When I found out that I was pregnant I was overwhelmed by a strong desire for privacy. I didn’t want to tell anyone outside of our very closest circles, so any sort of formal announcement was completely out of the question. This wasn’t totally new for me – I don’t share pictures of my family or home on social media – but this was some next level stuff. I knew almost immediately that I did not want to make mention of our baby before she arrived, after she arrived, during my maternity leave, or possibly ever in the future.
After I came to terms with the fact that I would need and want to take some significant time away from my business postpartum, I scoured the internet for articles about how to take a maternity leave as a service-based business. I dug up best practices, tried and true methods, what did and didn’t work. I honestly think I read around 25–30 blog posts, desperate to find someone who felt like I did. But I found the opposite. There was one common denominator in every strategy I read – you had to actually tell people that you were going to have and then subsequently had a baby in order for it to work. And of course, the people who weren’t sharing their pregnancies online were also likely NOT blogging about it. So I hope that this can serve as the resource that I wasn’t able to find.
A few of the many, many ideas I took in:
- Running an email signature in the months leading up to your maternity leave that states your last day in office
- Autoresponders saying that you were no longer accepting clients because of your maternity leave
- Canned emails through Dubsado, Honeybook or another CRM
- Deleting all emails during your maternity leave to return with a fresh start
- Sign off posts on social media saying you’ll be back in a couple of months
I finished my research and basically decided that there was no way around it. I had to tell prospective clients. And according to what I read, I was hopeful that people would celebrate my pregnancy and want to work with me even more. But It still felt totally wrong to me. I couldn’t get over how off I felt telling strangers that I was pregnant, but trudged ahead figuring there was no other way.
The following week I had two inquiry calls with big, very eager clients looking for jobs starting in mid-June (I was due in April) – I told them both I was pregnant and they both immediately declined to work with me because they weren’t sure I’d be ready to work again by their project start date.
I remember hanging up after my second call and walking downstairs to tell my husband – those were the last two people I was going to tell I was pregnant.
I’ll pause to say yes, I hear you. Olivia – feminism! How will we ever normalize and arrive at acceptance unless we show that expectant women are entirely capable of working in the same way that any other human being is? Shouldn’t we be shouting this from the rooftops?
Honestly – YES. This is a valid argument and I agree with it 100%. Pregnancy does NOT make you incompetent (in fact I was probably the most productive I have ever been from 13–38 weeks pregnant) but here’s the thing –– I simply could not muster up the strength to do it. I could barely make it through the day without taking 2–3 naps, eating six servings of hash browns, and going to bed at 7 PM, let alone strategically craft a narrative around why at 35 weeks pregnant I was more hireable than ever before.
I truly believe that it’s a great time to be a woman – I know personally I feel more empowered now than ever before – and from my perspective all of the hard work we have done to be recognized as equal contributing members of society whose voices deserve to be heard means that you can literally do whatever you want to do. THAT is what’s empowering. Write your own narrative. Tell your followers when your babe is the size is a pineapple or never mention your baby online. Tell clients or don’t tell clients. Send emails from the hospital or take six months off. Stay at home or enroll in full time daycare. Whatever is best for your family works for me, and I will never criticize it or tell you how I think you should do it differently. I am sharing this story because I hit so many dead ends when looking for resources and it was totally isolating. Was I just super weird for not wanting to talk about my pregnancy online? Had literally no one ever before had a baby without telling prospective clients? There had to be a different way, and when I couldn’t find it, I decided to come up with my own.
If it wasn’t clear already – this is a very personal thing. I love reading birth stories on blogs and follow lifestyle influencers whose kids are central to their personal brand. It’s all about what’s best and right for your family. But there are so many reasons people might not want to share their kids online, and I think it’s unreasonable to put pressure on any woman to share one of the most personal, intimate things that you can go through with an anonymous audience. This includes inquiries! If someone is putting pressure on you to share your pregnancy online – telling you that you’re being disingenuous, that pregnancy is good for engagement, or wondering why you’re hiding your baby – they do NOT have your best interest in mind.
Whatever feels right to you is the right thing to do.
So now let’s get down to it. How to manage pregnancy, postpartum, and a maternity leave while running a service-based business and not posting about it on the internet.
Here’s exactly what I did:
Pregnancy: This one’s pretty simple. Just don’t tell anyone! I had a running joke that I didn’t want to have kids until people stopped hashtagging their children’s full names on the internet. That’s still happening but my personal stance on kids online had been pretty decently established before I was pregnant. I asked family and friends to not post pictures of my bump on social and everyone happily obliged. I had a theory that everyone who needed to know that I was pregnant would find out and everyone who didn’t need to know would probably find out too because word generally travels pretty fast nowadays. I just said that I had a really strange desire for privacy and I couldn’t totally explain it but that it felt very primal. 99% of people had no problem with this.
Telling clients: I did tell my retainer clients that I was pregnant when I was about 5 months along. I wanted to give them time to either work with me in advance or end our contract and hire someone else (which I was okay with and totally understood). I really did not tell any other current or past clients unless they reached out and it felt appropriate (I had just finished working with Bumpin’ Blends and Village Birth and was excited for their wisdom and support!)
Another option here would be to hire another designer to carry on some of your work while you’re out. If you don’t want to lose a retainer or are concerned about how a client will respond, you might let them know that you have hired and vetted a designer who will take your place while you’re out. This designer should understand that you will return to your role when your leave is over. There are a LOT of great designers out there who will happily take on a gig like this! However, referrals are stressful and vetting designers is a lot of work. I was so gassed I did not have the energy for it, so I gave my clients the option to work in advance or end the contract (one worked in advance, one ended the contract).
Resist the urge: You guys – social media is POWERFUL. The adrenaline rush of likes and comments is 100% real. And people LOVE babies. I can’t tell you the number of times I almost posted an ultrasound or bump picture just because I needed some content. If you feel strongly about this you have to recognize two things 1) you will at some point consider changing your mind and telling everyone and 2) that it is 100% okay to change your mind and tell everyone. You are the boss and if you have a change of heart – go for it! Shoot that cute flat lay with your ultrasound pic and a onesie and shout it from the rooftops! But if you’re starting from a point of desiring complete privacy I’d recommend sitting on it for 24 hours.
Hiring a VA: I hired an assistant in October (7 months before I was due) because I knew I was going to need some help postpartum. This gave us a ton of time to get to know each other better and start to lay the foundation for what would happen while I was out of the office. I recognize that this might not be possible for everyone, but I will tell you that if there is ANY way you can make it happen you will not regret it. You might have someone helping you for just 5 hours a month, but you will be able to build up trust and get to know each other a bit better if you can loop them in a few months before you are going to be out of the office. I basically won the lottery and found the greatest studio manager on earth which made the process easier for me. But I did spend a lot of time looking for her – I interviewed probably 10 people before hiring Kiara!
Tasks that I would recommend a VA for postpartum:
- Invoices and contracts
- Responding to inquiries
- Posting on social
- Facilitating communication between clients and you if you’re still working a bit on leave
- Facilitating communication between clients and your replacement designer if you hire one
Booking in Advance: This takes a bit of reverse engineering, but you need to decide the last day that you want to be working before you have your baby (mine was 2 weeks prior to my due date, knowing projects would likely go a bit past this date) and then work backwards from there to find the last date that you can accept new clients. I booked my last visual branding clients on March 1 and then after that had a few projects pop up where I said “I can take this on, but it needs to start on X date and end on X date.” And if the timing worked – we moved forward.
A quick side note –Do you know how long your projects take? Do a deep dive into your work and track ALL of your design time in a spreadsheet for a couple months to determine how long it takes you to complete different projects. This is truly the most valuable information in your business as it will empower you to price and schedule with a strategic mindset.
April 23: My due date
April 9: Last day of work
March 1: Last day to book any bigger jobs
After March 1 I started telling inquiries that I was booking for a June 10 start date and did not provide any other information. As far as they were concerned I was booked for 3.5 months which is NOT unreasonable in the design industry at all! I also told a few people that I was going to be on a sabbatical. You have COMPLETE control over how you want to talk about your pregnancy and maternity leave. This is your body, your journey, and your business. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise.
Scheduling social: I designed 12 weeks of social media posts and scheduled them in Planoly before I went on leave and this was probably the best thing that I did before I was out of office. My studio manager published the posts for me every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday because I knew that I really needed some firm and clear separation from work, but you could do this yourself as well. Planoly sends a notification when it’s time to post and you could do it in under 15 seconds (I am not exaggerating) and then turn your phone off or leave it in another room. Kiara also managed my DMs and comments but an alternative to that would be setting a timer for 10 minutes and checking your DMs and responding to comments. Again – when it’s done, set your phone down. It will be there waiting for you for the rest of eternity.
Postpartum: Only after having a baby did I realize that when I had dreamed about my postpartum experience, I had planned for everything to go perfectly. I thought that I would feel up to working a few weeks after having our daughter and that as a chronic “doer” I would be desperate to do a bit of work and get back in the swing of things. As it turned out a few weeks after having our daughter I was battling postpartum depression and felt pretty darn terrible! Many women feel incredible and actually have postpartum euphoria, which is my absolute deepest most desperate hope for you, but I will say this – plan to take off as much time as you possibly can because you can always tell clients that you are able to start their projects earlier than expected and that’s a much cheerier message than letting them know that you have to delay their job. I dragged my sleep deprived self through those first few weeks with only one client, and had they not been the greatest duo on earth (Maker Wine), I don’t think I would have survived.
Responding to Emails: Another place where Kiara really kept me afloat postpartum was my inbox. She responded to all of my inquiries using a series of canned emails that we had developed before I was out of the office. If a client needed a custom quote I would calculate the numbers and then she would send it. Regardless of whether or not you have an assistant I would recommend creating a pricing document (even if you don’t normally use one) and crafting emails that you can copy and paste for the majority of your inquiries. It will make the process of responding a lot less daunting knowing you have already done the bulk of the work!
If I did not have an assistant I would have done the following: set an out of office before heading to the hospital saying that I was going to be out of the office for 2 weeks. No further explanation necessary. Or – say you’re recharging. Say you’re on vacation. Say whatever you want! Then after those first two weeks I would spend 30 minutes to an hour every couple of days responding to emails. I changed the message on our inquiry form to say that we would respond within five business days (which does not seem that unreasonable, even though our NOW, NOW culture kind of tells us that we should be available 24/7) to give us a bit of a buffer as well.
Getting back into work: I took 4 months off before our daughter started daycare full time but started working gently but consistently around the 8 week postpartum mark. It made me feel human and alive but my capacity was WAY lower than what I anticipated it would be. I would recommend keeping the workload low and adding on as you feel comfortable and empowered to do so. Running a service-based business is a real double-edged sword. The ability to have some degree of flexibility and control over what I do is a huge gift and is not lost on me. I have stood in the lobby of our daycare center multiple times trying to encourage a teary mom as she leaves her 6 week old baby to return to work (it’s indisputable that the American system is failing women and that is an entirely separate topic). But our businesses and lives are intertwined and it can feel like the weight of the world when you get a big inquiry that you want to respond to but you’ve been home from the hospital for 24 hours and aren’t totally sure you even know what day it is, let alone how to use a computer or craft a coherent email. Be gentle with yourself. Lean into others, ask for help with your baby and ask for help with your work! Several times I posted “I need help with a couple of projects – today!’ and have hired designers to help me get a few things out the door when I was behind on deadlines.
A quick recap:
Again I want to emphasize that this post is for anyone else out there who runs a service-based business and is feeling an especially intense desire for privacy while they are preparing to go on leave. YOU are in charge of the narrative surrounding your pregnancy and I hope that you feel empowered to create your own plan of attack. There are a lot of ways to do this! From monthly bumpdates to taking a year off of social media entirely and everything in between – when you truly listen to your gut, you can feel confident and at peace with the fact that you are doing the best thing for you and your family.
If you have any questions about the strategies I used, please feel free to leave a comment or shoot me a quick email at olivia@oliviaherrickdesign.com and I would love to help!
A little side note / quick laugh that should give you a sense of how serious I was – I did a cover photoshoot for our golf association’s magazine at 6 months pregnant but only agreed to it if they could find a way to cover my belly. Three cheers for the power of typography!
