Work-Life Balance - Tips for Start-up Founders

During my career as a marketing academic, I have mentored young people developing their business plans, competing in entrepreneurial competitions, and applying for funding. I have worked with young people aged nine years old to twenty-four years old on a range of projects including Step into Business, L’Oreal Brandstorm, and MBA small business strategic plans.

My current work focuses on the need to develop a work-life balance to ensure mental health and well being. I use my career journey as the basis of discussion around work-life pressures and the need to be radical when making important work-life choices, moving away from the traditional feeling of time pressure, guilt, and the drive towards linear career pathways.

My current research aims to provide a pragmatic, appropriate and sensible range of work-life balance tips for young startup founders; I am working with a range of entrepreneurs to collate

life experience stories with the aim of formulating proven guiding principles, learned and implemented by a range of successful entrepreneurs who have achieved an effective work-life balance. Keywords: Guiding principles, work-life balance; the experience of others.