The 9-month plan
How I prepped my business for mat leave—and how you can, too.
Hi friend,
Earlier this year, I went on my first ever mat leave.
Since I shared the news publicly, both business owners and personal friends have asked me questions about what preparing for it was like.
I'm not sure I'm qualified to give advice, having only gone through mat leave once and still being in the beginning stages of motherhood. Being asked for thoughts feels like being an intern who's been at the company all of one summer becoming in charge of the enterprise.
And yet, I know I'm asked about my mat leave experience because there's not enough info about it out there. Being on the verge of motherhood is a tremendously mysterious threshold--unless you've gotten a close-up look at these months through friends and family, it can feel like a place where the roadmap ends. It felt that way for me. (With good reason. It is a place where one road ends and the next has yet to begin.)
So I'm sharing my experience around how I prepped my business--and myself--for extended time away. I hope this dispels some of the mystery around mat leave and gives you a useful framework to plan the leave that's best for you, your business, and your growing family. 🐣
My ONE piece of business advice:
Prep your funnel
The ONE thing I think you should focus on as a business owner preparing for mat leave is having a full funnel setup.
That means plugging in any missing parts of your funnel, starting from the bottom (where your offers are) through the middle (aka your newsletter, blog posts) to the top (social media).
When you have your bottom-of-funnel offers in place at your point of sale (usually your website), you can focus on creating assets in the middle of your funnel and at the top that you schedule to go out during your leave--so you can continue to show up in front of your audience even when you're away from your computer.
What prepping my funnel looked like for me
Creating a full funnel setup looks different for every stage of every business. There's no one "recipe" you can follow that'll work for you...but to shed light on what worked for me, this is what I did:
When I became pregnant, I was in the middle of rebuilding my business. I’d been happy with it but wanted it to be better, and was working with Betsy Muse (founder, Rocket Fuel Strategy), to do this.
Over the course of my pregnancy, I worked first on building out the bottom of my funnel. It was important to me to build foundations that could last the test of time, so I took 5 months to define offers and re-write my website. (I have a separate blog post about this process that you can read here.)
Bottom of funnel work is long and lonely--you're not actively selling, but you need to get these assets in place in order to sell. It's definitely a process, and if you strategize it right, you reap the rewards later. My strategy was to focus on selling my Small Start, Big Win Copy Polish, which is largely async. It's a done-with-you package that gives me flexibility on when I fulfill the work, which is handy when a baby makes your schedule unpredictable.
Another part of my bofu work become taking Copyhackers’ Email Intensive in November last year. It was unexpected but I knew it was the last live, grad-level course I could do for a while. And I couldn't pass up a chance to study with Joanna Wiebe. Taking 5 weeks to do this helped me expand my offers too, since I went in as a website copywriter and left with the email writing skills to offer launch funnels.
As I was getting my bofu in place, I also attended Betsy Muse's List-Nurture-Sell workshops, where I landed on customer research as a value prop for my middle-of-funnel newsletter. Specifically, the value prop is smarter customer research, which, yes, became the name of the newsletter. Every month, I send out one email on how to take one aspect of customer research, implement it, and turn it into client-attractive copy. I landed on this topic because I have a research background from my academic career, and I genuinely love research. So much so that I was able to bank five newsletters that I scheduled to be sent out across the five months of my mat leave and return to work. (You can check out Smarter Customer Research here.)
Actually...a lot's fallen into place for me since I started SCR. It gives me a topic to anchor things like speaking engagements and social posts in. If there's one thing I wished happened earlier in my biz, it'd be anchoring my value into providing customer insights--because when you know how to talk to your customers, you never have to guess what they'll pay you for.
With the bottom and middle of the funnel in place, the top-of-funnel social content was much easier. Having the other two parts of the funnel meant having long-form content to mine from and to direct to. Many of the days right before my due date were spent banging out social posts that I scheduled to go out across five months, covering my mat leave and the first months of my return to work.
Btw--to schedule emails, I used ConvertKit and to schedule social posts, Publer. These two apps did the heavy lifting of keeping up my presence online for me while I was gone.
What prepping your funnel can look like for you
I said it above and I'll say it again--creating a full funnel setup looks different for every stage of every business. There's no right funnel to have, there's just what's right for you. Here are some assets you can check for at each stage of your funnel that you may want working for you during your time away:
Bottom-of-funnel:
Do you have the offers you want in place?
Middle-of-funnel:
What about assets that lead to your offers?
For example, are your newsletters for leave banked?
What about other email sequences--do you have a welcome sequence, a sales sequence, a post-sale sequence?
Do you need to create any assets like blog posts, lead magnets, etc.?
Top-of-funnel:
What content do you have banked? Podcasts? Tofu blog posts?
How can you use long-form content and turn it into short-form for social?
Can take one piece of social content and use it various ways (static post, carousel, video, story) to get more out of it?
None of this is easy to prepare--and having these assets doesn't mean tons of passive income during your leave either. But in my experience, setting up your mofu and tofu content keeps up your presence online and make the transition back more seamless--you won't really have "left."
My fantasy funnel...and one more thought
If I were ever to do mat leave again, I'd want to have digital assets I can deliver right away--meaning downloadables and courses. Yes, this kind of passive income is every person's dream, isn't it? I also know achieving this is much more difficult than the "gurus" will have you believe.
Because I don't know that I won't be doing another mat leave, I'm keeping an eye out now for what offers might be valuable to my audience of coaches, course creators, and fellow copywriters--if this is you and you've got thoughts, please message them to me on Instagram.
One final thought on preparing for your mat leave: My friend Paula (founder, Seva Digital) gave me the brilliant advice to record everything I was doing at this stage. Everyone takes photos of the baby when they come, but it's important that you record your life now too--so in those hard moments after your baby's here, you have memories of who you were, and who you still are.
Personally, I also think you should record everything you're doing as you prep so you can write your own blog post or do your own podcast episode to share with other business owners. People have questions that no one out there is answering. We need more stories--we need YOUR story. Sharing experiences like this is how we look out for each other.
Take all the photos. Write down all the things.
How my mat leave went
When I was thinking about time away, I had no idea how much time to take. Arbitrarily, I decided on 4 months because I enjoy working and I thought I'd miss it.
But because my husband had 3 months of leave, I ended up taking the same 3 months and going back to my desk when his leave ended. We figured it'd be easier to make one transition than two. The first two months back to work were "soft launch" months for me--I let myself do part-time, figuring out a rhythm that was workable. I didn't tell clients I was back until one month in to give myself time to adjust.
This was one of the best things I did for myself. The adjustment to being a new parent is huge. A woman's body goes through hormonal changes similar to what happens in adolescence (they call it "la matrescence"). It's all a bit unpredictable, especially as little research has been done on post-partum bodies (surprise, surprise, research on women's bodies isn't funded 🙄). Physically, I think nothing is ever really the same.
Final thoughts
Knowing what I know now, here are two things I would do differently if I ever did mat leave again…and one thing I’d keep the same:
First, I'd take six months away. This doesn't have to fully be away--going into mat leave, I had a to-do list. Even though I didn't work for 3 months, it was nice to have that little piece of myself waiting for me and it helped me hit the ground running when I did my soft launch.
But why six months? It takes that long for your baby to become more independent (they’ll be moving towards sitting on their own) and for your body to heal significantly (though you will continue to heal after too).
Second, I'd have a long-term childcare plan in place. My family struggled with this, we didn't realize we'd need childcare until a month before my husband's leave ended. We were fortunate to have grandparents step in temporarily before we landed on a long-term plan, which has helped everything settle tremendously. So whether it's grandparents for you or a nanny or daycare--plan well ahead of time. A good nanny and daycare can take months to find.
And finally, one of the best things my husband and I did years before we committed to being parents was move back to California to be near family. Having a "village" close by makes the biggest difference--you have much more support than you do without it. One BIG reason I was able to return to work and why I'm still able to work is because I'm fortunate to have that support. If that’s you, strengthen those ties now. If it’s not, see how you can re-create your village where you are (check out mom’s groups via your hospital, neighborhood Facebook communities, etc.).
Alrighty, my friend…
In no way does this blog post cover everything you need to know about mat leave. I don't think such a blog post exists.
But I hope it sheds more light on how to prepare for a time unlike any other in your life. I hope you share this knowledge with someone else who needs it--and I hope that you'll write me soon with a blog post sharing your own story.
Good luck--I'm cheering you on,
Mimi
