One mom tallied 23 hours a week of household work. Then she built a company to turn ‘invisible labor’ into a paid profession

Kelly Hubbell worked full-time in tech sales and raised two children when the overwhelm set in. She didn’t need a nanny—both kids were in daycare—but the household work kept piling up, and she was desperate for support.

So she made a list of everything she did to keep the house running. It added up to 23 hours a week. Most of that time, Hubbell realized, wasn’t the chores themselves. It was the mental work of planning them.

“I just thought, wouldn’t it be awesome if I could clone myself?” Hubbell said.

Instead, she went looking for what she called a “house manager,” someone who could take over the logistics and errands she had been cramming into her evenings and weekends. She found one.

“It completely changed my life,” Hubbell said. “Overnight, I felt like I could be a present parent, and I had relief from the mental load, because I was able to fully hand off tasks.”

That relief became a business. In 2023, during her third maternity leave, Hubbell founded Sage Haus, a white-glove service that helps parents hire a house manager and set up the “home-management systems” that make handing off work possible. Its pitch arrives as women hold more U.S. payroll jobs than men for only the third time in the country’s history, while still shouldering most of the planning that keeps a household running.

Solving the dual-income time problem

Sage Haus isn’t alone. “House manager” now turns up in job listings on Indeed and Care.com, and other agencies have emerged to place house managers with busy parents.

The difference between a house manager and a babysitter is ownership. A babysitter who noticed your child had outgrown their shoes, took your credit card, and bought a new pair without asking would be overstepping. For a house manager, that is the job.

That kind of help doesn’t come cheap. Sage Haus families typically pay a house manager $25 to $45 an hour for 15 to 20 hours a week, according to the company, or roughly $20,000 to $47,000 a year. Full-time house managers generally earn $50,000 to $120,000, depending on location and scope, and Sage Haus charges families a flat placement fee rather than a percentage of salary.

Those rates run well above the broader market. House manager job postings on Indeed average about $23 an hour.

The services are marketed to dual-income families who simply don’t have enough hours in the day. Hubbell said many of the women she has worked with told her that before they hired help, they feared they would have to leave careers they loved to take care of their homes.

That fear has data behind it. KPMG research found that mothers of young children cut hours or left work at higher rates than fathers, pushed by return-to-office mandates and scarce, expensive childcare.

Putting a price on the mental load

In the U.S., mothers handle 71% of household mental-load tasks, the cognitive work of planning meals, arranging activities, and keeping family life on schedule, according to a 2024 study by researchers at the University of Bath and the University of Melbourne. Fathers report handling 45%; the shares overlap because some tasks are shared.

In a world where someone from an app will deliver your dinner or build your IKEA furniture, Sage Haus wants to break the taboo around hiring help at home.

“We are putting a value on what has historically been invisible labor on the backs of mostly women, and that makes a lot of people uncomfortable,” Hubbell said. “Part of our mission is to normalize this, to take out the shame and the guilt around getting the kind of support that we need.”

In 2024, Hubbell quit her job to run Sage Haus full time. The company now has more than 60 employees and works with about 100 families a month across the U.S. and Canada, she said.

Sage Haus also draws on a network of more than 7,000 house managers and sells a $99 House Manager Certification course, which teaches them to anticipate needs, practice discretion, and become an integral part of a household.

Hubbell sees the role as a career path in both directions. She thinks house managers could move into corporate administrative work, and she has watched executive assistants switch into house management.

“I do believe that it takes high executive functioning to be in this role,” Hubbell said.

The value of work no one pays for

The work being handed off was never small. In 2020, Oxfam estimated that the unpaid care work done by women and girls worldwide is worth at least $10.8 trillion a year. In the U.S. alone, unpaid household labor is worth up to $6 trillion a year, about a fifth of GDP, and none of it appears in official growth figures.

Perhaps paying someone to make your grocery list is a late-stage-capitalist offering for families that have it all. But while hiring help has long been considered a luxury, companies like Sage Haus are asking why work traditionally done by women was ever free in the first place.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com