Prepare for Parental Leave as a Business Owner

1. Class intro: Hi and welcome to this Skillshare course on how to prepare your business for going on parental leave. When you run your own business, if feels like you're often have your hands in everything. And so at least I felt quite intimidated going on parental leave because you just feel like what is going to happen when you leave. And the best thing you can do is to prepare a little bit in your business, both mentally and very much practically for what's going to happen when you go on parental leave. And so I'm going to guide you through this course on the different sections that are going to help you feel more confident about you live. But it's also going to make your business run a lot more smoothly. We're going to cover everything from how responsive you should be when you're a way, how to plan your finances and what to expect from parental leave. Obviously, this is very personal, but I'm going to share a little bit of my personal tips. I hope that this course will take a little bit of the stress away and will help you feel empowered and excited about going on printed it, because it really is one of the most amazing experiences that you can have. 2. Plan your ideal time away: The first thing we wanna do when we're planning our parental leave is to think about what we want our ideal days to look like while we're actually way. So what is a typical day in terms of a scheduled, the type of things you'll be doing, what does that look like? And before I went on my parental leave, I thought, you know, I don't want to answer a single e-mail. I don't want to be thinking about work at all, but that also made me stressed because I felt like I have to prepare all the stuff beforehand. In reality, what happened was that was kind of two sections. So the first section was the first six weeks when I was home with my baby. And that time it really was a few emails but really quite focused on being home, taking care of my baby, recovering, getting to know each other. But after the six weeks, we were able to fall into more of a routine. And then I actually felt a little bit excited to start getting back to some work. So think about yourself and think about how you like to structure your day if you feel like I just want to focus on recovery and getting to know my baby, that is perfectly fine, then that's what you should do. I found that while I was feeding my baby, so breastfeeding or bottle feeding doesn't really matter. You have a bit of free time to answer emails or get some inspiration, or just check in with your team if you want to. So if you feel like I don't want to completely disappear at those times when you're feeding your baby is a good time. I find to kind of wedge in a little bit of time for work. Another thing is that in the beginning, babies will sleep a lot. And you should also sleep a lot because you're going to be very tired. But you also have the opportunity if you want to plan and for a little bit of time to work, if that's something that you want to, again, very much think about what you want your days to look like because you should get, set your own schedule. And think about the kind of dream life that you have in terms of your parental leave. The reason you want to start with this is I think that rather than trying to fit in the work that you want to accomplish into your parental leave. You want to start with what you want to print and you've to look like because that's going to reduce a lot of the stress that you might be feeling. Make sure that you are also realistic and kind to yourself when you're making these decisions because you don't want to feel like it's okay. I can just wet in some extra work that I'm maybe not super comfortable with. But, you know, it's good for finance as if you don't absolutely have to. So try to think about giving yourself a little bit of extra wiggle room because it is very different from everything else maybe that you've gone through. This is a time when it's not just a mental change, but it's also a physical change. And you've gone through a pregnancy or your partner has gone through a pregnancy and you maybe need to support them. So this is a time when I think be kind to yourself. Is that good advice? 3. Finances: Next one is a really important one of course, and that is to plan your finances. And the earlier you get started with this one, the better it works, I would say. So the first thing you want to do is to look into the country that you live in, what kind of parental support money or parental leave support that they offer. And so it really is very country specific and it also can work very differently if you're employed compared to if you, for example, have your own business or work freelance. So look at what the different options are because that's going to be really, really important basis for you. And for me and my husband, they were basing our parental leave on our past year's salary. And so you get a percentage of that. So make sure that you know exactly what the rules are because you might have to provide some paperwork for that once you know what support is available, you can also look at two other things. The first one is the own budget and see if there's anything that you don't necessarily need that you can cut to make it a little bit of extra space and wiggle room. And the third one is of course, to think about how much money you need to save. So if you feel like the money that you are getting from support or the money that you could take out a salary from your own business is not going to be quite enough while you're away. Saving is a really, really important step to make sure that you have that cushion to feel calm and relaxed while you reweight. And so the first thing you want to do, of course, is look at how much money you need every month. And again, look at what is necessary versus what is perhaps a luxury. And it can be a good idea to start cutting those things a little bit earlier just to get into the habit and testing of what it feels like. Because we're also thinking about your business. We want to think about if you're going to keep working for all of your clients while you're away. You might want to have a think about if you need to hire someone and if you need to hire someone part-time or full-time, you need to budget for that as well. So if you already know the person and then you can, of course, budget for that right away. If you don't, it can be a good idea to start getting some quotes from people so that you get an idea of how much it would cost you to hire help. 4. Overview of tasks: To make sure you can fully relax while you're away and make sure that everything is running smoothly and you don't have to think about it. The next thing we wanna do is to make a list of everything. And I mean, everything get really granular. That has to be done in your business on a daily basis, on a weekly or monthly, as long as you're going to be away. So if you know that you're going to be away for five months or nine months or a year and a half. Make sure that you think about everything that has to be done during that time. Do you have to do accounting? Do you need to post to social media to keep getting a new business, for example, do you need to think about updating anything on your website to work on SEO or can you drop those things? What is necessary and what do you want to keep doing? And what is something that perhaps you can put on the back-burner? So think about all the different things that have to be done. And because it's up to science task, the way I did it was I kind of started to think about my business in terms of different departments. So what do I need to do for accounting? What do I need to do for marketing? What do I need to do for client work? If I'm going to keep any of that up, do I need to again, set up something where I can delegate to my team? Do I need to think about what I can do myself from home if that's something that you choose to do. So think about your business in terms of different departments. And here are the typical departments that people usually have in their business. And so make sure that you think about exactly the different things you need to do and also how much time you need to have for each of those things. Once you know everything that needs to be done, you can try to setup as much of that preparation now. And you can start to automate things as much as possible. So for example, marketing. If you're posting to social media, you might be using a tool like later, for example, to schedule your social media posts. If you before you go on parental leave can make a bank of posts where you can schedule them ahead of time and they will all be posting as your way, doing completely different things. And all you have to do if you want to, is to do a little bit of perhaps answering comments or interaction when you have time. That is something that is going to take a lot of stress away. Similarly, you can set up messages for your e-mail client where you get a response that you're on parental leave and you'll answer a little bit perhaps slower than normal. So all these different automations that you can setup to prepare for when you go into the away. 5. Automate and organise: If you decide that there are certain tasks that you just cannot be working on while you're away. You need to start finding the team members that you either need to hire or work on a project by project basis on as a freelancer. So finding the right people and then setting up the right communications with them to make sure that they have understood exactly what they need to do. And they have an easy way to ask you questions, contact you and keep you updated on the work. A really big benefit of doing this ahead of you going on your parental leave is that you'll be able to give them a little bit of a briefing or training, or even run them through some projects before you actually go away. So this is a great way to have that connection and make sure they get all of their questions answered so that they can do the best job possible for you. When it comes to communication, I suggest having some form of a project management tool where you can collaborate so you can add in all the different tasks as you're doing that when you're planning the different pieces of work that needs to be done. But you can also have it for, let's say, uncertain questions or having access to login information or just the day-to-day running of the business. And some different ones that I recommend are Notion, Notion is really good because it's kinda like a wiki for your business. So you can set up like information for emails to all the different clients. You can set up information about them, what the briefs are for the different projects. You can set up contact information to yourself or you can set up your login details, everything that you need so that it's something that where people really have access to everything they need in one place. If you're already using a tool like Asana or Trello for actually creating a communication with your clients. I suggest keeping that as well and you can even integrate your new team into that. And of course you can use and chaplains like Slack, for example, to have that kind of instant communication. If you're not a big fan of email. For some people, this is the way that I did it. I decided to still manage all of our client work, but have a little bit of help from freelancers to actually do some of the, let's say mood boarding or concepting. And I will just give them the brief talk to the client and then have that back-and-forth communication that a little bit over e-mail and then wants something came in. I'll polish it up a little bit, package it and send it to the client. So it took a lot of work off my hands that freed me up. And this is something that I started doing after that kind of two month mark for me. If you want to keep a little bit more of that client facing side. And I thought it was really useful to use Kayla for requesting content from different freelancers or team members or collaborators. This is where you can set up requests for the different files. So pieces of content that you need and set a deadline so that you know that, okay, maybe a week ahead of time, I will have everything I need to put this together and send it to my client. I built Kayla, if we're exactly situations like this where you have different people involved in a project and you just want it to run as smoothly and automatically as possible. So I really do give a tip about checking that out. 6. Inform your clients: The next thing you want to consider is to inform your clients that you will be awake because even if they will have a conversation directly with you and there's not gonna be any other team members involved. You know, you still want to make sure that they are aware that you might be answering a little bit slower or that you might not have as much time to work on their projects. So if you're taking on any new work, I suggest already informing them that you will be going on parental leave. And if that's something where, you know, you're doing ongoing work, then you can also inform them that this is something that is coming up roughly at this time and edit those, bring me a little bit to a point of, you know, you do have to have some flexibility in your schedule because yes, you have a due date for when the baby should come. But of course, this is quite a range. So it can be weeks early, it can be weeks late. So I'll make sure that you have a little bit of that preparation setup before you actually need it. This is a great time to answer all their questions. They might wonder about your availability or if you should pause the project. And so this is where you want to have that open communication so that they're not sending you lots of e-mails. I'm wondering why they're not getting quick responses and then being surprised that they didn't maybe know that you are going on parental leave. Having that two-way really care communication is always going to build a much better relationships with your clients. 7. Class project: So before we finish and we just discussed the class project a little bit, I wanted to just say that this really is a time when you want to be flexible. You want to remove as many muscles as possible in your business. And of course, going on parental leave can mean that you can drop everything if you want to and if you're able to. But it is also totally okay if you want to keep working a little bit. This is much more about your personal preferences, unless it's purely financial. Having work or something that is contact with other adults. And where it's not just, you know, baby focused is something that can actually feel quite refreshing for you sometimes. So give yourself a lot of flexibility. Don't count on having to do a lot of work, but allow yourself to do it if it's something that makes you feel good, this is something where there's no judgment, there's no right or wrong. You just have to set up the practical details so that those things work well for you in the business. But there really isn't anything of how you have to do it to do right by your baby, you buy you. So just make sure you plan for what works for you. For the class projects. I would like you to create a checklist of the things that you would like to prepare from now until you go on parental leave. So I've given you some different inspiration and there is a worksheet that you can download. It's below this video. And if you have questions or you would like to discuss something with me or with everyone. You can also see the discussion portion below so that we can have a way to help each other out and share experiences because it really is helpful to get some input on your thoughts when you're doing this for the first time. Thank you so much for watching. Congratulations on having a baby soon. And I really hope that this helps you feel a little bit calmer and more just purely excited about jumping a little bit of your business for a bit. Best of luck with everything, and thank you so much for taking this course.