In CafeMom's monthly series, Work It, Mama, powerful moms detail how they navigate their professions and home life.
As a mom who runs her own business, CEEK Virtual Reality, a company that builds virtual worlds for celebrities like Lady Gaga and Demi Lovato, Mary Spio is all about running a tight ship ā both at work and at home.
"Becoming a mom, it's like a double edged sword in a sense that, to me, I say that my son saves my life because if I didn't have my son, I'll probably just work nonstop," says Mary, whose son is a preteen. "And so it's brought the balance that I need in my career, too. And you perform better when you take those breaks."
A streaming program for events and experiences, CEEK helps people visit places virtually. "We're like Roblox for the real world in the sense that instead of those tiny little characters, we have photo realistic avatars that are running around the celebrity world, which you can access through VR," says Mary, who has partnered with Universal Music, Facebook, and Dwyane Wade's Celebrity Sports Camp.
Mary, who grew up on Ghana, has a background in deep space engineering, and designing and launching communication satellites. Here, the mom-boss shares how she navigates her to-do list, when she carves out quality time to hang with her son, and when she focuses on wellness.
Mary's day kicks off around 6 a.m.
"When I get up, typically I have to scramble to get my son to school," says Mary, who returns emails between making breakfast and school drop-off. When she gets back home, she does her best to squeeze a workout in before having breakfast and then hitting the ground running.
"The first thing that I usually do is development calls," details Mary. "We have standing calls and then, depending on the day, we do very agile development, since we do frequent releases, feature releases, bug fixes, and stuff like that. So the first thing that I do in the morning is talk to the developers about anything they need help with and then we all just go back into our routines and we use a lot of virtual tools. So we use Slack, we use Zoom." Mary says she and her team also consistently running tests to make sure CEEK is running perfectly.
"So, it's just testing programming, and then after that, I go into meetings typically with labels, artists management, and sometimes we have artists in town that we're hosting."
Typically, she doesn't break for lunch.
"I try to have healthy snacks around," admits Mary. "But a lot of times, I would say I'm not very good at breaking. One thing just goes into the other."
Her days are usually jam-packed, so moments to herself are often reserved for the morning. "When I can get up earlier than six o'clock I like to get up at five or even earlier because of the quietness of the morning," she says.
During select moments throughout the day, and in the evening, she carves out time to meditate. "These are things I do deliberately that I wasn't doing before," she adds. "I wasn't decompressing from one thing onto the other, but now I try to do that and then even throughout the day, when I get a chance to stop for a second, I meditate."
When she takes moments for herself, Mary rollerblades, reads, and writes. "I'm an author, so I love to write," says Mary, whose book It's Not Rocket Science released in 2015.
On most days, Mary pauses during the day to hang with her son.
"It allows me to break," says Mary. In the evening, after Mary puts her son to bed, her workday continues. "I try to wrap things by nine, by 10, but sometimes things come up," she says.
Mary admits that due to her busy schedule, the mom guilt can often be all too real.
"Sometimes my son is just like, 'We are going to watch this two-hour movie.' And he physically closes my computer and takes my phone away to hide it," says Mary. "And I'm like, 'No, no, no, we can't do that.' But there is that guilt for sure.
"In some ways he's understanding," adds Mary, "especially as he's getting older, but in some ways, too, I think that it's difficult for both of us because he wishes that I could spend more time with him than I do now and I work hard now so that I can be in a position to have more resources available to me, so I can spend more time with him.
"And that's what I try to tell him and I make sure that the quality time that we have is quality time," she says. "But I do feel bad a lot of times, especially when he's like, 'No, I just want you to look at this. It's just one hour.' And you're like, 'But that might be in the middle of hell breaking loose.'"
It can be hard being a boss.
But Mary is determined to run her empire, both at home and at work, with finesse. "Having been in an environment where people were judged so harshly for wanting to have that home life balance, it's so much easier as an entrepreneur and as a CEO of my own company to prioritize family. Where I am in my career and where the company is, I have the luxury of being able to say, 'OK, I'm going to take the Saturday off.'"
As an entrepreneur in tech, Mary says she never takes her power and influence in the space for granted. "There are just so many double standards when it comes to female founders and male founders," she says. "I never forget that a lot of other people are going to be judged by what I do. So, I try to represent as well as I can. I try to bring as many women into the tech world and into what I'm doing. It's very important to me to represent our perspectives."
