As nearly any working mom will tell you, going back to work after maternity leave can be a shock to the system.
“I really struggled going back to work,” says Rashida McKenzie. “You spend all this time trying to get the baby here, then you have to go back to work in 12 weeks.”
McKenzie, who lives in Maryland, had a particularly difficult time. She was on bed rest prior to the birth of her daughter for 22 weeks.
Before that, she says, “I was the type of person who did it all. I was at a startup company, working my way up the ladder, and loved my job.”
But with doctor’s orders in hand, she found herself having to delegate both her professional and personal responsibilities while she tried to stay healthy for her baby and herself.
She enlisted her husband and her mom to help. “Anything I could think of: laundry, braiding my hair, just all of the little things that I could take off my plate, I took off,” she says. “My grandmother even sent meals from South Carolina on dry ice.”
But with a husband and mother who both worked full time, the demands of the day-to-day started to take a toll on them—and the idea for Queen Bee Concierge started to take shape.
McKenzie says at first she planned to launch a business called High Risk Helpers for other women like her who were on bed rest, but, “All of the calls that I got were, ‘I’m overwhelmed, I’m busy, I work full time,’” she recalls. “Everyone just had a different reason for needing help. Nobody on bed rest was calling me. Most worked full time, had small children. I just started to notice a pattern of who needed help.”
With that feedback, she shifted her focus and launched Queen Bee Concierge in 2015. Four years later, the company caters to local families (its very first client was in Alexandria) and, this year, is working to add more household managers. “I call this my expansion year,” she says.
Here’s how it works: clients sign up for a three-month contract and are assigned a household manager. You then meet with the assistant and work together on what you need help with—which can be anything from meal prep to laundry to keeping you organized.
“It’s all focused on your life at home,” says McKenzie of the services Queen Bee provides. “It’s about saving you time so that you can spend it on things that matter to you.”
She requires the three-month contract, she says, because managers and clients get to know each other and can focus on long-term goals. “I tell people we run your home like a business. At work, you’re comfortable delegating to get to a bigger goal. But we often forget that at home. It’s never about the laundry or the meal prep. Those are just the things that keep you occupied … it goes back to the mental load because we’re always thinking about the next thing that needs to be done.”
McKenzie says, for now, she has no plans to expand her business beyond the DC region. There are plenty of hardworking women here that need her help. And she continues to use her own life experiences as a working mom herself (McKenzie’ daughter, born healthy, is now 5 years old) to shape the business.
“We put so much on our plates and somewhere along the line it got crossed that ‘having it all’ meant doing it all,” says McKenzie. “What my company does is help women unravel that to be successful [and get] whatever you want out of life, whether that’s at work or at home.”
This post originally appeared in our June 2019 issue. Want more family content? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter.