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

Résumé détaillé

Sage Haus founder Kelly Hubbell now places house managers with families in the U.S. and Canada.

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.

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.

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