While I led my company through a $150 million acquisition, my husband handled the parenting. Here's how we make it work in our house.

Photo credit: Teresa's PHOTOWORKS Tiffany Haynes is the former COO of Fingercheck and led the company through an acquisition. She started her career in a call center, and later became a vice president at that company. She and her husband co-founded a school, where he works without taking a salary. This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Tiffany Haynes , host of the Between Builds podcast and Substack. It has been edited for length and clarity . I was entirely on my own when I was 19. While I was enrolled in college, I worked full-time at night in the call center of a fintech company , Jack Henry & Associates. It was a gritty, hands-on role, but an exciting time to be with the company, which was growing quickly. I didn't have a typical college experience . I worked a lot so I could pay for my car and home. At work, I put my hand up any chance I could. I was never the smartest person, but I worked really hard and was always willing to figure out problems. Even if I'd never done something, I would figure it out. I couldn't afford to fail, personally or professionally. That served me well. I gained a reputation as someone who could execute tasks with a high degree of excellence, while also operating with empathy. By the time I left Jack Henry in 2022, after 20 years, I had become a vice president. My husband handled childcare while I worked in NYC At that point, I was a wife, mom of five, and had been a foster mother to seven children. I live in Missouri, but my reputation was so strong that the team at Fingercheck, a New York-based HR platform, approached me about scaling the company with a goal of acquisition. I started traveling a lot, and spending two weeks in Brooklyn at a time, with a week at home in between. My husband handled childcare , loading up the kids and bringing them to the school that they attended, where he was the superintendent. Over three years, I helped scale Fingercheck. In October 2024, it was acquired for $150 million. Photo credit: Teresa's PHOTOWORKS After the acquisition, my husband and I founded a school I stayed at Fingercheck until this July to help with the transition. After that, the plan was to take time to reorient myself and rest. Yet, life had other plans. The school my husband led was affiliated with a local church. It grew so much that the church could no longer handle it, and this summer, we had a choice to make: let 100 kids find a new school community , or open our own. It was a whirlwind four months, but we did it. I call myself the quiet cofounder of the school, and I'm not involved in day-to-day operations. Now, I'm doing some advising work and have a podcast called Between Builds. I'm also taking some time for myself to...

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