How I Built 4 Coaching Systems That Made $500K While I Was on Maternity Leave

Hello, hello. Welcome back to the Thriving Therapreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Carly Hill. I am recording this episode very pregnant with baby boy number 2 on the way, and that's what we're going to talk about today. I get asked constantly, Carly, how are you going to handle your business when the baby comes? What happens to your clients? What happens to your revenue? Are you going to keep launching? How does all of this work? How am I supposed to take maternity leave and my business is supposed to keep going? I'm going to answer all of that today, just honestly because I've done this before. I went on maternity leave with my first son. I made half a million dollars while I was on leave. I didn't take one single coaching call. I'm planning to do that again, but I'm going to do it better. I know so much more now than I know the first time. The business has grown tremendously since my last baby, and I really want to start by just. Saying, if you are terrified about maternity leave, it is the best thing that ever happened to me in my business. Backtrack to when I first found out I was pregnant. I was very terrified, not about motherhood, but about business and losing the very thing that I had worked so hard to build. My business was my baby at the time, and I had always wanted to be a mother. I was very excited to be a mom, but I had built something very real and it was not running without me yet. That's why I was scared. I was very much in the growing and the scaling phases of my business, in the middle of it, still managing things, still showing up for things, still being the decision maker and the bottleneck for more areas in my business than I would like to admit. That was just the reality of the situation. And when I was forced in quotes to go on leave, right? I really had to get my systems and operations dialed in prior to leave, and that is what allowed me to make half a million dollars while I didn't show up once, while my business kept going, while the team kept running the show, while revenue kept coming in. And by the time I came back, I knew that this is how I was going to run my business for the rest of my life. It was, like I said, the best thing that ever happened to me that I could be home with my newborn, not working, not on calls, not in my DMs, not needing to be on Slack, not needing to answer to my team because SOPs were in place and still make half a million dollars. And it's not just about the money. Okay. Although the money was incredible. Yes. It was about what it proved. It proved that I had actually done the thing that I had been working towards For years, I had built a business that did not require my constant presence to function. I had broken successfully founder dependence, and I was always working towards that. But getting pregnant and going on leave was the fire under my ass that I absolutely needed to actually move this into fruition and completely break the founder dependence. And That generated revenue while I was sleeping, while I was nursing, while I was consumed by the most important thing and time in my life was irreplaceable. And I'm doing it again, round two, second baby, another boy. Oh my gosh, this is madness! And I'm gonna walk you through what I'm doing differently this time, and I'm gonna also talk about. The things that you need to have in place if you are going on maternity leave and you have an online coaching business. Okay, let me break down the actual infrastructure that allowed me to make half a million dollars while on maternity leave the first time, because this was not luck. This was absolutely planned, and it was systems that were in place. It was assets that were in place. So the first thing that I had was a recorded course asset. This is a foundational piece in your online business. When your core program is a recorded curriculum that clients can access at any time, whether you are on maternity leave, whether you are on vacation, whether you're on a boat in the Bahamas like I typically am, okay? And they log in, they learn, they implement. You could be sleeping, they're logging in, they're learning from you. You're not repeating yourself. The course keeps running whether You're on the couch recovering from childbirth, or you're outside watching your toddler play, or like I said, you're on vacation. Okay, any kind of leave, sabbatical, you have to have a recorded course where you're not trading time for money anymore. The second thing is having a team. You have to have a backbone of a team. My team handles client support. Sales conversations, DMs, operational questions, coaching calls—all of it. They are highly trained, and I have different departments. I have a separate episode on that, and I break down all of the people on my team and the different departments. But the reality is they have SOPs; they know what to do when I step away. Nothing stopped. I have decision makers besides just me. It can slow slightly in places where you are the direct energy source and. Visionary, bringing new ideas to the table. But that also doesn't have to stop. Quite frankly, I got my best ideas when I was on maternity leave and I could really step back from my business. And I came back full force, rested, and I changed almost every area of my business and every department of my business. And this is what has allowed me to grow tremendously since I had my first baby. So the business is not going to fall apart, it's going to keep moving. You also need to have automated revenue streams, low-ticket offers, freedom funnels, trust-building offers, tasters, teasers, appetizers. Every coach calls them something different, but you need to have email sequences and funnels and nurturing leads across the clock with your automations. Paid advertising—it's a beautiful thing. Bringing in new people into the ecosystem 24/7 when you're nowhere near your laptop. This is what I mean when I say leveraged income, not passive income. There's really no such thing as passive income; it's leveraged income. The income is not directly tied to your time anymore or your presence. There was work on the front end, but you are making money while you are sleeping because you have automated revenue streams, low-ticket offers, trust-building offers. Offers, tasters, teasers, appetizers, and then you have a killer ascension plan to move them along in the client journey and up and up towards your higher ticket offers. The 4th thing that you need is batch recorded content and batch recording right now for my podcast, making sure your social media is batched so you don't have to scramble and you don't have to worry about posting on social media, your emails going out, your podcasts going out. Okay, do it in advance. Prepare content ahead of time. Your voice is very much still important. Top-of-mind awareness is very much still important. Trust building cannot stop, should not stop, even when you take a break. The relationship building should not go cold even when you take a break. So you should still be showing up. You're just showing up ahead of time. Or you're possibly repurposing content. If you're not recording new content, that's totally fine. I promise you, nobody remembers what you posted yesterday. If you're not repeating yourself, you're not saying it enough. You should be repurposing your content. Okay? So all 4 of these pieces working together is what allowed me to generate half a million dollars. Again, it's a recorded course asset. It's a team that can run the show without you. It's automated revenue streams and low-ticket offers, and it's batch recording your content so you can still earn trust. The biggest shift that I'm doing this time, because I've been doing a lot of live launches— live launches crush— I'm moving into more of evergreen launches. Okay, so on my first maternity leave, I still had some live launch activity happening. My team was executing it. But this time I am leaning completely into evergreen. Evergreen launches just mean that instead of a specific promotional window where everything is live, where the emails, the urgency, the webinar, the deadline, the entire system is running on autopilot continuously. So someone finds me, enters the funnel, goes through the email sequence. Experiences the offer, and then makes a decision. Is there urgency and scarcity with ethics tied in using platforms such as Deadline Funnel? Yes, absolutely. That's very wise to do, but it's all without any live component required from me or my own team. That's why it's evergreen and it lives on for forever. That's what evergreen actually means. And so this is very much a more sustainable revenue model for maternity leave or whenever you're Taking a sabbatical, going on vacation, whatever the case is, because it removes the dependency on timing. We talked about breaking founder dependence earlier on in this episode. This is about breaking launch dependence. Okay, a live launch requires preparation, execution energy, follow-up energy. It requires you being in front of the computer coaching your clients. Okay, actually delivering, and I love doing that. There's actually nothing more than live launching that I love because it really just allows me to be back in the energy of these transformations with my potential clients. However, it's not always sustainable. We don't want to do it 24/7. There should be periods where we don't have to do it. It brings a beautiful pop of cash. Okay. 5-day challenges are my favorite way to launch. I teach that to all of my clients, but having an evergreen system that just runs, and then when you're ready to come back and do another live launch again, you can. There's a beauty in that. Okay. So evergreen is a strategy that I'm doing differently this time. The second shift that I have already made is just having clear SOPs for the team. So the first time around they had their SOPs, everybody knew their lane, but of course, as you're, Optimizing and going through new processes for the first time, then you find gaps and you need to rinse, repeat, and optimize. And so now every escalation path is clear. If something needs to come to me, then there is a series of events that need to happen before it comes to me. And we have practiced this. We have done many runs where I have been completely off, no internet in the Bahamas, and team is absolutely running the show. I very much still like to check in here and there on Slack when I am on maternity leave, because that is just me as a CEO, keeping my finger on the pulse. And I like to be in the loop, not only of what's going on behind the scenes in my company, but with my clients. My clients are my world. I had a potential client ask me, Carly, are you going to be taking time off? She was thinking about joining mentorship. And I said, yes, I'm absolutely gonna be taking time off, but that doesn't mean anything for my clients. The reality is my clients are hearing me every single day in their earbuds because of the recorded curriculum that I have created. Hundreds and hundreds of video trainings at this point, depending on the level of support that they need in the area of business that they need help with. They also get my whole entire team. When clients work with me, they don't just get me. They get my copywriter. They get my social media coaches. They get a mindset coach. They get my media buyer and paid advertising coach. They get my director of operations. They get all of that. They get a one-to-one coach. It is not dependent on me. I wouldn't be able to best support my clients by myself. My team supports me, and so my team also supports my clients. The third shift that I'm making is just focusing more on lower ticket offers, the mid-ticket ecosystem. This isn't only because I'm going on maternity leave. This is a shift that I'm making in my business just as the market is changing and we must stay up with the times. And it is more important now than ever as we are in this trust recession to have lower ticket offers and build trust and have a killer ascension model. And high ticket is incredible. That is what I teach. That is what I preach. That is the bread and butter of my business, and I will die on the hill of high ticket. But it also requires more active sales conversations. I believe in high ticket, but I also believe in low and mid ticket and having a beautiful offer suite and ascension funnels behind all of them. This means that revenue can come in at every single price point, not just at the top. And the low ticket to mid ticket to then high ticket pipeline. Means that my team, my funnels, they can move somebody from first touch all the way to a high-ticket conversation without me being involved in the early stages at all because my funnels and the offers inside these low-ticket and mid-ticket, they're doing the work for me. All right, so I know this is a lot. Okay, let's recap, soak all of this in. I think that the thing Most of you are probably curious about, especially those who are in my world as clients right now or possibly thinking about joining. Like I said, is my experience going to go away when you go on maternity leave, Carly? And again, my team is here, my curriculum is here, all of my AI agents I didn't even mention. I have about 15, 16 AI agents at this point that is trained in my exact brain to help you write your social media posts, audit your sales calls, reverse engineer your revenue goals and launch plans, write your offer suite and your offer stack, and so much more. Okay? Every area of your business, there is an AI agent to help you go faster. Coaching calls continue. Slack support continues. One-to-one coach continues. The whole infrastructure that I have built is specifically so my clients are never dependent on just me. That is what makes this possible. That is far more important than the 4 things that I mentioned earlier, such as having a recorded course, having a team to back you up. But it's having an infrastructure with your client fulfillment that means that you can step away and your clients can still be supported. That's really what it comes down to. So yes, I'll be dabbling. I love my company. I love my clients. They're my world. When you're the CEO of your business, you're never fully clocked out. That's just the reality. I will be checking in. I will be aware of what is happening, but I will not be the one executing the day-to-day. I will not be on coaching calls. Maybe I'll be in my DMs at 2 AM one night when I'm nursing. That wouldn't surprise me, but I don't have to be okay. My team will be running the show. So I wanna say this to any of you who are my clients or considering becoming one. The fact that the business can run without me while on maternity leave, this is not a fluke. This is not a bug. This is proof of concept of everything that I teach. And I'm quite literally living this model. I am showing you in real time what it looks like to build a business that serves your life, that supports your life. We're building a lifestyle business. Not the other way around. Okay? I'm not the only one who can build this. You can build this too. And it doesn't even have to be for maternity leave. Maybe you just want better systems in place and you wanna have more freedom and you wanna travel and you wanna break founder dependence. You wanna break launch dependence. You wanna have a larger offer suite so clients can come in at any entry point. Freedom to take a real vacation. Freedom to just be more present with your kids. Without your laptop open or being shoved in your office trading time for money. Maybe just freedom to have a slow day, freedom to have a short week, freedom to make money while you're sleeping. Whatever the case is, okay, these are not luxuries for 7-figure businesses. These are foundational decisions that determine whether your business supports your life or whether It's gonna consume it. And the earlier you start building all of these assets in place, then the more options that you're gonna have. I started building it before I need it, but it was really maternity leave that set the fire under my ass. Every decision since then has been about strengthening it, making it more robust, making it more independent, making it more me-proof where I don't have to show up. And my business can still generate millions of dollars. So key takeaway and summary here is your business can survive and thrive without your constant presence, but only if you build it the right way intentionally from the start. The time to build that infrastructure is not right before you need it. It is right now. It is as soon as possible. It is being proactive. So build the business that supports your life. That is always, always the goal. We become entrepreneurs to have freedom. I hope this episode inspired you. I hope you took a gold nugget away of what you can do in your business to set up better systems. Perhaps you're going on maternity leave. If you're a fellow mama, my love is with you. I have a second book coming out soon. It's on money, motherhood, entrepreneurship rewritten. I cannot wait for you to get your hands on it. If you need help and support with any of this, know that I am here for you. You can actually hire my team to build out Some of these low-ticket offers or funnels, or possibly some AI agents. Social media agents have been really popular in what we've been building out for clients. So shoot us a message, check out the website, talk to my team. Lots of different ways that we can help support you in your business. My love is with you, and I will see you in the next episode.