Meet Our Interns: Traci Feit Love

Traci Feit Love (@TraciLove) is a freelance writer, small business consultant, and entrepreneur.  A Harvard Law School graduate and former trial attorney, Traci left the practice of law so she could work from home and spend more time with her family.  She writes about her experiences at The Breadwinner Mom.

A few years ago I was working as a trial attorney at one of the largest law firms in the world.  The pay was great, the people were great, and the work was interesting.  But something wasn’t right; I was tired all the time and I felt a lot older than I was.  In the spring of 2007, an opportunity came along that I couldn’t pass up – the chance to work from home running a small business.  I left the law firm and dove in.

As the sole full-time employee of the business, I was responsible for pretty much everything.  Marketing, operations, payroll, benefits – you name it, I was in charge of it.  It was an incredible education.  In less than two years (during which time I also had a baby!)

I more than doubled the business’ revenue and began to dream about launching my own venture.  I wasn’t sure exactly what that venture would be, but I knew I wanted to continue working from home so I could spend as much time as possible with my family.  I also knew I wanted to capitalize on my experience with small business management, online and e-mail marketing, writing, and sales.

I did some research to figure out what type of services I wanted to provide and then started my own company, Love Communications, this past March.  Love Communications provides freelance writing, marketing, and consulting services to other small businesses (and I’m proud to say it became a profitable venture in less than a month).  At around the same time, I launched my blog, The Breadwinner Mom.  The plan for the blog was just to connect with other breadwinner moms and share some of my personal experiences – a project that (I thought) would be totally separate from Love Communications.

And then an interesting thing happened: my blog’s readers started to ask about how to make a living working from home.  Essentially they said, “yes, yes,  this stuff about your baby becoming a toddler is all well and good – but how is it that you’re able to totally support yourself, your daughter, and your husband (a stay-at-home dad) without working outside the home?”  I began to realize that my business and my blog might turn out to be more connected than I thought.

In what I can only describe as perfect timing, Sparkplugging then announced its internship program.  It offered exactly the type of on-the-job education I thought I would need in order to get where I wanted to go with my blog and my business: helping other parents learn how to start and grow home-based online businesses that earn enough to support their families, so that they can spend as much time as possible with their kids.

I’m so excited to be one of Sparkplugging’s new interns, and look forward to learning from some of the best bloggers and entrepreneurs on the web.  I also hope to get to know as many of you as possible, so I encourage you to connect with me on Twitter (@tracilove)!