Eryn Vargo, a Central Florida mom with 4 children, gave up her corporate career to go down the social enterprise path. Now she runs three different companies: Baby OK, Moms Give Back, and The Diaper Bank of Central Florida.

As a busy mom and entrepreneur, Eryn knows how to ask for what she wants in order to get things done. When she feels overwhelmed with all the different aspects of her businesses, she reflects back on the core values of what she wants to accomplish to help her make decisions.

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1) Moms Give Back wants to help companies that want to make a social impact for good.

Moms Give back started as a side gig project where Eryn could combine philanthropy with marketing and sales. It’s been a labor of love for four years.

She specializes in helping women specifically, to “Bring purpose and social impact to small businesses.”

Eryn knows that consumers, especially millennials, are concerned with the values that businesses have.

“People resonate more with businesses that have meaning and just aren’t in it for themselves.”

Eryn believes when companies have a purpose that allows them to positively impact their community, it attracts more clients to the business. It’s a great way to establish the know, like, and trust.

New companies often establish the purpose component into their business from the start. However, Eryn encourages businesses that have been established for a long time to consider what their core values are, if they haven’t examined them for a while, and to decide how to incorporate that into their business and marketing models.

Eryn believes social impact is important for all businesses, old and new, big and small. She created Moms Give Back to use her experience from her corporate job with a large company to teach small business owners how to use those  tactics.

Eryn knows businesses of all levels can benefit from social enterprise work, even momprenuers who run small side businesses to help their families.

When Eryn started the platform, the purpose was to help connect and highlight moms who are doing really great community work. The platform has grown so much since then.

2) The Diaper Bank of Central Florida is a true family project that distributes thousands of diapers a year!

When Eryn first had the idea to start The Diaper Bank of Central Florida, she was on the board for Second Harvest Food Bank. As she learned more about food insecurity in the community, she realized the same people who needed food from the food bank probably also lacked the ability to get diapers for their babies.

Compelled to fix this problem, Eryn built a plan. She partnered with a diaper bank in west Orlando and eventually took over. Four years later, Eryn still runs the diaper bank with her family from their garage.

The diaper bank normally distributes about 16,000 diapers a year in Orange County. However, after the hurricane last fall, Eryn found that people from all over the world donated money to the diaper bank to help hurricane victims.

Eryn decided to use the money to send diapers to Puerto Rico, Houston, and southwest Florida where there was a lot of immediate supply needs.

With that additional effort, Eryn was able to distribute 32,000 diapers in 2017 – all out of a little operation in her garage.

3) Baby OK is a technology solution that solves an important potential problem.

Eryn founded Baby OK because again, as a mom, she was compelled to solve a problem that could potentially devastate a family.

About six months after she started the diaper bank, Eryn was at the doctor’s office with one of her kids for a checkup. While she was there, a mom came in after accidentally leaving her baby in a hot car for an hour. Luckily, the baby ended up being completely OK, but the incident really affected Eryn.

The concern inspired Eryn to come up with an idea: to develop an app that would allow a parent’s smart phone to create an accountability partner so the baby is never forgotten.

As a mom herself, Eryn knew accidents happen when routines change. Those changes might mean that a parent has their child at a time they’re not usually with the child.

Developing the Baby OK app

Eryn got to work to figure out how to develop the app. With her husband, they brainstormed ideas of how they could implement this.

Next, Eryn sought out an app developer who could help build the prototype. This is when she ran into a snag: app development costs a lot of money that she didn’t have at the time.

So, Eryn shelved the app idea for a while. She was unsure what to do while she worked on her other business and nonprofit.

Through a networking group, Eryn was introduced to an app development company called Concepto. They understood Eryn’s vision for Baby OK, and she knew they were the right company to work with.

Baby OK now has two app prototypes: one for private use of parents, nannies, and other caretakers. They also developed a prototype for a commercial version of the app that will help check kids in and out of daycare, school buses, and other areas where kids might be forgotten.

“It’s mind-boggling that paper and pencil is the method of tracking these kids. With all the technology the world has to offer, they’re using paper and pencil.”

4) Objections don’t bother Eryn because she knows there is a need for Baby OK.

One of the biggest objections Eryn gets is from people who usually don’t have kids. There are also people who believe leaving their kid in a car would never happen to them. Many people shame the parents who make the mistake of leaving their kid in a car.

This mistake could end in tragedy, and people don’t want to believe that they would ever make that mistake themselves. So they assume there is something wrong with the people who do suffer from the mistake.

However, it can happen really easily when a parent adjusts to a new routine of having the baby in the first place. It’s really a problem that could happen to anyone.

“When you’re out of your normal routine, you can easily forget to do a lot of things,” Eryn said.

Eryn has heard her fair share of negative feedback about the app. She was on the local news last year, and she received so much negative feedback on Facebook that she had to turn off her notifications.

However, Eryn has also received a ton of great feedback. Parents and nannies have reached out to her and told her how excited they are for the app. That feedback reminds Eryn of her mission and how much Baby OK is needed in the world.

Now Eryn is at the point where she needs to raise capital to go into producing the app. She is on the hunt to find an investor who can help fund Baby OK into the next phase of development.

5) When Eryn feels pulled in too many directions, she goes back to what she wants her personal mission to be to help guide her.

A lot changed in the years after Eryn quit her corporate job to pursue her own company full time. Through the building process, there has been a lot of ebbs and flows between success and pivots. It felt messy at times to figure out how everything in her vision fit together.

However, for Eryn, it always came back to the idea that she wanted to “use business as a force for good,” she told me.

“There has to be a way to teach people or show people that you can use business as a force for good.”

“If we each had that mindset of ‘What can I do as one person to add a little bit of sunshine into the world?’, if everybody had that mindset, imagine how different it would be. Because one person could do something huge.”

About Eryn Vargo

Wife and Momprenuer of 4 & Bunny Mom to Mimi. Creator & Founder of Moms Give Back, a purpose-driven marketing resource for mompreneurs and small businesses focused on marketing, impact and creative. She is a breastfeeding, babywearing, wine & craft beer lover, wanna be photographer & DIY-er. Eryn is passionate about children’s health and is the Founder of the Diaper Bank of Central Florida & Baby OK, a social enterprise dedicated to preventing heatstroke deaths.

Links From the Show

Visit the Moms Give Back Website
Follow Moms Give Back on Instagram

The post How to Build a Business with Impact with Eryn Vargo – Episode #56 appeared first on Orlando Lady Boss.