How to Start Thinking About Maternity Leave as an Entrepreneur

Welcome to the System Sami podcast. I'm your usual host, Jordan Gill. But this season I am so thrilled to share my feed with some absolute gems from my community.

Zahra Marie Henry of Zara Marie Online Business Management is back on the podcast speaking out how you can start to put together your dream maternity leave. And it may feel overwhelming, but I assure you, Zara Marie's step by step process is so soothing. So get excited to hear from Zara Marie again speaking about how to start thinking about maternity leave as an entrepreneur. Hey, System saved me listeners. Welcome back to the podcast. I am so excited to be here again.

If you didn't catch my first episode in this two part series, hello. I am Zara Marie, an online business manager for service providers and I have a service special interest in helping entrepreneurs with family planning and preparing for maternity leave. I'm an island girl from the beautiful tiny Caribbean island of Jamaica where it is always sunny and the vibes is always great. That sounds like a tourist ad, but for real, it's, it's pretty nice here.

So the last time we talked about my baby framework, which is designed to help entrepreneurs plan for their maternity leave in a way that is flexible and in a way that will align with their personal and business goals. I love the baby framework because it really appreciates the fact that something like maternity leave is so precious and so specific to the person who is going to be planning it. Right. So I don't put it in a box.

Instead I just give you a roadmap so that you can know exactly where you're going to be, what you're going to be doing at each stage. So it gives you a kickstart, a guide. So if you missed that episode and you want to learn about the baby framework, I highly recommend that you go back and listen. It's a great starting point for today's topic. So in this episode we're going to dive a little bit into how to start thinking about maternity as an entrepreneur.

So whether you're years away from needing this or you're already expecting, yay. This episode is the one that will talk about the actual steps to begin. So remember in the last episode I spoke a lot about the fact that I am in this B stage. Right? We are in this B stage and it is breaking down your goals or your desires.

And one of the things that really stood out to me though when I started talking about not just maternity leave but family planning is that even though the whole family planning conversation is tied to reproductive health as entrepreneurs and having kids and Stuff like that. If we were supposed to take the words literally, Family planning, planning for the family, it could really mean any change in your family. So for some of us, it actually won't be babies. It might be aging parents.

It might be something like the diagnosis of a terminal illness for a family member who has listed you as a guardian, so now you have nieces and nephews who are under your control. It might be that your siblings need your support and they have to move in for the next three, four years. It might be that you have a sibling who has always had special needs and your parent died and now you have to take over.

Whatever it is, changes can happen, and whatever new changes happen will shift things up for your immediate family. And yet we have to start putting things in place. And so anyways, today we're spending a little time in the B part of the baby framework, as mentioned before.

And it's okay to spend years in this phase because that's, as I said, this is where I am now. And as I think about it, as an only child, I want to make sure that my business is built in a way where when I have to take over responsibility of my mom, it's not a big deal. Right? So the first step is to reflect on your long term personal and professional aspirations, understanding your personal and professional goals.

Family planning is deeply personal, but as entrepreneurs, it's so intertwined with how we run our businesses. And the things that I'm thinking about is what are my personal goals for starting and growing a family? What are my professional goals over the next few years? What do I want it to look like and how can they align? In my former life, as I like to say, I actually went to school to become a lawyer in the Caribbean.

We do a law degree first, which is a bachelor's of laws, and then we go to law school and we do that. It was supposed to be really nice. I was supposed to be a lawyer who was in court, dressed up every day. I did it all. I went to got the first degree. I went to law school. I graduated. We still wear black robes and the little white scarves. I did it and it was great. And it felt like that's what I wanted to do. And if you had asked me five, six years ago, hey, what do you want to become?

I would have given you the whole Elle Woods, Legally Blonde explanation and, you know, just trying to find ways to make it pretty. And my entrepreneurship journey is one of those journeys that always blow my mind because I started off as a creative and I had A social media agency before that was specifically for law firms. Anyways, why am I going around and around all this?

What I'm saying is that the dream that I'm living, the life that I'm living now, was Not My Dream 5, 6 years ago in terms of practicality, like in terms of specifics, right? So specifically I thought I would be still practicing as a lawyer fully, I would be in like some pink suits in court, just really turning heads and breaking the stereotype. But that didn't happen. But I'm still living the dream life because one thing never changed is where I think I wanted to be at this age.

So at the recording of this podcast, I'm 27 and everything on the vision board that I created at 23 or 20, 22, they're all done. I've accomplished them, but the way I've accomplished them and the specifics look a little bit different. So yeah, I still did really well in my professional career. I launched a business and if you launch a business and lasted more than a year and it start, it can pay you, it is successful. I do don't care what anybody wants to say, it is successful.

And I did that and I'm very proud of it. I was able to accomplish the smaller goals and accomplish the things that I wanted to accomplish, but the vision didn't change, right? So because I knew what my personal goals were and I knew what those things are, I just kept at it, even if the specifics looked a little different. Now for the future, it's time for me to be very clear about what I want the future to look like.

When kids come in, even though the specifics might change, the vision will remain the same, right? So maybe you want to expand your business, but you also want to start such a family next year or two or three or four. And in the balance, in. In the pursuit of balancing these goals, or as one of my friend likes to say, harmonizing these goals because she doesn't believe in balance. I don't believe in balance either. It's a fluke. These goals might mean prioritizing your systems.

No. It might mean prioritizing things like building. No. Prioritizing some of the profit. No. Some of the owners paying. No. So that your business can run more independently in the future. And I have a little reflection prompt for you. What does success look like for you personally and what does success look like for you professionally? Write it down. Get your journal, write it down. Because if the vision remains the same, the specifics can always change as we go with the ebbs and flows of life.

All right, second thing, assess your current situation. So remember, we're talking about how do we start thinking about family planning as entrepreneurs? Assess your current situation. Evaluate where you are now, both in your business and your personal life. Because we always talk about, okay, what do we want that to look like now we have to understand where we're coming from. Because if you don't know where you're coming from, how are you going to know where you're going?

How are you going to know what things you're measuring, how you're going to be moving forward, what adjustments may be needed? You know, you have to evaluate, you need to evaluate your business stability. How is your business doing now? Do you have consistent income? Do you have mrr? Monthly recurring revenue, by the way, is the only MRR I know. And on mrri, what's the word I own mri say yes to? I can't remember the word. Anyways, are your operations running well? Is it smooth enough?

What's going on there? What's your service like? Does your service feel tacky, whether it be a membership or digital products, or do we need anything to just, just what is here? What is it? The stability? Do you even feel stable or do you don't have any sort of stability? What is your, your weekly finance workflow like? Also financial health? Do you have any savings, any emergency funds, any investments?

Do you have any type of predictable income, whether it be you and your partner, any other streams of income? What does that look like for you? For you? Because remember, this is not me. It's not Zara asking her services for you. And then what does your support system look and feel like? Are you living close to relatives, close to your parents? Do you have friends who are like more like family who come over or who you can rely on, lean on? Do you have any support systems professionally?

Who are your business besties? What's that like? Are they moms too? What will that look and feel like? What kind of support do you have? We have to ask those questions too, because then it will help you to decide on timing, will help you decide on even the decision on whether you actually do want to have kids. You know, that's also something that you completely have the opportunity to make that decision.

And of course, personal health, you must be able to assess where you are currently with your personal health. Do you have health conditions that you need to address before that, you know, like, what will that look like? Do you have tests that you need to run? Will you have an issue? You know, we'll hear talking all nice and dandy about planning for baby, but you may have some fertility issues and baby might decide to come in his or her own time or maybe not at all.

You may have to now think about adoption. No, adoption takes a little while. So in the same time that you're planning on strategizing the 2, 3 years old for the business, that might be the time you might need to start applying to an agency as well. You just never ever know. And that's why it's so good. Just assess your current situation to see where you are and to help your and to give yourself the ability to make those reasonable decisions.

And I guess a good example of that would be I have a client who right now we are in the B phase where she's just starting to think about it and she travels so much to the west coast for some of her meetings. And because she travels to the west coast for some of her meetings, one of the things that now as we move into the building stage, we will now have to find a solution for that. But we're not in the building phase yet. We're just in the B phase.

The first B phase, I mean, where we are just talking about her desires and we're assessing the situation. We're like, okay, here's what's happening now. When we start to build out this plan, then we'll have to make a plan on what we will be, how we'll be dealing with her frequent travels to the West Coast. All right, what's the third thing? Oh, you don't know? I'm going to tell you.

But the third thing to start thinking about when you are thinking about family planning, you know, I just thinking about like three. Anyways, the third point you will no need to prioritize things like flexibility and adaptability in these initial stages. It's really good for you to just embrace these tricks as an entrepreneur because you need to be able to roll with the punches because punches will come, right?

And you're going to start doing in the east, you're going to start thinking about what type of flexible hours you would want. Do you even like working at home? Try to fight a bit. If you are in office, what does that look like? And then also how adaptable is your current business operation? That type of thing, you really have to prioritize that and you really have to look into how much of an impact that can make on your life going forward.

I remember I worked with a CEO and she implemented project management tools and automated workflows and when the project management tool came in, there was so much kickback. We got so much fire because we don't want to use ClickUp. ClickUp is ClickUp that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. However, ClickUp starts to work so well for their brains because they gave it a choice and through then because they were flexible and they were adaptable.

By the time she was ready to go, they were all good. So here's the engagement prompt I want to share with you. Ask yourself, what adjustments have you considered in your business and also in your family life to look at it, how big is where you're living those type of things to accommodate new life. To accommodate changes. Not just new life. But remember we spoke about the fact that aging parents can also be a part of the consideration. How. Yeah, what. What are those adjustments?

Write them down. Next thing I want you to be thinking about is just thinking about what you want to plan to look like. We're not going to be planning in this phase. It's just a thinking phase. So in this thinking, we're going to be thinking about how your team is built up. Who are the people? Do you have a current model plus a future model? So leadership coaching and is something that I just do inadvertently because of I do work with 6, 7, 8 figure CEOs, which means that we work with teams.

So what does your current team org chart look like? And then what does your future org chart look like? So you want to start having those conversations so that you can now think about the roles and the responsibilities that you have to shift up. And then after you figure that out, of course you're going to just write it down. I love writing things down. I love just being open and transparent of how I feel. And then you can use your little tools to organize.

I said before you do, I'm a processes person. Right. I love processes. You have processes over tools. So yeah, that's where we are. I'm going to go.

I'm going to be going into the fourth thing to start thinking about when you are thinking about maternity leave planning and family planning. But I wanted to stop now and go ahead and post a story post and just tell me how much you are enjoying this episode. And when you do that, you will be entered into a draw that I will choose randomly and you will get my maternity leave DIY kit. Maternity planning kit for. Yeah, you get that as a gift, 100% free.

Because as I said, especially if you're just thinking about saying you're in that B phase, I think it would be so great for just. It's all laid out. Yeah, go ahead and do that. All

right. And the last thing I wanted to talk about is in this preliminary phase, when you're just thinking about it, start seeking guidance. Start seeking guidance. Build the support network. You can go far alone. You can go further with people. You don't have to do this by yourself. Even if it's in the thinking stages, you don't have to do. You don't have to tell everybody your business, but support. Just surround yourself with the right people.

Use the opportunity to talk with other entrepreneurs who are parents so that I can give you their insights. I can tell you what are the things that they're struggling with. Lean on the people who are above you, your family, your friends who have gone down the road before you. Right. And okay, consider, like, okay, who are the people who I can potentially hire? Like, I know I've told this to my husband that when I have kids, I want a night nanny.

So until my business can afford to pay me in a way that I can pay a nanny with, not having kids. And that's because I have sought guidance. I have a good support system around me of other mommy entrepreneurs, and I see what they go through and they are stressed out for the most part, and I really value my sleep.

So if I can get a night nurse who can come in one, you know, every now and again, maybe two, three times a week to kind of help me to get that extra sleep, I know it's going to be transformational. So that's something that I got from seeking guidance. I remember I worked with an entrepreneur one time and. And she joined a mastermind group that was specifically for mommy entrepreneurs. And it was really interesting for her. It was really nice.

And I'm sure that there are a lot of other mommy group that are really nice. So honestly, family planning. As an entrepreneur, thinking about kids and my time to leave, it can feel that it's overwhelming, but I think it's absolutely doable. Just break it down in steps.

Remember the steps that I spoke about, Reflecting on your personal and professional goals, assessing what your current situation is, making sure that you think about ways to prioritize flexibility and adaptability in your current business operations. And just start thinking about what, like your preliminary planning and of course, building a network of support to guide and encourage you. Remember, you don't have to figure it all out at once. Start where you are. Refine it as you go along.

Everybody's situation is different. Everybody has something different working with, and we have to be okay with that. It is our uniqueness that makes us special and that's what's going to always be our differentiating factor. My story is not your story and your story is not my story. If this episode resonated with you, please you would love my maternity leave checklist. It's packed with tools and prompts to help you take the first step. If you want to connect, find me on Instagram on Threads.

I've been hanging out a lot on Threads these days and on YouTube @Zaramarie. I'd love to hear your thoughts, your questions, strategies, just drop them in my DMS in my Instagram DMs, especially questions because I think that really fuels me to make my maternity leave planning kit even better. But I'd love to connect with you. Until next time, remember, you've got this and I'm cheering you on every step of the way. Thanks for tuning in. Bye. So good, right?

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Systems Amy Podcast Cast. If you loved this episode, I would so appreciate a review on whatever platform you're listening on. But also go up on the guest host. Connect with them on Instagram, LinkedIn or wherever they suggested to reach out. I hope you're having a great day and I will see you on the next episode.