I’ve been talking and talking about my maternity leave on Instagram and it’s brought up a ton of questions about how I did it since I serve a few high level clients and teams. Since October’s theme is Behind the Scenes, I thought I’d give you a quick once over how we went about tackling the time off and what it truly entailed. Not that my life is so incredibly interesting, but because the tools, strategies, and plans can help you see how important mapping the next 90 (and beyond) are to your business.
While I’ll give you a little insight into the specifics of my maternity leave, I really want to show you the tools and strategies we implemented to help prep for and take considerable time off from my own business and take a hiatus from client work.
I approached this in 3 parts. 1) Overall planning for before, during, and after! 2) Taking care of my clients. and 3) Taking care of my own business.
First off the plan BEFORE!
Consult the calendar!
I approached this maternity leave as its on project. I had approximate start and end dates, then worked backwards to set other milestones. I plan to take a full 12 weeks off. For my family, this is what we needed. Several factors went into this decision, but it all centered around the calendar. Which is why the first step into project planning is to consult your handy dandy calendar!
This is no different than preparing for a vacation, business sabbatical, or even slowing down for summer. The calendar is key!
Since we work in 2 week sprints, that gave me a framework to start looking at dates. We considered the school starting date (which is WAY earlier than last year) and I had to consider how I would slow down as we got closer to my due date. I also knew it would be easier for me to transition back part time during the holiday season, since my clients and myself usually take things a little slower during that time.<
I ended up taking official maternity leave August 6 – November 10. I’ll return part time through the first of the year and then full blast (I will be oh-so-ready) January 2019!
Very Important Note: We had to factor in not just when I would be leaving, but when the prep and transition work needed to take place so my teams could have a good chunk of time to digest how everything would work without my active presence. I set milestones at regular intervals from April to July to be completely transparent with the teams. Which brings me to the next chunk of time!
The preparation!
Since I knew where each client stood and what on-going projects each would have during that time, I could work backwards to prepare the teams for managing #allthethings while I’m gone. This meant I had to work really hard during the spring months to have my regular work done plus focus on the project prep this summer. I had to add in additional work blocks during the week to make sure I had specific, devoted time time to get ahead. I worked more in those months that I have EVER worked before, but it was all worth it!
Again, I used my Progress Gameplan Sheets to break down all the work, dates, and milestones so I would be prepared to make the transition.
The transition out!
When I was ready to hand over the keys and officially take my first day of maternity leave, I will admit I was pretty darn nervous! So much of my recent years had been devoted to shepherding the teams through the highs and lows of business. In many ways, their businesses became an extension of myself. I have been super invested in their success and pivotal to the expansion of each brand.
So I knew I how important the transition was. Documenting, training, hiring the right support staff, and making sure I had firm boundaries in place was very important.
Taking care of my clients!
This is where I spent almost my entire spring and summer. My clients are my work fam and I could not just leave them in the dust. I wanted to leave them feeling empowered, ready, and prepared for the time away. I also learned a lot about how I want to manage things and a few new strategic plans I will have in place for 2019.
One thing I needed to do that I haven’t always been the best at is documenting all the things I personally manage. I’m lucky to work with experts on each team I manage so I knew they could take care of their pieces of the pie, they just needed to know what that looked like without me running things behind the scenes. And I really needed to be totally transparent as to what I handled on the daily. Which ended up being so much more than I realized!
Here’s what I did and why you need to consider doing it too:
1) I took planning the next 90 days into overdrive!
Luckily, we already had most of the regular work laid out, but I needed to consider how much more (and the improvements we needed) over the next 90. So I ended up planning and forecasting for closer to 120 days!
2) Training and Onboarding videos
3) Workflow boards and preparations
4) Project Planning
Tools I used:
Your Progress Gameplan sheets
Workflow boards (on both Trello and Asana- depending on the client)
Loom
Taking care of my own business!
One thing this maternity leave made clear to me was that I did not want to spend any more weeks or months letting my own business slide or be put on the backburner. I had started down the track of creating my first digital product (Progress System: Trello Edition). Due to impeccable timing, all the pieces were coming together just about the time I would have the baby. Of course!
My hard work to create a 1-1 service suite built solely by referrals would not sell this new product. I knew that meant I needed to start growing my list again and have some sort of social media presence. Even if it didn’t sell extremely well, I didn’t want to let 3 months go by without putting it out to the world.
So I got serious about Instagram planning, finding the perfectly branded stock photos, and creating a plan my fabulous VA could implement.
I also had to wrap my head around tracking and planning triple duty for regular client work, maternity leave prep, and my own business. I had to wrangle all the tasks into Trello so I could track and keep tabs on what was getting done when. It took my project planning to next level status. I’ve never managed so many moving parts at once — and considering some of the projects we have managed that says a lot.
Since we had mapped all the milestones, projects, and dates along with specific tasks I needed an easy way to log all that info into Trello. We used a Trello card importer to systematically moved every single detail of every project plan into Trello. What I had estimated at literally 2-3 weeks minimum worth of inputting took myself + my VA a couple afternoons. Total lifesaver!
So here are the tools that made prepping my own business easier:
1) Trello Importer- what a lifesaver!
2) Airtable Instagram planner (from my VA), plus an excel printout so I could plan from hand
3) Bloguettes stock photos (they are completely on brand for me)
4) Social Curator to help fill in captions, plus her photos are pretty cute too
5) VA! She’s my backup and I love her to pieces and trust her judgement completely
I can’t tell you enough how important prepping for this leave was. I could not have done my regular work and transitioned out as easily as I did without planning the next 90+ days. Breaking down each sprint and setting milestones is what kept us on track. All the hours spent documenting and refining 100+ workflows into Loom videos made everyone feel at ease, plus it helped us see how we needed to simplify things in the future.
What I also love about this planning is it showed me how to plan on extreme overdrive. From pen and paper to the Progress Gameplan Sheets to using the Trello importer- that allowed us to move quicker and adjust even easier.
So if you are looking at time off, simplifying things, or even just getting way ahead. . . use the tools and strategies described above and you’ll be on the right path!
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