Annette Rossel and Angela Hill – Vellicorp
Annette Rossel and Angela Hill are two peas in a pod.
They go way back, too. As young adults, they purchased a house as a rental property together. They’ve traveled the world together. They’ve helped out at a centre for kids with special needs together. And they always knew they wanted to work together.
Now they’re co-owners of Vellicorp, an agency that puts professionals seeking part-time jobs in touch with companies in the Kitchener-Waterloo region.
“We always had those points in our lives where we were connecting,” says Angela, so it’s strange to think the inspiration for Vellicorp is rooted in a time when those connections just didn’t line up.
For about 10 years, their lives were pretty dissimilar. Angela started a family – she’s the proud mom of 2 kids – while Annette worked 70 to 80 hours a week as a vice-president growing a startup company into a large-scale operation.
Then, Annette’s work situation changed. It was a tough decision, but she parted ways with the company and started looking for other ways she could continue contributing professionally.
“I thought, I’ll just find something part-time that utilizes my skills here in the Waterloo region. There are so many businesses! It’s such a thriving environment, right?” she says.
But she hit a roadblock. There just wasn’t anyone serving people looking for professional work like she was doing before, just without the full-time hours.
At the same time, Angela had some struggles of her own. After having her youngest child, she found herself up against a choice many working mothers face: “Stay home where I have no professional fulfillment or work full-time where I have no family fulfilment, where I’m just exhausted,” she says.
She went back to work for about a year after maternity leave, but decided it wasn’t the right fit for her family. “I decided to quit, and all of a sudden people were like you’re quitting? You’re not going to work?”
Quite the opposite, actually. Angela decided to make her own opportunities working on contracts that fit in with her background in computer science and as an analyst (among other things, like home décor).
So the pair finally arrived at another one of those moments in their lives, when things just clicked. They both had similar experiences (though different reasons) with breaking free from the typical full-time work week. And they knew it was time to start that company they’d always wanted to.
The idea first took hold during a trip to Holland, where they noticed that the majority of women work fewer than 40 hours a week. That got them thinking. “What is it with this 40-hour work week, what is that all about?” asks Annette.
So they dove into research, where they found out Sweden has a full-time work option that’s only six hours a day. “We were seeing that in other parts of the world, this is a reality, so then we started talking to people just to see if there are other people like us who really want to be working but not in that 40-hour plus model.”
They also found the demand for part-time work went way beyond parents looking for a better work-life balance. “We quickly realized it’s parents, and then also retirees are so eager to have this option, and then also people with their own side hustle,” says Annette.
They also saw a lack of balance and efficiency in the way people were hired for jobs. Either a company would hire a full-time employee for a role that didn’t really demand full-time hours, or they’d Frankenstein together several smaller jobs into one role.
“We’d see comps that would be advertising a job for a sales-slash-marketing, or administration-slash-bookkeeper,” says Annette. The end result: you end up with someone who doesn’t always know the tricks of each trade as thoroughly as a specialist would.
Instead, “I’m going to tell you that there is an amazing bookkeeper who’s just recently retired. He’s willing to do your bookkeeping for 10 hours or 15 hours a week. You know he’s going to do a good job,” says Angela. “I’m going to tell you there’s an amazing administrator who’s willing to work 20 hours a week. Again, you’re going to get an incredibly effective person.”
Thinking back to her time leaving her full-time job after returning from maternity leave, Angela remembers the feeling of having limited choices available to her. And she knows they’re making a difference.
“We think there’s a happy medium,” Angela says. “We’re the third option.”
Learn more at:
https://www.vellicorp.com