Becoming a Mom as an Entrepreneur
One of the identities that I took on quite quickly when I left my corporate job and started my first business was the fact that I was an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur who liked the hustle, that was ready to put in the time, and an entrepreneur who had a strong and important vision — building my business.
I dedicated massive time to building my first business, and I could see the results. I was able to build a community quickly, gain international press, start to monetize the idea. It felt good. Actually, it felt great. I was going a mile a minute, meeting people I never thought I would, and I truly felt that the sky was my limit.
But what I didn’t realize that at the same time, I stopped seeing my friends, all I could think about was “work”, and I was quickly becoming a work-a-holic, something that I had always strived not to do.
When we find that our passions mix with what we’re trying to build as an entrepreneur, it becomes a very slippery slope and blurred line of balancing our personal health, creating healthy boundaries, and making sure that we are prioritizing ourselves ahead of our businesses.
It wasn’t until life threw me two major curveballs that uprooted everything, that I started to realize the negative habits that I had picked up and the missing void in my life.
I spent the next two years reflecting on what type of entrepreneur I wanted to be, what was a long term vision of life that I wanted, and how my current habits, both good and bad, would help me shape the life that I wanted. Taking this break, was a necessary recharge. It showed me what really gave me passion, what caused me stressed, and what I thought I wanted out of being my own boss.
One thing that I hadn’t reflected on in my entrepreneurship plan was what it would be like to be a mom entrepreneur. Although having a child and being a mother was something that I’ve always wanted, it wasn’t something that I actually considered when mapping out my entrepreneurship plan.
It wasn’t until I became pregnant, that I started asking myself some very important questions.
- Would the way that I am currently making money be impacted by being a new mom?
- How much time would I take off?
- Did I have enough savings to make maternity leave work for me?
- What type of passive income streams was working for me?
- What other automation could I put in my business?
- Could my business run without me?
- How would my priorities shift as a new mom and an entrepreneur?
The goal of building any business is to build something that works without you. This is even more important when you realize that life isn’t just about you anymore.
Building a business as a mom entrepreneur is about building something reliable, consistent, and has recurring revenue.
Building a business as a mom entrepreneur is about building something with automation and having the right people to delegate to.
Building that type of business takes time. It takes infrastructure, planning, and a baseline first.
As I approach my 7th month of pregnancy, I am continuing to work on my entrepreneurship plan as a future new mom.
I continue to focus each day on the systems I build, the automation that can help me grow, and training a team that can manage the business without me, and growing my network.
Building an actionable and realistic plan for my maternity leave as a new mom is something that has helped give me specific goals and tasks to do leading up to my pregnancy.
One of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned over the past few years, is that life circumstances can change in a blink of an eye. It’s important to approach everything with a plan and a keen sense that the plan can and probably will change.
Originally published at https://womenmoneymakers.com on January 21, 2021.
