For the last 5 and a half years my husband and I have become top real estate agents in our area. We LOVE what we do, and it’s so true what they say about your business being your first “baby”! It’s been almost 8 weeks since we had our first baby, Grady, and I’m ready to share what’s worked and what I missed during these first months settling in.
Because our entire household income relies on the success of our real estate business, we knew we had to be strategic when starting a family to ensure we could balance it all. I wanted to be able to enjoy motherhood and some kind of maternity leave, while continue doing what I love: selling real estate and coaching other agents!
In this post, I’m going to share some of the ways we began prepping our business for baby, but you could also use these tips if you wanted to take an extended sabbatical, prepare for major surgery, or even just stress-test your business to make sure it’s optimized.
How to Prepare Your Business for Baby: What Worked for Us
1. Get clear on how you want your maternity leave to look.
A lot of times we forget to take a pause and ask ourselves the question: What do I want from this experience? It’s absolutely essential, here. Get very clear on exactly what you expect from your maternity leave. Do you want 12 weeks of maternity leave before you return to work part-time? Or do you think you’ll be itching to get back to some light work once you’ve settled in after the precious newborn months? Have a clear understanding of what this needs to look like for you, and what your business will have to be to support it.
This will give you an idea of the scope service you will commit to provide your clients while you ease into becoming a new parent - and in turn, how you’ll need to prepare. Because remember, just because you wish to take a well-deserved step back from work to truly soak in those precious newborn months, doesn’t mean your business has to stop! You just need the right systems (and people!) in place to take over the work you won’t be taking on. Which leads us to step #2…
2. Automate, Delegate, and Streamline
This strategy is employed in a business any time you begin scaling, but it’s especially important as you work to replace yourself in certain aspects of your business. In real estate, we wear many hats, but it’s important to remember that you don’t need to be the only one doing all the heavy lifting. In fact, there are really only a couple of tasks you should be doing every day in your business - the rest should be outsourced.
The biggest gift you can give yourself in your business is to organize it in a way that it works FOR you. This means, not wasting time typing out the exact same email you’ve sent 10 times before, tracking down long-term prospects, or choking through a scattered content calendar for your social media posting. In any given day, the only tasks you truly should be doing as a business owner are the revenue producing tasks around client acquisition and retention. Obviously there are a lot of other things that have to happen to keep your business afloat. But the only way to grow and create space for yourself like during a maternity leave is to replace yourself in as many aspects of your business as possible.
Spend some time to audit your business and figure out what you do each day, week and month. Automate as many of these tasks as you can using technology, templates, and other tools that are available to you. Outsource the tasks that need a human touch - you might consider hiring a transaction coordinator, virtual assistant, showing agent, or a social media manager. If you can, these hires should be done a few months before you intend on taking your leave, so that you can ensure your personnel are properly trained and confident to take over the role even when you’re offline.
Then, streamline the rest of the work by simplifying and eliminating whatever is redundant or unnecessary. Your business will not crumble if you turn off a few tasks for a couple of months. Decide what is not necessary or revenue producing and don’t feel guilty for keeping it warm on the back burner for a bit.
Sidenote - Teaching how to do this step by step is the biggest gift I can give my coaching students, so if you need some extra help here, check out the Market Authority Academy.
3. Save, save, save.
Now that you know how much time you’ll want away, and you’ve done a little business audit to know how much you’ll need in the bank for operating expenses, you need to save up! The biggest wish I had for my maternity leave was to return to work when I felt like it, not when I felt I had to because we were low on cash.
You’ll likely have several months to prepare your savings, and much longer if you’re planning your family in advance. I suggest setting aside a percentage of every commission check you get into a separate account where you can’t dip into funds that are meant to cushion your time with baby. This is also a time to ask yourself if there are ways you can cut expenses (like paid lead generation - if it’s not paying for itself now, ditch it), renegotiate commission or referral splits, and stop discounting your commissions.
4. Fine-tune your marketing plan.
The secret to a blissful maternity leave is knowing you’ll be returning to a pipeline full of clients, not starting from scratch once you get back! To ensure this, your marketing HAS to keep running for the duration of your leave.
This includes your social media content, marketing campaigns that are TESTED and PROVEN (now is not the time to try your hand at farming a new neighborhood!), and your prospecting channels need to be maintained as much as possible. Luckily, most of this content can and should be planned and scheduled in advance, and you can get a lot of your prospecting responsibilities covered with the help of an internal sales agent - or ISA (human or tech - we use both!) - and/or showing agent.
5. Bring in your database!
I’m just going to come out and say it: You may be tempted to hide the exciting news about your pregnancy when you’re in work-mode. Maybe you’re just wanting to “keep private life private”, or maybe it’s for fear of losing clients who may assume that you will be unable to help them when your baby arrives. In most cases, I would say this is a mistake.
How would you feel if one of your friends was pregnant, and didn’t tell you? One day she shows up to a coffee date with a giant pregnant belly, or, gasp - a bouncing baby! - and you’re completely blindsided by the news! Of course you’re overjoyed for her, but wouldn’t you feel a little off that she hid something so big from you?
Most of your clientbase would likely feel the same way. Remember, real estate is built on REAL PEOPLE, and REAL RELATIONSHIPS. Don’t be afraid to let your clientbase in and have the opportunity to root you on during this time!
While some clients did make a point to ask if we would still be a fit for their late-spring purchase or sale, most were overwhelmingly excited for us. For those who would be transacting during our newborn weeks, we were sure to set expectations far in advance and let them know what our plan was.
I also was sure to share a lot about my pregnancy on Instagram, since that is where we get a huge portion of our business, as well as stay in touch with our database. Instagram is like an extension of our database, and I’m always sure to share some personal details so that those who follow us can really get to know who we are and what we are all about. That way, by the time we finally meet a new client, they already know we are the best fit for them!
By the way, if you need help with Instagram for real estate, check this out.
6. Invest in your health.
I knew that our ability to get back up and running again would directly correlate to how good I felt. Before baby came, Bryce and I discussed what we’d need from each other, and it turned out I would need a lot more help to heal than I realized. For the first week postpartum, I was in bed as much as possible. Bryce did all the cooking and cleaning for three weeks until I was well enough to start helping. Beforehand, I made sure the house was stocked with food and friends and family sent meals for the first two weeks after we returned from the hospital!
We also prepared for SLEEP. I don’t believe that the stereotypical “zombie parent syndrome” is something that is just a given, like a rite new parents have to pay. For us, if we aren’t sleeping and feeling good, then we aren’t productive (or nice, even!). We invested in the SNOO bassinet to help baby get to sleep and stay asleep, and it’s worked like a CHARM!! We also took the TakingCaraBabies newborn sleep class which helped us know how to instill good sleep habits from day one. At almost 8 weeks old, Grady sleeps from 10pm to 6am most nights and taking 1.5-2 hour naps multiple times a day.
Not every day is perfect, but having the tools to get us close has been a game changer, and helped me stay on top of things without grandma or a nanny. This is also part of why by week 3, I was feeling so energized and inspired that I was already dipping my toe back into some of my more favored work tasks (like our weekly coaching call with real estate agents!).
7. Be flexible.
One thing I underestimated was how flexible I would need to be with my plan. Life happens and there are a lot of variables that are outside of our control when it comes to becoming parents. On top of that, in my 8th month of pregnancy, the coronavirus hit full tilt in our area so not only was I huge and in early labor for three weeks before baby came (not a good look), we have now been quarantined for more than 3 months with a newborn and no help from family or otherwise.
Obviously that’s an extreme example, but you never know what could happen on your journey. Babies have a mind of their own - they can come early, they can come late, they can be “easy” or they can have a lot of unexpected complications. So, be gentle on yourself during your maternity leave and allow your plans to flex if and when they need to.
Now before I sign off, I did want to share one last bonus tip: When I asked my audience on Instagram what questions they had about prepping their business for baby, one question stood out: What do you do if you’re a new real estate agent expecting a baby?
If you are a new real estate agent expecting a baby, you may still be trying to grind to get your business up and running, but you still deserve to take time off for your maternity leave. To make it happen, I’d follow the tips I just shared, plus a few other suggestions:
Spend time on your business and marketing plan. You have to have a very clear understanding on where your clients will be coming from and what tasks are required to procure them. This is a really difficult thing for new agents to do, because you get licensed, start hitting the pavement, and you want to try everything. You do cold calling one week, open houses another, Facebook ads the next, and it takes a lot of time to settle into something that’s consistent. Don’t make this mistake, because you do not have the luxury of time on your side.
Remember, whatever prospecting you do today is what will feed you 90-120 days from now, and the only way to be successful with it whatever prospecting channels you go with is to commit to sticking with it consistently. You need to be able to fill your pipeline with short-term and long-term business prospects to sustain your book of business through your pregnancy and past your maternity leave. It can be done, but you need a plan. Consider joining a team or hiring a coach like me to help make it happen.
Hope this helps, and don’t hesitate to reach out on Instagram if you have any follow up questions! I’m always happy to help you on your journey towards a business and life you love!
