Meet Coralee! She’s our #WCW (Woman Crush Wednesday), she’s not only got incredible advice for mom entrepreneurs but a product that is helpful for every mom.

Coralee Dixon was consumed with guilt over not preserving her kids memories and milestones. She couldn’t find the time like most of us. She was posting photos and captions on social media ( like most of us) that had the dates and milestones, but that was all. She was upset that she wasn’t making a baby book like the one her mom made for her when she was little. She pondered over this and looked for solutions to help capture her own baby’s memories. She couldn’t find anything that could work or that seemed helpful. Then she had her “Big Idea” and here is how she did it. Please meet Coralee and Shortcake Inc. our Mom of the Week!

Why did you start your business?
I started Shortcake because I wanted to help modern families preserve and share their memories in a way that was both beautiful and easy. The inspiration came when, a little before my daughter’s first birthday, I started feeling guilty because I hadn’t been writing down her milestones and special moments in the baby book I bought for her. Both my mom and my mother-in-law had kept lovely baby books for my husband and I, so I felt awful that I hadn’t done the same. Then I thought about how I had shared most of my daughter’s most important moments with family and friends on social media, which included written descriptions, captured the date, and received some fun comments that I liked looking back on. “Somebody must have a business that will help me turn that into a nice album, right?” I couldn’t find what I was looking for, so I decided to create it myself.

2. Where do you see your business in 5 years?
Today Shortcake is a custom album and photo book design service for modern families. We turn your social content and family photos into premium keepsake albums. In 5 years, I see us expanding our market beyond moms and dads to grandparents, weddings, pets, vacations, and school events. We may consider implementing some tech and intelligent automation into our process to help our designers work more quickly while maintaining our hallmark personal touch and unrivaled customization options. And we will continue expanding our services beyond albums to new areas, such as greeting cards and invitations (where we’ve already begun experimenting). This business has taught me so many new things, and it’s a continuous learning process.

So much of the tech-based stuff that I didn’t know about; I just learnt what is a DDoS attack because we had to look at the cybersecurity aspects of our service since we make use of a lot of tools that could be vulnerable to attacks. Customer information and transaction security is a key point to consider for any business, as anyone can tell you. Anyway, I’m sure there’s a lot of growth on the horizon and much more to do. Of course, in order to do all of that, we need to be growing our business and increasing our sales. This can be difficult, but most businesses these days seem to find success on social media, particularly Instagram. Perhaps we should look into improving our Instagram marketing strategy by incorporating hashtags onto our posts. This could increase visibility, especially if we used https://taskant.com to help us find the best hashtags for our business.

3. If there was one tip you could give a working mom what would it be?
Don’t make “help” a four-letter word. Ask for help. Accept offers of help. Every amazing mom needs her support system.

4. If you could do one thing over as a mom what would it be?
Potty training. Not because I enjoyed it – exactly the opposite. I felt so helpless the first time – I had no idea what I was doing and felt like a complete failure. Now that I’ve been through it once I realize how foolish it was to put so much pressure on myself. I feel bad because I made the experience more stressful for everyone than it needed to be. It also would have helped if I had not been pregnant with our second at the time (wine would have been really helpful – I’ve realized a laid-back attitude is a must!).

5. Whats your Mom Motto?
Do the best you can and give lots of hugs.