“The Trials and Triumphs of Female Entrepreneurship,” Interview with Michele Rhudy, History 150H Spring 2021, Conducted by Morgan Rhudy, March 14, 2021.

Introduction to Interview:

In this interview, my mom, Michele Rhudy, walks us through her journey from growing up in a working-class household to starting her own business. As a first-generation college student, Michele had limited exposure to the idea of women in leadership, but working with inspiring female role models within her profession helped her understand how she could use her strengths and talents to launch her own career. The focus of this interview extends beyond Michele’s inspiring story as she discusses a fascinating area of social change: the evolving role of women in the workplace, specifically working mothers. As this narrative surrounding this issue has shifted over the past decade, Michele has had a front-row seat and reflects on her experiences and tales throughout this conversation. For Michele, the flexibility she’s had as an entrepreneur has left her feeling fulfilled by the balance of her career and ability to parent her three daughters. Way before she wanted a professional career, she knew she wanted to be a mother, and being a good mom was not something she was willing to sacrifice for the sake of a leadership position. 

In telling her story, Michele expressed her wishes for more opportunities for BIPOC and LGBTQ women in leadership roles within the workplace. She hopes to see more progress and wants to play a role in that as a female business owner. Michele’s story proves that sometimes we don’t even know what our hopes for our lives entail, but with hard work and perseverance, we can exceed all our wildest goals and expectations.

 

Biography:

My mom, Michele Rhudy, grew up in Roanoke, Virginia, and was born the only child of two hard-working parents, Mike and Barbara. Forced to be completely independent by the age of 16, Barbara put herself through cosmetology school while attending a public high school where she met Mike. Out of high school, Mike took a few community college courses before spending his career working for Norfolk-Southern railroad before having to retire early due to an injury on the job. Mike has always been very skilled in fixing things. He deeply values family and passed that trait to his daughter.

While it was typical for women to be hairdressers in the 60s and 70s, it was certainly not typical for women to run their own business out of their family home. For much of Michele’s childhood, her mother worked tirelessly in the basement of their home cutting and styling hair to the trends of the times. Her customers were loyal, but not for her hairdressing skills, rather for her jokes and infectious smile. For years, Barbara cut hair and cut deals while Michele watched intently while learning traits of hard-work and resilience through the atypical gender role her mother played in the family.

After graduating from UVA as a first-generation college student, Michele moved to Richmond and started her life with Jonathan, both of which worked a series of fascinating internships and summer jobs before landing a spot at one of the best PR firms in town. While thrilled, they both worked long, hard hours, and while Michele was passionate about her work, she felt unfulfilled and as though her role would not pair well with her real dream, being a mother. A gifted writer, Michele left the firm and started freelancing before eventually starting Rhudy & Co shortly after the birth of her first child (me) in 2001. Eventually, Jonathan joined the team along with 20+ others, mostly females all working from home and connecting with each other through a unique team-based model that now provides strategic communication services to some of the largest companies in Virginia. Just like her own mother, at a time where such a thing was unusual for women, Michele built her life around working at home and teaching her own daughters those same values of hard work and resilience.

 

Morgan: To start us off, can you describe some of your first memories of your mom’s beauty shop and just your childhood, your experiences growing up?

Michele: Absolutely. So I had what I would call an idyllic working-class childhood. My mom had the beauty shop in the basement, my entire family was working class. My neighborhood was working class. But it was happy and supported, and loving. So my impression of my mom’s work was that it was joyful.

Morgan: Absolutely, and this was obviously a very unique experience that you had growing up home with your mom working right there in the basement. And so how did that shape your overall impression of women’s role in the workplace as you were growing up? And can you just describe the types of jobs that your friend’s mothers did when you were growing up and how they compared to your own mom’s work?

Michele: Sure. So I think everyone has everyone approaches their career based on an accumulation of experiences they’ve had, and those experiences can shape either opportunities or challenges. So for me, probably a challenge was that I had zero knowledge of professional jobs. I pretty much because I lived in a working-class neighborhood, I didn’t know anyone whose parents had been to college, I didn’t know what that path looked like, and I couldn’t really visualize professional jobs or knowledge-based jobs. However, on the plus side, I had almost all of my friends, parents were hard-working people. So I had lots and lots of examples of very hard work, and them making it work, you know, just making it work, paying your bills, making it work. So my friend’s moms were things … they worked retail, they worked in all sorts of grocery stores, different types of environments that were working class, but hard working. So I think that imprinted that value on me.

Morgan: Absolutely. And beyond that, in what ways do you find that growing up in Roanoke, Virginia, really shaped your perspective, beyond just looking at it through the lens of the workforce and the gender roles within that.

Michele: So Roanoke is… and was… Well, I can’t speak to it today. But but growing up, there was a wonderful place to grow up very simple, very happy, nice, small-town feeling. And also had some closed perspectives. You know, in hindsight, I experienced more people who were racist, or people who were sexist, or people who were homophobic than I even realized at the time. And I do think some of that is the nature of the environment, they’re the culture, the type of economy… It’s, it’s a, it is not a strong professional economy, at least it wasn’t when I was growing up. And that’s unfortunate. The positive was that it was really a friendly community-based, nice place to grow up where people looked after one another’s kids. So I would call it a little bit stuck in time when I was there.

Morgan: Definitely, that’s interesting. And I think, you know, you mentioned not really being able to visualize yourself being in a professional job in and obviously we now know, and it’s a big topic of conversation as far as social issues go, that representation is really important, and being able to visualize yourself as a big part of the process of kind of dreaming and understanding what you want to do. And so would you say, when you were in high school, college, even middle school, did was starting in company going to college… is that something that you thought you were capable of? Was it was it something you knew you wanted to do? Or had you not even considered it?

Michele: I always knew that I was a good student. And so my teachers would talk about the opportunities that I would have as a result of being a good student. And I was also a very hard worker. And that is certainly one of my values today. So I would say that I always visualized myself going to college. I didn’t understand what that might look like. I didn’t have any idea what even good schools were or bad schools. Had no concept of what it might cost. But I knew I would go. That’s about as far as I could get with it, though, because I, as you mentioned, I couldn’t see myself, there was no representation.

Morgan: Definitely. And so once you got there, what was that experience like? You went to the University of Virginia, which is pretty historically a school where you have generations after generations of students going and working in pretty big professions like medicine and law and what was that like when you first got there?

Michele: That was shocking, I will say. I was shocked at the affluence that others had. It was it was really that going to college that not until I landed there did I realize that I had grown up… by definition poor. I literally didn’t know that. And that sounds crazy, but when your entire environment is happy and taken care of, and then suddenly you’re propelled into a new environment, where people’s day to day reality is so different… I found it shocking and actually kind of disgusting. I mean, the entitlement that I saw there really made me wonder if it was the right place for me.

Morgan: Absolutely. And so when you had your first, I guess, professional experiences in the workforce, while you were still at UVA, and immediately after college, what were those internships like? And like, you mentioned feeling maybe out of place? Or like, you didn’t feel like that was the place for you? Did that feeling kind of extend to those experiences? And, and kind of just how did you feel? Can you describe what those experiences were like, and how you kind of pull from them now in your, in your own experiences in your work now?

Michele: So I loved interning, loved interning because each little experience that I was able to gather was sort of a window into an entirely new world. And I felt like I had some time to make up because I hadn’t grown up around anything professional. So I had to pack as many internships, paid and unpaid, as I could into that little window of time, from the beginning of college to the end of college. And I think I did like three or four a year for four years. And the first one I did was in the Roanoke city manager’s office for their communications officer. And she was smart and funny and cool, and the first professional mentor I ever had. And she poured a lot of encouragement into me and helped me see a path for myself, that I never knew that was possible. And I until until I worked for her, I knew that I was good at writing and talking and I didn’t know how to make money…how to make a career off of that. And she helped me see it. And so for I will be forever indebted to Michelle Bono was her name.

Morgan: That’s awesome. So with these experiences, did you feel that you had some kind of “aha” moment where you discovered that you wanted to do something more, it became clear what it was that you wanted to do?

Michele: Definitely. So once I sort of got on that path with communications, each little experience built on itself. So I started just trying to run the gauntlet of understanding the entirety of communications, did internships in television, and newspaper, public relations, advertising all the different facets at the time… each one sort of building a scaffolding for me of what I loved and what I didn’t love. And through those experiences, and rapid-fire, I sort of quickly got to the path that I liked, consulting, and I, at the time, traditional public relations was more what it was called. And so I got pretty fiercely focused on working for a firm when I got out of college.

Morgan: Absolutely. So then you left your firm and you started kind of consulting as a writer and can you describe kind of how that started from just you in your office to this big team of people that you have now all working on different projects and doing different types of work under the kind of umbrella that you all use, strategic communications. Can you describe that and like what that means to you now?

Michele: Sure. Our world in the 26 years, 27 years that I’ve been working has grown exponentially complex. And the role of clear communications and truth and trust has gotten more and more important because our institutions have failed us, all of them. Whether that’s the media, or politics, or religion, or education, pick one. And so I see the role of communications is to come in and provide clarity and truth to all topics. So we can help our clients tell their stories. Whether it’s to their customers, to their investors, to politicians, we help them in a clear and truthful way explain their points of view. And I find that work to be really rewarding. A lot of a lot of the world is convoluted and riddled with unnecessary complexity. And we bring order to that…and that is really fun.

Morgan: Absolutely, it’s amazing. And when you first started out, it was the one-woman show. So, you know, obviously, maybe you didn’t feel like you were defined by that kind of typical gender role of the time, you know, that women had a specific role within the workplace? What was that experience? Like, just as a woman taking that leap of faith? And and how do you see that evolving today, 20 years later,

Michele: Gosh, you know how women’s roles I, it’s almost, it’s mind-blowing what has happened that what I’ve seen happen in my lifetime. So when I think about when I first got out of college, I just accepted that there were many, it’s hard to explain, but it was just you just sort of accepted that a lot of leadership roles were held by men, even in communications has always been a female, always been a female-dominated profession. And yet, every firm, every major company was led by men, and oddly enough, that was just accepted. I mean, these are things, these are norms that take generations to build. So in my lifetime, I have seen that change dramatically. There will always be a biological tension in women between motherhood and their jobs. And there’s no right or wrong around that. But, in my when I was coming along in my 20s, moving up in this firm, it became obvious that success was going to mean longer hours, more travel, and that would have been fine. Plenty of women choose that, it was just not my choice. So I wanted to be, I got to see how my mother had that flexibility back in the beauty shop to create her own life. And that, to me, was more appealing than any perk the big job could have given me. So they could have thrown more money at me, more anything, but none of it mattered as much as the flexibility.

So I think is so important to understand just simply what matters to you most, because women even today, as they accelerate primarily, especially in large companies, what they lose is their own freedom. And for many of them, that is absolutely fine, and that is a wonderful choice. It was just not my choice. So I made this decision to step out of it, just get off the elevator. I had one child, and I wanted time to think about it and figure it out. And in that space, I’ve found a way just like my mom to build a life that worked for me. And if I could go back 18 years and do it again, I would do it the exact same way. It’s been super hard at times, it’s been super easy at times. But it’s been the right thing for me. You know, I’ve watched my friends now that I’m this old, I have female friends that are big executives now. They give up a lot for those jobs. And I wouldn’t want it for anything, I can do what I want. I mean, this whole year of COVID, I’ve lived at the beach, I’ve lived in the mountains… I’ve and and my hope is that your generation, with COVID, that’s… I hope that’s what my generation is giving you all. The opportunity and the the representation and the mentorship to build your own lives. So that it doesn’t have to be quite as “either-or.” You know, my mother’s generation, the professional women, I didn’t know, they lay the groundwork to even make it possible for us to be there and be at the table. And now I hope that we’ve made it possible to create your life, the way there might be less tension between particularly mothering and working.

Morgan: Absolutely. So I think it’s a it’s really beautiful to see kind of how your mom’s entrepreneurial spirit really shaped yours directly, even though your jobs and your careers were totally different. And it looked totally different. But I think it’s a great point that that’s very much okay. And that should be normalized. And I guess beyond that, what are your goals as an individual? And how do you see that playing out kind of in the big picture, whether it’s your goals as a mother or as the owner of Rhudy & Co. [the company she started]? What… Where do you think the biggest growth areas remain for you and for this big picture idea of women in the workplace as it continues to evolve?

Michele: You know, it’s so… for women in general, it is getting just rapidly so much better. And and, more importantly, for women of color, who really have just tremendous struggles. I think we are all tapping into our awareness. You know, just as we’ve all been, we’ve all been waking up or for the past year. For example, I noticed I have a dear Black client who I love and I started noticing the microaggressions toward her that I maybe never noticed before. Because I was always just trying to make my own points. And I’ve talked to her off to the side and tried to be her advocate. Because it’s time we all just call these things out. You know, mansplaining is a real thing, and I’ve gotten much better at pointing it out when it happens in a nice way. So I’m super hopeful that the next generation, that women and people of the LGBTQ community and people of color will, hopefully, we can make some progress in this space… You know, as for me, I’m in this really beautiful place in my career where I’ve kind of done it, you know, I, and I’ve sort of done what I wanted to do. And now I feel like I have earned the right to play a little bit. And now I take on assignments that I enjoy. I’m taking my career less seriously, I’ve earned enough to not have to work so hard. And it’s a nice spot, you know, I feel like I can just sort of… thinking of retiring and six years, if I want to…I may or may not want to. But knowing that that option is there is wonderful. And it’s, I would only have that option as an entrepreneur. If I had stayed with, there’s really the interesting part to me. I did this with no financial driver in mind, just simply because that’s not my core. And what ended up happening is I have more financial freedom than my friends who stayed on the hamster wheel. And sometimes I feel a little guilty about that a lot of them can’t retire at 55. There’ll be in that’ll be in the shuffle till they’re 65 and I feel really grateful for my choices.

Morgan: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for your answers and for your time. This is really fascinating, and we just appreciate it.

Michele: Thank you!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

 

Research:

To further contextualize the content of this interview, I conducted research on global trends over the past few decades that show changes in women’s roles in the workforce. This information can help people who engage with this interview better understand how my mom’s story fits into these trends, as well as the notability of her having grown up in Southwestern Virginia. This source accounts for cultural differences and draws attention to the intersectionality of motherhood and women in the workforce, a topic my interviewee spends a lot of time discussing. To narrow my research, I found an organization called “Status of Women in the States” that aims to provide statistics and information that spans multiple industries and women issues. The statistics I reviewed focused on the gender wage gap and labor force participation over the years and how it has changed. It also addresses where we are today which I feel is very important to compare and contrast with 2002, the year my interviewee became a female business owner. Lastly, I took a closer look at my interviewee’s company website, which outlines their goals, values, and mission and offers a glimpse into their services and clientele.

Bibliography:

Abendroth, Anja-Kristin, et al. “The Parity Penalty in Life Course Perspective: Motherhood and Occupational Status in 13 European Countries.” American Sociological Review, vol. 79, no. 5, 2014, pp. 993–1014. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43187575. Accessed 21 Feb. 2020.

Rhudy & Co. Strategic Communications, 2020, www.rhudy.biz/. Accessed 21 Feb. 2020.

“Women’s Labor Force Participation.” Women in the States, 4 Mar. 2015, statusofwomendata.org/earnings-and-the-gender-wage-gap/womens-labor-force-participation/. Accessed 21 Feb. 2020.

 

Follow-up Commentary:

The interviewee approved this transcript on March 27, 2021. No changes were requested and no notable follow-up conversation was had. This interview was recording using the voice memo feature on an iPhone. Otter.ai was used to transcribe the audio recording, and I manually edited to correct misspellings, run-on sentences, and grammatical errors made by Otter.ai.