Business Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Website http://marketmesuite.com
Twitter @marketmesuite
Facebook http://facebook.com/marketmesuite
Pinterest http://pinterest.com/marketmesuite
Reason for starting
I saw a problem and wanted to fix it. There was no solution out there to help small business find value out of using Social Media.
How do you define success?
That’s a hard one – success in business with a super successful company, but I also look at some of the smaller things that happen that I believe mean success — Like starting this company when I was about to give birth to my first child, growing it to 30,000 users, and then helping my team relocate from the UK to the USA and the bright future they each have now. So I guess if I had to put a definition on success I would say “achieving something that most wouldn’t think possible.”
Biggest Success
Besides my child, who is still my best “project” to date, my biggest success is seeing how my team has grown. Seeing an intern, who started off working for free lunch blossom into an amazingly talented engineer, seeing my co-founder grow and develop through this journey and knowing I’ve played a part is a huge success for me.
What is your top challenge and how have you addressed it?
You often hear about the work/life balance — so not to be too cleche, but that is a tough one. I’m a mom of a young child and the CEO of my own startup. The way I addressed this is that my husband and I decided, as a team, that he would become a stay at home dad. More on this decision here: http://marketmesuite.com/blog/is-a-female-entrepreneur-different.
Who is your most important role model?
Does the role model have to be living? If not, I would have to say the founding fathers of the USA. Not a typical choice, I’m sure, but when you think about it, America was one of the greatest experiments, and thanks to a few people who were willing to think “outside of the box” our nation came to be. They were willing to say “there’s a problem and we are going to fix it,” and isn’t that similar to what entrepreneurs do? 🙂