WHEN on Topic: Balance sheet: when you take care of your business (and others)

Stella: Welcome to a new episode of WHEN on Topic. I’m Stella Kasdagli, and I’m happy to welcome you to another conversation about women’s professional and financial empowerment and gender equality at work – and sometimes beyond work, too. This season of our podcast is dedicated to caregiving responsibilities and the equal distribution of care, and, as you know, it is brought to you through CAREdiZo. CAREdiZo is a European project in which we participate as WHEN, under the European Commission’s CERV programme. Its goal is to help bridge the gender gap in caregiving responsibilities by promoting equality practices at home, in micro-businesses, and in small civil society organisations, meaning organisations and businesses with up to ten employees. The project supports family-friendly policies, encourages men to participate in caregiving, and highlights the value of care in society more broadly, which is exactly what we’ve been advocating for all this time. Its activities include research, co-creation workshops, training programmes, and the development of digital tools, such as an educational game and podcasts like this one, all aimed at challenging stereotypes and promoting equality.

Our partners are based in Cyprus, Lithuania, and Bulgaria, and as we speak, they’re creating their own podcasts, which you may soon have the chance to discover as well. Today, we’ll be talking about the personal caregiving challenges faced -often constantly- by founders and owners of small businesses and organisations, and how those challenges affect their role as leaders of the teams helping them carry their entrepreneurial vision forward. To explore this topic, we’re joined by Marisa Antonopoulou. Marisa joins us in a dual capacity: today she is an entrepreneur herself, but she also previously served as COO of AFI, Greece’s first microfinance organisation. In that role, she supported aspiring entrepreneurs — both practically and emotionally — through knowledge, guidance, and experience, helping people seeking funding to launch their businesses. Let’s hear more about her journey. 

Stella: Hello Marissa.

Marissa: Hello, Stella.

Stella: Could you tell us a few things about your own path and how you got to where you are today, so we can better understand the perspective you bring to this discussion around the work-life balance challenges entrepreneurs and founders face?

Marissa: Sure. My career didn’t actually begin in the startup world. I took a very different path, starting in a corporate environment at PwC as a financial auditor, that is, somewhere with a lot of structure, numbers, in a very corporate environment.

Stella: And more structured, I imagine, in terms of policies.

Marisa: Absolutely. And although that environment came with certain costs, it also gave me tools and skills that I later carried into much less structured environments in my life. Then I spent ten years helping build Greece’s first microfinance organisation. Beyond supporting and training people trying to start a business for the first time, we were also financing people who had no access to other funding sources.

Stella: What percentage of those people starting businesses would you say had caregiving responsibilities? Not necessarily a traditional family structure, because that can mean many things, but how many of the people you supported at AFI had caregiving responsibilities in their lives?

Marisa: I’d say around 60%. If they weren’t mothers raising children themselves, they were often men supporting ageing parents.

Stella: So you’re making the distinction…

Marisa: Looking at age demographics alone, I’d say that most people over the age of 35 or 40 had some form of caregiving responsibility.

Stella: But you’re also distinguishing between parenthood and caring for others in the sense that women were usually the primary caregivers for children, whereas men were less often taking on that primary caregiving role.

Marisa: Definitely. I think socially that’s still true in Greece. Later on, after leaving AFI, I became an entrepreneur myself. And that’s when I realised how much easier it is to advise people about entrepreneurship from the outside. I thought I understood it before. Of course, an outside perspective can still be incredibly helpful, but it’s much easier to advise someone when you’re not personally carrying the risk yourself. What I realised once I became an entrepreneur was how difficult it is to ask for help. And also how lonely entrepreneurship can feel. There’s this feeling that something is lacking in you if you need to ask someone else for support. It’s not necessarily a rational feeling, but it was something I absolutely didn’t expect to encounter once I crossed over to the other side.

Stella: And does that need for support relate mostly to the operational side of running a business, or also to how entrepreneurship interacts with the rest of your life?

Marisa: Everything. Because you don’t only need help with the business itself – admitting, for example, “I don’t know how to do this, I need to learn it or ask someone else to do it for me.” You also need help with what I call “borrowed time.”

Stella: Tell me more about that phrase, “borrowed time.” I really like it.

Marisa: When you move from being employed somewhere into entrepreneurship, you naturally start feeling like your time is borrowed. When you have a job with fixed hours, you know where you’re supposed to be from 9 to 5. But when you’re an entrepreneur, because theoretically you can work whenever you want, people also assume you’re available whenever they want. So in my mind, and it’s something I’m trying to work through, time always feels borrowed. If I ask someone to watch my child, I find it difficult to say, “No, I can’t at that time because I have work,” because somewhere inside me I believe I could rearrange it if I really wanted to.

Stella: So work feels more like a choice than it would in a salaried job – or at least that’s how it appears from the outside.

Marisa: Exactly. That’s how it appears.

Stella: But does the opposite happen too? Sometimes I feel that even the time I choose not to work feels borrowed from the business itself.

Marisa: Absolutely. Of course.

Stella: Because there’s always something more you could be doing for your business.

Marisa: Exactly. And if you don’t work on your relationship with perfectionism, it can drive you insane. You can never be fully present anywhere. When you’re working, you think about everything else. And when you’re with family or doing something personal, you think about the business — about the thing that won’t move forward unless you personally make it happen.

Stella: We often hear from women who gave so much of themselves in corporate environments. They entered those spaces young, ambitious, eager to grow, and they gained a lot — but they also sacrificed a lot. And at some point they turn toward entrepreneurship hoping for more flexibility, more autonomy over their time and decisions. Do you think entrepreneurship really improves work-life balance? Does it actually make it easier -especially for women- to devote time to caregiving responsibilities or life outside work?

Marisa: Honestly, I think it would be a little ironic to say that becoming an entrepreneur gives you more time. That’s simply not true. At the same time, though, I wouldn’t change it for anything. Leaving the corporate environment was absolutely the right choice for me. You do gain more flexibility over how you organise your time, but not more time itself. Your mind is always working. The difference is that in one scenario you take meetings in a quiet office, and in the other you’re taking them from a playground while holding your child in one arm and your headphones in the other. That’s the difference. You simply use your time differently, and from the outside it may look more flexible. But the sense of responsibility is much heavier when it’s your own business. You carry the emotional and moral weight of it all. You carry your team on your shoulders. The only thing that changes is that you can structure your actual working hours a bit more freely.

Stella: I could picture that perfectly. I’ve taken meetings from the park, from the stands at OAKA, from the car right before or after picking up the kids. Does that create guilt for you too? Because for me it creates double guilt – guilt toward the child in the back seat because I’m talking to a colleague instead of talking to them, but also guilt toward the professional environment because people can hear children in the background while I’m in the park.

Marisa: Constantly. That’s exactly the issue – the guilt that comes with this kind of life. It never really stops. But at the same time, I think every one of us has to work very hard internally not to constantly feel guilty from every direction. I certainly haven’t mastered it yet. If someone else has figured it out, they should tell the rest of us how.

Stella: We should invite them onto the podcast.

Marisa: Exactly.

Stella: How has this experience, the guilt, the balancing act, the transition from employment to entrepreneurship, affected the way you lead your own team today? Has it changed the way you understand your employees’ needs or shape your company culture?

Marisa: It’s made me much more direct and human with my team.

Stella: What do you mean by “direct”?

Marisa: In more traditional professional environments, our personal lives -especially our identities as caregivers- were almost hidden. You were “professional” at work, and your caregiving role existed somewhere else. I’ve tried to break down that wall with my own team. If something caregiving-related comes up, we address it openly and immediately. If your child is sick, there’s no discussion – you leave and we’ll figure it out. We’ll cover for you. I try to integrate the human side into professional life much more consciously now. And honestly, that’s something I wish others had done for me earlier in my own career.

Stella: So you hadn’t really experienced that support yourself from previous managers?

Marisa: Not consistently. I’ve had many managers over the years, and everyone had their own style. Some people understood because they were living through similar realities themselves. Others made me feel like my humanity had to stay hidden in professional settings. And this isn’t only about caregiving. It’s also about empathy in general. In many workplaces, empathy is still treated as weakness. I hope that’s changing now – that understanding and empathy are increasingly being recognised as strengths instead.

Stella: That empathy is becoming destigmatised in leadership.

Marisa: Exactly. That’s the shift.

Stella: Earlier you said, “We’ll deal with it.” But structurally, what does that actually mean? Have you built systems, budgets, or staffing structures into your business that allow you to genuinely respond to emergencies and caregiving needs?

Marisa: The main thing I’ve done -at least in one of my businesses, because I now have three- is to avoid assigning myself fixed hours in the business.

Stella: May they become a hundred.

Marisa: No thank you! In the business where I have eleven employees, I deliberately haven’t given myself a fixed schedule. That way, when there’s a need, I can step in and cover any role. I’ve trained myself to be able to do every position. So the first thing I’ve done is take responsibility for being the first person who can step in when something happens. The second thing is that this specific business is a restaurant, so things are more complicated.

Stella: So it’s fully in-person work. You can’t just close up and say, “We’re remote today.”

Marisa: Exactly. Working from home simply isn’t an option in that environment. So some of the policies and approaches I was trained in just don’t apply there, and I have to think differently.

Stella: I want to pause there because I think many of us instinctively say, “If there’s a problem, I’ll step in and fix it myself.” But as businesses grow, is that sustainable? And what does that mean for our own caregiving responsibilities and our own work-life balance? And I also wonder whether women are more likely to say, “I’ll handle it, you go,” compared to men – although maybe that’s just my own bias.

Marisa: Honestly, I hadn’t thought deeply about the gender dimension until now. But I do think we haven’t been trained to destigmatise delegation. Women often carry a stronger sense of personal responsibility. I see it in teams all the time – very often it’s one of the women who immediately says, “I’ll cover it.” So yes, I do think there’s a difference there.

Stella: But what happens when the team grows and we remain stuck in that mindset of personally covering every emergency? How do you transition into a structure that makes the business -and your own life- sustainable? Especially in a small market like Greece, where it’s not always financially possible to build extra capacity into staffing or budgets?

Marisa: It’s incredibly difficult to say, “I’m going to hire two extra people just in case someone needs leave or there’s an emergency.” But if you can afford to do it, the psychological relief is worth the financial sacrifice. Knowing you don’t always have to be the one stepping in allows you to focus elsewhere. Of course, not everyone has that luxury. There are periods when I’m fortunate enough to have extra people who can help cover things, but that’s not always possible. As a company grows, it becomes a little more realistic. But even then, we have to be intentional about where we invest both money and time. So yes, it’s a trade-off. For me, it’s worth it, but it’s not possible for everyone.

Stella: Looking back now, what would you say differently to founders you supported in the past, especially women with caregiving responsibilities? What do you think you were missing back then?

Marisa: I don’t know if I would change my words exactly. But I think I underestimated how important it is to talk about loneliness and about the fact that no one really tells you “well done” anymore. That’s something I still struggle with.

Stella: That’s such a powerful point.

Marisa: When you work for someone else, you have managers, goals, milestones. When you complete something, someone acknowledges it. Someone says, “Good job.”

Stella: And there’s also someone else to blame when things go wrong.

Marisa: Exactly.

Stella: There’s a kind of parental figure in the workplace, someone to care for you or rebel against.

Marisa: Exactly. And all of that disappears when you become self-employed or start your own business. So I would focus much more on helping people prepare for the loneliness, because entrepreneurship is lonely, caregiving is lonely, and in both cases nobody is constantly telling you that you’re doing well.

Stella: What could that kind of support or community look like?

Marisa: I think simply talking about it matters enormously. When a mother or caregiver says, “My life has changed completely,” people respond with, “Well, you chose to have children.” And when you start a business, people say, “But you control your own time.”

Stella: “You chose this yourself,” basically.

Marisa: Exactly. And yes, both things are true. Nobody forced you into either choice. But you still need support. And we need to normalise saying things like, “I need encouragement,” or “I want to feel recognised.” Or even learning to define recognition differently – maybe my reward is simply the fact that my work supports me financially. But we need to talk about loneliness and recognition much more openly before people step into entrepreneurship. Because honestly, I never used to say these things to people when they came to AFI asking for funding. I would tell them, “You’re strong, you’re empowered, go do it, don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t.” And yes, all of that matters. But I should also have asked: are you ready to be alone in this? Are you ready to have no one else to blame when things go wrong? Are you ready for everyone you hire to eventually look to you for answers — and sometimes blame you when things fall apart? That’s what I would say differently now.

Stella: If entrepreneurs are the caregivers of their businesses, then who takes care of the caregivers? Where have you personally found care and support?

Marisa: For me, definitely my husband, Tasos. And thankfully my parents are still around too. But another important thing I didn’t fully appreciate before is how much it matters to genuinely love what you do. That’s a form of care too. Not everyone has a partner who supports them without making them feel guilty. Not everyone has parents who can step in with childcare when needed. So I’m deeply grateful for all of that. But I also believe that building work you love and creating the kind of environment you yourself would want to exist in is a form of self-care.

Stella: Beautifully said. Thank you so much.

Marisa: Thank you too.

Stella: What did you think about today’s conversation with Marisa? What else do you think CAREdiZo could create to bring us one step closer to equality – both inside and outside the workplace? As always, we’d love to hear your ideas, comments, and suggestions. Follow us on social media if you haven’t already, send us an email, leave us a review on Spotify, come visit us at the WHEN Hub in Athens, and let’s keep this conversation going everywhere we can – so we can make both WHEN and CAREdiZo even better for everyone.