How Am I Preparing For Maternity Leave As A 7-Figure Coach [Ep 24]

Welcome to the thriving TherapyNewer podcast. The show for ambitious therapists who are ready to unapologetically make more money, scale their impact and build their dream coaching business. I'm Carly Hill, therapist turned coach turned CEO of a seven figure online business. I created the Thriving Therapeutic podcast because I'm obsessed with helping big hearted therapists outgrow the office and build successful and sustainable online businesses. So if you are wondering how you can continue to make an impact without sacrificing the life you love, welcome Therapanur.

This is exactly the place for you.

Think of it like the business school we never had. I am so excited to dive in with you. Let's get started.

Welcome back to another episode of the thriving Therapeneur podcast. Today's podcast episode is going to be how I'm preparing for maternity leave as a seven figure coach. So if you didn't see the announcement on social media, you now know I am expecting in March of 2025. My very first. It is a baby boy and we are so incredibly excited. My husband and I are just finishing up renovating our very first home, which we should cross our fingers. Knock on wood. Cross your toes too. It should be done in January. So basically I'll have a month to get my shit together before this baby comes. New chapter, new home, new baby. We are so incredibly excited. I could not be more thrilled to step into my mother era. And I'll tell you, just a few years ago, because I'm always a forward thinker, I would search for podcast exactly like this. How does a successful CEO entrepreneur step away from the business without clients feeling her absence with them still being fully supported? I swear I've dreamed of being a mother since I was playing with my baby dolls as a child. I feel like I have been preparing for this moment my whole entire life. And how I built my business was very intentional, very strategic. So that when this time came for me to step into my mother era, I would be set up. So if you're listening, you're an entrepreneur. You. You dream of being a mother. Maybe you're going on maternity leave for a second or third time. Wherever you are in your journey, I hope this episode sparks an aha moment for you. And hey, even if you're not going on maternity leave and you just want to know how can I have more freedom in my life as a CEO entrepreneur, as an online coach, this will shed some light into how I've structured my business, how I've structured my teams, and maybe you'll walk away with Some ideas. So before we dive into the logistics of how my team is supporting me, what I'm actually doing to step away while my business and clients continue to thrive, I wanna just get vulnerable for a second and tell you that I was actually very scared to let all of you know that I was pregnant. It was a short lived irrational fear where I was making up stories in my head like, what are my clients gonna think? Is this gonna impact business? Are people gonna think I'm gonna be MIA and then they're not gonna wanna join my mentorship programs? And I was talking to a best friend of mine. She's an entrepreneur and she's a mother of two. She runs her own successful wedding photographer business. And I think she was marinating on my fears. And she texted me out of the blue one day, these long paragraphs, and she was like, you know what, Carly, you should not be one bit afraid to post about this first. She validated because she had the same experience when she was pregnant with her first about it impacting her business. But she said, if there's anybody who can be an inspiration to help mothers have more freedom starting a coaching business, it's you. This is just going to attract a whole new level of clientele. Carly Hill Coaching is forever growing and evolving. This was inevitable for you basically just giving me permission to fully step into and claim this new identity that I've legit been preparing for since the second I filed my LLC years ago. And I was like, you know what? You are so freaking right. My business has always been my baby. Like, I absolutely pour my heart and my soul into my business. It is so incredibly mission driven for me because it was my own life. I care about my clients so deeply. I want them to succeed so bad. It literally hurts my bones sometimes. Like I was really just getting in my head. But the thing is how I set up my business. My clients don't even need me as is. Like, I often feel like I'm on maternity leave weekly. The show is still going to go on. In fact, I actually feel more powerful. It's like super powers are being unleashed within me for future ideas serving my clients. And when I very first got into course creation, I remember having many aha moments where I'd be in the Bahamas, on a boat, in this beautiful blue water, white sands, and I would look up at the sky and I'm like, wow, my clients are literally learning from me right now. They're thriving, they're learning, they're applying, and they don't even need me face to face. So the first thing I'll say on the logistical side, and this is something I've spent years doing, so I'm not really creating new courses at this point, but I am taking note of any questions that I maybe have not addressed in depth in a training and I'm taking some time to put one together to add it to my course in case these type of questions come up time and time again. But that's something I would do regardless of going on maternity leave or not. So what I would say to you when you are setting up a freedom based business, is having a recorded course as an asset in your business. This is one of the best ways in my opinion, to have more freedom to step away while your clients are still receiving a very high touch service from you. The second thing is sops, standard operating procedures and systems in place. So whether you have a team or not you plan to hire in the near future, or not having what you do on a daily basis in case you need to hand it over, this is incredibly helpful. So you could always just do a video of you doing something behind the scenes. It doesn't have to be this fancy standard operating procedure that you have, in a word, doc, just something in place where if somebody needed to take over your job or you weren't available for a question, how could they go be self sufficient and figure out what they have to do without you physically having to be present. Just how your clients can learn from you without you physically having to be present. An SOP is just a map for whoever needs to do the job. Speaking of teams, this is something that I am so incredibly grateful for as I move into maternity leave because my team pretty much runs the show on a daily basis where like I said earlier in this episode, I feel like I'm on maternity leave already, which is really the freaking goal of being an entrepreneur and having a freedom based business. Like just the other month I was doing this big five day challenge and my husband knew I was doing this promotion and one morning I was cleaning out drawers, I was organizing things like full nesting mode. I was actually organizing my wrapping paper to be exact. I don't know why I felt I really needed to organize my wrapping paper, but that's what I was doing. And he was like, don't you have work to do? Like shouldn't you be doing something right now? And I was like, I got it under control. Like this is actually what I should be doing right now. I would love to just continue organizing my wrapping paper. And that's what I did and this is what can happen when you have SOPs in place, when you have a recorded course, when you have a team who can make sure that your clients are taken care of when you're not physically there. So I have an episode that I recorded previously on the show that talks about what my team looks like and a more in depth behind the scenes of my business. But I'm just going to give you a quick overview so you understand exactly how my team is running the show, the different segments of my team and how I'm really able to step away from for maternity leave or maybe just when I want to go on vacation or if I have a family emergency. Basically, how is my team helping me deliver client results, answer client questions so that the business can continue to run smoothly and seamlessly. So we have a copywriting coach, we have a mindset coach, we have multiple business coaches, we have a sales coach, we have a client community manager who also answers questions in between all of those bigger questions that the coaches are handling. So clients are very well taken care of and supported. They have group time, they have one to one time, they have email review time, they have a Facebook group of support. So even without me being there, whether I'm on maternity leave or not, the clients are following on my curriculum, they're listening to the recorded course and they are coming and they're asking questions. Basically anytime they have a question, it is getting answered. And all of these coaches are trained by me. I am still overseeing everything. So if these coaches have a question and it needs to come back to me, we have an SOP for that. We have meetings, we have slack channels, we have, you know, voice memos that we go back and forth with. Like I'm definitely making mentor that knows what is going on. I run two coaching calls a week myself, so I'll be handling handing those over to one of my business coaches when I go on maternity leave. But a client will bring something up and they're like, yeah, like this is going on with my niche. And I'm like, oh yeah, I know. Or I'll beat them to it and I'll bring something up that they've been talking about with one of their assigned business coaches. So you can still say very much in the loop and be hands on in your client's business even if you are not forward facing all of the time. I also have a marketing and an operations manager who runs a call a week. And these are a lot of the coaches that are actually helping my clients, my higher level mentorship. So my Marketing and operations manager. She runs a call a week and my higher level mentorship, so does my ads manager. So when clients are getting to the point where they're really ready to scale their business, they already have proof of concept, then they have that support available to them. And like I said, these are all people who are trained by me. So they've either been through my program, they were actual clients of mine, or they've spent a significant amount of time training with me, or they are part of my personal team and then they are also additionally helping my clients. So it all comes back to the question, how can I step away from my business? How can I leverage my time? How can I leverage technology? How can I leverage my team while also continuing to serve clients and help them drive results? I also have a podcast editor who edits all of these shows and I've been batch recording. Well, I need to batch record more, but batch recording so that I don't have to record. Over maternity leave I have a virtual assistant who helps with so many different tasks in my business. Basically whatever we need her to do, she's on it. She has specific SOP tasks that she does weekly, but also anytime we have like a side project we can just let her know. Hey, add this to your to do list. Love you Len. A lot of my clients use her too. Additionally, I have a sales team that I've been managing but I will be promoting one of my sales team members to sales manager so that I don't have to manage that when I go on maternity leave. Because we meet weekly as a team to talk about updates in the business, how conversations are going with current clients, any tech issues that we need to figure out on the back end, etc. Etc. I have an ads manager who runs all of my ads for me. This was at hire that I made earlier this year which was such a huge relief for me because prior to that for the past three years I've been running all of my own ads so it was really nice to hand that over. So she's taking care of that. My marketing manager and director of operations because I mentioned her earlier, she runs a call a week for my clients. She is basically the right hand in the business to help me keep the day to day operations running smoothly. She does a lot of delegating to my virtual assistant or to my other team members, especially when we have projects that we need to complete, answering any technical difficulty or operational issues that we run into, making sure all the automations are running smoothly and really helping me continue to scale the business, give me deadlines as well. I work well off of deadlines, keeping me on track. So we've been talking and preparing about wrapping up certain projects, even preparing when I come back from maternity leave, like where do we want to pick up? Because I don't know exactly when I'm going to come back. I'm just going to kind of play that by ear. I don't know what this time is going to bring, so I want to weave in flexibility. So we've been moving things from the backlog to the front log to take care and wrap up some projects before I go on maternity leave, but also future pacing and planning for what we're going to tackle when I do get back, whenever that time comes. So I am incredibly, forever grateful for her. This was a hire that I also made earlier in the year. So I made my ads manager hire and I also made my operations and marketing manager hire earlier in the year. And I probably should have done that a lot sooner in my business. But we live and we learn, right? Another random thing that I'm going to do. I haven't fully explored this yet, but I've heard about it on another podcast. Like some type of email management, like a third party app, possibly some AI with a mixture of having maybe a VA go in there and just manage my inbox. So I have my personal inbox, but I also have a support inbox. But even in my regular inbox I definitely get some just kind of spam emails that I just go through daily and delete. So having somebody help me manage and clean out my inbox so that when I do get a chance to check it when I'm on maternity leave, it's not completely filled with unnecessary emails and junk that I don't need to spend my time sifting through. As far as social media goes, that content is always batched, so I'm just going to batch it even further. I'll probably just repurpose a lot of my content as well. Nobody remembers what you posted yesterday, so if you're not repurposing your content, you're definitely missing out. So I will most definitely be repurposing a lot of my content. I also have a lot of low ticket items and digital products that I sell all day every day through tripwire funnels. So even without front end high ticket sales and making passive income every single day, these are really like freedom funnels. It's kind of like an ecosystem that points everyone to everything in your offer suite eventually. And I joked about trademarking Maternity leave funnel and making a course on this because I do have a passive income course, but it doesn't go in depth about the ecosystem, the backend marketing, the operations side of things. Really, how do you create a freedom funnel and an ecosystem where you can continuously make sales all day, every day? So holy moly. That's a lot. That's everything that's kind of going on personally in the business, how my team is handling everything. And I fully recognize that a lot of this may not apply to you at all because you don't have all of these team members. But I hope that this can future pace you and give you a roadmap and a blueprint to what your business can look like, especially if you have dreams, aspirations, goals of scaling it to seven figures. What needs to be set up? What team members should I think about hiring in the future? How can I get in the mindset of leveraging technology, leveraging my team? Working smarter, not harder. How can I get in the mindset of not trading dollars for hours and creating recorded courses, having SOPs in place in systems so that you do not have to trade time for money? That is a big part of Carly Hill. Coaching's mission is helping therapists get out of trading time for money, outgrowing the office, Working smarter, not harder. So like I mentioned, whether you're going on maternity leave or not, these are great strategies to implement in your business or think about implementing in your business so that you can have a business that supports you, not the other way around. A freedom based business. This is why we become entrepreneurs, is to have more freedom and flexibility and security in our life. So wish me the best of luck. Thank you everyone for reaching out to me, sending your love and congratulations. I had quite a few clients who actually told me they had a feeling I was pregnant. They told me I was just glowing differently on the call. So I'm happy to hear I have that pregnancy glow because damn, I have been so nauseous. But it is finally going away. I start to feel like a normal person now. But at one point I looked at my husband and I was like pregnancy is not as glorious as I thought it was going to be. I thought it was going to be so cute bumping around. I'm starting to feel like that now. But yeah, first trimester and well into my second I was still feeling very nauseous. So I commend all of you mamas because I have tons of clients who are moms and they are just kicking ass in the coaching space. Taken names they are putting in the work and I know it is not easy. I look forward to getting support from you as I step into my mother era and until next episode, my love is with you all and I'll see you then.

Thank you so much for listening to the Thriving Therapy podcast. I hope that this episode has inspired you to reduce burnout, work smarter, and see the freedom potential you have as a therapist. We would love to have you inside the Therapist to Coach Accelerator Facebook group where we have live trainings and cheat sheets on all things marketing, sales and adding coaching ethically and legally. I am here cheering you on and I'll see you around.