How to Create a Maternity Leave for Entrepreneurs
In case my Instagram post didn’t give it away, I’m pregnant! Yay! But also… yay?
I’d be lying if I said leaving the business for a little doesn’t give me anxiety. And what does a Type A person do to ease her anxiety? Plan. So here I am, 13 weeks pregnant, and beginning on the first draft of my maternity leave.
As a first-time mom, let me just say up front: I have no fucking clue what I’m doing. So maybe sharing my journey with you is a bit premature. But, in talking with friends and doing basic research online, I’ve found that most conventional advice about maternity leave is unhelpful because it’s centered around the corporate experience. I’m a creative entrepreneur running a service-based business, though; there aren’t many templates or plans or advice geared toward people like me.
So here I am, sharing my journey. I hope what I share helps you, too.
Structuring Maternity Leave
The first step in planning my maternity leave, in my mind, is deciding how to structure the leave. Most (corporate) maternity plans are structured around dates — people only get 4 months off, for example, so they have to plan what they can within that time. But being the CEO of my own company, I get to decide how long my leave is.
So instead of centering it on dates, I decided to create a plan with “phases.” Each phase represents a different percentage of my involvement in the business: 0%, 25%, 75%, and 100%. Next, I’m adding potential dates associated with each phase. My hope is that, by creating the phases and bringing my team up to speed on each one, they’ll be more adaptable and allow me more flexibility with the timing. For example, what if I decide to spend 3 months at 0% involvement, and realize 1.5 months in that I’m going stir crazy and want to upgrade to 25% involvement? I’m optimistic that the phased maternity plan will make that transition easy.
The next component of the plan is actually writing down who will be responsible for what so that every team member is clear on their responsibilities. To organize all of this information, I created a Google Spreadsheet with data validation columns for the task categories (like Marketing, Sales, Finance, Admin, and Client Experience), and for the team member responsible for them.
Want to see my maternity leave spreadsheet? I turned it into a template so that you can create a copy and use it for yourself.
Deciding What’s Important
In talking to some mompreneur friends yesterday (shoutout to Kelly and Lis!), I realized that I was missing a crucial part of my maternity leave: a goal.
I needed to ask myself this question: what would need to happen for me to consider this maternity leave a “success”?
Success looks different for everyone, and I’m certainly leaving room for change. But as of today, at almost 14 weeks pregnant, success looks like having the freedom to take off three months for maternity leave and pay myself my normal salary. There are two ways to accomplish this: save up the money needed in advance, or continue to have money rolling in while I’m away. The latter is my ultimate goal, but the former seemed like the perfect place to start formulating my plan.
This brought me back to my spreadsheet. I added a second tab (now also added to the template above) to include my goal and some basic numbers.
If my monthly take-home pay is $4,000, and my monthly tax withholding is $2,677.84, then I’ll need to save $20,033.52 to have a fully-funded, three-month maternity leave. I’ll also need to fund some operating expenses for my business during that time: paying my bookkeeper and assistant, rent for my office space, and other recurring bills. Those roughly total to $3,720.
Suddenly, my maternity leave is feeling a whole lot less daunting. All I have to do is save $3,720 for my OpEx budget and $20,033.52 for my owner’s compensation in the next six months, and I can leave for maternity leave stress-free.
Creating Revenue for Maternity Leave
With a goal in place, I was then able to start thinking of how I could create those savings in time for my maternity leave.
My copywriting business has several sources of revenue, involving several different service providers:
Website Copywriting (via me and my team)
Blog Content Writing (via my team only)
Day Rate Copywriting (via me only)
Speaking (via me only)
Copy Shop templates (self-sufficient, but only created by me)
Obviously, if I’m out on maternity leave, I won’t be able to perform any work myself. That means I’ll have to institute a waitlist for Day Rates, web copy projects where I’m the lead, and speaking gigs.
For many businesses, planning to this level is enough. If you have tons of inquiries each week and a high close rate, you don’t have to worry about where you revenue will come from. While my business is doing well, it’s not so successful that I can let the year play out as normal. I’m going to need to take extra action to create a “quick” influx of cash. Customers will need an incentive, and typically there are just two that really motivate people: time and money.
Creating Time Constraints
FOMO is very real, and creating time urgency can absolutely motivate a sale. In the case of maternity leave, creating time constraints is relatively easy. If my baby is due September 29, I will plan to stop taking on projects in September and not come back until Jan. 1. This means, as I advertise myself this spring and summer, I can comfortably urge potential clients to book before Sept. 1 because I won’t be taking on any more projects until the new year.
Creating Discounts
The other quick way to get some cash in the door is by offering a sweet deal. I think the two best places to do this are with Day Rates and within the Copy Shop.
The Copy Shop is a natural choice because it’s “passive” income. Since all of my digital products are already created and automatically delivered once someone purchases, all I have to do is:
Decide on a discount amount
Create a discount code
Put restrictions on when the discount is available
Write a few emails and Instagram posts to sell it for me
My goal is to add a few more copywriting guides to the shop before I put on the sale, but even if that doesn’t happen, a template sale is an easy way to get some cash in the door.
Which brings us back to the big boy — Day Rates. Since I’m the only writer on the team who offers these, and since they only take a day to complete, it makes sense to offer a sale to fill up my calendar (and my bank account) before baby comes. I’m still deciding the details on this, but here are a few of my preliminary thoughts:
Limit the number of discounted spots per week or month
Decide on a specific discount in advance
Conduct personal outreach about the sale
Send invitation to cold leads/lost leads
Send invitation to past clients (and perhaps offer a lower rate or guaranteed spots?)
Conduct general marketing about the sale (if needed)
Via my email list
Via my Instagram
Only schedule a maximum of three Day Rates per week
Still offer payment plans (but maybe enforce that 50% is due in advance?)
… And that’s all I have so far! Stay tuned for more updates.
How My Maternity Leave Planning Went Off the Rails
It’s August, 2022. The last time I updated this blog, it was in March. Man, oh man, has a lot happened between then and now. Mostly, I reorganized my priorities. Instead of jumping into marketing early, as I had hoped, I dove into preparing the team for the transition. I’ve spent the months writing job descriptions and performance expectations, standard operating procedures for each of our offers, and trainings to help the team do their jobs without me.
That shit took wayyyyy longer than expected. And now, here I am at 8 months pregnant, just two or three weeks away from maternity leave, and I’m running out of steam.
Not an optimistic take, huh? But it’s the truth, and we’re all about telling the truth around here. And in that same spirit, I want to share what efforts I’ve taken that have and haven’t worked.
What worked:
Reducing the number of social media posts from four per week to two per week. It “worked” in that I’ve been able to maintain it despite my reduced energy level.
Switching my testimonial request efforts from Google reviews to Instagram Stories. Instagram is not a top lead source for us… except when a past client posts about our work. So instead of asking clients to post reviews on Google, like I used to, now I ask them to post on IG. So far, it’s been working really well and boosting inquiries like a charm.
I streamlined my offers. I removed blogging from our services because it wasn’t selling but was adding complexity and taking up resources. I set all invoices for a four-month payment plan by default instead of asking clients which options they’d prefer. I updated or removed parts of our processes (like switching check-ins from meetings to video recordings) based on feedback from the team.
Hiring a sales rep. This is an added expense, but one that I know will help us maintain our growth while I’m away.
Updating my website. I changes some of the copy and lots of the design to better speak to our ideal clientele across the evergreen pages and my hidden brochure page. I’m confident that the new look will continue to attract the “right fit” clients for us even though I won’t be there to evaluate them personally.
Training the team to offer Day Rates without me. We did one tester that was very successful, and considering how Day Rates account for roughly 40% of our revenue, it’s a huge relief to know that we can keep booking them while I’m on maternity leave.
Cutting “CEO rates.” Originally, I had offered a team rate and a higher rate to work with me as the CEO one-on-one. But I realized after offering this for a short time that first, no one was booking the higher rate and, second, it was planting a seed of doubt in clients’ minds that the team couldn’t deliver like I could, which is just not true. So I cut that rate and things have been going swimmingly ever since.
What didn’t:
I tried to get an influx of day rates through a one-on-one marketing campaign to past inquiries, but was unsuccessful. Even with a discount. Womp womp.
Similarly, I’ve tried to sell my existing email templates through email promotions with no success. Womp womp again. This is now several signals pointing toward “email marketing isn’t working for us.” That will be something I need to look into further in 2023.
Our numbers. In prep for leaving, I did some mid-year auditing (and checked it with my bookkeeper, business coach, and an accountant) and realized that the business has been slowly losing money with every project. Part of that problem comes from a lack of volume (we don’t have enough business coming in the door to cover recurring expenses) and part of that problem comes from pay. Essentially, I set the writers’ pay rates too high to keep the business afloat. This has been an incredibly hard realization; one that makes me feel ashamed and embarrassed, because paying my writers well is something that’s incredibly important to me. And in telling the team about the reduced rate, I’ve already gotten some feedback that folks will be leaving.
Published March 24, 2022. Updated august 9, 2022. By Taylor de la Fuente (she/her), CEO of Lemon Tree Editorial