Taking a 12-Week Maternity Leave as an Entrepreneur
Almost exactly a year ago, my husband and I found out that we were expecting a baby. As we started sharing the happy news with family and friends over the next few months, the questions started rolling in:
When are you due?
Do you know if it’s a boy or girl? (we didn’t!)
And, “wait…how does maternity leave work for you?”
I’ve been an entrepreneur since 2015, running education startup SkillPop. In that time we scaled an in-person class model to six cities, launched a virtual platform, survived a pandemic and built a corporate learning arm. I’ve hired and managed over 80 employees and taken us through a 12-week startup accelerator in Austin, Texas.
None of these felt as daunting as planning my own maternity leave.
At companies I worked for previously, parental leave was a given. And as an employer at SkillPop, it’s something that we’ve navigated for previous team members. But as a CEO and entrepreneur, it felt like a huge challenge. How would I step away for 12 weeks without putting too much of a burden on my team? Would our business suffer if I wasn’t there to lead, especially if unexpected challenges came up? And the question I got most often — would it be possible for me to truly disconnect?
Luckily, I have both an incredible team at work and at home and had 9 months to prepare. My son was born on July 14th and I was able to take a full twelve weeks off; here’s how we made it happen.
PLANNING AHEAD
As I thought about what I wanted for this season, my goal was simple: I wanted to take a full 12-week leave. Since my son was due on July 1st (I joked that he was business-minded — coming at the start of a new quarter!), my team and I had the first half of the year to prepare and used three main strategies:
- Frontload
- Delegate
- Eliminate
I knew that I wouldn’t enjoy maternity leave if I felt like the business was suffering from being down a person, so the first thing we did was frontload as much as possible. SkillPop does both public, virtual classes and corporate teambuilding events. Corporate events make a huge impact on our bottom line and provide monthly stability, so our focus in the first half of the year was to book classes in advance that could be executed while I was out. We started pitching larger companies, booking recurring events (like monthly or quarterly classes for teams) and filling our pipeline early. Come July, we had a strong lineup of events that my team could run without me.
As a side note, this turned out to be a win-win — many of our clients loved getting their teambuilding and training events on the calendar early. 😉
We used the strategy of frontloading in other ways, too; I worked with a copywriter to batch-write the copy for all 35 marketing emails that would need to be sent so that no one would have to worry about that internally. We also had been wanting to try in-person public classes again for a while, so we ran a huge in-person series (with the kickoff when I was 36 weeks pregnant!) before I signed off for the summer.
Next, I focused on delegating. Everyone at a startup wears a few different hats; mine lately have been marketing, HR, and sales. I knew that my team couldn’t realistically divide up everything that falls in my bucket, so we took a few of the bigger things (social media management & email marketing copy) and contracted out additional help.
Finally, I took an honest look at my week-to-week responsibilities and did some eliminating. If it wasn’t a critical task (like sending marketing emails) and wasn’t easy for someone else to absorb (like tracking an extra metric or two throughout the week), we put it on pause for the summer.
DEFINING COMMUNICATION
A common question I got leading up to my leave was how “offline” I planned to be. SkillPop turned 7 while I was out; after being in business for that long, I knew it would be impossible to completely disconnect. I also wanted to make sure that if anyone on my team needed me, they had a channel for reaching out.
We decided on one weekly email. Every Friday, one of the women on my team sent me a quick report with high-level items like:
- Metrics: sales revenue, classes booked, etc.
- Team/staffing updates
- Notable challenges
- 911 (i.e., questions they needed help or input with)
Sending this email just took 15 minutes, helped us feel connected throughout the summer and gave me the perfect amount of information I needed to know how things were going.
TRANSITIONING BACK
As I start back up at work this week, I’m incredibly proud of everything my team accomplished while I was out — this wouldn’t have been possible without them. They maintained a busy schedule of public classes, ran over twenty corporate events, closed out our inaugural Summer Series and launched new partnerships.
And, I’m grateful for the last twelve weeks. A friend told me that the early newborn days were “exhausting, but pure magic” — and they were right. Being able to soak in these early days of parenthood has been critical to our health as a family, but it’s also been sweet. I know I’ve stored up lots of good memories of getting to know our baby boy.
As I head back into work at SkillPop, I’m more ready than ever to keep making magic happen here, too. 🎉
