Hey, badass. Bit of a fun one today as I'm going to walk you through how I'm preparing my business to withstand the baby bomb. So how is it going to work when I have a small human living at my house in my life, in my business that I need to juggle alongside everything else in terms of being a CEO, running a team, running a successful business, what will it actually look like?
Whether or not you have kids, want to have kids, or never want to have kids, it's all good. I think you can absolutely take something from this episode because it's about that wider topic of taking breaks from your business. It’s about being able to step away, potentially, for a few weeks or a few months at a time or completely reduce your hours to make a certain phase of life work for you.
One of the main reasons we started these things is to have that freedom and flexibility. It's because the predetermined structures of the professional world are very stale when it comes to our options in general around things like leave, like life, like family and I'm obviously not talking about our beautiful friends over in Scandinavia who get two years of paid leave or whatever it is to share between mum and dad. Keep doing you. That's amazing.
But in general, for a lot of people, when something changes in life significantly, that can be moving country, having a kid, whatever it is, when something big comes along, it’s typically really tough to keep that rhythm and intensity of work going in face of such a massive change.
The cool thing for us entrepreneurs is that we don't necessarily have to, we can adapt. So what I love about babies and business is that both of them come with a lot of ambiguity. So I'm going to walk you through, yes, how I'm preparing and planning for the arrival of this miniature human while keeping in mind that I have no idea what they'll be like.
Any baby, people will tell you, comes inbuilt with their own personality, their own style, if they don't want to sleep, if they are fussier or not, whatever it is, right? They're going to be a baby. Babies are going to baby. And we don't know what we're going to get. On the flip side, we could get super lucky and have a baby who, just like their mum and dad, loves to sleep, loves to get a good night of Z's, and can easily pull off an eight, nine-hour night uninterrupted, who knows, but what's that saying? You hope for the best but plan for the worst.
I think it's worth doing a little bit of planning, a little bit of risk mitigation and just figuring out how that's all going to look. Business, as well, can be unpredictable. I'm at a phase in business where honestly things feel pretty damn stable and predictable from a lot of aspects, but still, things change.
Markets change. Content consumption changes in terms of behavior, in terms of what the market expects from you. In this world of a lot of ambiguity that I'm stepping into, I thought I'd pull together a bit of a plan, a little bit of a game plan, at least based on some core principles and values and ways I want to do life. To inject as much clarity as I can into the system.
Now I'm going to be talking about how I'm going to be setting up my family, my life, my working hours, my goals, all of those kinds of things. And as always, remember, we're building our own empires. Your badass empire will be the empire that is your own and feels good for you and suits your lifestyle.
I might say things that make you think, “Oh, I wouldn't necessarily do it that way.” And that's cool. We're all different. You get to design your business in a way that works for you. I also want to say that I absolutely do not buy into the belief that I am going to be making less money in this business because I'm working less.
As entrepreneurs, we do not trade time for money. We do not get paid an hourly rate. And just there is absolutely no rule saying that I need to fill up a 40-hour week in order to land, say, 20 new clients, there's no rule to say that I can't land the same amount of clients working 10. It may just look a little different.
Remember, we don't exist within those norms anymore of the more hours you work, the harder you work, the more likely you are to get those sales or to get that promotion. We're allowed to have both, but there's a design in that so that it works for you. And there's also a sweet spot, I believe, that you get to decide what feels right for you.
At the end of the day, taking a break from your business is all around making sure that we're building from the get-go, a business that works smarter alongside you, does a lot of the heavy lifting, can be hugely automated and scaled, and you've got systems and workflows in place, that this business can continue to grow and thrive whether or not you are physically present at times.
And that's been something that I've been working on for a while because I like to travel and I have over the years taken 10 days off to go to Rarotonga and had zero way of my team contacting me. And I do work part-time when I'm in France for three months of the year. So it's really important to me that my business can do its thing and grow and thrive even when I'm not watching.
That's the dream, right? Whatever your business model ends up being, ultimately, I think that a business that can run with less and less of you being the doer, being the executor, and more and more of you being the CEO who gets to proactively create this long-term runway that allows you to step away for weeks or months at a time, eventually, either with a team or with systems supporting that absence is one of the absolute joys of being an entrepreneur, especially when we don't get things like paid leave anymore, or, I'm not getting paid parental leave. So all of this to say, this is something that I've been thinking through for a while for multiple different reasons, not just the whole baby bomb.
And it's something that I want to keep building up over time, creating this incredible business that is so purposeful, and so joyful to work in. Like I want to be there, but I don't need to be, so with all of that said and done, let's talk through my process, loose, rough, doing this for the first time process, figuring out how I'm going to manage business, life, and endless nappies when this little baby arrives.
Like anything, the first step is to think about the vision. When we started talking about Project Baby, I spent some time reflecting on what do I want life to feel like during that time. And this is going to be, again, very much anchored in your values and what you want out of life.
And all options were open. Anything on the spectrum from, I'm stepping away and shutting up shop for the foreseeable future, I'm doing a big long hiatus, all the way to, I'm going to keep on going business as usual my husband can step in, maybe I'll hire a nanny, like whatever it was. I really put all options on the table.
When I asked myself, how do I want this to feel and how do I see my days and knowing myself and knowing what's important to me, what does that look like for me? A very strong sense of myself, identity kept coming back up and I knew that I wanted to still keep working in some capacity. I love what I do because it's my purpose because the intellectual stimulation and the challenge and the problem solving and the creativity and the joy of it all are what makes me.
And it's not just my business. I want to keep doing my pole dancing. So there are things that I know that I'm going to have to scale back. I know that I'm not going to go as regularly or whatever it is. But there were things that I identified that felt like non-negotiables for me to feel my happiest best self and be the role model and mom that I'd like to be because I'm feeling so good.
So in that, obviously started looking at my context and looking at what I would need in terms of support in terms of that ability to make that vision come to life. And obviously having a lot of conversations with the Frenchie. And what we decided would work best for our family is essentially the Frenchie, my husband, he's going to take off an entire year from work. And that first year will be so full of change, so full of discovery, so full of learning for us both.
I'm really happy that we're at a place in life and business and finances where that is possible for us. And then for myself, what I say happening is that I would like to have a few weeks off completely obviously for physical and mental recovery from the labor and all of that good stuff.
And then I very much see myself working sort of five to 10 hours per week at first, to be doing a little bit of work on my own after three months. And slowly scaling that up to 15 to 20 hours per week until the end of this year. And then I'm not sure exactly what the future holds, but my goal would be to settle into a business rhythm where I'm running my two businesses, my team, and all of that good stuff, working around about 20 to 30 hours per week and making my revenue goals, my sweet spot revenue goals. And we'll talk about that in a moment, in terms of what that means for my KPIs and my ambitions and my big goals for the business and their growth and their revenue as well.
But I think for me, what's really important to note is that obviously, I work from home. I can work as and when I want because I'm serving clients from all around the world. And those five to 10 hours per week, they can happen at 2 a. m. They can happen at 2 p. m. They're super flexible. And I'm going to have my husband who can enable that time for me.
And then when I'm not doing work, I'm going to enable that time for him. So he can get out of the house. So he can go for a run. So he can catch up with a friend. And that's how we see it working for our family. Now the thing is, because I'm currently working on average about 30, 35 hours per week, how am I going to drop down to five to 10? What would that look like?
What I realized is that what I want to be solely focused on for at least three, or four months is going to be client work. And in particular, my empire's clients. So they are going to get all of me. When I'm at work, it's to serve them. It's to respond to their voice notes. It's to build their businesses with them. It's to hop on calls with them. And that's the work that I'm going to be doing almost exclusively for the first three, or four months before I pick back up my content creation, my CEO and team management kind of tasks.
So that's quite confronting in terms of all of the things that I will no longer be doing, which brings me to my next phase of this planning of this problem solving, which was around the business audit. So how do my businesses look right now, Badass Careers and Badass Empires, and how will they need to look in order to bring this vision to life?
To do this, I essentially just looked at every single aspect of my business, marketing, sales, finances, client experience, team, you name it, every area of business, and I went through a classic keep, kill or change exercise. Am I going to keep it? Am I going to kill it? Or am I going to change it? And I'll give you a little bit of an insight into a few of these different business areas.
So for example, let's take marketing and sales. How am I going to make sure that people still know who I am, the business is growing and the sales keep coming in, even though I don't know who I am. I'm not going to be present as such on social media. I'm not going to be creating any content and so on and so forth. So if we take Badass Careers, for example, Badass Careers works exclusively now through evergreen funnels, which means that I have prerecorded masterclasses that teach and educate and show off my expertise for an hour. And at the end of those prerecorded masterclasses, I walk them through the course options that I have in ways that they can work with us to go further.
And so the model is to get eyeballs, get traffic on these masterclasses and a certain percentage of people watching that masterclass will end up purchasing the paid product, the paid self-study course.
Now, before I had a hybrid model where I was having, evergreen sales happening all year round, sales coming in every single day, plus four massive launches per year, where I'd get a massive cash injection doing a full-on marketing campaign and launch. So for example, launches, they are no launches for the rest of this year when it comes to getting visibility, getting eyeballs, and getting traffic on these funnels.
It means that I had to look at the business activity in terms of content creation. There's the research, there's the writing, there's the creating, there's the editing, there's the captioning, there's the scheduling. So there's creative work, there's the admin work. So I had to very much think about what can I delegate and what needs to be me?
So when it comes to me, I need to do the research, the writing, the creating, or at least that's how I work. Some people have content writers. I do not like that. I like writing all of my own content. And so for me, for example, I knew that I wanted to have a huge runway of content batched in advance so that I don't have to worry about jumping on social media and being like, “Hey guys, here are four resume tips” when I've got spit up on my t-shirt, I haven't slept in two days. You know what I mean?
I knew that content creation and creativity would be very difficult for me when I'm sleep-deprived, and so that was something that I identified, like we're going to keep the content, but we're going to change up how we do it. I love to batch, but I usually just do one big batch per quarter and I'm going to be batching months worth of content, which I'll get into detail about in just a little bit.
I also simplified the offer. So we were going to put out a confidence course for Badass Careers around being more confident at work, overcoming imposter syndrome, people pleasing, setting boundaries, avoiding burnout, you name it, super cool course concept, started writing it, did so much input research work on that, and we've decided to kill it. Because it's just not the year to build out, market, launch, film, edit, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, a brand new course.
So there were things that we've definitely stopped doing. We're not adding any more courses, any more products, any more offers to the Badass Careers suite. And on that note, we have killed all of the client work for Badass Careers. So my signature group program, the Career Glow Up, which used to be a six-month group coaching program to help people figure out what they truly wanted out of their careers, brand themselves, market themselves, and land their dream jobs, and honestly achieve incredible career moves, career pivots, you name it. We closed down the Career Glow Up, which was an emotional decision for me because the Career Glow Up was my baby. And it works, it's hard looking at something that brings in $300,000-400,000 per year and saying, you know what, we're going to stop.
But we're going to stop because, again, looking at my business vision, I only have so many hours per week. So I had to make a decision and I'm going to be going to my empire's clients. So Rosie needed to stop coaching and badass careers. We had a wonderful career coach as well, delivering within the Career Glow Up just by complete chance, she has also left on maternity leave. And so rather than recruiting training, building up a brand new coaching profile, and telling people, “Hey, by the way, you can invest significant money into Career Glow Up but I won't even be there to support you or coach you”, I decided that if I can't do Career Glow Up really well, I don't want to do it at all. It's too precious to me. It's too transformative.
And so we made the difficult decision to shut down Career Glow Up. And then all of the extras, the coaching calls, the booster calls around things like mock interview preparation, salary negotiation, role plays.
We had, private coaching for all sorts of things available. All of that has gone again, just can't afford that client work fulfillment that only I can do or someone else on the team who is also on leave. And so the only client work that we have left for Badass Careers are the resume and cover letter and LinkedIn reviews, which I have someone in my team who has been doing them for over four years and is an expert in copywriting, graphic design, resumes, career coaching, and can absolutely do those just as well, if not better than me. So that's absolutely perfect. So we decided to keep the reviews.
However. Everything else in terms of clients, when it comes to Badass Careers, we are shutting down shop. So that means in the absence of the revenue coming in from coaching for Badass Careers, we're going to have to really up the traffic and visibility and marketing going towards our evergreen funnels, which are selling our self-study courses. And so that is a business model shift that's really important.
And then, as I said, my focus is very much going to be on the client work for empires. Now I'm already booked at least three to four months ahead at any one time, so there's no issue there in terms of worrying about leads coming in or anything like that. And that's the power of a great personal brand and a rock-solid business model.
And I know that so many more private coaching applications are going to come in. I'm not worried about that whatsoever. I'm also, in the meantime, going to be dedicating some of my brain power to building out our very first group coaching program at a much more accessible price point, which will become the signature flagship offer for badass empires as well.
So little sneak peek into that, but watch this space. So I'm going to get started on that before the baby arrives, and then the team will be able to start building it out in terms of slide decks and materials that I've designed and making it all beautiful for you while I'm on leave. Aside from that, all of the coaching for Badass Careers, all of the client work, aside from those reviews, it's on an indefinite hiatus.
Again, this is why it's really smart that I've created a model that had both this evergreen and live launch or highly involved aspect to it. Because if I need to cut the live launches and the highly involved coaching and client delivery aspects I've already got an evergreen sales machine working for me. I just need to pump it up.
Then when it comes to the team, just over time, naturally, because I had this vision in mind of how I wanted this phase of my life to look, I've gone from having a team of seven last year to whenever anyone finishes the internship or goes on maternity leave or moves on for whatever reason, I haven't necessarily been replacing them.
And I've been consolidating their responsibilities into slight role modifications and basically this team design, that's going to be a lot simpler, more efficient, and reduce that level of complexity because managing seven, eight people last year at the peak versus having a team of three or four people here, depending on whether we've got an intern at the moment or not, it makes a massive difference in terms of the ability for my number two, my head of marketing and operations essentially to be able to manage these people, delegate that amount of people while still doing her role as well.
So just things like that, in terms of making sure that the team is going to be really manageable and work really well, even if I'm not there. So knowing that simpler, smaller, like small and mighty team size. Would be the team to navigate this new business model. That's very evergreen, heavy, that vision being held over time, because luckily when you find out you're pregnant, you've still got nine months to go, but being able to have that foresight has been really helpful because now we're able to reduce that in terms of stress and complexity as well.
And also been able to upskill my number two on things like one-to-ones, giving feedback, and creating smart dashboards that track numbers to run the business, sales, conversion rates, and evergreen funnel performance. So putting things in place so that this person really can run the business in my absence.
She's been at Badass Careers and now Badass Empires for well over four years and she knows what she's doing. So that's just an incredible asset to have as well. So that's a little sneak peek into how I'm changing my business itself and have made some interesting decisions in terms of keeping, killing, or changing entirely.
There were a lot more where that came from, as I'm sure you can imagine. And now let's talk about the practical side of things, like concretely preparing the runway. Getting everything in place. So the big thing for me is going to be the content. So my plan is to batch six months' worth of YouTube videos for Badass Careers.
So that's 26 videos, then four months' worth of Empires podcast. Now I have got things that are going to happen spontaneously and will be real-time that I'm going to get out. And I'm still going to record from time to time, especially some really exciting interviews and guests that we have coming up. But in general, having four months of what I call evergreen topics, which are topics that don't date, don't age in terms of like my core learnings and education that I have for you.
Again, when you think about the content, it's not going to be, ‘what is the Instagram algorithm doing right now?’ Because imagine if I record that podcast and it gets put out in four months and the algorithms changed, gotta be smart about the kind of content as well that's going to be really relevant long term.
Then I want to batch four months of Instagram reels for both Careers and Empires. Even within that, we have killed things like repurposing reels over to TikTok or YouTube shorts. Again, we've simplified and we've doubled down based on data on what's actually working for us when it comes to sales.
I've also recorded endless B roll footage, which is footage of me working on my laptop, on the phone, walking, whatever it is. So that my team can create reels without me as well. So basically the dream is that for at least four months I'm not creating any content. I am absolutely hands-off in terms of not having to care what I look like, or what I sound like, while still serving my community, while still growing my community, while still educating my community.
It's just about getting nice and organised. Obviously, I have a team, a small and mighty team that I can delegate to in terms of concretely “caption this, please schedule this, etc”, but you could absolutely do this yourself. I'm four or five years in now. Of course, I've got this team, a massive content production schedule. I'm putting out YouTube videos and putting out podcasts. I'm running two businesses.
Your business might look like three Instagram reels per week, and that's cool. And whatever your four months of content would look like may look completely different, but in terms of me having that small team, I am able to say, “Hey, can you please edit this? Can you please schedule this? Can you please get this out?” And that's obviously a huge help.
It allows me to know that they've got a lot to get on with while I'm away. It'll be business as usual. I've just got a massive backend for them to be able to get through, which feels really good. I've also got those marketing and sales dashboards, those dashboards to run the business in place.
And so I will be able to have these communication frameworks in place that I will, for example, receive a Loom update. So a Loom is a software that you can use to speak and record your screen at the same time. It's awesome. We use it pretty much every day. And my team member will create a Loom video for me, walking me through the dashboards every few weeks, so I feel connected to business performance.
With that, we've already pre-identified some marketing triggers and campaigns that can be pulled if the sales aren't going where we want them to go. I'll be able to send her a quick voice note as well and say, “Hey, have you tried this? Have you tried that?” My team will do daily check-ins and check-outs so I can see what they're working on and Slack every single day. We'll keep in touch via voice notes.
I won't be there for meetings. I won't be there for one-to-ones. I might join the Monday kick-off here and there, but they're not expecting me at all. But it doesn't mean we can't keep in touch from time to time and just make sure that they're feeling okay. If they have any urgent questions, they can reach out to me. It's all about that flexibility. We've also put in place things like project trackers that allow me to see where the team is at in terms of progress on their projects as well, without having to, again, be there, and be part of those conversations all the time. It just allows me to hop in, get that big-picture view, and make sure everything is tracking along nicely.
We've also worked really hard to put some systems in place. So for example, you know how on social media where people are like “drop resume below and I'll send you my free resume template”, like that lead generation kind of life, well we used to have people sending out those links, like the junior of the team sending out those links manually, for example. And having a smaller team with reduced capacity, but still really big goals I've invested in tools like ManyChat, which will send those links out automatically based on a keyword that's dropped below the reel for example, we have put things in place to do the heavy lifting for us. So we've done things like built out a 50 email long sequence for Badass Careers so that people can receive essentially an email a week, every single week for a year, and it's all automated.
So if they sign up to any of our masterclasses, if they show interest, they'll start getting these emails from me that are full of value, full of tips, and full of advice. Meanwhile, I'm not having to do anything, but they feel like they're hearing from me and they're learning from me and I'm building them up and I'm making sure that they're still having wins in my absence, for example.
We also made sure that we had really clear workflows in place for the team. So for example, if a YouTube video goes out or a podcast goes out, there's always going to be a reel promoting that video or that podcast with sound bites and a teaser of that. There are going to be Instagram stories pertaining to that video episode or that podcast episode.
And there's also going to be an email going out to the community as well. So little things like that, little workflows with templates and tools, just to make sure that everyone knows. What to do and when, if an event happens. So if a YouTube video gets posted, then this, and this happens. And I've also had things in place really strong ways of wrapping up clients from Careers, really clear contracts with my Empire clients in terms of, “Hey, I'm going to take a few weeks off when the baby comes. This will be added to the end of your private coaching agreement” and so on and so forth.
So just thinking about all the things that can help you to navigate this time and either take that heavy lifting out and protect you in terms of that clarity of that communication and knowing that people are very clear about what's going on yourself included.
And then in terms of preparing the runway, of course, you've got to think about money. So what felt really good for me was having two to three months' worth of my business expenses ready to go in my bank account so that I don't have to check my bank balance. I want to be able to go away for three months, and just focus on my clients, right, and to not have to check in with Slack if I don't need to, not have to create any content, not have to check my bank balance and wonder how the sales are going and that kind of thing. It gets to be a happy surprise, whatever happens with the sales.
It also takes that stress and heat off my team as well. Like, “Guys, we need to make this happen. We're living like month to month.” Not, they know that we've got a buffer. They know that they can do their absolute best. And of course, we have expectations and KPIs and we have things that they're gunning for. But it's not going to break the business. We'll be fine, right?
So having two to three months of business expenses fully covered in terms of a financial runway felt really good for me.
The last aspect of my preparation that I wanted to walk you through is around the mindset and goals because this is a big change and it's really tough when you go from being able to work when you want, how you want, wherever, whenever, and now there's almost this little dictator coming in, which is telling you, “Hey, all that freedom you've created, you're going to need to adapt that a little bit.”
Some things that used to be a given for you won't be a given anymore. For example, when it comes to the business goals this year, rather than a massive hyper-focus on revenue goals and reaching particular revenue milestones, I've got much more balanced lifestyle sweet spot goals.
What that means is a really exciting number in both businesses that we're shooting for and Rosie working five to 15 hours for a massive chunk of the year and honestly for the foreseeable future. So rather than saying we're going to go hard as the team of seven, eight, and Rosie's going to be here full time and we're going to double this business and we're going to double down like we are going to do so well, but with such a simple model with reduced complexity, and that's what success looks like.
So being able to make that shift was really important. I've also, in all transparency, just never worked this little in my life. I have been working at least part-time on top of school since I was 14 years old.
I've always been quite a hard worker in terms of pulling extra hours. Even at L'Oreal, I would work weekends, and evenings, and not to say that was a good thing, but I've just always been that way because what I do has always been so in line with my purpose that I've always loved working. I enjoy working.
And so in doing this business where it becomes incredibly addictive because you can always do more and you can always put in more hours, and then you see these incredible results coming back to you, I've had to be really careful and over the past year I've been very conscious of not working more than 40 hours a week.
I've practiced indulging and taking my Fridays off just because I wanted to go get my nails done, get my hair done, or catch up with a friend. Or for example, I've done a lot of travel lately, a huge amount of travel this year, working part-time in France, going to Canada, going to Australia for almost three weeks, had Nils's dad over, been working like I guess an average of probably 10 hours a week for a month.
So there's been a lot going on in my life and I've been practicing very much being okay with that and making that work, which has been really good. And then in terms of my mindset, I guess another big thing is just what I was saying at the start of the episode, which is I'm going to prepare to be able to do the bare minimum, but then also allow myself to be able to change my mind and allow myself to be able to work more or jump back into action if I need to.
And at some point, I'm open to the idea that it may make more sense for our family, and because of my immense earning potential as an entrepreneur, to hire a nanny two days a week and just go hard. So as much as I'm sitting here being like, I will not work a single hour over 20 hours a week for at least six months, at some point, I also want to have the option for that not to be the case.
So we can prepare for what we think it's going to be like and what we think we'll be capable of and what we think we might want to happen, and also stay open-minded that we get to decide because this is our business and we get to do it our way.
I think what really helps when I zoom out and I think about business in general is that there are going to be phases to build your business. There are going to be phases to pivot your business. There are going to be phases to double down on the massive sales rush that's just happened right now. And there are going to be phases to step back. Life isn't linear, so neither are you, neither is your business and that's okay. It's okay that this won't be an immense phase of new product development and new ventures and opening up new lines of sales and marketing. That's not what this year is about.
This year is about simplification. It's about doing more with less. It's about working smarter, not harder. And it's about enjoying this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, for me to become a mum for the very first time and as much as I can joke that my business is my baby, my business isn't my baby. My baby is gonna be my baby and my business is going to be able to support me in that and facilitate that not take away from that.
So as you can see quite a lot of thinking and reflection and planning does go into big life changes like this but the cool thing is that this is yours and you get to make that happen and whatever I decided I wanted to make work, I know that because of where I'm at in my business, I can, and I could have done it.
I can set the vision, I can reverse engineer the goals, and I can make it come to life. And that's the beauty of being an entrepreneur and being able to design this on purpose in a way that feels really good. So I'd love to hear from you. What do you think about the way I'm attacking this phase of my life?
Have you gone through that transition yourself of a major life change, like becoming a parent or anything else that completely shifted the way you needed to show up in the world and manage your time? If you've got any tips for me, hints for me, or hacks for me, please let me know, I'd love to hear from you, so send me a DM on Instagram, and otherwise, I'll keep you in the loop, and I'll let you know how it's going, I'll let you know about the expectations versus reality, and I know, in my heart, in my head, in my gut, that this experience of becoming a mum it's absolutely going to make me a better entrepreneur, just like any massive personal development, personal growth, big life change project will.
And I'm really excited to see how I transform, how I view the world, how I view my business, how I view my definition of success. I'm open to change and I'm open to that shifting. And I'm really excited to see who I'm going to become in this journey because I know it's going to make me a better CEO. I know it's going to make me a better coach.
