Motherhood Alliance – because ‘every mom needs support’

Heather Graves

Staff

January 27, 2025

NORTHEAST WISCONSIN – Sisters Andrea Renkas and Britney Suttner – both now mothers of two school-aged children – said they felt well supported during their pregnancies and births.

However, the duo said they were surprised to feel so alone and confused about how to heal and strengthen their bodies postpartum. 

As they began to research and talk with other moms in the area, they said they realized they weren’t alone.

“We discovered significant gaps in postpartum support from within the fitness and healthcare industries,” Renkas said.

The aha moments

After serving in the U.S. Army, Renkas said she worked as a group fitness instructor.

After having her first child, she said she had every intention of returning to that role after he was born.

Her body, Renkas said, had different plans, in part due to many of the changes associated with bearing children.

“That got me to a point where I was like, ‘Wow, I’m not doing the right thing for me, and I’m not doing the right thing for the women that come in my classes,’” she said. “Many of them get their six-week checkup, they think they’re good to go and they just start doing jumping jacks and burpees when really that’s not the best path for them.”

Renkas said this realization led her to ask her sister – who earned a degree in exercise science from Carroll University – for advice.

“I’m like, ‘Hey, I’m a group fitness instructor. You should know what you’re doing with this stuff – let’s get together and come up with something,’” she said.

Though she was armed with a four-year degree in exercise science, Suttner said she realized she didn’t have the answers either.

“She asked me, ‘Are you educated in what happens to women’s bodies after they have babies?’” she said. “And I’m like, ‘Nope – four-year degree and they didn’t talk about that kind of thing.’”

Unless they pursue additional training and certification, Suttner said personal trainers and group fitness instructors are not equipped to support women in this particular area.

“This is different from physical therapy or rehab for something like prolapse,” she said. “Every woman, their body changes when they’re pregnant and after birth, and there is strategy and things you should know on how to approach getting your body strength back before jumping back into fitness.”

As the sisters recognized the gap in the fitness industry when it comes to helping women restore their core and pelvic floor before they get back into fitness, they decided to “become prenatal and postpartum specialized personal trainers.”

“That’s when we started our summer classes,” she said. “They were group fitness classes, but highly educational and help women understand what’s truly going on in their bodies, where they’re at in their journey and what their next step is.”

This, Suttner said, was the start of Fit Moms on the Move – which focuses on safe, functional pregnancy and postpartum fitness.

Over the next several years, the sisters said they continued to teach group fitness classes for women from pregnancy through postpartum and beyond – eventually starting a class specifically for pregnant women.

“We really wanted to catch them in the pregnancy period, so we came up with a class called Prepared for Postpartum,” Renkas said.

It was during that class, she said, when they recognized another gap.

“A lot of women come to us for fitness, but then we talk about breastfeeding, and we talk about all these other things that Brit and I have our personal experience on, but we are not experts in everything,” she said.

As wellness advocates with a business focused on a client base that ranges from pregnancy through about five years postpartum, Suttner said quite often women would ask them for a referral, and “we’d be like, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know. I think I heard of someone maybe in Oshkosh, good luck.’”

As moms themselves, Suttner said she and Renkas know firsthand how exhausting motherhood can be.

“We know how exhausting this season of life can be – when you have zero time for research, and by the time you’re actually willing to admit you need help, it’s an emergency,” she said. “So to be the somebody they are finally able to admit this to, and then to respond with, ‘I don’t know,’ broke our hearts.”

Recognizing they were not experts in everything, Renkas said, sparked an idea.

“We thought, ‘Well, we do know some experts, why don’t we come up with a list of people that we trust and refer people to?’” she said. “So, for this class, we came up with a list and that’s where it all kind of started.”

As the list continued to grow and the interest from moms in the community grew, Renkas said they realized that “this could be something big.”

“Just within 18 months, we discovered more than 90 small businesses just between Appleton and Green Bay (that fit our criteria),” Suttner said.

The duo said they had no idea that jotting down the names of a few local, small businesses – experts – for mothers looking for help beyond what Fit Mom could provide would lead to them starting a second business, Motherhood Alliance.

Motherhood Alliance is born

Once they decided to launch Motherhood Alliance and formalize the then scrollable PDF list, Suttner said it took a “solid six months” to get things off the ground.

This time, she said, was spent further cultivating the list, creating a searchable keyword database, launching a website, obtaining an LLC and finalizing the brand/logo.

“We did this all ourselves – all while running Fit Moms on the Move,” she said.

Suttner said Motherhood Alliance focuses on two niches – mothers and small, local businesses.

“We want to help moms make their lives and families easier and help them get the help that they need,” she said. “But then we also want to help these small businesses that don’t have huge marketing budgets. We’ve been entrepreneurs for 10 years, and we know how hard it can be. So, we want to help lift them both up and help them connect.”

Focused on continuing to build a community within Motherhood Alliance, Renkas said they brought some businesses on the original Fit Mom list along on the journey.

“They got to help pick our brand colors,” Suttner said. “These businesses were highly involved.”

Suttner said Motherhood Alliance is not a traditional business – “our business kind of has to be explained in a way.”

When looking at what Motherhood Alliance provides local small businesses, Suttner said she sees it as “almost like a niche down chamber for health and wellness businesses.”

“I think for businesses to understand how we help them, that’s an easy way to say it,” she said.

While chambers often give support to businesses to help them connect, Suttner said Motherhood Alliance takes “it almost a step further.”

“We’re actually bringing their ideal client to them,” she said. “We’re helping them connect with each other and build up the referral network and meet each other at events and stuff. But then we’re also helping them with digital marketing and like getting their name out in the community.”

Two focuses

For moms, Sutter said the Motherhood Alliance website (motherhoodalliance.com) hosts a searchable list of local businesses in the health and wellness space, blog posts from local businesses on a variety of topics, a list of community events, coupons and a podcast, which features Northeast Wisconsin experts.

“We’re starting to host community events,” Suttner said. “In October, we held our first community event. Because we are more of a holistic mindset type group, we decided to run a dye-free and allergy-friendly trunk-or-treat to help support the families that are looking for healthier options – especially those families who feel excluded, unseen and unheard from typical parties (because their children have allergies).”

Suttner said the Halloween event – which had trunks sponsored by Motherhood Alliance business members – attracted more than 1,000 people.

“We’re giving the community an opportunity to meet some of these local experts in person through a fun event that is obviously very family-focused,” she said.

Suttner said they plan to host a similar dye-free, allergy-friendly event this spring and eventually host an expo to help showcase local businesses.

“Our goal for all of these community events is to give support to the families in a healthier way, and then also to give our businesses an opportunity to be exposed,” she said.

For small businesses, Suttner said the Motherhood Alliance website serves as a marketing tool to connect with clients.

Businesses, Renkas said, can purchase memberships of varying tiers.

“They get to choose the involvement they want,” she said. “So, whether that’s like, ‘I just want to be in the directory, I can’t come to any events,’ or they want to be full-blown everything – (which includes blog posts, podcast appearances, coupon placement, etc.).”

Renkas said each business member has a dashboard on the website where they can change and update their information as needed/wanted.

Motherhood Alliance focuses on small businesses, which Suttner said to them, means 20 staff or fewer.

“And then we’re also looking for more of a holistic mindset – meaning that they start with maybe more of a natural approach before going to traditional medicines,” she said. 

Motherhood Alliance’s focus in the beginning, Suttner said, was on doulas, midwives – primarily prenatal postpartum specialists.

“But pretty quickly, because our kids are school age, we recognized that we needed to expand that into functional medicine and homeopaths and other areas outside of just that short season of life,” she said. “Especially since COVID-19, there are so many families that are looking for more natural remedies.”

Motherhood Alliance, Renkas said, isn’t just about connecting moms and families to services – it’s about connecting professionals to each other. 

“We also are very passionate about helping small business owners make it, because it is very difficult to even get a business off the ground,” she said. 

As small business owners themselves, the sisters said they knew firsthand the hurdles of limited marketing and advertising budgets, fierce competition with big business and the constant juggle of responsibilities.

“We felt like that was a calling for us as well – to help connect these businesses not just with potential clients and referral networks, but with business building materials and resources,” Renkas said.

All businesses featured on Motherhood Alliance, Suttner said, have been personally vetted by her and Renkas.

“We interview every single business one-on-one,” she said. “I have a conversation with each one of them. I listen to their stories. I want to make sure that they’re a good fit for us, and to be transparent, if we’re a good fit for them. If their ideal client isn’t the people coming to our website, let’s have an honest conversation about that.”

Suttner said about 90% of the businesses on the website were started to serve as a solution.

“They started their business because of a pain point that they went through, or somebody close to them went through,” she said. “Because of that, they want to step out, take risks, start their own business and change lives so other people don’t have to go through that, too.”

Come a long way, not done

Running Fit Moms on the Move for more than 10 years, Suttner said they’ve learned a lot.

“We’ve done in person, things we’ve done online,” she said. “We have created robust educational programs. We have learned digital marketing. We have been super involved on social media. So we’ve made so many pivots even just in the Fit Moms business.”

Though they already knew many of the starting-a-business steps, Suttner said “that doesn’t mean starting another business was easy by any means.”

“We’ve made so many pivots in our business,” she said. “With Fit Moms, we had to make some full pivots, where we were almost starting over in certain ways, but that can also be a blessing. I think we’ve learned that though it can be scary to make changes within your business, the outcomes can oftentimes be worth it.”

Now that their children are school-aged, Suttner said the launch of Motherhood Alliance – which officially started spring 2024 – happened at the perfect time.

“When we started Fit Moms, our kids were toddlers, so we were basically stay-at-home moms with a side business,” she said. “Trying to navigate all that was very challenging. So, we can definitely relate to working moms in that area.”

Now running two businesses, Suttner said, “we kind of need our kids to be in school.”

“There have been many challenges,” she said. “I think because we’re sisters, we work so well together that it’s been almost like a marriage between us. When I’m down, she’s up and pulls me back up. And when she’s down, I help pull her back up.”

Suttner said they never initially set out to start a list, or Motherhood Alliance.

“It’s just been part of our journey,” she said. “God was like, ‘Here’s how you can help serve people.’ Especially as we get older and maybe we have less interest in teaching group fitness classes multiple times a week – this is how we can still continue to serve our community.”

In addition to its initial focus on small businesses, Suttner said Motherhood Alliance also puts a strong focus on local.

“Right now, we are focused on Northeast Wisconsin – basically from Fond du Lac to Sheboygan, Manitowoc to Waupaca and a little bit north of Green Bay,” she said. “We really want to do a good job making sure that we are servicing Northeast Wisconsin before we consider expanding more outward.”

Suttner said they are pretty transparent that local matters to Motherhood Alliance.

“We’re not going to be sharing an event in Madison on our Northeast Wisconsin page – that just doesn’t make sense,” she said. “We have a couple of businesses that are primarily virtual, where their services can be used by anybody. We have one girl who lived here, started with us but has since moved to Texas. Some of the things she does with her business are transferable, so she can still be a part of Motherhood Alliance.”

As far as expansion in the future, Suttner and Renkas said “check back with us in a year.”

“We want to do a good job serving Northeast Wisconsin, and then we’ll just see where God takes us from there,” Suttner said.