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Women@Work: Kellie Smytheby David Pereyra
Draw Me A Picture, Please "At first it was kind of strange going into meetings with these young guys who might have been wearing their first ever jacket for the meeting," she says about being a senior member of the IXL team. "But then the meeting starts and they really pull it together, articulating the technical part of the project." The average age at IXL is 33 years old, which reflects how the Internet is changing the workplace, skewing young. Most of the engineers and software developers throughout the industry are young. "I've never felt it was a man's world, maybe because I've been a part of it for so long," she says, describing the variety of people she works with. "It's a diverse group. You may have people from ages 20 to 60 in a room for a meeting." Bright-eyed and no nonsense, Kellie has a two year old son, Turner, and is expecting her second child in the next few months. Her husband, Stewart, has his own small business. In 1995, while at Alamo Rent A Car, Kellie helped launch Alamo's online booking engine, the very 1st in the travel industry. "I fell into it almost by accident," she says of her early success. "Nobody really had their arms around the internet back then. I used to draw pictures to show the world of the Internet, how AOL and CompuServe and Prodigy all worked. I remember one meeting where I drew a picture of the Internet to educate senior executives as to what the opportunities were." From there, Kellie moved on to IXL in a business development role for the travel industry. As the company and the Internet itself changed, she became a consultant, evolving her focus from selling clients on the Internet to e-business strategies and implementation. With the birth of her son, Turner, her IXl consultant status allowed flexible hours that was a perfect fit.
In Search of the Brass Ring "Basically, it would have been a 15 month gig," she says of the job, which was in the property management and hospitality industry. She was offered two positions, whichever she wanted: affinity marketing or consumer and business development. But she would have had to relocate and the travel would have been intense, weeks on end. Sales calls and onsite database management at properties throughout the Pacific Rim and Europe. "That's time away from your family where you can't just pick up the phone and call or fly them out to meet you," she says. The decision was almost proverbial in its complexity: go for the brass ring or find something closer to home and attend to family. "Stewart and I had discussed having another baby and if I took that job we would have had to put it off for a couple of years. Also, I would have missed out on a lot of Turner's formative years." After much thought and the figurative agonizing, she decided to stay stateside. "It was literally like the weight of the world off my shoulders," she said. "Without a doubt if roles had been reversed with me and my husband I would have taken the job," she says. "It was a no brainer, with so much upside. The internet is truly a marketing medium that's taken off on a world class level." But, and here Kellie chooses her words rather carefully. "I think you have core values as a women. My husband's role in our family is of the breadwinner. For me, the travel threw me off. I would have been on the road 75 percent of the time. There would have been too much emotional pull away from me being a fulltime mom. As a woman, you're still responsible for your child getting to the doctor or to daycare. I think these things are ingrained in your head when you're young, that you are responsible for things at home. I don't mean to make my husband sound like the bad guy but he's not the one who packs up Turner's things every day for daycare." Motherhood and success in business, especially in the dot-com world, is a very tricky mix. Both are stressful and all consuming. Daily responsibilities such as helping the kids with their homework, dance lessons, doctor's appointments are still considered a woman's responsibility. And in many companies, run by single white males who don't have a context for family issues, conflicts are certain to arise. A new study by the Entrepreneurial Research Consortium reports that women entrepreneurs spend three times as much time on child care and housework than men do--34 hours a week vs. 12 hours.
Kismet or Back to the Beginning "I like the camaraderie of working in a company," she says. "With this position, I don't feel like I'll lose my place as Turner's mom. Also, I like being the client for a change."
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