The Way I Work: Kim Kleeman of ShakespeareSquared

Kim Kleeman is founder and president of ShakespeareSquared, a Glenview, Illinois, company that creates educational materials--lesson plans, teacher guides, activity workbooks, discussion guides--for large publishers. The company did $2.3 million in business last year, capping a three-year growth spurt of 815 percent. Here Kleeman describes the challenge of running an (almost) all-women company and her carefully tended system for sustaining work and family life.

Up until six years ago the last thing I wanted was to be an entrepreneur. I like sane hours. I like routine. I like knowing where my next paycheck is coming from. My father's been an entrepreneur for 40 years: He's owned delis, restaurants, and retail businesses. My mother always helped him. It was a hard life, hard on us kids, and not what I wanted for me and my family. So I married my college sweetheart and we both became teachers. It was wonderful.

But when my eldest daughter, Casey, was just a few years old she was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. When it flares up she has trouble walking, and it makes her vulnerable to other diseases. Casey's not a "sick" child; she gets straight A's and she's super-friendly. But she has chronic pain, and I have to help her live with it. She has five or six different doctors that she sees regularly, and every three months she goes for blood tests. When this started I thought: How am I going to take time off for all those appointments? Plus, our health insurance sucked. As teachers, my husband, Jay, and I were in an HMO and just managing the referrals was a full-time job.

I decided to start the business so I could make my own hours and create a benefits package that was good for me and working mothers like me. I thought I could do it without sacrificing family life. I promised Jay that I would. We've always been a close family, but to make this work I've drawn my parents and siblings even closer around me, and I lean on them when I have to. And I've shrunk the physical world I move around in to a few square blocks.

So here I am with three kids under age 10. For the first hour of my day I'm like any mom: cooking breakfast, checking backpacks, signing permission slips. Jay leaves for his high school teaching job at 5:30 a.m., so it's all me. The nanny arrives at 7:30 to watch my youngest, and I walk my daughters to school, just a block from my house. Then I head for my parents' house--the house I grew up in--which is just two blocks away.

Every morning I sit with my parents by the pond in their backyard, or in the family room if it's cold. My mom makes tea and for one glorious hour it's someone taking care of me instead of me taking care of everyone. But it's practical time too. My mom and dad have become my personal advisory board. They have this incredible reservoir of business knowledge, and we hash over my business problems. Like recently I've had a couple of personnel issues--an employee I fired who keeps pestering me with e-mails, and an employee with legal problems that could have repercussions for the business. Pretty hairy stuff for a 19-person company. My older brother, Tom, often drops by too. He has a law degree and is a partner in a real estate firm, so he brings a different perspective. Tom's the one who used to say I could do something bigger than teaching--he imagined me as the mayor of a small town. He's still the one who makes me focus on the big picture.

After my parents' house I drive to the gym. That's my longest commute of the day and it's less than a mile. The company's growth has taken its toll on me physically, so now I make myself work out at least four days a week. About half the time my mom comes too. She works for me as managing editor, and as we walk around the inside track we talk about family and company matters. My mom's an introvert, and when she's around my dad he dominates the conversation. So this is when I get her real take on things. I recently launched a foundation that offers scholarships for student teachers--an idea Mom and I hatched while exercising.

It's maybe a three-minute drive from the gym to my company. Before entering the building I check e-mail for the first time that day to see if there's something I have to deal with immediately. Waiting to check e-mail is part of the same strategy as tea with my parents and daily workouts. I'm trying to create a mental air bag between me and the craziness of the day. Before I started doing it I would come in totally stressed out from getting the kids off--maybe they'd be crying because they didn't want mom to leave. I'd walk in the door and I'd be all frazzled, going a hundred miles an hour. Now when I walk in I feel calm and focused.

My administrative assistant leaves a printout of the day's calendar on my desk. I check to see what everyone is up to and where I have to be when. My scheduled meetings are in red; if someone requests a meeting during the day, my assistant will add it in purple. I started using purple ink when I taught high school because psychologists say students find red ink threatening. Now I use it because it's the color of our logo. I always write with Uniball Vision pens because I'm left-handed and they don't smear.

I make myself a cup of tea to soothe my throat. I do a lot of talking during the day and I'm pretty loud. Then I open the mail for the whole company. There's not a lot of it, since people mostly get e-mail, but I like to see what's coming through. Things pop out at me that my staff might not notice. A bill for shipping looks too high. A local business is offering office spa treatments, and I've been thinking we should do something for National Relaxation Day. We work with more than 400 freelance editors and writers, so new resumés arrive all the time. I have a photographic memory, and I can tell you better than any database who fits what projects if I read all the resumés as they come in.