How I'm Prepping for Maternity Leave (and Growing Through Hard Seasons)
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What if you could step away from your business without missing a beat? Join Victoria as she prepares for her third maternity leave and to enjoy the summer off with her girls. This season finale episode is packed with insights and strategies to ensure your business thrives independently, drawing from her personal experiences with maternity leave years ago. You’ll discover how to identify potential pitfalls and succeed in automating and delegating tasks, creating a harmonious blend of work and family life.
Throughout this finale of The Branding Business School podcast, Victoria unravels the transformative magic of outsourcing. With six years of steering BrandWell, embracing her role as CEO meant letting go of wearing all the hats. From marketing to client management, Victoria shares how outsourcing crucial tasks has been the backbone of her business scalability and a shield against burnout. Even if outsourcing isn't your current path, Victoria offers creative solutions for enlisting support from your network, ensuring both business and personal well-being thrive.
Prepare to be inspired by tales of resilience and adaptability. In the second half of this episode, Victoria dives into how her and her team have been navigating the recent rebranding challenges at BrandWell, which she calls, The Messy Middle. Victoria delves into the lessons learned from unexpected trials and the power of faith and flexibility. This episode is your guide to embracing chaos, finding peace in tumultuous times, and growing through every challenge. We’re ending Season 9 with a GOOD one, so throw in those ear buds, and press play!
Setting Up a Business to Operate With or Without You
A few years ago, Victoria recorded a similar episode when she was preparing her business to take time away during her maternity leave with her second daughter. Now that she’s about to have her third, Victoria actually went back to relisten to that episode and reminded herself of how good the information was. You can listen to that episode, here!
If one of your goals is to have a business that operates when you are not around whether that be having a baby or on vacation, this episode will provide you with tangible tips that you can start implementing today to get your business ready for the extended time away.
Two Questions to Ask Yourself
What would completely fall apart if I stepped away today?
What can I do now to fix that?
The only way you can answer these two questions is to really pay attention to all the little tasks that you handle for your business. Take note of every task you do each day. What are you doing for the business, how are you moving the needle forward, and what are people coming to you for? Once you have your list, you need to figure out what you can either automate or what can be handed off to someone else.
Outsourcing Your Tasks
Victoria has been running BrandWell for six years and she’s seen time and time again how acting like the CEO will actually help you grow your business. When you stop trying to play every role in your business and you start to act and work as the CEO, things will change, things will improve, whether your business is taking off or not.
It can be scary outsourcing when you’re first starting out, but there’s a cost to everything. There’s the cost of hiring – training someone to do it and the time it takes to do that, but there’s also the cost of doing it yourself. The cost of hiring somebody that’s skilled in a specific task to free up your time and your mind to focus on things that only you can do is far less costly than the cost of trying to do it all yourself and eventually burning out.
Here’s a list of tasks that Victoria has outsourced to members of her team over the last five years, which has allowed her to take a maternity leave while operating a multi-six figure design agency with a lot of clients.
Marketing
Sales
Onboarding
Brand Strategy – Victoria created The Branding Business School course to be support the masses without having to meet with them one-on-one
Design – Victoria has a full team of designers and does not design brands or websites for clients anymore
Day-to-day management of BrandWell
Payments & Collections through HoneyBook
Payroll
After seeing this list you might think, what is even left? Frankly, that’s the point. Victoria has been working on this over the last six years to get BrandWell to operate with or without her, and it took a lot of hiring and being willing to reinvest the profits back into her business, but now she’s able to take summers off and prepare for her third baby.
Ask For Help
Maybe you’re not at the place to outsource yet or the thought of it feels overwhelming. An alternative to outsourcing is asking for help. If you don’t have time to hire a team or train people before your upcoming time off, what else can you take off your plate? Is there a family member that could help with your other kids, or with laundry or grocery shopping? If you need to ask for help, just do it. A lot of entrepreneurs have a type A mentality and are prideful in being able to “do it all”, but that can also be a weakness when we’re overwhelmed and we simply just can’t get as much done. Don’t be afraid to accept help when it’s offered.
Be Outspoken About Your Time Away
One of the best things you can do as a service provider is to be really vocal about the time you’re going to be taking off from your business. You don’t want to catch somebody off guard when they reach out to you and they receive an auto responder that states you’re out of office for weeks on end. That can create confusion and uncertainty and they’re probably going to look somewhere else.
Set Clear Expectations
Create pieces of communication that are going to set clear expectations for both your current clients and your future ones, because if you don’t, you’re going to be working on your vacation or your maternity leave. Set clear expectations across the board and give them ample notice as well.
Block Your Calendar
Block off the dates that you plan on taking time off. You don’t want somebody to accidentally get onto your calendar when you’re not available. No need to create extra stress for yourself trying to hop on meetings that you never planned to be on.
Train Your Team
When preparing to take extended time away, train your team. Create SOP’s (standard operating procedures), tutorial videos, loom videos, or any other materials that can support your team when you’re out of office.
Trim The Fat
What do you spend time on that doesn’t necessarily move the needle for your business? It may be something that you enjoy doing, but not necessarily driving new business. Determine what is necessary vs. what is not necessary. Don’t spend all your time and all your hours investing in tasks that are not changing the bottom line if you can stop doing them for a short while. Spend your time better preparing for all the other things that you need to do to get your business ready to operate without you.
Set Realistic Expectations for Yourself and Your Business
If you can build a company that can sell and onboard and serve clients while you’re not there, that’s amazing. That’s something to be proud of and something that’s deserving of a few weeks off here and there. So allow yourself to be fully present in your time off and away from the business. Set realistic expectations for what you’re gonna be able to get done and for what your business is going to be able to produce while you’re gone, so that way you’re not going to be disappointed if you can’t make it through your to-do list or if your numbers are a little low while you’re gone.
Have a Point Person for Emergencies
Things are going to pop up, just expect it. If you expect it, you’re not going to be uprooted by it when it happens. Have somebody in place that is designated to field those phone calls, handle the emails, handle upset clients, or meet with the team. Whatever it is, you need to have a point person in place because if you don’t, you’ll be working when you're supposed to be on your vacation or maternity leave.
BrandWell’s Growing Pains
BrandWell raised their prices at the start of the year and at first, it was smooth sailing, but shortly after the brand retreat, Victoria started noticing a little bit of a shift. There was a drop in leads, lower engagement on their marketing, and a spike in unmet expectations.
Victoria prides herself and BrandWell on client experience, so seeing this recurring theme of clients that had unmet expectations was hard to stomach. This initiated a full evaluation to determine what was going on. When there are changes in client behavior, pay attention. Don’t just write it off as a bad month. Pay attention because your customers will tell you everything you need to know about the direction you need to take your brand, but you have to be willing to listen.
Victoria and her managers started meeting weekly to really review their processes and ask key questions to help them determine where the disconnect was. By doing this reflection, they were able to identify that what they initially thought would be a value add as part of the rebrand, BrandWell’s clientele actually wanted the opposite. So now, Victoria is able to change that up and hopefully avoid future confusion from clients with unmet expectations.
Another thing that she realized with this rebrand and price increase was that you have to also revisit your messaging. It’s not enough to level up your visuals and raise your rates. You have to clarify your message to match the transformation you’re promising. So this is another area that has been reviewed, evaluated, and changed to better align with the price point that BrandWell is now at.
A good best practice that Victoria also went through with her managers was review all projects over the last six months where a manager was pulled into the project. If you don’t have managers or a team, this could look like any project where you had to get on a phone and clarify expectations or kind of put out a fire. Take note of these projects and see if there are any patterns or common themes between them.
As challenging as the last six weeks have been for Victoria, she’s humble enough to say that she runs a branding agency and they didn’t perfectly roll out their rebrand. But also, that’s kind of the point. The point of the rebrand is to adapt, to grow. It’s like launching a new brand all over again, and when you do so, you have to still pay attention because it’s something new. Entrepreneurship will always require adaptation. What worked last year might not work next week, but that’s part of the journey and something that Victoria is honestly grateful for.
Faith That Grounds Me
There’s a verse that Victoria comes back to all the time and it says, “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, of love, and of sound mind.” Since the overwhelm has creeped in for Victoria over the last six weeks, she has been playing a song called Sound Mind by Brian and Katie Torval. The lyrics state, “In the chaos, you are the peace. In my suffering, you’re here with me. In the darkness, you never leave. God of Mercy, you are walking with me. I surrender anxiety. All the striving has to cease. In this moment, you’re still the king. This is the gift you are giving to me, a sound mind for the spirit of fear. A sound mind so that I can see clearly.”
It’s during these seasons where Victoria is humbled, and struggles to show up as the leader that she wants to be, or the entrepreneur that she wants to be. It’s these seasons when she’s most dependent on God and that’s when he gives her the sound mind to remind her that she’s not supposed to have it all figured out. She’s not supposed to be self-sufficient, because she relies on the all-sufficient one.
Wrap Up of Season 9
Lean into the hard seasons because so much good can come from them. When Victoria returns with Season 10 of The Branding Business School Podcast, she will hopefully be able to share some wonderful updates on how the changes that were made are positively impacting BrandWell. Until then, there are 160 episodes in the podcast library! Feel free to binge those while we’re on a break! You can also follow Victoria’s journey of becoming a mom of three and running BrandWell through all of it by joining the Insider List here! If you’re not already following BrandWell on Instagram, be sure to do that too so you don’t miss out on all the summer updates! See you again when Season 10 returns! Thank you for listening to The Branding Business School Podcast!
Key Quotes
“If you have a business that cannot run without you, then you don't just have a business, you have a job.”
Victoria Marcouillier
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