How I Took a 3-Month Maternity Leave as an Entrepreneur
Keep reading this post to learn:
⋒ What my vision and goals were for my maternity leave
⋒ The 6-step process I used to take a 3-month maternity leave and keep my business running
⋒ How I used The 5 Keys to Hustling Sanely to help me plan and prep
As I’m sure you’ve gathered from the title, I will be talking about how I was able to take a 3-month maternity leave as an entrepreneur. But honestly, this blog post will be helpful for more than just that because I’m going to walk you through the process I used to prep, plan, and execute a big project – which in my case, was 3 months off of work.
My process boils down to 6 steps, and we are going to talk through each!
You’ll be able to apply these strategies of project management to other types of situations, too, like planning for a move, planning a product launch in your business, or planning for applying to school – you get it.
Oh and fun fact, this episode is actually great timing because the topic for quarter 3 in the BFF Membership is — Project Management: How to create action plans for big goals and projects and still live your life.
I hope this doesn’t surprise you, but I used The 5 Keys to Hustling Sanely to help me prep, plan, and execute my 3-month maternity leave, so I’m going to use the 5 Keys to help guide us through this episode. At the end of the episode, I’ll recap the 6 steps so you’ll be able to hear it that way, too. And keep in mind that every podcast episode also has a corresponding blog post on my website that is always linked in the show notes, so that will be really helpful to help you digest this episode I think.
If you need a quick little refresher, the 5 Keys to Hustling Sanely are:
01. Get your mindset right.
02. Get clear on your vision.
03. Define your priorities.
04. Create your schedule and routines.
05. Implement Hustle Sanely 5 every day.
Let’s get into the nitty-gritty of how I got myself and my business ready for a 3-month maternity leave.
I’ll start off by saying that I found out I was pregnant in April of 2022 and my due date was in December of 2022. I started working on the stuff I’m about to share with you in this episode in May. I spent May and June creating and prepping my plan and July-the beginning of November executing it.
Key 01: Get your mindset right.
I started with doing some mindset work because as y’all know – I call myself a recovering workaholic. If you would’ve told me 3 years ago that I was going to step away from my business for 3 months, I would’ve probably had an actual panic attack right there on the spot. I wanted to check myself for any lingering limiting beliefs that may be hanging out in the corners of my brain when it came to taking time off of work.
Thankfully, because of all the work I’ve been doing in therapy over the last few years about detaching my worth and my identity from my work and achievements, I didn’t really have any fear about taking maternity leave. I knew I wanted to do it and there wasn’t much mental resistance to the idea.
I did, however, have to dig into some thoughts about pacing.
When I started Hustle Sanely almost 5 years ago, I had a really hard time with thinking that I always had to act on business ideas immediately or else someone would “beat me to it” – it was me being stuck in a scarcity mindset. I wanted to make sure that my current state of mind didn’t have any traces of those old thoughts. I had to remind myself that my direction is more important than my speed and that my focus was taking quality and aligned action in my life AND in my business. I had to remind myself that I wasn’t in a race, that Hustle Sanely is my long-term career so I have plenty of time to accomplish my business goals, and that I wanted to run a business that complemented my life – not one that I scheduled my life around.
It can be tempting to want to skip this step and go right into creating your vision and game plan BUT I’m telling you that doesn’t work out well because if you don’t address limiting beliefs, they’ll keep popping up, robbing you of being fully present for what is happening in your life.
The last thing you want is to be on maternity leave and trying to fend off and navigate limiting beliefs about how you don’t deserve to take time off or that your business is doomed if you do. You want to be able to spend your time and energy loving on your new babe and healing.
Once I made sure that my mindset was in a solid place to support taking extended maternity leave, I moved on to:
Key 2: Get clear on your vision.
I had to define what maternity leave looked like to me. To do this, you better believe I used one of my favorite exercises – the ideal day exercise. I spent a few minutes imagining how I wanted my maternity leave to look and feel and then I got to journaling my desires so they were clear.
I knew that I didn’t want a 6-week leave, which, unfortunately, is the norm for a lot of places in the U.S. right now. I also knew that as the breadwinner for my family, and no paid maternity leave, I didn’t feel good about taking 6 months or a year off either. Taking 3 months off sounded really great so that’s what I decided on.
My due date was December 3 and I envisioned myself taking a few weeks off before that to really focus on resting, prepping the house, and enjoying time with Adam before the baby came. So I decided to start my leave in mid-November and continue it through mid-February.
I also knew that I’d probably want to ease back into work so I decided that I wouldn’t be available for calls and meetings until March so that I could spend the second half of February responding to emails and prepping to get back into coaching with my students and community.
Once I was clear on that part of my vision – deciding how much leave to take and when to take it, I had to decide what maternity leave looked like for me.
I personally didn’t want to be completely offline during my maternity leave, but I wanted to be able to like come and go as I pleased.
I knew I wanted to:
~ Hang out on Instagram stories but not feel the pressure to post on my feed
~ Hang out in the BFF community with my normal boundaries – checking in Monday-Friday
~ Continue selling our paper planners and journals
And I knew I didn’t want to be:
~ Actively working on creating new products
~ Writing monthly emails
~ Answering emails
~ Creating podcast episodes (but I still wanted new episodes to go out – we’ll talk about that in a bit)
~ Taking on any calls or meetings
Basically, anything that required heavy mental lifting, I didn’t want to have to do.
So now I was clear on my vision of when and what I wanted my maternity leave to be.
The next step was to:
KEY 3: Define my priorities.
I did this in 2 parts and both parts required a document that I’ve been using to plan out my business for a few years now – I just call it my Yearly Biz At A Glance doc – it’s something I created to use in my own business and I included it in the Peacefully Productive Schedule course, too, so the students in there have access to a copy of it as well! Oh, and I guess now is a good time to mention that there is a whole module of how I plan out a year in my business in the PPS course. Having this document already filled out for all of 2022 when I found out I was pregnant in April made pivoting and planning much more manageable instead of overwhelming.
Here are the 2 steps I followed to help me define my priorities:
01. I went through my year-at-a-glance business document and pruned it so that I knew what projects absolutely needed to be done before my maternity leave and which projects were getting bumped into 2023.
Just so you can have a general idea of what that means, I’ll tell you how I have the doc set up. At the top, I have a list of all of the projects and products that are releasing for the year just so I can see a bird’s eye view. Then for each month, I have this stuff outlined: focus goal, important dates, what’s launching, and what’s being worked on. Then there’s a content section so I can plan out my podcast episodes and Instagram posts.
So I went through the document for the rest of the year and decided what projects actually needed to be carried out and which ones could get moved into next year.
Not gonna lie, this was tough because I’m an Enneagram 3, an achiever, and as I mentioned earlier, I like to do ALL the things when it comes to my business. But I knew that didn’t align with the kind of year I wanted to have – I didn’t want to spread myself too thin while I was pregnant and prepping for leave either. I wanted to be able to peacefully prep for a solid maternity leave, not be cramming in a billion projects that I ended up doing halfheartedly. And I wanted to enjoy my pregnancy. I knew I wanted to go on a babymoon with my husband and go on a bestie moon with my best friend.
That meant that I had to scale back my launches for the year and decide where I was giving my time and energy in regard to work.
02. I created my 2023 year-at-a-glance business document using the info from the previous step.
Once I knew what projects were staying in 2022, I decided to plan out 2023 to help me see that the projects I was tabling for 2022, weren’t just going away.
I usually fill out my business planning doc in November for the following year, but I know myself and I knew that filling it out ahead of time would help me mentally as I planned for my maternity leave. Plus, having a general outline of what 2023 looked like, helped me prepare to return to work with ease instead of stress when my maternity leave was over.
And that brings us to:
Key 4: Create your routines and schedule.
I broke this into 2 parts:
01. I used reverse engineering to create a timeline of what I needed to do in the months leading up to my maternity leave so that my priority projects were complete.
Having that 2022 year-at-a-glance business document handy, I could easily see what my “2022 business yesses” were:
~ Releasing podcast episodes every Tuesday (except for December because we always take December off of the podcast – just happened to perfectly line up with my maternity leave)
~ Launching and shipping the 2023 planners (which included the Best Year Ever workshop – which I decided to pre-record instead of doing it live since I’d be on leave in December)
~ Prepping the Q4 and Q1 content for the BFF Membership
~ Prepping my business to run “without me” during my leave (this included things like creating SOPs [standard operating procedures] for my team)
I took each priority project and applied the Hustle Sanely Planning System, which is what I teach inside the Peacefully Productive Schedule Course – the same course that has my biz planning doc).
I gave each month for the rest of 2022 that I was working on a Focus Goal. Then for each week, I was able to write out my Top 3 tasks to make sure that Focus Goal got completed. Then for each day, I was able to write out a Focus 3 to make sure that the week’s Top 3 tasks got completed.
Just so you have a tangible example, here is what my Focus Goals for each month looked like:
JULY: Prep all podcast episodes and interviews for August-March
AUGUST: Prep BFF content for Q4 and Q1
SEPTEMBER: Prep for the planner launch/BYE workshop
OCTOBER: Prep my business to “run without me” – get my team prepared/systems nailed down
NOVEMBER: Open loops/catch-all (I used the first 2 weeks of the month to tie up any loose ends before my leave started in mid-November)
And then the second part of creating my routines and schedules was:
02. Secured the support I needed to be offline from the areas I wanted to be away from.
I’ll expand on this one in just a bit.
I want to note that Key 5: Implement Hustle Sanely 5 every day helped me make sure that I wasn’t overworking or spreading myself too thin as I prepared for my maternity leave. It helped me focus on the important tasks each day, get my movement in, keep our home tidy, and show up for myself and my relationships.
Pre-Hustle Sanely, I would get tunnel vision with big projects and let those things fall to the wayside but thanks to HS5, that didn’t happen.
Then before I wrap this blog post up, I wanted to share a few things that really helped me stay present during my maternity leave:
~ Automatic email reply set up:
I had about of office auto-responder so that anytime someone emailed me, they would get a message letting them know that I was away from my inbox until February and I wouldn’t be answering emails before then. I also had a line in there that said if something was urgent or needed a sooner reply that they could reach out to my team at a certain email address. Which brings me to the next thing:
~ Having a team in place to take care of things while I was away:
Thankfully, I already had a team so I just had to prep my team to take things off my plate that they weren’t used to. If I remember correctly, I only had one team member when I was on maternity leave, my amazing OBM Kate, who kept things going by replying to emails in our customer support inbox, creating content for Hustle Sanely Instagram account, and making sure that podcast episodes and blog posts were being released.
I created SOPs to show her how to do all of the things that I was previously doing.
The amount that I paid her each month was increased during my maternity leave – but instead of viewing it as an expense, I viewed it as an investment – the return being spending uninterrupted time with my baby.
Oh and thankfully, Adam took on all of the shipping of our physical products. It was a busy season for planner shipping during my leave, so we paid one of our friends an hourly wage to help Adam a few times.
~ Having email funnels set up:
Since I started my business, I’ve had automatic email funnels in place so that people are getting a series of emails from me without me actually having to send out emails.
I use Flodeks for my email marketing and I have so many workflows set up in there – so for example, when someone joins my email list, they are put in a workflow that goes on for 10 weeks. They get an email a week for 10 weeks without me having to do anything because the workflow is already built.
I have email funnels built for my courses and products so that people are always being pitched my products and services without me having to “cold” market.
Having this setup, allowed for course and product sales to keep going even though I wasn’t actively promoting things on Instagram.
And that actually leads nicely into the last tip I wanted to share that gave me peace of mind during my maternity leave and that’s:
~ Having a few forms of residual income set up
Aka a way to bring money in without having to trade your time for it.
For me that looked like my courses, digital products (planners, e-books, journals), and membership community – these products were already created and could just be sold.
Now, keep in mind, I did have to show up in the BFF community by checking in with our FB group a few times a week during my leave, but I was cool with that and I was also very forward with the people in the community, letting them know that my presence would be scaled back during my leave. They were really supportive of that! I did lead the January coaching call, which fell during my leave, but I did all the prep work before my leave so I felt okay about that.
I had my OBM lead the December coaching call, which just so happened to be a Q+A with a guest expert so I didn’t have to worry about being present so close to my due date.
The really rad thing is, I did a lot of praying about taking a 3-month maternity leave and you know what? We ended up having the most people join the Hustle Sanely BFF community at one time during 2023 Q1 which was open for enrollment when I was on leave…won’t He do it y’all. He honors our work when we seek to honor Him through it.
So to sum it all up, here are the 6 steps I followed to plan for my 3-month maternity leave as an entrepreneur:
01. Made sure my mindset was solid. I addressed any lingering limiting beliefs that might try to rob me from being present during my maternity leave.
02. Got clear on my vision and decided what I wanted my leave to look like.
03. Went through my year-at-a-glance business document and pruned it so that I knew what projects absolutely needed to be done before my maternity leave and which projects were getting bumped to 2023.
04. Created my 2023 year-at-a-glance business document using the info from the previous step so I’d know what the first quarter would look like coming back from maternity leave so that I could return to work with confidence instead of feeling chaotic.
05. Used reverse engineering to create a timeline of what I needed to do in the months leading up to my maternity leave so that my priority projects were complete.
06. Secured the support I needed to be offline from the areas I wanted to be away from.
I hope this was helpful for fellow entrepreneurs out there who are wanting to plan a maternity leave – I promise that it is possible, it just takes some solid planning and intention!
Curious about the Hustle Sanely Planning System?
Loved this blog post? Tune into the full podcast episode below!
